The room

MR. WRIGHT made sure, with a quick look, that the shop door leading back to the parlour, was closed. Then he leant across the counter to Ursula, and in low confidential tones, scornfully tolerant, enlightened her as to the true character of St. Miniot, its inhabitants and its history. Mr. Wright kept the general shop which was not also the post office, in opposition to Mr. Sampson’s general shop—which was.

Mr. Wright was not a native of the place; he was indeed a very superior man, preoccupied with care lest a stranger, such as Ursula, should not take note of this superiority within the first five minutes’ intercourse. He had a short pointed beard and wise eyes; he spoke consciously good English; he had once kept a store in Sydney, and he behaved entirely as though life were a delicate mission entrusted to him by a celestial Diplomatic Service, who had selected him for his special gifts of tact, suavity and discretion.

He was a materialist and an agnostic—so he informed Ursula; but she, who was quick to recognize little boys at their games, knew him at once for a romantic who could only make existence bearable by such pretences as: “I think if you’ll give me time I can put that through for you, Mrs. Barrison,” when she asked for a pound of castor sugar, “but you’ll understand, I know, that I’ve good reason for asking you to keep the matter quiet. There are some people here”—with a significant nod at the door—“who’d do neither of us any good if it came round to them. And I needn’t tell you that in a little place like this things do get round in an astonishing way. I mention no names, mind you”—bending still further forward until his beard almost touched Ursula’s chin—“but I heard only yesterday that you were thinking of entering into negotiations for a house down here. Now I wouldn’t go so far as to say I know of one that might suit you—it’s best not to commit oneself in a place like this”—a shrug of the shoulders and a short embittered laugh every time he mentioned “the folks down here” or “a place like this”—“but there’d be no harm in my asking you if you had happened to notice—and a ball of string, Mrs. Barrison? Thank you very much, I’ll send it along with the other parcels.”

The sudden swerve into ordinary professional tones was for the hoodwinking of a small child who came in for some washing soda. “Now then, Lizzie, what is it? Oh, all right. Run along home, now, your mother’ll be wanting this in a hurry.”

The bell clanged behind Lizzie ... and the low diplomatic tones were resumed: “Those children, they gossip worse than their parents, sometimes, and that’s saying a good deal, in a place like this. Lizzie’s dumb, poor little soul, but still, it’s best to be on the safe side, and her grandmother on her father’s side, Mrs. Arthur Endellion, that would be—is related to Mr. Wenn that I was just going to tell you about. A sister, in fact.”

“But I thought Lizzie was the old postman’s granddaughter.”

Mr. Wright smiled enigmatically. “Ah, poor old Danny Mawgan—he made the mistake of his life there. Ten pounds was what the Endellions offered him to adopt the baby for good and all; it seemed a great lot to him at the time, he’s not too bright, you may have noticed. But now, of course, the money’s gone, and the child isn’t, so to speak.”

Mr. Wright was very pleased with the delicate way he had manoeuvred the story into Ursula’s consciousness, without having done anything so commonplace as actually talking village scandal. “About that house, now——”

The door-bell tinkled again, and Doug strode in, wearing very old, very baggy, shaggy tweeds, full of loose ends and string and knots, and very woolly stockings. Ursula introduced Mr. Wright: “He says perhaps he can put us into communication with somebody who knows some one who has heard”—sinking her voice to a careful whisper, for Mr. Wright’s manner was infectious—“about a house, Doug.”

“Good egg!” cried Doug exuberantly. “Where is this house? Let’s go and have a look at it.”

Mr. Wright coughed, and on the pretext of re-arranging some tins, came round the counter and closed the door which Doug had left wide open.

“You won’t think me interfering, Mr. Barrison, if I ask you first for just how long you’ve taken Parc Gooth? Don’t tell me unless it’s convenient. I’m one that can mind his own business, thank God. And you’ll find out they’re not many of them in this place who can.”

“No, I suppose not. Did you choose to settle down here on spec, or because you’d heard about it?”

“If I’d heard about it, Mr. Barrison, I would not have chosen to settle down here!” His expressive beard recorded satisfaction at having scored a neat point in cynical repartee.

“Oh come—I’d call it quite a good spot for a man to end his days!”

“He’d certainly end them quicker here than anywhere else, Mr. Barrison.” And the beard found it hard to control its jubilance. “How long did you say they’d bound you to at Parc Gooth?”

“Only three months, and furnished, of course. I thought we’d be sure to have landed something permanent by then.”

“Ah.... You want to stay here permanently?”

“Rather. I mean to farm.”

“Ah....” Mr. Wright concealed knowledge of the conflicting rumours, but all alike sinister, which were afloat in St. Miniot, to account for the Barrisons’ arrival among them:

That he (or she) was a dipsomaniac.

That he (or she) was a criminal, either escaped to St. Miniot, or paid to keep out of the way by the family he (or she, or both) had disgraced.

That he (or she) was a spy in the pay of some foreign power.

That he (or she) was an incurable victim to drugs.

The idea that they had removed far from the world’s hum merely because they could not (or would not) be conventionally married, was only entertained when bracketed with one of the other conjectures. Otherwise it was too much of a commonplace at St. Miniot to find favour. Mere bankruptcy was also too mild for a thrill. Besides, “foreigners” who came to St. Miniot were usually not bankrupt—beforehand.

“Ah.... Then you’ll be wanting a house with plenty of land?”

“Not for a year or two. I’m out for practical experience first.... I’ll go as a labourer to any prosperous farmer in the neighbourhood who’ll teach me the job in return. I’ve all my life in front of me, Sampson, and unless you shove all your guts into an enterprise, you might as well leave it alone. Don’t you agree?”

Mr. Wright might have agreed more heartily if he had not just been addressed as Sampson. It proved that Doug had been patronizing the other stores.

“The house I’m thinking of,” he began—“but I’d rather you just gave me your authority for making inquiries about it, and leave it at that for the moment. Between ourselves, Mr. Barrison, it’s the property of Isaac Wenn, who keeps the Temperance Hotel up to Polpinnock. That’s a local expression, of course—‘up to’ anywhere. I’ve been here so long now that I’m sorry to say I’m falling into their habits. Have you heard Wenn spoken of? No? Ah—they’re afraid to, for the most part. Wenn’s hard—he’d skin a louse for its hide and tallow.” He waggled a gratified beard in acknowledgement of Ursula’s chuckle. “He was landlord of the King’s Arms, near Newquay, when he was younger. Made a pile out of liquor, Wenn did. And now he’s making a pile out of temperance.”

Ursula’s chuckle broke into a laugh: “I think I shall like Mr. Wenn. He sounds broad-minded.”

“I’ll crash over and see him about the house at once,” Doug said. “Only a mile or two to Polpinnock, isn’t it?”

Mr. Wright advised him to wait: “And I’ll make a few careful inquiries first and then let you know.... Let me see—perhaps if you were to call in here Thursday about eleven.... And if I’ve customers in the shop, if you wouldn’t mind making out you wanted some trifle——”

“Right-o! I’ll buy a ball of string.”

