"What do you mean?" asked Miss Tibb.u.t.t. Father Dormer smiled comprehendingly.

"I mean," said Trix slowly, "they recognize the thing that makes the show, and the person because of that thing, not for the person's own self. Let me try and explain better. A man, born in the slums, has a marvellous voice. He becomes a noted singer. He's received everywhere and feted. But it's really his voice that is feted, because it is the fashion to fete it. Let him lose his voice, and he drops out of existence. People don't recognize him himself, the self which gave expression to the voice, and which still _is_, even after the voice is dumb."

Father Dormer nodded.

"Well," went on Trix, "I maintain that that man is every bit as well worth knowing afterwards,--after he has lost his voice. And even if he'd never been able to give expression to himself by singing, he might have been just as well worth knowing. But the world never looks for inside things, but only for external things that make a show. So if Mrs. B.

hasn't an atom of anything congenial to me in her composition, but has a magnificent house and heaps of money, it's quite right and fitting I should know her, so people would say, and encourage me to do so. But it's against all the conventions that I should be friendly with little Miss F.

who lives over the tobacconist's at the corner of such and such a street, though she _is_ thoroughly congenial to me, and I love her plucky and cheery outlook on life." She stopped.

"Go on," encouraged Doctor Hilary.

"Well," laughed Trix, "take a more extreme case. Sir A. C. is--well, not a bad man, but not the least the kind of man I care about, but he may take me in to dinner, and, on the strength of that brief acquaintance, to a theatre if he wants, provided I have some other woman with me as a sort of chaperon, and he can talk to me by the hour, and that all on account of his money and t.i.tle. Mr. Z. is a really white man, but he's a 'come-down,' through no fault of his own, and a bus-conductor. I happen to have spoken to him once or twice; and like him. But I mightn't even walk for half an hour with him in the park, if I'd fifty authorized chaperons attending on me. That's what I mean about conventions that are conventions for their own sake." She stopped again.

"And what do you suggest as a remedy?" asked Father Dormer, smiling.

"There isn't one," sighed Trix. "At least not one you can apply universally. Everybody must just apply it for themselves, and not exactly by defying conventions, but by treating them as simply non-existent."

The d.u.c.h.essa made a little movement in the moonlight.

"Which," she said quietly, "comes to exactly the same thing as defying them, and it won't work."

"Why not?" demanded Trix.

"You'd find yourself curiously lonely after a time if you did."

"You mean my friends--no, my acquaintances--would desert me?"

"Probably."

"Well, I'd have the one I'd chanced it all for."

"Yes," said the d.u.c.h.essa slowly and deliberately, "but you'd have to be very sure, not only that the friend was worth it, but that you were worth it to the friend."

There was rather a blank silence. Trix gave a little gasp. It was not so much the words that hurt, as the tone in which they had been spoken. It was a repet.i.tion of the little scene at dinner, but this time intensified. And it was so utterly, so entirely unlike Pia. Trix felt miserably squashed. She had been talking a good deal too, perhaps, indeed, rather foolishly, that was the worst of it. No doubt she _had_ made rather an idiot of herself. She swallowed a little lump in her throat. Well, anyhow that inflection in Pia's tone must be covered at once. That was the first, indeed the only, consideration.

"I never thought of all those contingencies," she laughed. There was the faintest suspicion of a quiver in her voice. "Let's talk about the moonlight. But it was the moonlight began it all."

Two hours later the garden lay deserted in the same moonlight.

A woman was sitting by an open window, looking out into the garden. She had been sitting there quite a long time. Suddenly her eyes filled with tears.

"Oh, Trix, Trix," she said half aloud, "if only it would work. But it won't. And it was the moonlight that began it all."

CHAPTER XXI

ON THE MOORLAND

Trix was walking over the moorland. The d.u.c.h.essa and Miss Tibb.u.t.t had departed to what promised to be an exceedingly dull garden party some five miles distant. It had been decreed that it was entirely unnecessary to inflict the same probable dulness on Trix, therefore she had been left to freedom and her own devices for the afternoon.

Trix was playing the game of "I remember." It can be a quite extraordinarily fascinating game, or an exceedingly painful one. Trix was finding it extraordinarily fascinating. It was so gorgeously delightful to find that nothing had shrunk, nothing lessened in beauty or mystery. A larch copse was every bit as much a haunt of the Little People as formerly; the moss every bit as much a cool green carpet for their tripping feet. A few belated foxglove stems added to the old-time enchantment of the place. Even a little stream rippling through the wood, was a veritable stream, and not merely a watery ditch, as it might quite well have proved. Then there was the view from the gate, through a frame of beech trees out towards the sea. It was still as entrancing an ocean, sun-flecked and radiant. There were still as infinite possibilities in the unknown Beyond, could one have chartered a white-winged boat, and have sailed to where land and water meet. There was a pond, too, surrounded by blackberry bushes and great spear-like rushes, perhaps not quite the enormous lake of one's childhood, but a reasonably large pond enough, and there were still the blackberry bushes and the spear-like rushes. And, finally, there was the moorland, glowing with more radiant crimson lakes and madders than the most wonderful paint box ever held, and stretching up and down, and up again, till it melted in far away purples and lavenders.

