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AT a suitable interval from their first visit to the Rock they were bidden to a water-picnic, and thereafter with increasing frequency to a luncheon-party, or a supper, or some excursion with various members of the family, male and female, among the intricate and distant windings of the Lake. They were invited into the most interior chambers of the house itself. Lychnis and Ruby made friends of young girls or married women with exquisite names. The depression that some of the party had begun to feel lifted, and there was great gaiety and friendship. Messengers were soon dispensed with, and all their arrangements were made by wireless, once they had learned to use the apparatus discovered in a cabinet on the day of their arrival at the Pavilion. It was, Ambrose reports, a better instrument than any known in Europe, the principle of it, Sir Richard and Fulke agreed, being in advance of European physical knowledge—a thing guessed at, but not grasped. They began to know the coves, shrubberies and summer-houses, and some of the mysteries of the island; and they began to see what Sprot and Fulke called the sinister side of their hosts’ lives. The weather was wonderful—clear, warm and mellow, with mist in the morning. Peaches and apricots ripened on the brown flanks of the island, and the two parties spent glorious days and wonderful summer evenings about the Lake and the valleys among those fantastic oyster-shell hills. The only rule that Lord Sombrewater made was that Lychnis and Ruby were on no account to visit the Rock unless accompanied by himself, Sir Richard Frew-Gaff, or Ambrose.
Ambrose found that in one way the task of keeping the record of their activities began to present difficult problems. Wang, Hsiao and Yuan baffled analysis and gave him no confidences. Their characters did not seem to have recognizable springs. Merry old Wang said little and laughed immoderately, smiting his clean, blanched-yellow old head without obvious occasion; his sayings, moreover, usually seemed inappropriate and without sense. Hsiao, who with his top-knot resembled an inspired turnip, drank a great deal and painted divinely. Yuan was perhaps easier to understand. He had a certain candour, almost an impulsiveness; but then, as his great-grandfather said, he had not yet quite learned to cease from activity and return to his centre. He ranged abroad and vanished sometimes for days at a time, while his elders kept to the Lake and the island, and seemed to find great contentment in an almost perpetual motionlessness. He liked to be among mountains and pines. “He persists,” Wang said, “in riding among wind-storms and adding to the sum of human emotion.” And then he explained that for countless centuries every generation of the family had produced a Sage. There was always one to whom it came as nature, and in his own generation the mantle had fallen on Yuan. But Yuan had yet much to learn. Ambrose thereupon grasped the situation—Wang was a complete Sage, a perfect or superior man, as they put it. Yuan’s father, Sage of another generation, was on a pilgrimage. Hsiao was a side-line. Yuan, the beginner (from the point of view of the Europeans he was already far enough on the way to wisdom), was in training. Like the elders, he would spend hours in the neighbourhood of a flower or a water-fowl—he used courtesy towards flowers and animals—and more than once in her walks Lychnis came upon him wrapped in his meditation, self-unconscious, quite lost to the world. It charmed her.
In another way Ambrose’s task became easier, because, as their reactions to their strange circumstances became stronger, and as their troubles increased, the Sages all came with their confidences. Even Ruby had something to say and advice to ask, and Lychnis made him absolutely her conscience and heart.