“Well—no”—Mr. Wright considered the proposition carefully—“because Lizzie Mawgan heard me selling Mrs. Barrison a ball of string a few minutes ago; and it might get about and look funny, if it happened again within a week. They’re dreadful scandalmongers down here—poor ignorant souls, they’ve nothing better to do, most of them. But I shouldn’t care for Wenn to get suspicious. Just in confidence, Mr. Barrison, don’t trust him too far. He’s a sharp business man and needs watching. But it might do me harm for him to hear it repeated that I’d make mischief——”

Three ladies in black, gentry, not villagers, came in for groceries; and Mr. Wright served them with that manner of respectful independence by which he accentuated his equal contempt for familiarity or obsequiousness.

“If it comes to being done by landlords,” Doug broke out, “I’d back that jolly old pair of ruffians, the Abbotts, against your Mr. Wenn any day!”

“They let me Parc Gooth, you know,” he continued, unabashed by Mr. Wright’s visible anguish at the fourteen indiscretions committed by that one speech. “Rum old couple. They told me you weren’t straight, among other things; but as it turned out a sort of obsession with them that nobody was straight, I didn’t bother.”

“Indeed, sir. Thank you, Mrs. Rowe; thank you, Miss Tregunter. I’m sorry I haven’t that size needles, but I’ll try and put it through for you, if you’ll leave it in my hands. Good morning....”

Alone with the Barrisons again, Mr. Wright was in a quandary. He badly wanted to talk about the Abbotts; in fact, he had inside information about Parc Gooth; but he felt also that Doug ought to be brought to realize he had committed grave errors of policy. So that his reply was stiff and shaded with reproach.

“I’m not surprised Mr. Abbott should not be feeling friendly towards me, sir. I was rather disposed to be reserved and cautious in my dealings with him. He was too fond of calling everybody a rogue, to be altogether an honest man himself. Now Miss Gregson, who built Parc Gooth, she was of good family, there was no mistaking it; she wore her hair short like a man’s, and had a deep bullying voice, and her clothes might have been fished out of the bottom of a ditch when the winter floods went down. But for all that, so soft-hearted and believing, that any one could have made a fool of her, and most people did, hereabouts. And then she married a pretty fellow, an Italian circus-rider, they said he was, and that was the end of her as far as St. Miniot was concerned. And that was where Mr. and Mrs. Abbott came in. You took the house direct from the Laceys, I suppose?”

“Without seeing them, yes. But when we got there, we found a respectable old granny and grandfather camping in the wash-house, and they smiled at us and said they were the Abbotts and we weren’t to trust the Laceys because the house was really not theirs for letting. We tried to work it out, and they treated us to an excellent supper they had ordered in at our expense, and ate some oatmeal biscuits and onions themselves, and we discussed Bocaccio.... Mrs. Abbott had a sort of thin brittle titter as though you were treading on dry leaves, which rather upset me, and the old chap reminded me of a discontented Mr. Pickwick....”

“Quite so, sir,” put in Mr. Wright, to show that he had read Dickens.

Ursula lifted the description away from Doug: “And at eleven o’clock or thereabouts, they began packing up all their things in filthy old bags and bottles and biscuit-tins and bits of carpet and torn sacking; and hung them in bundles round a crazy pony-cart, with the harness all tied up with string and rags; and then they told us that the pony had once been Mr. Abbott’s polo mount and had won many cups; and would we drop them a card c/o the Gullick post-office at any time we’re away for a week-end, as they enjoyed coming over to camp at Parc Gooth; and could we lend them fivepence for lump sugar which was healthier than any meat, and a perusal of ‘Timon of Athens’ would enlighten us as to the characters of all the hypocrites and parasites who swarmed in St. Miniot.... And so saying, Mrs. Abbott lit a red lantern, and hopped into the cart and they drove away, rattling and bumping up the dark lane. I couldn’t help wondering——” but she remembered that Mr. Wright had his limitations, and kept to herself the appeal which the lawless homeless Abbotts had made to her imagination. Young, roystering, rollicking adventurers, here today, on the road tomorrow, ready for flight at any moment, picking up a precarious living by their wits—Young rogues and adventurers were not uncommon nor to be pitied. But Mr. and Mrs. Abbott were well over sixty—and, it might seem, too old to live defiantly. They ought to have settled down long ago to days of pious security, fussed over by kindly grandchildren, and quite certain of the same chair in the same place until they peacefully died.

“Oh well, we haven’t come to the end of the Abbotts yet—but I’d watch him if I were you, sir. There’s a lot more I could tell you.... It’s a house of ill luck, Parc Gooth is, for all that it’s not yet built four years. I’ll let you know about what I said before, when I said I would. Thank you, Mr. Barrison. Good-day, madam.”

[II]

ONCE outside Mr. Wright’s stuffy little shop, Ursula said doubtfully: “These rustics, they’re awfully quaint, aren’t they, Doug?”

“Thumping good fellows, all of them,” replied her husband, in vigorous remonstrance of her uneasiness.

“I wonder why they all tell us to watch each other.... D’you remember what the Abbotts told us about Wright?”

“I think old Abbott means well—he’s one of us, of course, and sees our point of view ... what was it he said about Wenn of the Temperance Hotel?”

“Said he was the most dangerous thief in the neighbourhood.... M’yes. That’s our future landlord, isn’t it?”

Their eyes met—and they laughed.

“Arcadia ...” said Ursula.

“More or less.”

“I wonder if the Laceys are paying over our rent to Miss Gregson and her circus-rider, or to the Abbotts.”

“Or keeping it themselves,” suggested Doug, vaulting a gate. “How unmarried you look, Teddy,” as she followed him over, with that sedate air which she wore like a fichu and dorothy-bag. “It’s hardly respectable.”

“Young, do you mean?”

“Yes ... not quite——” His meaning slipped elusively away, and he stifled her in a warm tweed hug. “It’s splendid having you all day long like this, isn’t it? though that’ll have to stop directly I start work. I fixed it up with Mrs. Thomas this morning, before I met you. She was a bit astonished that I wanted to work like an ordinary farmhand, and consulted her two sons about it ... snobbish young cubs who were officers in the war. They said I could clean out the shippons on Saturday mornings, if I tipped the man who usually does it.”

“It sounds a good arrangement—for somebody. Doug, did they say anything about Parc Gooth and who we weren’t to trust?”

“The Laceys,” promptly. “They’re thieves and swindlers and never paid up their rent at all, so they’ve no right to ours; the Gregsons have, but they’ve sub-let to the Abbotts, who drove away the Todys who are coming back tomorrow; and Mrs. Thomas says we can trust them. Mrs. Tody’s her sister.”

Ursula collapsed on to a flat stone, overwhelmed by the sweet wholesome primitive state of affairs into which their flight from complex London had landed them.

Doug had followed their post-Doreen conversation in the boarding house, by an impetuous day on which he handed in his immediate resignation to the Knapsack Club, bought a Devon and Morcar Post, and broke it to his mother—or rather smashed it over her—that he and Ursula had decided to emigrate to the remote West Country, and become farmers.

The Knapsack Club subscribed to present him with a silver-topped walking-stick; his mother had a heart-attack; and in the Post they found Parc Gooth advertised as “To Let furnished.”

Doug had some money of his own, not very much, but sufficient to keep them both for a couple of years or so, until he had learned farming.

So the Barrisons corresponded with the Laceys, who apparently lived in Nottingham; and liking the sound of Parc Gooth, they took it for three months. They sent the Laceys half their rent in advance, who in reply hoped they would find everything comfortable, including a handy man and his equally handy wife, Mr. and Mrs. Tody, attached to the house since its infancy, who would be upon the premises when Mr. and Mrs. Barrison arrived, to be used as convenient.

