Clara burst out in her shrill treble.

"I've give him a taste of the stick, I have," said she, brandishing a stout ash twig, "for killing o' my turkey. He's a cruel boy, he is, and I'm very angry wi' him. He took an' threw great rocks over into the poultry-yard, and Miss Allonby, she was there wi' me, and he might ha'

killed both of us; but 'stead o' that, he goes an' kills my best turkey I set such store by. I'll l'arn him to throw stones, I will! I's take an' tell me mother I won't have un abaout the place if he's going to take to throwing stones."

"It won't do," said Mr. Fowler, lightly touching the rec.u.mbent Saul with his foot. "I always said it wouldn't do when the poor lad grew up. He's getting mischievous. Up, Saul!--up, my lad, now at once. You've had a beating, which you richly deserved. What made you so naughty, eh?"

For answer the big lad raised himself on his hands and knees, crawled towards Clara, and flung his arms humbly about her knees, saying, in his imperfect way,

"Poor! poor!"

His castigator was melted at once. She took his beautiful head of golden curls between her hands, and patted it energetically.

"There, you see, he don't mean anything; he's as good as gold all the time," she said. "But mind, you leave my birds a-be, Saul. If I ketch you in my poultry-yard, I'll give you such a licking! I will! So mind!"

He began to whimper penitently. Lady Mabel looked sorrowfully at him.

"Poor boy!" said she, "what an affliction! He ought to be put into an asylum."

"Please, your ladyship, his mother won't part with him," said Clara; "and he never does no harm, not if you're kind to him. There, there, boy, don't cry. I've got some b.u.t.ter-milk for you in t' dairy."

He began to smile through his tears, which he wiped away on her ap.r.o.n.

Claud thought it the oddest group he had ever seen. The sight of the great fellow p.r.o.ne on the ground, meekly taking a beating from a girl half his size, was a mixture of the pathetic and the absurd. It half touched, half disgusted him. Suddenly a light step on the wooden stair made him turn.

Wynifred stood in the doorway.

"Oh,--Mr. Cranmer," she said, faltering somewhat at the presence of three strangers. "I beg your pardon, I thought you were alone. My brother would like to see you."

"I'll come at once, but first of all you must let me introduce you to my sister."

CHAPTER XIV.

"Till the lost sense of life returned again, Not as delight, but as relief from pain."

_The Falcon of Sir Federigo._

Allonby's return to full consciousness had been a very gradual affair.

Each lucid interval had been eagerly watched by Dr. Forbes, who feared the loss of memory, partial or entire, which often results from such brain attacks. Were the young man to forget--as it was entirely probable that he would--the circ.u.mstances immediately preceding his illness, the difficulty of Mr. d.i.c.kens' mission would be increased tenfold.

When it became evident that the sick man recognised his sister, the excitement began to culminate. But hours went by, he slept, ate, awoke, and dozed again, quite tranquil, and apparently not at all solicitous as to how Wynifred came to be at his side, or where he was, or what was the reason of his illness.

But at last, one afternoon, the "light of common day" broke in upon the calmness of his musings, and sent his mind tossing restlessly to and fro in all the tumult of newly aroused consciousness.

He awoke from a delicious sleep with a sense of returning vigor in all his big limbs, and, essaying to throw out his left arm, behold! It was immovable.

He held his breath, while he surveyed the bandaged limb, and all the glittering visions which had been the companion of his delirium came showering to earth in a torrent of shining fragments.

Throughout his illness, the idea of the Island Valley of Avilion had never left him. No doubt the fact that his dominant idea had been a beautiful and a peaceful one had greatly served to help him through. His talk, when he rambled, had been all of "bowery willows crowned with summer sea," and of the rest of the exquisite imagery with which he had mentally surrounded Edge Combe in his holiday dreams. Now, the mirage of imaginary loveliness had fled. Like a flash it was gone, and only the commonplace daylight of every day remained.

This sudden departure of the baseless fabric of his vision was by no means a novelty to Osmond. Often and often before he had had violently to recall his winged thoughts to earth: to set aside the sparkling beauties of the life he lived in fancy, in order to cope with the butcher's bills, the rates and taxes of the life he lived in reality.

But this last dream had been pa.s.sing sweet, and he thought it had lasted longer than was common with the airy things. It had rivetted itself in his mind, till he felt that he could close his eyes and commit it to canvas from memory alone. He could see the soft dim outline of the mythic barge, he could "hear the water lapping on the crags, and the long ripple washing in the reeds," and he could see, feature for feature, the face of the sorrowing queen. A young, lovely face, with the light of morning on it, but with anguish in the eyes, and sympathy of tears upon the cheeks.

