"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 fashion. 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?

"G.o.ddess," thought Eloquent, was much more appropriate than gawk. He had no very clear conception of a G.o.ddess, but vaguely pictured a woman fair and simple and superb and young--not quite so young as Mary Ffolliot. It was only during the last year or two that he had read any poetry, and he was never quite sure whether he liked it or not. It was upsetting stuff he considered, vaguely disquieting and suggestive. Yet there were times when it came in useful. It said things for a chap that he couldn't say for himself. It expressed the inexpressible . . .

in words. It synthesised and formulated fantastic and illusive experiences.

His youthful facility in learning "bits" of prose by heart had not deserted him, and he found verse even easier to remember; in fact, sometimes certain stanzas would recur with irritating persistency when he didn't want them at all; and in thinking of this, to him, new type of girl, there flowed into his mind the lines:

"Walking in maiden wise, Modest and kind and fair, The freshness of spring in her eyes And the fulness of spring in her hair."

Gawk, indeed! that little boy ought to have his head smacked.

And having come to a definite condition at last, he found he had reached his aunt's house. The lamp was lit in the parlour and the blind was down, for it was already quite dark. He had taken twenty-five minutes to walk from Mr Ffolliot's gates to his aunt's house.

Miss Gallup, plump, ruddy, and garrulous, very like her brother Abel with her round pink face and twinkling eyes, was greatly delighted to see him.

"You've come to your old aunt first thing, Eloquent," she cried triumphantly, "which is no more than I expected, though none the less gratifying, and you nearly a member and all. How things do come to pa.s.s, to be sure. I wish as your poor father had lived to see this day, and you going into parlyment with the best of 'em."

"Don't say 'going in,' aunt," Eloquent expostulated. "It's quite on the cards that they won't elect me. Personally, I think they would have done better to put up a stronger candidate. Marlehouse is always looked upon as a safe Tory seat; you know Mr Brooke has been member for a long time, and was unopposed at the last election."

"An' never opens his mouth in London from one year's end to the other, sits and sleeps, so I've heard, and leaves the rest to do all the talking and bills and that. My dear boy, don't tell me! Marlehouse folk's got too much sense to give the go-by to one as can talk and was born amongst 'em, and they all know you."

"But, Aunt Susan, I thought you were ever such a Tory. What has become of all your political convictions, if you want me to get in?"

Miss Gallup laughed. "Precious little chance; I had of _'aving_ any convictions all the years I kept house for your dear father; an' a pretty aunt I'd be if I could go against you now. Politics is all very well, but flesh and blood's a deal more, an' a woman wouldn't be half a woman if she didn't stand by her own. It don't seem to matter much which side's in. There'll be plenty to find fault with 'em whichever it is, and anyway from all I can hear just now you're on the winnin'

side, so 'vote for Gallup,' says I, an' get someone as'll speak up for you--and not sit mumchance for all the world like a stuckey image night after night. Your bag come by the carrier all right yesterday. And now you must want your tea after that long walk--but, good gracious me, boy, have you met with an accident, or what, that you're all over with mud like that? You aren't hurted, are you?"

Eloquent again explained his mishap, but he said nothing about Mary Ffolliot. His aunt took him to the back-door and brushed him vigorously, then they both sat down to tea in her exceedingly cosy sitting-room.

"Do you like being back here again after all these years, Aunt Susan?"

asked Eloquent. "I suppose everything has changed very much since you lived here before."

"Not so much as you'd think; and then the _place_ is the same, and as one grows older that counts for a lot. When one's young, one's all for change and gallivantin', but once you're up in years 'tis the old things you cares for most; 'an when I heard as the house I was born in was empty I just had to come back. Redmarley village don't change, because no one can build. Mr Ffolliot sees to that; not one rood of land will he sell, and the old houses looks just the same as when I was a little girl. Your father he left Redmarley when he was fourteen, and went 'prentice to the 'Golden Anchor,' an' he never cared for the village like me. I hardly knew him when I was young, he being twelve years older than me, and him coming home but seldom."

"It must make a good deal of difference having a family at . . . the Manor," said Eloquent, with studied carelessness. He had nearly said "the Manshun," after the fashion of the villagers.

"Of course it do. There's changes there, if you like."

"I suppose you sometimes see . . . the young people?"

"See them? I should just think we do, _and_ hear them and hear _about_ them from morning to night. There never was more mixable children than the young Ffolliots."

"How many are there?" Eloquent tried to keep his voice cool and uninterested, but he felt as he used to feel when he was a child in "hiding games," when some one told him he was "getting warm."

"Well, there's Mr Grantly, he's the eldest; he's going to be an officer in the army like his grandpa; he's gone apprentice to some shop."

"What?" asked Eloquent, in astonishment.

"I thought it a bit queer myself, but Miss Mary herself did say it.