Trix's heart sang in accord with the laughing sun-kissed earth around her. It was all so gorgeous, so free and untrammelled. She lay upon the hot springy heather, and crushed the tiny purple flowers of the wild thyme between her fingers, raising the bruised petals to her face to drink in their strong sweet scent.

From far off she could hear the tinkle of a goat bell, and the occasional short bark of a sheep dog. All else was silence, save for the humming of the bees above the heather. Tiny insects floated in the still air, looking like specks of thistle-down as the sun caught and silvered their minute wings. Little blue b.u.t.terflies flitted hither and thither like radiant animated flowers.

For a long time Trix sat very still, body and soul bathed in the beauty around her. At last she got to her feet, and made her way across the heather, ignoring the small beaten tracks despite the p.r.i.c.kliness of her chosen route.

After some half-hour's walking she came to a stone wall bordering a hilly field, a low wall, a battered wall, where tiny ferns grew in the crevices, and the stones themselves were patched with orange-coloured lichen.

Trix climbed the wall, and walked across the soft gra.s.s. A good way to the right was a fence, and beyond the fence a wood. Trix made her way slowly towards it. Thistles grew among the gra.s.s,--carding thistles, and thistles with small drooping heads. She looked at them idly as she walked. Suddenly a slight sound behind her made her turn, and with the turning her heart leapt to her throat.

From over the brow of the hilly field behind her, quite a number of cattle were coming at a fair pace towards her.

Now Trix hated cows in any shape or form, and these were the unpleasant white-faced, brown cattle, whose very appearance is against them. They were moving quickly too, quite alarmingly quickly.

Trix cast one terrified and pathetic glance over her shoulder. The glance was all-sufficient. She ran,--ran straight for the wood, the cattle after her. Doubtless curiosity, mere enquiry maybe, prompted their pursuit.

Trix concerned herself not at all with the motive, the fact was all-sufficient. Fear lent wings to her feet, and with the horned and horrid beasts still some ten yards behind her, she precipitated herself across the fence to fall in an undignified but wholly relieved heap among a ma.s.s of bracken and whortleberry bushes. The briefest of moments saw her once more on her feet, struggling, fighting her way through shoulder-high bracken. Five minutes brought her to an open s.p.a.ce beyond.

Trembling, breathless, and most suspiciously near tears, she sank upon the ground.

"The beasts!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Trix opprobriously, and not as the mere statement of an obvious fact. She took off her hat, which flight had flung to a somewhat rakish angle, and blinked vigorously towards the trees. She was _not_ going to cry.

Presently fright gave place to interest. She gazed around, curious, speculative. It was an unusual wood, a strange wood, a wood of holly trees, with a scattered sprinkling of beech trees. The grey twisted trunks of the hollies gleamed among the dark foliage, giving an eerie and almost uncanny atmosphere to the place. It was extraordinarily silent, too; and infinitely lonelier than the deserted moorland. It gave Trix an odd feeling of unpleasant mystery. Yet there was nothing for it but to face the mystery, to see if she could not find some way out further adown the wood. Not for untold gold would she again have faced those horned beasts behind her.

A tiny narrow path led downhill from the cleared s.p.a.ce. Trix set off down it, swinging her hat airily by the brim the while. Presently the sense of uncanniness abated somewhat; the elfin in her went out to meet the weirdness of the wood.

Now and again she stopped to pick and eat whortleberries from the ma.s.sed bushes beneath the trees. She did not particularly like them, truly; nevertheless she was still young enough to pick and eat what nature had provided for picking and eating, and that for the mere pleasure of being able to do so. Also, at this juncture the action brought confidence in its train.

Presently, through the trees facing her, she saw a wall, a high wall, a brick wall, and quite evidently bordering civilization.

"It can't go on for ever," considered Trix. "It must come to an end some time, either right, or left. And I'm not going back." This last exceedingly firmly.

She went forward, scrutinizing, anxious. And then,--joyful and welcome sight!--a door, an open door came into view. A mound of half-carted leaf mould just without showed, to any one endowed with even the meanest powers of deduction, that someone--some man, probably--was busy in the neighbourhood.

Trix made hastily for the door. The next moment she was through it, to find herself face to face with a man and a wheelbarrow. Trix came to a standstill, a standstill at once sudden and unpremeditated. The man dropped the wheelbarrow. They stared blankly at each other. And Trix was far too fl.u.s.tered to realize that his stare was infinitely more amazed than her own.

"You can't come through this way," said the man, decisive though bewildered. His orders regarding the non-entrance of strangers had been of the emphatic kind.

Trix's brain worked rapidly. The route before her must lead to safety, and nothing, no power on earth, would take her back through the field atop the wood. She was genuinely, quite genuinely too frightened. This is by way of excuse, since here a regrettable fact must be recorded. Trix gave vent to a sound closely resembling a sneeze. It was followed by one brief sentence.

"There's someone at the gate," was what the man heard.

Again amazement was written on his face. He turned towards the gate. Trix fled past him.