None of them wished to remove it from the room where it had so many romantic a.s.sociations; but they one and all had used it as a lever to raise the price of the property--if only a hundred pounds--beyond that which they had, in the first case, paid for it themselves. Once, in fact, the hangings had been taken down and the bed itself lifted from the ground before the very eyes of the intended purchaser; but that had been too much for him. He had given in. There is England's greatness! Can it be wondered--much as we pose to despise them--that we are the only nation in Europe which has given shelter to the tribes of Israel?

In spring-time, the Manor looked wonderful--the lawns cut for the first time since the winter, the hedges of blackthorn splashed thick with snow-blossom, and daffodils, as if sackfuls of new-minted gold were emptied underneath the trees and elves had scattered pieces here and there from out the ma.s.s. Birds were building in all the thickets, and the young leaves--virgin green--shyly hid their love-making.

Everything alive was possessed with a new-found energy. The sparrows--most ostentatious of any bird there is--flew about, trailing long threads of hay, with an air as if they carried the Golden Fleece in their beaks each time they returned to the apple trees. But other creatures were as busy as they. Strange little brown birds--whitethroats and linnets perhaps, if the eye could only have followed them--flew in and out of the blackthorn hedges all day long.

Thrushes and blackbirds hopped pompously about the lawns, and the starlings chattered like old women on the roofs of the red gables.

The house itself was modelled as are nearly all such residences of the Tudor period, the gables at either end making, with the hall, the formation of the letter E so characteristic of the architecture of that time. Only two additions had been made, oriel windows to enlarge the rooms at each end of the gables; but they had been executed, some seventy years before Sir William Hewitt Traill's occupation of the place, by a man who had respect for the days of King Harry and they had long since toned into the atmosphere. A great tree of wisteria lifted itself above one of the windows, and on the other a clematis clung with its wiry, brittle shoots.

The huge cedars, holding out their black-green fans of foliage like Eastern canopies--the high yew-trees, to whom only age could bring such lofty dimensions, all surrounded the old, red building and wrapped it in a velvet cloak of warm security. Tulips in long beds--brilliant mosaics in a floor of green marble--were let into the lawn that stretched down the drive. Away on the horizon, the rising ground about Wycombe showed blue through the soft spring atmosphere, and in the middle distance, the ploughed fields--freshly turned--glowed with the rich, red blood of the earth's fulness. So it presented itself to the eyes of Mrs. Durlacher, when, one morning late in April, she drove up in her motor to the old iron-barred oak-door which opened into the panelled hall of her country residence.

She was alone. Her maid and another servant had come down by rail to High Wycombe and were being driven over in one of the house conveyances from the station, a distance of five miles. The chauffeur descended from the seat, opened the door of the car, and when she had pa.s.sed into the house, beckoned a gardener who was at work on one of the tulip beds, to help him in with some of the luggage which Mrs. Durlacher had brought with her.

"She's coming to stay, then?" said the gardener.

"S'pose so," replied the chauffeur. "I'd understood yesterday as she was going to the openin' of a bazaar this afternoon--openin' by royalty; but I got my orders this morning to fill up the tank and come along at once, 'cos she was going out into the country. 'Ow's that ferret of mine going on?"

"First cla.s.s," said the gardener.

"Well then, as soon as I get the car cleaned this afternoon, I'm going to have some rattin'. Here--put 'em in the 'all--here."

The gardener struggled obediently. The chauffeur did most of the looking on and practically all the talking.

From the mouths of babes and sucklings and from the lips of hired servants one gets wisdom in the one case and information in the other.

All that the chauffeur had stated was quite true. Some five days before--and we have now three years behind us since that night when Sally Bishop tottered into Traill's arms--Mrs. Durlacher had received a letter from her brother, of whom she had seen nothing for almost six months, saying that he thought of going down to Apsley for the day. "But I make sure first," his letter concluded, "that the field is cleared. Down there, as you know, I prefer to be the only starter."

She had written in reply that she had only been down to Apsley once that year herself and, furthermore, on the day he mentioned, the place would be as deserted of human beings as London is in the heart of July--meaning thereby that any place is a wilderness which is empty of one's self and one's a.s.sociates. That she had written by return of post; then, two days later, her mind had caught an impression--a wandering insect that the flimsy web of a spider clutches by chance. He had gone down to Apsley before this, many a time. She knew that he had a lingering fondness for the place which no amount of gluttony of Bohemianism could ever wipe out. But he had never taken these precautions before. He had chanced his luck; if he had found people there, then he had forced a retreat as soon as possible. But now he was going out of his way--writing a letter, an action foreign to the whole of his nature--to ensure that he should be alone.

