Part 13 (1/2)

”Ah, yes, that is it.” Lady Agatha's face flushed and lit up. ”I've made it healthy for them. Highercombe is a painted lie--a pest-house, a charnel-house, full of unwholesome miasmas from its pretty green, its pond covered with water-lilies. Death lurks in that pond. There is bad drainage and bad water; the damp oozes through the old brick floors of the houses. The whole place is as deadly in its way as those West African jungles of which Mr. Jardine told us.”

They were to see Mr. Jardine later. At present he was on a round of visiting at the houses of the great. The names of the people who had elected to do honour to Paul Jardine would have been a list of pretty well the most ill.u.s.trious persons in the kingdom. When Lady Agatha had suggested to him that he might give a week to Hazels before the summer was done, he had been eager about it, had even suggested dropping some of his other engagements. But that she would not hear of. She seemed to take an odd pride and pleasure in the way he had conquered the world best worth conquering.

”What!” she had said. ”Drop Sir Richard Greville and Lord Overbury! Not for worlds! You may find it dull. Sir Richard lives the life of a hermit, and you won't get anything fit to eat at Lord Overbury's. He never knows what he's eating, and his cook has long given up trying to do credit to herself. I believe that only for his dining-out he'd be starved. Even as it is, he's been known to take mustard with his soup and red-currant jelly with his cheese. Still--he's Lord Overbury!”

They led a very quiet life at Hazels, seeing hardly anyone. Lady Agatha had declared that she was going to make up for her rackety life in town, as well as to prepare for the winter. She had looked as fresh as a rose through all the racketing, and when she talked about the need for rest she had smiled.

As a matter of fact, her energy was too overflowing to permit of her resting as other folk rested. A change of occupation was about as much as one could hope for. And now she was restless as she had not been before, for, energetic as she had always been, she had never driven others. Indeed, many people had found absolute restfulness in her Ladys.h.i.+p's big, wholesome presence.

”The life in town has only stimulated me, Mary,” she confessed; ”just stimulated me and excited my brain. I must work it off somehow. Let us begin at the novel to-morrow.”

They began at the novel. Lady Agatha dictated it, and Mary took it down in short-hand. They worked out of doors. Mary had her seat under the boughs of a splendid chestnut tree on a little green lawn. The lawn was at the side of the house, not over-looked, enclosed on three sides by a splendid yew hedge. The dogs would lie at Mary's feet. There were Roy the St. Bernard, and Brian the bull-dog, a toy Pomeranian, and a little Chow. The dogs always stayed at Hazels. ”If I took them up to town,”

Lady Agatha said, ”they would see more of me, to be sure, but then they would always be losing me, for, of course, I couldn't take them out in town. And they always know I'll come back--they're so wise. The parting is dreadful, but they know I'll come back.”

Mary sometimes wondered how her Ladys.h.i.+p had found time to think out her novel. For it seemed all ready and prepared in her mind. She would sweep up and down the gra.s.s while she dictated. Mary used to say that it meant a ten-mile walk of a morning. The train of her white morning-dress lopped the daisies in their places; the incessant pa.s.sage of her feet made a track in the gra.s.s. Sometimes she would pa.s.s out of her secretary's hearing and have to be recalled by Mary's laughing voice of remonstrance.

”Am I afflicting you, Mary?” she asked on one of these occasions. ”Am I overwhelming you? It's a horrible flood, isn't it?”

”You are very fluent,” Mary answered, looking down at the queer little dots and spirals on her paper. ”I daresay we'll have to prune it before it's printed. But it is a good fluency, a rich fluency. To me it is irresistible--like a spring freshet, like the sap rus.h.i.+ng madly through all the veins of spring.”

”Ah, you feel it?--you feel it like that, Mary? I feel it so myself; I riot in it.”

”It will have no sense of effort--it is vital. I hope we shall be able to keep it up.”

”Why not, O Ca.s.sandra?”

She stood with one hand on the back of Mary's chair, and looked up into the tree.

”The book should have been written in spring,” she went on. ”I feel the spring in my blood. Why should I, Mary, now when it is full summer, and the trees are dark?”

”I don't know, unless that you were so busy in spring that you had not time to enjoy it. Come, let us get on; perhaps presently you will flag.

We must get the book done before anyone comes to interrupt us.”

”Never was there such a willing co-worker. You mustn't overdo it, Mary.

How many words did I dictate to you yesterday?”

”Six thousand.”

”And you gave them to me typewritten this morning.”

”I wanted to see how they looked in type. It is all right, Agatha. Even you cannot go on for long, dictating six thousand words a day. We must take the tide at the flow.”

”Afterwards I shall do a play--after I have given you a rest.”

”More kingdoms to conquer,” Mary laughed. ”There is only one person like you--the Kaiser.”

”I have an immense admiration for him.”

Mrs. Morres meanwhile sat and smiled to herself. She had given up the crochet for point-lace, which, as it had more intricate st.i.tches, necessitated the more care. Sometimes she knitted and read with a book in her lap. But when she was not reading, she smiled quietly to herself.