“Directly we’ve got our sea-legs, we can sling ’em out,” said Doug. “Their name’s a bit ominous.”

“Oh, people are never like their names, really....”

But anyhow, on arrival, they found Mr. and Mrs. Tody had retired in a temper to relations in Gullick; and instead, they were warmly welcomed by the mysterious Abbotts, who, with their onions and biscuit-boxes, were camping in the kitchen; and, with a lazy proprietorial air, re-painting the front door. The Abbotts told them that they had rented Parc Gooth for seven years from their dear friend Miss Gregson who built it, but had to leave it because St. Miniot passionately rejected her nice new Italian-Circus husband who jumped through hoops. The Abbotts sub-let it for three years, complete with Todys, to the Laceys. Tody, apparently, had been St. Miniot’s cobbler, but ever since eccentric and lovable Miss Gregson had built Parc Gooth, he had renounced cobbling, and devoted himself to the house.

After expensively re-decorating the house, and doing their utmost to efface some of the blatant rigid hideousness of its exterior, Mr. Lacey suddenly took an urgent dislike to the house, and returned with his wife to Nottingham. The rumour crept about, as it always did on these occasions, that they were ruined. The Abbotts told Doug that they had never received any rent from the Laceys, and therefore the Laceys had no right to the rent which Doug had paid.

“Abbott’s your landlord, not Lacey,” was the situation’s paraphrase on the immortal Codlin. To which the Laceys retorted, by letter, that they had paid their rent, due to the Abbotts, direct to Miss Gregson, because they did not trust the Abbotts and nor did Tody!...

“Then did our rent, via the Laceys, also go to Miss Gregson?” wondered Ursula, as she and Doug, sitting side by side on a piece of granite stone on the moors, tried to grasp the intricacies of Parc Gooth. “And do the Abbotts also pay Miss Gregson for their seven years? And supposing Miss Gregson doesn’t exist at all?”

“I dunno,” said Doug, gloomily, stretched at her feet. “We’ll see if Tody says we may trust old Wright. Parc Gooth is rather like a musical comedy, isn’t it? composed by—libretto by—lyrics by—additional lyrics—and entirely new costumes and scenery in Act II. I say, we’re half-way to Polpinnock Head. Let’s go on, and have a drink with Wenn and see about his cottage to let. I’m fed up with Parc Gooth.”

“Wright said we were to leave it to him to open discreet negotiations without mentioning names.”

“Well, I can negotiate as discreetly as a small village shopkeeper, I suppose ...” and Doug marched up to a man standing in the doorway of the one hotel at Polpinnock, with a bluff: “Good day. Are you Wenn? Wright of St. Miniot tells me you’ve got a house to let. What about letting it to us, eh?... My name’s Barrison.”

Ursula, in the background, smiled—and adored him.

Mr. Wenn said eagerly that he had indeed a house to let, a beautiful house, a gentleman’s house—but—hastily amending his eagerness—he did not at all want to let it. In fact, he intended to live in it himself....

“A villain so transparent as to be lovable,” reflected Ursula, summing him up. It was wonderful that with his naïve simplicity he should have attained such a sway of terror in St. Miniot and Polpinnock.

Isaac Wenn was tall and ruddy, with a short black moustache. He wore a lilac cotton tie; and he spoke of himself pathetically as an old man, or nonchalantly as still a young one, adapted to opportunities of gain. Frequently, too, he spoke of money, and always as “good money”; the adjective was never omitted: “I paid good money to get my boys educated,” he would say, with a tinge of regret in his voice.

Now, hearing that Doug was in search of a house, he became blatantly the spider who has sighted a fat fly:

“Who was it, did you say, sir, told you I’d a house to let?”

“I don’t know,” stammered Doug, suddenly remembering that he was under pledge to be wary and not mention the name of Wright, and forgetting that he had already done so.

“Ah. You’m stayin’ up to Parc Gooth.”

“Yes,” and the Barrisons waited apprehensively for warnings against the Abbotts, the Todys or the Laceys, according to the direction of Mr. Wenn’s prejudice.

“I never got on with Miss Gregson,” said Wenn unexpectedly, taking the cigarette Doug offered him; “Thank you, sir—nor with Wright of St. Miniot neither. They’m not teetotallers, none of ’em—and when a man takes a glass too much, why he takes two or three glasses, d’you see, sir? throwing good money down their throats, ’stead of putting it by. And then they get tu talking. They’m all too fond of drink and talk, up tu St. Miniot. The one gentleman o’ the lot’s Mr. Abbott. Many’s the friendly glass o’ lemonade him and me have had together, sittin’ here at this table. You can trust he, same as you can trust me, being neither of us drinkers,” concluded Wenn of the Temperance Hotel, whose truculent speech and red face were unfortunate legacies from his former career as landlord of the King’s Arms, Newquay.

“Now about this house. What rent was ee prepared to pay, Mr. Barrison?”

“I’m a poor man,” Doug began, doing a little rudimentary diplomacy on his own.

Mr. Wenn laughed with forced geniality.

“Oh, come. Oh, that’s good. You don’t expect me to believe that. Wish I had what you had, Mr. Barrison!”

“I wish you had,” replied Doug; “I mean I wish I had what you wished you had if I had it....”

It struck Ursula that they were both more pathetic than comic, with their elaborate show of tactics and bluff. More little boys at their games ... they might just as well sit down side by side with their feet turned in, and say: “I’m going to do you!” “Yes, an’ I’m goin’ to do you too!”

Finally, they were taken to look at the house. It stood in a clump with the Vicarage, the doctor’s house and the butcher’s house. The latter was the most palatial of the three, but Mr. Wenn’s house was approached by a carriage-drive which was his special pride: “This is a gentleman’s residence,” he said; and pointed out some artificial swirls and markings which covered the light shiny wood of the front door: “That there graining, I did every bit of it myself. It costs good money to have done, graining does.”

“It’s a horrible house,” whispered Ursula to Doug, who nodded agreement.

But sycophantically they praised it to the complacent Wenn, who, sure now of his tenants, began to bluster afresh that his intention in getting rid of the former occupants, was to dwell himself, with his wife and family, at Bella Vista.

“Then have you anything else to let, Mr. Wenn?”

“Only a cottage; nearer St. Miniot; about a couple o’ miles from here back along by the moor. I’ll have the jingle out—no trouble at all, Mrs. Barrison.” He was anxious to show them the cottage, to emphasize in tantalizing contrast the superiority of Bella Vista.

While he harnessed the pony to the jingle, Ursula strolled down on to the Polpinnock sands, much valued by families, because they were “so safe,” and by sightseers, because they contained the famous Drummer’s Cave. Returning to Wenn’s Temperance Hotel, which stood on a small outjutting headland west of the cove, she noticed on a similar headland east of the cove, the torn and jagged framework of a ruined house, looking rather like the mouth of a Jew after treatment from King John. A dejected signboard still flapped over a non-existent frontage, and on it Ursula was able to decipher the words “Polpinnock Arms.” From which she gathered the significant truth, that this dilapidated tumble of masonry had once been the rival establishment to Mr. Wenn’s hotel.

Perhaps, after all, rumour might be correct in saying that Wenn was a hard man....

