Part 5 (1/2)

”I must be going,” said Eloquent, ”good-evening,” and he hastened on his way.

”Sorry you couldn't stop to tea,” the small boy called after him hospitably. ”I'm Ger, so you'll know me again when you see me.”

The child stood for a minute looking after the stranger in the hope that he would turn his head, and nod or wave to him in friendly farewell, but he did neither. Ger gave a little sigh, and trotted up the drive towards home.

Outside the gates Eloquent paused and looked back at them. Brought from Verona generations ago, they were a perfect example of a perfect period.

Richly decorative, various in design, light and flowing in form, the delicate curves broke into actual leaf.a.ge, sweeping and free as nature's own. The Ffolliots were proud of their gates.

He gazed at them admiringly, and then, like Ger, he sighed.

”Why,” he muttered, ”why should they have had all this always? I wonder if it's the constant pa.s.sing through gates like this that helps to make them what they are.”

CHAPTER IV

REFLECTION AND ENLIGHTENMENT

Eloquent found that M. B. Ffolliot had not deceived him as to the nearness of the village. A few yards to the left, over the bridge, and the long, irregular street lay in front of him; the river on one side; the houses, various in size and shape, but alike in one respect, that the most modern of them was over two hundred years old. He knew that his aunt's house was at the very end of the street and furthest from the bridge, and that Redmarley village was nearly a mile in length.

Yet he did not hurry. He walked very slowly in the middle of the muddy road, resolved to marshal and tabulate his impressions as was his orderly wont.

But in this instance his impressions refused to conform to either process, and remained mutinously chaotic.

He found that, in thinking of Mary, he unconsciously called her ”that girl,” whereas such maidens as he hitherto had encountered were always ”young ladies.” He didn't know many ”young ladies,” but those he did know he there and then called into review and compared with Mary Ffolliot.

They were all of them much better dressed, he was certain of that. But he was equally a.s.sured that not one of them would have forborne to laugh at his plight, as he sat abject and ridiculous in the very largest puddle in Redmarley woods.

She had not laughed.

And would any one of these well-dressed young ladies (Eloquent took into account that it was Sunday) have held out helping hands to a total stranger with such absolute simplicity, so entirely as a matter of course? not as a young woman to a young man, but as one fellow-creature to another who had, literally, in this instance, fallen upon evil times.

How tall she was, and how strong.

Again (he blushed at the recollection) he seemed to feel the clasp of those muscular young hands in the worn tan-coloured gloves, gloves loose at the wrists, that did not b.u.t.ton but were drawn on. He had noticed her leather gloves as she held out her hands to him, and knew that in the language of the trade they were ”rather costly to start with, but lasted for ever.”

They did not stock goods of that cla.s.s in the particular branch of the outfitting trade that he knew best. People wouldn't pay the price.

And he found himself saying over and over again, ”wouldn't pay the price,” and it was of the girl he was thinking, not of her gloves.

How eager she had been that he should come and be brushed; ”I've no objection,” Eloquent reflected, ”to being under an obligation to her, but I'm hanged if I'd be beholden to Ffolliot for anything.” Somehow it gave him infinite satisfaction to think of Mary's father in that familiar fas.h.i.+on. He, to put up boards about trespa.s.sers in the woods!

Who was he?

Eloquent ignored the fact that they were the same boards that had been there in old Mr Ffolliot's time, and badly needed repainting.

That little boy, too, who first appeared to suspect him of poaching, and then expressed sorrow that he would not stay to tea. What an extraordinary family they seemed to be!

The girl had actually owned to being constantly suspected of all sorts of damage, and not always wrongfully either. He was devoured by curiosity as to what forms her lawlessness could take.

”A bit of a gawk” her young brother had called her. How dared he?