Volume III Part 3 (1/2)
”I have heard people say that of anything respectable in the shape of a hill,” answered Vixen, with a dubious air.
She was in a humour to take objection to everything, and had a flippant air curiously at variance with the dull aching of her heart. She was determined to take the situation lightly. Not for worlds would she have let Captain Winstanley see her wounds, or guess how deep they were. She set her face steadily towards the hills in which her place of exile was hidden, and bore herself bravely. Conrad Winstanley gave her many a furtive glance as he sat opposite her in the fly, while they drove slowly up the steep green country lanes, leaving the white town in the valley below them.
”The place is not so bad, after all,” said Vixen, looking back at the conglomeration of white walls and slate roofs, of docks and s.h.i.+pping, and barracks, on the edge of a world of blue water, ”not nearly so odious as it looked when we landed. But it is a little disappointing at best, like all places that people praise ridiculously. I had pictured Jersey as a tropical island, with cactuses and Cape jasmine growing in the hedges, orchards of peaches and apricots, and melons running wild.”
”To my mind the island is a pocket edition of Devons.h.i.+re with a dash of Brittany,” answered the Captain. ”There's a fig-tree for you!” he cried, pointing to a great spreading ma.s.s of five-fingered leaves lolloping over a pink plastered garden-wall--an old untidy tree that had swallowed up the whole extent of a cottager's garden. ”You don't see anything like that in the Forest.”
”No,” answered Vixen, tightening her lips; ”we have only oaks and beeches that have been growing since the Heptarchy.”
And now they entered a long lane, where the interlaced tree-tops made an arcade of foliage--a lane whose beauty even Vixen could not gainsay.
Ah, there were the Hamps.h.i.+re ferns on the steep green banks! She gave a little choking sob at sight of them, as if they had been living things.
Hart's-tongue, and lady-fern, and the whole family of osmundas. Yes; they were all there. It was like home--with a difference.
Here and there they pa.s.sed a modern villa, in its park-like grounds, and the Captain, who evidently wished to be pleasant, tried to expound to Violet the conditions of Jersey leases, and the difficulties which attend the purchase of land or tenements in that feudal settlement. But Vixen did not even endeavour to understand him. She listened with an air of polite vacancy which was not encouraging.
They pa.s.sed various humbler homesteads, painted a lively pink, or a refres.h.i.+ng lavender, with gardens where the fuchsias were trees covered with crimson bloom, and where gigantic hydrangeas bloomed in palest pink and brightest azure in wildest abundance. Here Vixen beheld for the first time those preposterous cabbages from whose hyper-natural growth the islanders seem to derive a loftier pride than from any other productions of the island, not excepting its grapes and its lobsters.
”I don't suppose you ever saw cabbages growing six feet high before,”
said the Captain.
”No,” answered Vixen; ”they are too preposterous to be met with in a civilised country. Poor Charles the Second! I don't wonder that he was wild and riotous when he came to be king.”
”Why not?”
”Because he had spent several months of exile among his loyal subjects in Jersey. A man who had been buried alive in such a fragmentary bit of the world must have required some compensation in after life.”
They had mounted a long hill which seemed the pinnacle of the island, and from whose fertile summit the view was full of beauty--a green undulating garden-world, ringed with yellow sands and bright blue sea; and now they began to descend gently by a winding lane where again the topmost elm-branches were interwoven, and where the glowing June day was softened to a tender twilight. A curve in the lane brought them suddenly to an old gateway, with a crumbling stone bench in a nook beside it--a bench where the wayfarer used to sit and wait for alms, when the site of Les Tourelles was occupied by a monastery.
The old manor house rose up behind the dilapidated wall--a goodly old house as to size and form--overlooking a n.o.ble sweep of hillside and valley; a house with a gallery on the roof for purposes of observation, but with as dreary and abandoned a look about its blank curtainless windows as if mansion and estate had been in Chancery for the last half-century.
”A fine old place, is it not?” asked the Captain, while a cracked bell was jingling in remote distance, amidst the drowsy summer stillness, without eliciting so much as the bark of a house-dog.
”It looks very big,” Violet answered dubiously, ”and very empty.”
”My aunt has no relatives residing with her.”
”If she had started in life with a large family of brothers and sisters, I should think they would all be dead by this time,” said the girl, with a stifled yawn that was half a sigh.
”How do you mean?”
”They would have died of the stillness and solitude and all-pervading desolation of Les Tourelles.”
”Strange houses are apt to look desolate.”
”Yes. Particularly when the windows have neither blinds nor curtains, and the walls have not been painted for a century.”
After this conversation flagged. The jingling bell was once more set going in the unknown distance; Vixen sat looking sleepily at the arched roof of foliage chequered with blue sky. Argus lolled against the carriage-door with his tongue out.
They waited five minutes or so, languidly expectant. Vixen began to wonder whether the gates would ever open--whether there were really any living human creatures in that blank dead-looking house--whether they would not have to give up all idea of entering, and drive back to the harbour, and return to Hamps.h.i.+re by the way they had come.