She was silent on the drive, studying the stolid red of his nape, and wishing one might adopt the simple course of asking a swindler straight out whether he were a swindler or not.

The cottage stood on the empty edge of cliff between rough moor and sea. It was a defiantly plain squat little building of grey stone, seeming to emphasize the fact that what with winter storms and so forth, it had no time for mere prinking prettiness. The gorse and bramble grew almost up to the doors, without any compromise of garden; and there was no carriage drive. Obviously not a “gentleman’s residence.”

Yet Ursula and Doug both knew at once that, in the jargon of house-agents, they were suited.

“We might as well look inside,” said Ursula in disparaging tones. For she was beginning to know Mr. Wenn.

The entrance faced the moors; and so did the two windows of the large living-room kitchen; West was a fair-sized scullery kitchen. Behind the living-room was a much smaller one, with gorse-bushes choking the view.... “These’ll have to be rooted up and cleared away,” said Doug.

Mr. Wenn glanced at him sharply: “The sort I let it tu won’t object tu a bit o’ stiffish digging. It’s only fit for labourers. Not for gentlefolk, o’ course.”

Doug and Ursula said nothing. They went upstairs. A large double bedroom looked onto the moors; leading from it was a roomy box-room over the scullery—“My dressing-room,” murmured Doug. Along the short passage ... a door flung open....

[III]

A SMALL room with irregular corners, a dipping roof, and two stark windows full of the sea. Ursula’s heart gave a queer sort of twist when she saw it. It was her own room, of which she had been robbed years and years ago—her own room; only with the outlook metamorphosed from a blank wall, to the tumbling shining enchantment of space and green water beyond, and sunshine which slipped about the bare floor. Once again she was whipped by the old feeling of high secret expectation.... In here something significant was to happen to her—to her alone.

In the room ... her room ... loving it, she took possession.

[IV]

“——for a spare-room, in case we want to put somebody up for a few nights,” finished Doug.

Wenn had followed them up the stairs: “I’m a blunt man, sir, and when there’s business to be talked, I like to be plain and straightforward about it, and get it over. That’s my way. I don’t mind saying that I like you, and if you was really thinking of settling down at Bella Vista——”

“We mean to settle down here,” said Ursula, breaking it to him.

He could not understand it, and he would not accept it without understanding. Bella Vista was a gentleman’s residence with grained doors, entrance hall and glasshouse, inside sanitation and every convenience. This grey stone cottage had absolutely nothing to recommend it; even accepting the fact that gentry and foreigners were often “queer”—it was mostly only the queer ones who came to live any longer space of time than just the summer holidays at St. Miniot or Polpinnock—even they, surely, must recognize the overwhelming superiority of Bella Vista? Wenn argued and argued, with bulging eyes, and his tie an angrier lilac against his deep-coloured face. He disparaged his cottage with a zest that would have astonished the former tenants. He pointed out the fact that it was lonely, and liable to sudden night attacks: that the soil was too poor even to grow potatoes; that all water had to be pumped up from the well outside; that the beamed ceilings were low, the windows draughty, and the roof unreliable; no carts or cars could drive up to it, moreover, as the only access was by a looping footpath across the moor. Wenn himself was a poor man, but he could never bring himself to live in such a rough sort of a hole nor yet to bring his missus to live in it. Mr. Barrison—with stolid contempt he eliminated Ursula from negotiation—Mr. Barrison had better reconsider his joke, for o’ course it was only a joke, and take Bella Vista on a three years’ lease. “And I’ll tell ee what I’ll do, sir; I’ll rent it to you for fifty-five pounds a year, and that’s ten pounds good money less than I meant to ask for” ... he had meant to ask forty-eight pounds, but the discussion had made him thirsty, and thirst is as little pleasure to a temperance landlord who has once been an honest drinker, as sunset to a blind man who has once had his sight.

Finally, as the Barrisons could not be persuaded to return to Bella Vista and be charmed by a more detailed inspection of the graining; and as Wenn simply could not believe it possible that any one actually in his senses could prefer the cottage—“It isn’t a question of rent at all,” Doug remarked rashly—they agreed to let the matter stand over for reflection and further counsels. And Wenn charged them heavily both for the hire of his jingle, and for driving it in person.

[V]

MANY times during the week which followed, Ursula caught sight of Wenn and Wright, the lilac tie and the sagacious beard, standing together in confidential attitudes about the lanes, or in the doorway of Wright’s garden, or in the evening shadow of a fuchsia-bush. And afterwards Wright would remark, à propos of nothing, that Wenn was just having a look at his early cabbages which were coming up earlier than any on record.... “And”—in an undertone over the counter—“I’m attending to that little affair of you-know-what, sir. I hope to be able to put it through for you. But you’ll understand I’m in a delicate position and”—Mr. Wright came round the counter and closed the shop-door—“I wouldn’t altogether trust Wenn.... He needs watching.”...

At the end of the week, after one more attempt to cajole Doug into taking over Bella Vista, Wenn gave it up as hopeless, and realizing that a tenant of the grey stone cottage was better than no tenant at all, suddenly abandoned his former policy, and began to boast of its many excellencies which he had the week before depreciated, such as the pure spring of well-water (how much wholesomer than water from pipes); the soothing distance from any road, so that no rumble should profane the quiet (“It cost me good money to get that quiet laid on” was the unspoken parenthesis in Wenn language). Likewise he drew unblushing attention to the stability of the roof, the tightness of the windows in their frames, and the richness of the surrounding soil!

The Barrisons took the cottage. They called it Grey Stone, because they did not want to call it Sea View, and grey stone and a sea view were the only obvious facts about it. Wenn, who enjoyed such succulent adjuncts to business as leases, lawyers, clauses, seals and so forth, as other men enjoyed women and wine, promised jubilantly to give instructions to his lawyer, and drive them himself into Gullick, the nearest town, when the formalities were ready. Meanwhile, they still had several weeks at Parc Gooth—and the Todys had returned.

Mrs. Tody was a respectful shadow in poor health who cooked well. Her husband, whose official position at Parc Gooth seemed to be a sort of Morcarian Beefeater, greeted his new master and mistress with a long glib speech of welcome, addressed not to them directly but to some impersonal lady and gentleman standing beside them. He also referred constantly, and in terms of deep admiration, to one Tody.... The Barrisons were puzzled as to the identity of this Tody, who might quite well have been Tody himself, but who seemed also to have the distinct identity of a third person.

“... Tody is very pleased to see the lady and gentleman. If the gentleman acts fair by Tody, then ’e won’t have nothing to complain of. But when they swindling Abbotts as don’t belong to set foot in Parc Gooth, walk in with their tales of Mr. and Mrs. Lacey who are a generous lady and gentleman which they Abbotts are neither one nor t’other, why, then Tody remembers he was engaged by Miss Gregson and no one else, and ’e packs up and ’e goes....”