The circ.u.mstance--for circ.u.mstance there must be, just as there is the puff of wind that drifts the wandering insect to the spider's web--that brought the impression to her mind, was the brief report of a cross-examination in the divorce courts, conducted by J.H.

Traill. She knew that in the last two years he had, in a desultory way, been gleaning briefs from the great field where others reaped.

That had stood for little in her mind; for though she had always realized that in temperament and intellect he would make an excellent barrister, she had never believed that he would throw aside the Bohemian side of his nature sufficiently to gain ambition. Now, in this stray report, she beheld between the lines the successful man.

His cross-examination had won the case, for his side. Its ability was undoubted, even to her untutored mind, and from this, in that indirect method--taking no heed of the straight line--by which women come leaping to their admirable conclusions, she received the impression that when Traill came down to Apsley, he would not come alone.

It is scarcely possible to see how this is arrived at; yet, to the mind of a woman, it is simple enough. Her brother had, after all these years, breasted his way out of the slow-moving tide of mental indifference, into the rapid current of ambition. When a man does that, her intuition prompted her to know that it is more than likely that he brings a woman with him. It is always possible for a woman to recognize--apart from her own ident.i.ty--that her s.e.x is an enc.u.mbrance to most men which they cannot easily shake off. Witness the generous criticism of a woman upon any husband but her own.

Combine with this intuitive knowledge the fact--hitherto unrecorded, even by Traill to Sally--that when he handed over Apsley Manor to his sister and took her ready money in exchange, Traill had made her sign a doc.u.ment granting him the right to repurchase possession with the same amount at any time that it might please him, and you have the apprehension of the woman who knows that possession const.i.tutes but few points of the law when there is ink and parchment to nullify the whole transaction.

Jack, with a woman at his heels; a woman, moreover, whom he had probably brought with him out of that dark abyss of the past; might quite easily be a crushing blow to all her social power. Five thousand pounds perhaps would be a difficult sum for him to raise--certainly to raise immediately--but she had the proof before her that he was striding into eminence and, as has been mentioned before in this chapter, England is the only country in Europe which is a safe harbour for the Jews.

So then she leapt to the conclusion. He was bringing a woman with him to see the place. She pictured the creature vividly in her mind--a woman with a large hat, red lips, a woman with a bold figure who knew how to dress it brazenly, with eyes that danced to the whip of his remarks; a woman who as mistress of Apsley, would make it impossible for her ever to go near the place again. There was only one way to meet the situation--a situation it had definitely become in the sudden workings of her mind--and that was face to face, at Apsley, in possession, with the servants at her command and the most gracious of speeches on her lips. Tramping through the house alone, that woman would be a.s.signing rooms to their different owners, as if she were already in possession; but with Mrs. Durlacher, the perfect artist, as Jack had called her--she laughed unfeelingly when that phrase came back to her mind--with herself at the woman's heels, telling her what they did with this room and how in the hunting season they used that, there would be little scope for exhibition of the proprietary sentiment and, whoever the person might be, Mrs. Durlacher guaranteed she should not shine on that occasion before her brother.

For that day, then, she had cancelled all her engagements. The opening of the bazaar, a function at which she had felt it her duty to be present, she crossed out of her book. From the dinner, to which she and her husband had been asked on the evening previous to Traill's visit to Apsley, she wrote and excused herself, saying she had been called out of Town; and on the next morning she had ordered the car to be round at the house in Sloane Street punctually at a quarter to ten.

"Can't see why you have to give up the dinner and drive me out of it as well because you have to go down to Apsley to-morrow," her husband had said when she had written to her hostess excusing their presence at dinner.

"The reason's obvious," she replied equably. "I haven't had a good night's rest for a week--I can't sleep after eight o'clock in the morning like you do, and I've got a woman to deal with to-morrow.

You don't want to lose the shooting and the hunting down at Apsley, do you?"

"No--rather not--of course I don't."

"Then let me get a good night's rest."