For a moment he closed his eyes to recall it all. Then he boldly opened them, to confront a world with which he felt too weak to cope.

Not much of the said world was visible just then, and what there was seemed calculated to soothe and cheer. It was bounded by the four walls of a not very large room, the whitewash of whose ceiling was spotlessly white, the roses of whose wall paper were aggressively round and pink.

To his right, a cas.e.m.e.nt window hung wide open; and through it came the sighing of a summer wind rustling through elm-trees.

Near this window stood the well-known figure of his sister Wynifred, stepping leisurely to and fro before the board on her sketching easel, to which she was transferring, in charcoal, some impression which was visible to her through the window.

Her straight brows were pulled together so as to make a perpendicular furrow in the forehead between them; the soft scratching of her charcoal brought back to Osmond common-place memories of the Woodstead Art School, wherein he pa.s.sed three days of every week as a master, when it was not vacation time.

Wynifred and Wynifred's occupation were familiar enough. They let him know the folly of his dreaming; but there yet remained one puzzling thing. How came he to be lying there in bed, with a bandaged arm, in a room that was utterly strange to him?

It was rather a remarkable room, too, when one came to study it attentively. It possessed a heavy door carved in black oak, which door was not set flat in the wall, but placed cross-ways across the corner--evidently a relic of great antiquity.

The invalid pondered over that door with a curiosity which was somewhat strange, considering that the answer to his puzzle, in the shape of his sister, stood so close to him, and that he had only to ask to be enlightened.

But it is to be supposed that there is something fascinating in suspense, or why do we so often turn over and over in our hands a letter the handwriting of which is unknown to us--exhausting ourselves in surmise as to who is our correspondent, when we have but to break the seal for the signature to stare us in the face? There is no saying how long Allonby might have amused himself with conjecture, for it was, truth to tell, a state of mind peculiarly congenial to him. He liked to feel that he did not know what was to happen next--to wait for an unexpected _denouement_ of the situation. He had often, when exploring an unknown country, been guilty of the puerile device of sitting down by the roadside, just before a sharp bend in the road, or just below the summit of a high hill, while he pleased himself with guessing what would be likely to meet his eye when the corner was turned, or the hill-crest reached. So now he lay, speculating idly to himself, and by no means anxious to break the spell of silence by p.r.o.nouncing his sister's name; when suddenly she looked up from her work, half absently, and, finding his eyes gravely fixed on her, flung down her charcoal, and came hastily to the bedside, wiping her fingers on her ap.r.o.n.

"How are you, old man?" she said, meeting his inquiring look with one of frank kindliness. There was no trace of the burst of feeling with which she had told Dr. Forbes that her heart was soaring up to the evening star in the quiet heavens in grat.i.tude and love. Evidently Miss Allonby kept her sentiment for rare occasions.

"I believe I feel pretty well," said he, using his own voice in an experimented and tentative way. "But I feel rather muddled. I don't quite recall things. I think, if you were to tell me where I am, it would give me a leg up."

"Take a spoonful of 'Brand' first," said Wyn; and, taking up a spoon, she proceeded to feed him. He ate readily enough; and philosophically said no more till she had turned his pillows and arranged his head in comfort; all of which she did both quietly and efficaciously, though in a manner all her own, and which would have revealed to the eye of an expert that she had been through no course of nursing lectures, nor known the interior of any hospital.

"There!" she said at last, seating herself lightly on the edge of the bed. "Now I will tell you--you are in a place called Poole Farm. Does that help you?"

"Poole Farm? Yes," he said, reflectively. "I was sketching near there.

Did I have a fall? I have managed to smash myself somehow. How did I do it?"

"Don't you remember?" asked Wyn, earnestly.

He lifted his uninjured hand and pa.s.sed it over his forehead. It came in contact with more bandages. He felt them speculatively.

"Broken head, broken arm, broken rib," he remarked, drily. "Broken mainspring would almost have been more simple. How did it happen, now?

How did it happen? I can't understand."

"You were painting, in the lane by the wayside," said the girl, suggestively. "A picture with a warm key of color, and a little bit of the corner of the farm-house coming into it--evening sky--horizon line broken on the left by clump of ash-trees."

"Yes, I know. I recollect that," he said. "I walked over from Edge Combe in rather a hot sun. I felt a little queer. But a sunstroke couldn't break one's bones, Wyn. I must have had a fall, eh?"

"You fell from your camp-stool to the gra.s.s," she returned, "but that could hardly have hurt you to such an extent."

He lay musing. At last,