To Doug and Ursula the whole Parc Gooth narrative was by now a confusion, in which irrelevant names and grotesque sinister persons bobbed up and vanished as in an unreasonable dream. Ursula did not attempt any more to untwist the rights and wrongs of it all; but, dwelling in the house with her was an uneasiness that swelled almost to fear ... after all, they were “foreigners” among the natives of Arcadia; and the matter-of-fact natives told strange legends about other “foreigners” who had settled down in the locality, perhaps seeking for peace or healing or burial ... and they had all been ruined; sold up; shot themselves; the least among them were labelled “freaks.” Such as, for instance, Mrs. Fawcett, whose little house in the village was stifled with ivy, and a-swarm with cats: a frowsy temple dedicated to cat-worship; some of them sick, and some slow with kittens. And young Fawcett, her son, grey for his forty years and “queerish,” still remembered that he had years ago been a journalist, and still wrote “topical” articles for the papers; but news was stale before it reached St. Miniot; and more stale before the article was laboriously conceived, written and sent off. Once on sight of Ursula and Doug, he had leapt a stile and rushed towards them across three fields. “Excuse me, but have you read ‘Pendennis’?” he panted “Oh, you have? I’m so glad. Good day” ... and rushed off again.

Doug roared with laughter, but Ursula shuddered, and for an instant hated the bright glinting sea and hard-coloured gorse. Was this the result of living in Arcadia?

[VI]

MR. WENN, shortly afterwards, drove them into Gullick to sign the lease at his lawyer’s; and beguiled the eleven miles of monotonous road by anecdotes of his many successes in “doing” people, with the same ingenuous charm as an executioner might display towards his victims in a tumbril, by entertaining them with sunny accounts of his prowess with the axe.

“This lawyer chap of yours,” asked Doug with a not unnatural misgiving, “is he a decent sort?”

“Oh, Roberts? He’m a gentleman’s lawyer, Mr. Barrison,” and Wenn produced his famous straight-between-the-eyes look. “They call un Gentleman Roberts hereabout, and that’s the truth. Mitch”—to a grey, bent henchman whom he had brought along in the jingle to lead the horse up the hills, and—obviously—to corroborate his statements—“what do they call Mr. Roberts hereabouts?”

“Gentleman Roberts,” responded Joshua Mitch, promptly.

Gentleman Roberts had drawn up a lease most marvellously in favour of Isaac Wenn and to the disadvantage of Douglas Barrison. He lost his temper every time Doug questioned a clause, and threw his inkpot down and stamped about the floor. Finally, Doug and Wenn both pressed their thumbs solemnly upon a seal and repeated an oath, and the “foreigner” was charged five guineas.

“Five guineas was rather a lot to plank down for a simple job like that, surely?” remarked Ursula, as, once more in the jingle, they jolted home along eleven miles of dark and chilly road.

“Usual price, Mrs. Barrison.” Wenn was in a rubicund state of good humour, in contrast to the Barrisons’ slight moodiness. “You wouldn’t find Gentleman Roberts’d do a fly. Five guineas is what I pay for a lease whenever I can afford to buy a bit o’ property. Mitch, what price did ee pay for lease when you took Trewoofa?”

“Five guineas,” droned the well-trained Joshua Mitch, from where he trudged at the horse’s head.

Ursula longed to ask whether he also took a small percentage of the day’s easy gains; or if Wenn and Gentleman Roberts, with many chuckles, divided the five guineas equally, and Mitch backed them up merely because he was a humble minion in their power? But she refrained, because the road was long and chilly and very dark ... and on either side was a ditch.

“You’ve got a rare bargain in renting that there cottage o’ mine,” Wenn continued, turning up the collar of his overcoat. “Why, the tenant afore you—one o’ the Endellions, moved away to St. Pol now, he made twelve pounds, two summers back, out o’ growin’ potatoes alone. Mitch, what did William Endellion make out o’ potatoes up tu my cottage, two summers back?”

“Twelve pounds,” said Joshua Mitch.

The next morning, Wenn appeared suddenly in the doorway of Parc Gooth, his hands full of early cauliflowers which he had brought the Barrisons as a spontaneous gift from his own garden at Polpinnock. Most gifts are made in a spirit of either generosity or remorse; Wenn was not by nature generous.

“Timeo Danaos....” murmured Ursula.

[VII]

THE doors of Wright’s General Stores were closed and heavily barred, when the Barrisons went round to him with an account of the sinister cauliflowers; after repeated noisy rappings from Doug’s specially knotted and gnarled blackthorn, a reconnoitering beard was thrust through a flap—“One minute, sir, if you don’t mind,” bars were drawn back, keys turned, and the lower part of the door creaked cautiously open, admitting Ursula and Doug, and was hastily closed again behind them. “It’s my travellers’ day,” explained Mr. Wright, breathing very hard. “You won’t mind waiting a few minutes?”

Two sad-faced men with bags of samples were sitting by the counter, and Mr. Wright proceeded to impress his spectators by doing tremendous deals in St. Miniot rock, a pink sugar-stick with the name of the village running through in green. At last the travellers were let out conspiratorially by a back door; and Mr. Wright, with the air of a Minister who, by an effort, dismisses an international crisis from his mind and switches it instead on to a minor question of drains, asked Mr. and Mrs. Barrison how he could help them?

“Ah!” he wagged his beard suspiciously at the incident of the doings at Gullick, and said that certain people, mentioning no names, needed watching all the time.

“You’ll be going to St. Pol, no doubt, for your furniture? You’ll find some dishonest dealers up there, that charge high prices for rotten stuff. Now I could give you an introduction——”

Doug and Ursula stood outside Mr. Wright’s shop, gazing at the window display: dusty bottles of Condy’s fluid; a heap of faded red, white and blue Coronation whistles, and some tin kettles.

“I don’t think that his ideas of decoration and ours are quite the same,” said Doug. “We’ll go and rummage round in St. Pol on our own, Teddy.”

Ursula, gazing silently at the window, was again clutched by apprehension.... Wright had not always lived at St. Miniot; he had travelled, dwelt in big cities, seen the shop-windows of great stores; why, then, did he not devote one morning’s energy and initiative into transforming his dreary and out-of-date frontage into bright new order, inviting customers. Was it that it did not matter—here?

“Is it true, Mrs. Barrison, that you’ve taken Wenn’s cottage on the moor? They told me so, at Endellion’s cart”—Endellion, one of a large family, was the butcher who lived in the big mansion opposite the Vicarage. His cart, hung with joints, a welter of opaque pink and thick white, stood in his carriage-drive twice a week; and he, on the steps of his own front door, condescended affably to the humble stream of visitors and natives who trooped up to him with their dishes and baskets. “Endellion is so very disobliging,” Mrs. Fawcett went on, half crying. “He won’t let me have calves’ liver for my darlings, simply because Miss Tregunter at Penallen Lodge is so fond of liver, she takes all he’s got. You’ll want a cat directly you move in, won’t you, Mrs. Barrison? I can let you have the dearest little ginger tom—it’ll break my heart to let him go.” She was half crying still from her encounter with Endellion over the liver. “Dear me, I suppose you’ll be with us for good, now. Fancy that. But I’m sorry Wenn is your landlord—I wouldn’t be in his clutches for anything. Don’t trust him, Mrs. Barrison.... Poor Frankie Davis, who lived at Jermyn Street—wasn’t that an odd name for him to call his house down here?—he shot himself after two years.”

“Was Wenn his landlord, then?”

“Oh no, but still”—vaguely—“one must be careful. Poor Frankie—he had one of my sweetest cats, and it came back to me after the tragedy, and I save it an extra saucer of chicken broth whenever I can, because it has seemed so queer ever since.... They know, you see, better than we do, often. Frankie Davis had a wonderful marble staircase,” she rumbled on, “and he had a gang of workmen all the way down from London to move it four times and set it up in different parts of the house, to see where it looked best. And then he went bankrupt and was sold up.... So many of them do down here. Well, it was all very exciting and we mustn’t think about it. Oh, good day, Mr. Wenn”—Mrs. Fawcett scurried into her cat-temple, which was next door to Wright’s shop.