One admires the woman who sees her plan of action and takes it like a sword in the hand. Certainly, there was a possibility that she might be wrong. There well might be no woman. But in her mind, she was confident, and this was the only method of defence. She did not hesitate to accept it, difficult though it were. The woman might be any one--a creature whose touch would be contamination. She placed no trust in her brother where women were concerned. He would not actually disgrace her; she could be certain of that. A calculation on the presence of Mrs. b.u.t.terick, the housekeeper, who was always left in charge of the Manor, would be bound to act as a certain restraint. But what he expected to present a quotient of respectability to Mrs. b.u.t.terick and the gardener if he happened to be about the grounds, might well represent sordid vulgarity to her.

He had certainly taken every precaution to be alone. Yet having drawn all these facts into consideration, she was undaunted. The whole way down to Apsley, sitting comfortably in the corner of the car, her eyes unseeingly fixed upon the back of the chauffeur's neck, she rehea.r.s.ed one scene after another with a precision of imagination that was worthy of a greater cause. Yet what cause could be greater to her? With the loss of Apsley, she fell irremediably in social power.

Five thousand pounds would purchase another residence in the country.

But what sort of a residence? She shuddered and, in a moment of relaxation, became aware that the chauffeur was in need of a clean collar.

The moment she arrived, she sent for Mrs. b.u.t.terick and went upstairs to her bedroom. The good, fat, little woman--her face a full harvest moon, to which the features adhered with regularity but no expression--soon followed her. She stood at the door of the long, lofty room with its three big, latticed windows and beamed upon her mistress. She loved the quality--the quality, she always called them.

When the season of week-ends came round each year, she was the proudest of women in the country-side. At that very moment, she was wearing a silk petticoat, worth its weight in gold, five guineas at the utmost for it seemed like froth in the hand--which a French lady's maid had given her in exchange for silence over a little incident that scarcely calls for mention. The first return of her mistress to Apsley, then, was a sign of the nearing season--the lonely swallow that is seen scudding through the first break in the year by some enthusiastic ornithologist and recorded in the next morning's edition of the _Times_. She kept a diary, in fact, did Mrs. b.u.t.terick, and in about the middle of April of every year, might be noticed the comment, "Madame arrived--first time this year--" and then, more than probably the addition, "House-party on the ----" and thereafter the date, whatever it may have been.

Now, on this occasion, as she always did, she beamed in silence and waited.

"Good morning, Mrs. b.u.t.terick. You got my letter?"

"Yes, madam."

"These sheets are aired?"

"Dry as a bone, madam. I felt 'em myself."

"I shall only be staying the night," Mrs. Durlacher continued; "I go back to Town to-morrow morning."

Mrs. b.u.t.terick made no reply, If her features could have fallen into an expression of disappointment, they would willingly have done so; but nature had taken no trouble with them. They were an afterthought.

It seemed as if they had been placed there at the last moment of birth, with no inner mechanism to answer to sensation. She just said nothing.

"To-morrow morning," Mrs. Durlacher repeated.

"Yes, madam."

"And now you can take the chintz covers off everything in this room and the drawing-room as well. There's rather a snap in the air; I think perhaps you might have the fire lighted in the dining-room.

And tell one of the gardeners to pick me plenty of daffodils--not common ones--not those ordinary double ones, but the best he's got.

White petals with the yellow trumpets--you know the ones I mean. Also some narcissi and a few tulips--pink ones for the drawing-room. They must all be on the dining-room table when I come downstairs. I'll arrange them myself. And get my trunks sent up to me at once--I want to change my dress. Taylor and Mason are coming down by train; they'll be here any minute now. The trap went for them--didn't it?"

"Yes, madam--at half-past ten."

"Well, then, that's all, Mrs. b.u.t.terick. What time is it?"

The housekeeper extracted a silver watch with its flowery, ornamental dial from the recesses of an ample bosom. She drew it out by the chain and, once free, it swung violently to and fro till she caught it.

"A quarter past eleven, madam."

"Very well, there's not too much time. I expect my brother and probably a lady down here to-day. Oh yes, and by the way--when they come--well--I'll tell that to Taylor. You go and see about the flowers and the chintz covers at once--and my trunks--immediately.

You'd better come up yourself and unpack for me until Mason arrives."

When once she heard the crunching wheels of the trap upon the drive, she rang her bell. Mason entered almost immediately.

"Tell Taylor I want her here at once," said Mrs. Durlacher, "and come and help me dress before you change your things."

The moment she had closed the door, her mistress called her back.

"And send Mrs. b.u.t.terick as well."