Part 12 (2/2)
Paul Jardine talked as much as they desired him to talk. He started on his hobby about those West African peoples, and rode it with spirit and energy. His friend laughed at him.
”Why, Jardine,” he said, ”I can never again call you the lion that will not roar.”
”Am I horribly loquacious?” The hero smiled, but was not more silent. He had great things to tell, and he told them well and modestly. Lady Agatha sat with her cheek shaded by a peac.o.c.k-feather fan. There was a deep glow in her eyes. Glancing across at her from the opposite corner, Mary thought it must be the reflection of the firelight.
She came to Mary's room after the guests had departed, when Mary was preparing for bed, and sat down in the chair by the open window.
”What do you think of him, Mary?” she asked.
”Of whom?” Mary said sleepily. They had met a good many people during the day, so the question was a pardonable one.
”Of whom! Why, of Mr. Jardine! Who else could it be?”
She lifted her arms about her head, and the loose white sleeves of her gown fell away from their roundness and softness.
”What a man!” she said, with a long sigh. ”What a man! That is life, if you like. How tame the others seem beside him!”
”He roared very gently,” said Mary, ”but it was very exciting.”
”Yes, wasn't it? That sail in the canoe down the river, with the jungle on each side of them alive with wild beasts and venomous reptiles, to say nothing of cannibals, and deadly sicknesses worse than any of those.
He said so little about the danger. One got an impression of the extraordinary languorous beauty of the tropical vegetation; one smelt it, that African night, with its enormous moon beyond the mists. There was death on every side of him, in every breath he drew. He found what he went for, the antidote to the bite of the death's-head spider.
Henceforth life in those lat.i.tudes will be robbed of one of its terrors.
What a man!”
”It is a pity that we could not have heard him at the Royal Society,”
Mary said, with a little yawn--they had been keeping late hours. ”If it had been a day or two earlier!”
”But I am going,” said Lady Agatha. ”Why, Mary, it is only to alter our arrangements by a day. Hazels--the dear place--will keep for a day longer.”
CHAPTER XII
HER LADYs.h.i.+P
At Hazels Mary found her duties more onerous than they had been in town.
It was delightful to see Lady Agatha among her own people. She had made life easier for them. Mary marvelled at the prettiness of the red-brick farmhouses, with roses and honeysuckle to their eaves. She could never get over the feeling that it was only a picture. They would walk or drive to them, and the farmer's wife would come out and beg her Ladys.h.i.+p to come in for a gla.s.s of cowslip wine; and she and Mary would go in to a rather dark parlour--to be sure, the windows were smothered in jessamine and roses and honeysuckle--and sit down in chairs covered in flowery chintz, and sip the fragrant wine and eat the home-made cake, while the topics of interest between landlord and tenant were discussed.
Then the farmer would come in himself, hat in hand, and his eyes would light up at the sight of the visitor, and there would be more pleasant homely talk of cattle and crops, and the harvest and the plans for the autumn sowing, and the state of fairs and markets.
There was Nuthatch Village, which seemed to have stepped out of Morland's pictures. It was all so pretty and peaceful, with its red gabled cottages sending up their blue spirals of smoke into the overhanging boughs of great trees. Mary cried out in delight at the quaint dormers, with their diamond panes, at the wooden fronts, at the gardens chockfull of the gayest and most old-fas.h.i.+oned flowers.
”As for prettiness,” said Lady Agatha, ”it isn't a patch on Highercombe, a mile away, and, what is more, I've done more than anyone else to spoil its prettiness. I've filled in the pond and driven the swan and the water-hen to other haunts. I've given them a new water-supply and done away with the most picturesque pump, which was sunk in 1770 by Dame Elizabeth Chenevix. I've put new grates and new floors into the houses, and I've seen to it that all windows open and shut. The pity of it is that I can't compel them to make use of their privilege of opening.
Also, I've introduced cowls on the chimneys. My friend, Lionel Armytage, the painter, lifted his hands in horror at my doings. I'd have liked to get at the chimneys, but I'd have had to pull down every cottage in the place to rectify them. Oh, I've spoilt Nuthatch, there's not a doubt of it. You must see Highercombe.”
”The children seem healthy,” Mary said thoughtfully, ”and the old people walk straighter than one sees them often.”
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