“I been digging you a cess-pit, Mr. Barrison,” said Wenn.

Doug thanked him.

“An’ your pump wasn’t workin’,” he continued, with a touch of grievance in his voice—for obviously since the lease was signed, Doug was now responsible for the pump; “so I had to send my son—Henry, the middle one—down your well to find out where the stoppage was. More’n fifty foot deep it was ... lucky thing Henry went down, too, because if I’d hired a man to put on a dangerous job like that, I’d have had to pay good money to insure his life. But I won’t charge ee more’n I can help, Mr. Barrison. I only want to make you comfortable in the place.”

Doug thanked him again, and Ursula amused herself by raising serious childish eyes to meet Wenn’s squarely, with the question: “They say you’re a hard man, Mr. Wenn? Is it true?” It was a trick which she had discovered, to disconcert him completely.

“I’d like to know them as say it, Mrs. Barrison.”

“I believe in you absolutely, Mr. Wenn. I know you wouldn’t cheat us” ... she wondered whether she dare slip a trustful little hand into his palm.

[VIII]

IT became apparent during the last three or four weeks of the Barrisons’ tenancy at Parc Gooth, that all its various landlords and sub-landlords were pulling cross-strings at the question of its future. The Abbotts jingled up to the back door, late one evening, and suavely begged for a night’s shelter, as they had business to transact at dawn. Ursula, from her bedroom window, watched them untying from the burdened harness their usual paraphernalia of sacks and parcels, bottles and cans and blankets; Mr. Abbott was a large goblin outline in the sinister yellow flicker of their lantern; she heard and hated Mrs. Abbott’s thin rustling laugh, in reply to some pleasantry of Doug, genial and commonplace in a rough, brown dressing-gown—the type of dressing-gown that proclaimed its owner had no use for effeminate men.

Very early in the morning, the Abbotts were reported to have been in profound conference with Wenn, of all people in Arcadia! and seemingly satisfied, rattled away again before the hostile Todys appeared from their cottage. And after that, Wenn frequently stood immovable at the gate of Parc Gooth, staring at it, as one who had a right to stare....

And a whisper went round that Wright, of the General Stores, was in communication with Miss Gregson, who was in Scotland—at least, so the postman’s sister said—(“An’ she du belong to know!”)

Then whom was he betraying? his old crony, Wenn? Whose interests did he watchfully guard? Tody confided in Ursula his disgusted suspicions: “If aught’s been done that shouldn’t be, Tody’ll know what to do. The lady and gentleman, who was here before the lady and gentleman, they put their trust in Tody and nobody else, and if they have to be written to about goings-on over this house, it’s Tody ought to do it, as it wouldn’t be pleasant for the lady to be mixed up in it.”

“He’s going to write to Lacey,” Doug decided, when Ursula brought him this speech for elucidation.

Ursula wriggled, as though she felt the meshes of a net—“I believe this beastly house has a curse on it.”

“Can’t have,” replied Doug cheerfully. “It isn’t old. Why, it’s almost new.”

“That’s just it. An almost new house with a curse on it is uncannier than an old one, where you expect it more. And we’re in the thick of it. And whispers crawling about like spiders. I wish—I wish we were already at Grey Stone.”

“Jove, so do I! I want to knock up a lot of shelves in my cabin.”

Wild rumours were flying now from St. Miniot to Polpinnock Cove, and from Churchtown and Polpinnock back to St. Miniot, regarding the destiny of Parc Gooth. The Abbotts came no more at night, but they were frequently “seen about” in their restless jingle; Wenn was reported to have given an unsolicited penny to an urchin who had fallen down and was crying; pregnant sign of good temper! Tody bought a bottle of ink and a pen at Sampson’s shop—noticeably not at Wright’s. And Wright received the Barrisons with a grave face, and formally attended to them from behind the counter. Only once did he relax sufficiently to say: “If any one should call to see over the house, sir, I’d make very careful inquiries as to who sent him, before you give your consent. It’s your responsibility, you see....”

In Arcadia, things quickly swell out of their right proportions.... Ursula thought of the silly house and the silly affairs, and the silly gossip surrounding it, as though it were really vital. She was interested in any fresh development in the accumulating scandal—morbidly worried over the hints to be careful, dropped from first one direction and then another. Her sense of amusement was being nagged away by the humourless pre-occupations of Arcadia, and fear obsessed and suffocated her.... Suddenly, she felt indeed a foreigner, and as such, apologetic and timorous. After all, they were going to settle down in this place, perhaps never to leave it, so it mattered that the natives should not hate them; it was important to twist and wriggle and force your viewpoint to the same alien angle as theirs—“you have made your bed and you must lie on it!” For the moment Ursula was helplessly victim to this fallacy. Then a telegram was delivered at Parc Gooth by a sloe-eyed, grinning youngster so agog to spread its contents that he practically threw it over the garden wall. It was signed “Gregson,” and said curtly: “Allow no one to inspect house. Arriving shortly.” Half an hour later, Major Allingham-Jones, a cross little inquisitive yellowish man and his large pink wife, stood clamouring at the front door, with the Laceys’ written authority to be shown over Parc Gooth. Doug was happily employed up at the cottage, wrenching at the roots of gorse and bramble which obscured the window of his cabin, so Ursula had to refuse the couple admittance, on her own initiative; she thought on the whole she would rather offend the Laceys, who lived at Nottingham, than the near-pressing tradesmen of St. Miniot and Polpinnock, in whose power they lay for shelter, sustenance, warmth and society. Oh, the hateful propitiating dependence of life lived moderately close to nature! Oh, the humility of not being able to change your butcher or threaten the only person in the district who hires out jingles and cars.

Tody was sulky with Ursula all the rest of the day, having had private information by post from Mr. and Mrs. Lacey that the Allingham-Joneses were to be graciously received at Parc Gooth, as they would pay a good rent for such a house, and good wages to Tody. He hinted menacingly that if Wright imagined by writing lies to Miss Gregson he could do Tody out of a job, then Tody, who was prepared to act fairly by everybody, would have to tell the lady and gentleman an item of news that hitherto he had kept to Tody for fear of upsetting the lady who had so far treated him fairly....

[IX]

URSULA went forth from beleaguerment to a sale in the neighbourhood of Polpinnock. With her last remnants of idealism, she hoped to be able to bid successfully for “good” pieces of old furniture for Grey Stone, against an innocent throng unaware of their value. The ruined family were as usual impulsive “foreigners” who had settled down four years earlier, hoping to prosper body and soul, at the expense of the unsophisticated natives ... who mysteriously, never came to grief in the same inevitable fashion, but were always able to crowd to the sales and make profitable purchases for their own homes speculating the while with stolid excitement on the exact disasters which has led to the hammer’s triple fall.

Wenn was there, bearing himself like a man who can see through the auctioneer’s humbug, and calculate the worth of things for himself. If his vulture eye happened to see some old flowerpots, beansticks or potato-peelings going cheap, he might bargain for them, but he warned Ursula against throwing away good money: “You’ve got dealers running up prices against ee all the time. There’s several of ’em here talking about roots and barley to make believe they’re farmers from up-along. Look, Mrs. Barrison, there’s something I want to tell ee if you’ll step with me where tes quiet!”

They pushed their way through the groups in the trampled yard and garden with its forlorn furniture piled up in lots; and in a corner of the field where the auctioneer’s monotonously jocund voice only reached them faintly, Wenn announced that he had bought the remainder of Abbott’s seven-year lease of Parc Gooth, and had already found a good tenant, an American who was staying at his hotel, and wished to be shown over the house very shortly.

“But....” Ursula stopped short, in desperate perplexity. Wenn was their landlord at Grey Stone ... supposing she offended him, and the well went wrong, and he refused to send down Henry, his middle son (because it was too dangerous a job on which to risk a hired man). Supposing.... Yes, but that wire from Miss Gregson ... and the Allingham-Joneses, backed up by Tody, calling nearly every day....

Without replying to Wenn, she went quickly back to where the sale was active and already slightly dissipated and hysterical. Queer, unlikely bits of rubbish, such as a stuffed hawk, a pair of ornate vases, battered tin pails, some old boots and a roll of linoleum fetched abnormal prices, far larger than their new equivalents in a shop. It seemed every now and again, as though the bodiless voices from the crowd—voices that were alternately defiant or timid—simply could not stop themselves from bidding higher and higher.... The scene was watched by the quondam owners of “The Mount”: Mr. Gregory Loftus, his son and three middle-aged daughters, with cynical smiles. They were ruined, and it was—according to popular opinion—indescribably indecent of them to be present at all, witnesses of their own disgrace; but Ursula envied them ... and was frightened because she envied them: “They’ve lost their property and their money—yes, but they’ve got away! they’ve escaped!...”

“One poun’-fifteen-an-six I am bid.—One-poun’-sixteen shall I make it?”

She brought nothing home from the sale except weariness and an inferior copper kettle with an unexpected hole in the bottom.

Waiting for her at Parc Gooth was a letter from Miss Roberts—“Gums” of her schoolroom days, and now installed with Grace and Stanley Watson at “Merlin’s Isle” (late “The Kopje”)—to be governess to Honor Rose, aged eleven, and to Honor Rose’s three little sisters, Lucy Ann, Freda and Belphoebe, nine, seven and five years old respectively, their ages diminishing with as compact a fit as a nest of tables, one within the other. The letter was full of chirpy gossip, such as: “Lottie has been staying with us for a fortnight; she is such a good auntie to the little girls and so helpful; I think Lottie has a beautiful character.” And: “Your mother and Aunt Lavvy went up to London last Saturday to have tea with Hal in his new chambers. I think that quite soon we shall have some interesting news to tell you about that young man!”

She looked with bright bird-like eyes upon Ursula’s affairs, determined to find them very good: “How lovely for you, Ursula dear, to be living a peaceful rural life with your husband. I am sure it is healthy; after all, what could be more invigorating than Nature. We are all expecting cream and butter and eggs from you as soon as they begin to lay well. The society of the quaint rustics must make you long to write a book about them. Don’t be proud, dear, but go about among them and share their joys and sorrows as though you were one of themselves; teach them—tactfully, of course—all you can about hygiene and the first care of babies; and I am sure that in time you will learn to love these simple folk....”

Ursula’s smile held more irony than genuine merriment.

There would always be trustful, credulous people like Doug and herself, like Miss Roberts, like the late Frankie Davis and the Allingham-Joneses and Mr. Gregory Loftus and his daughters, who left the gritty evil of towns behind them, intending to nestle closer to Nature, in the uncomplicated country amongst those quaint rustics.... Those same rustics who, a few years later, watching the broken, penniless procession wending their way back again to the towns, might murmur perhaps, with kindly, if contemptuous affection: “One learns to love these simple folk....”

[X]

JUNE 24th ended their tenancy at Parc Gooth; and the problem of its disposal was still unsettled the day before the Barrisons moved their belongings into Grey Stone, preparatory to moving in themselves the following morning. They had spent a day at St. Pol buying furniture; and the motor-van duly arrived on the morning of the 23rd, and halted a quarter of a mile away from the cottage, which was as near as the highway touched. Doug had collected two serfs to help him carry the pieces from the van across the rough ground to the house; Henry Endellion, a burly, grizzled gardener-fisherman, with a perpetual smile puckering his good-tempered features; and Jo Percy Jeyne, fisherman-gardener, and sexton and water-carrier in his spare time, a solemn anxious little old man, gnarled with the years. The van-men unloaded at the cross-roads, but refused to do any carrying; and the rain striped heavily on the comically absorbed trio, Doug and Endellion and Jo Percy Jeyne, who, with sacking over their shoulders, and maintaining exactly the same pace and regular distance one from the other, strode and trudged and trotted in Indian file to and fro between the van and Grey Stone. Ursula and Mrs. Endellion—Harry’s wife—stood ready to receive the articles as they were brought in, and to direct their destination; but Doug’s briefly Napoleonic: “My cabin” occurred so often that Ursula gave up her mild attempt to divert the flow of all that was most useful and precious into the small ground-floor room behind the big living-room. After a couple of hours steady work, the empty van drove away, the last splashed and dripping chair was carried in; the rain stopped; and the stolid children from the cove who had been lurking all the morning among the bushes near the house, some hiding, some claiming bold-eyed their right to satisfy curiosity, now scampered back to St. Miniot to report to their mothers exactly what the Barrisons had bought at St. Pol, and how many rugs, mattresses, saucepans and teacups they possessed.

“Thank you, my men!” said Doug, dismissing his serfs in what Ursula termed his most hearty “leggings-and-landowner” voice. “Here’s something to drink my health in!”

To which Endellion and Jo Percy Jeyne, to remain strictly in character, ought to have responded with: “Three cheers fur t’squoire!” and danced off left and right, to the ivied inn. Reality, however, prompted them to remain, and separately and argumentatively point out that five shillings was not enough pay for a full morning’s heavy work....

“I’m enjoying this,” Doug remarked, sitting on a packing-case and biting at a cold pasty Mrs. Endellion had brought him. “Aren’t you, Teddy?”

“No. Not a bit. I feel like somebody in Funny Chips.... Presently you’ll try and hang a picture up, and hit your thumb.”

“Why, my dear old kid, I once chopped half a finger off, rigging up a store-hut in a blizzard!” Doug laughed boisterously at the recollection.

“I’m sure you did.... I’ve got a sort of creepy suspicion that the Abbotts are going to turn up at Parc Gooth for the night.”

“What if they do? Abbott’s a plausible old rogue—simply dripping with humbug. I like him awfully.”

“Do you think he had a right to sell his lease to Wenn? Or ought we to have let the Allingham-Joneses look over the place?—but then there was Miss Gregson’s telegram....” Ursula’s eyes brooded in deep shadow. “And Wright said.... Oh, I hate it all!”

“Nothing to do with us. Why should you hate it? Women——”

“Doug, a woman is never just women——”

“——always get cross, moving,” finished Doug, who, never cross or snappish or irritable himself, presented a surface like the wrong sort of matchbox on which these special qualities would not effectively strike. “Come on, Teddy, be a sport, and help me with my cabin,” he concluded, at his last mouthful of pasty. He leaped to his feet, and jumped over an oak chest and part of a dresser, which happened to be blocking his way.

By tea-time, his cabin was in beautiful order and ready for occupation.

“Do you think we might spare a few minutes now for the other rooms?” Ursula suggested petulantly.

But Doug was occupied in lining the drawers of his desk with paper; he announced, absently, that the job would take him some time, and after that, of course, he must give his tools a rub up before stowing them away in the oak chest which he was going to bring down from their bedroom after all....

“Yes,” said Ursula. “I’m going home.”

He nodded, absorbed, breathing very hard; his hair was tousled and his bare knees dirty and bruised. Ursula told Mrs. Endellion to rouse him in a couple of hours, to lock up; and went.

[XI]

A SEA fog had crept up after the sting of hot sunshine which followed the rain, and stifled it. When Ursula had walked a few paces from Grey Stone, the solid world was melted to clammy vapour. The siren at Polpinnock Head was emitting at regular intervals a sound comparable to that of a wolf in Northern Canada who, after four months’ winter starvation, smells faintly his first caribou, and then discovers he has a stiff leg. Ursula slipped along, huddling her mind against the wraiths of dreariness and fear. The invisible sea fell back from the rocks below with a sulky gurgle and suck.

Nearing the village, she heard occasional steps around her, and once or twice a foolish laugh ... and all the while, like a forlorn child, she was repeating to herself, “I want to run away—oh, I do want to run away,” till the very rhythm of the phrase soothed her.

Parc Gooth seemed full of angry people. The Abbotts’ jingle stood outside; and within, the Abbotts were backing the claims of a melancholy veteran with a long beard and an American accent, against Tody, whose mysterious other Todys were rapidly multiplying in his speech. The Allingham-Joneses had penetrated to upstairs, and were critically investigating the bedrooms. And two telegrams addressed to Barrison, and signed Lacey, announced that Major Allingham-Jones was by signed agreement the next in succession at Parc Gooth, after June 24th. Bewildered by the sudden clamour and rivalry, on top of her silent walk from Grey Stone, Ursula went into the kitchen, where Mrs. Tody respectfully murmured: “I can’t get tea till Mr. Wenn comes out o’ the pantry, please madam, if you don’t mind!”

“Are they here yet?” stammered Wenn in answer to Ursula’s mocking inquiries.

“Quite a lot of people are here. Can I send anybody to interview you? The bearded gentleman, for instance——”

“That’s Mr. Van Lou, what I’m letting this place to,” Wenn explained truculently. “No”—with a cautious drop in his tone—“it’s Miss Gregson and her Eye-talian that I don’t want to see. They were up tu Wright’s at noon—tes all over the village that they’m back again. And I don’t like ’em, Mrs. Barrison.”

Ursula shrugged her shoulders. Then, as her ear caught an unfamiliar note in the added hubbub in the hall, she suggested mischievously: “Come out and tell them so. Here they are, back in their old home....”

Wenn shrank limply against the wall. His knees gave. “It’s none o’ my business, letting this house. You’ll tell them so, Mrs. Barrison? If Abbott sells his lease to me, then Abbott’s my landlord, and there’s no need for me to talk to any one else about it. I’m best where I am, minding my own business without interfering....”

“You’re a blustering coward without even the courage of your own villainies,” Ursula sweetly informed him, losing in that one minute all dread of Wenn as a sinister personage. “If any one asks me, I shall say you’re hiding in the pantry.” And she left him.

In the hall, a broad-shouldered woman with cropped grey hair and sturdy features was abusing Mrs. Abbott, whose frequent titters were eerily at variance with her wizened miserable expression. A supple, olive-skinned man lounged gracefully against the balustrade beside them. His vague sweet smile embraced all humanity.

“How do you do, Mrs——” Ursula stopped short, for though she had constantly heard the pair referred to, like a performing troupe, as “Miss Gregson and her Eye-talian,” she had no idea of Miss Gregson’s married name.

“How do you do. You, of course, are Mrs. Barrison. Whose house is this?”

“Mine.” Miss Gregson triumphantly answered her own question before Ursula or Mrs. Abbott had time to offer an opinion.

“Most kindly,” interposed Mr. Abbott, “we took it off your hands on a seven years’ lease, when—ah—an unpopular marriage decided you to quit the neighbourhood.”

The Eye-talian beamed.

“I didn’t decide. We were kicked out,” Miss Gregson said bluntly. “I’ve not had any rent from you yet—that’s my trouble.”

“And I have not had any rent from the Laceys, to whom I sub-let it for three years, because, owing to alien interference, they sent the rent straight to you, to whom it was not due ... I’m mentioning no names,” finished Mrs. Abbott with a sardonic salute to the absent Mr. Wright.

“And pray, to whom did you pay the rent?” the Oliver-Cromwellian lady demanded of Ursula, who bowed her small gold head reverently and replied: “To God ...” and then ran with swift step upstairs, pursued by Abbott’s fat chuckle. She found Major Allingham-Jones minutely interested in the furnishings of her bedroom.

“Are those duns downstairs?” he snapped inquisitively. “D’you owe ’em money? Can’t you get rid of ’em? Who’s the fat fellow? Who’s the Dago draped over the balustrade? Who’s——”

“They are all, more or less, landlords of this house. Perhaps, if you still feel inclined to rent it, you’d do well to consult some of them.”

“But—bless me—my dear young woman—I have rented it. Came to an agreement with Lacey about it, by post, only yesterday. He said he’d wire you. I say, where does your husband keep his clothes, if you stuff up all this chest of drawers with yours? And why his brushes on top? But before you tell me, I’ll just come downstairs and turn these impostors out.”

“Do.” Ursula led the way. Mrs. Allingham-Jones drifted out of Tody’s bedroom, and joined them.

The tide of battle seemed to have rolled out on to the front lawn, where, dim legendary figures swirled about with fog, Tody argued with the American:

“I’m going to live right here, and I’m going to be buried right here,” the American stated firmly, indicating his future grave by driving his stick into a portion of the sod directly blocking the entrance to Parc Gooth. And he walked away towards the vegetable garden; Tody, black with grievances, at his heels; Miss Gregson and her Eye-talian, the Abbotts, and Ursula with Major and Mrs. Allingham-Jones, following Tody.

“Tody has his duty to do towards the lady and gentleman, and if aught goes wrong wi’ things it’s Tody’s fault. Tody has nothing against the gentleman, nothing at all, he may be a very nice gentleman, but when Tody’s orders are to let the house to no one but under Mr. Lacey’s written orders, and the gentleman and lady arrive with the letter in their pockets, it isn’t that Tody favours the gentleman and lady any more than this gentleman, but fair’s fair and a promise a promise, leastways when Tody promises——”

“I’ve just taken a fancy to this place.” The American passed like a weary steamroller over Tody’s eloquence and crushed it. “And I’m tired of moving about; I’m going to stay here an’ live here and not shift away from here, and be buried right here ... and again he selected a portion of ground and drove his stick among the lettuces. “Now,” glaring defiantly at the surrounding company, “if any one would care to see my bank-book, or my cheque-book, my letters of credit, and the first half-year’s rent, whatever you like to make it, down in notes, why, I’ve got the lot on me right now.” It was easy to see what had fascinated Wenn in this prospective tenant. “Where’s the guy who’s let me this house? he came here with me, but I haven’t seen his face round, lately.”