The room

“Mr. Wenn is hiding in the pantry,” said Ursula.

“Wenn!” Miss Gregson now became excited. “Wenn’s an old enemy of mine. How did he come to be letting my house?”

“Forgive me—mine,” contradicted Mr. Abbott, flushed but caressingly gentle. “For the next five and a half years, mine.”

Ursula rather admired the old outlaw playing his wits against the multitude. He was not unromantic, in spite of his dingy felt hat pushed to the back of his head, and his wary, mischievous eyes behind their round spectacles. Young dark-bearded captains may have sailed for the Spanish Main with the same spirit of contempt for safe conformity as the Abbotts clambered into their creaking precarious jingle. Thus musing, Ursula missed Miss Gregson’s answering speech, which was a pity, as it summed up in brisk sentences the whole of her past relations with the Abbotts, material and moral, including an account of what she had believed them to be, and what she had since discovered in their overwhelming disfavour.

Suddenly a young Endellion—the village swarmed with them—popped like a goblin from a hole in the fog, handed Ursula yet another telegram, and disappeared again. She read it aloud:

Silence ... and then a hubbub of mingled expostulation and jubilance broke out. Ursula darted away from conflict, into the house, into the pantry, and seized the cowering Wenn by the arm:

“You’ve got to come out and face it.”

“I—I—ted’n no business of mine.”

“Yes, it is. Your tenant is burying himself all over the garden. Come out.” He stood petrified, but she dragged him along with her....

Nobody in the garden. No human voice. The white mist was clotted densely where Tody and the Major, Miss Gregson and her Eye-talian, the Abbotts and the mournful American, had stood disputing in all languages, three minutes before. All gone. A spell might have broken loose from ancient Cornish magic, and, drifting that way, enchanted them into bramble-bushes. Only the siren at Polpinnock Head still hooted dolorously, and at the high bend of the invisible road, a ghostly jingle rattled on its way.

Wenn sighed with relief: “I’ll be getting along home,” he said, “these damp fogs, they gnaw into my bones.... We fixed that matter up all right, Mrs. Barrison—I like to be friends with everybody....” And he, too, departed.

[XII]

HALF an hour later, Doug returned from Grey Stone.

“My cabin looks top-hole,” he began enthusiastically. “I say, who d’you think’s here? Miss Gregson and her Eye-talian. They’re in the bar-parlour of the ‘Dog and Pilchard,’ lapping up hot whisky as pally as anything with those Allingham-Jones people and a fellow with a long beard and an American twang. I dropped in for a drink on my way home from Grey Stone. This infernal fog—it’s like breathing damp wool—I expect they’ll all be rolling up here presently. I say, Teddy, you should see my cabin now——”

“We’ve got to get away from here,” said Ursula, speaking quietly, but with a steady taut unreason which was her form of hysteria. “I don’t care where we go or what we leave behind, but I’m not going to settle down. Things grow over us ... here. Parc Gooth—I’ve got Parc Gooth on the brain. Stuck there like a burr. Let’s go tonight, Doug—please.... Oh, please let’s go tonight.”

“My dear old kid,” Doug began. Then: “You’re tired out. Moving’s the devil. I’m going to carry you upstairs and put you to bed! And if you want a good cry, you shall have it.” He advanced towards her, large and ruddy and cheerful, his arms outstretched. Ursula shrank.

“I’m not going to be put to bed, and I’m nowhere near a good cry. Don’t you understand, Doug, that we’re in danger—deadly danger. I’m not just being womanish. We were wrong to come here. At least, it was my fault—I was wrong. I’m owning it. We’re too young to live in the country where it’s peaceful ... where it isn’t peaceful, and only looks it. At first I thought everybody rather quaint and amusing, with their quaint, rigid little prejudices. But I’m frightened of them now; they’re not our kind of people, down in the country. They’ll never grow like us, but we might grow like them ... we’d have to pretend to, to start with, because they’re here first, and they won’t budge in the way they think and behave. Can’t and won’t. But we’re too tolerant and broad-minded and we have such a sense of humour.... Oh, yes, we can afford to pretend and to adjust ourselves and to be flexible—it’s fatally easy. Doug, I’m just now more interested than in anything else in the world, to hear what Jeyne of the ‘Dog and Pilchard’ will probably tell his brother-in-law, Harry Endellion, about what Miss Gregson said to the Allingham-Joneses, and whether it was Wright who warned her to come down, and why and what he gets out of it. Doesn’t that prove to you it’s serious and that we must go?”

Doug had one fixed conviction, and he brought it forth now:

“My dear old kid, you’ll feel different in the morning.”

“I know I will. More settled down. That’s just it—that’s just it—that’s why we’ve got to go now, while I’ve still got the desire, and before I begin to feel different....”

“Don’t be absurd, Teddy.” Her husband walked up and down the verandah with truculent strides. “Go? Run away? Give up Grey Stone and everything? When my cabin looks so jolly?”

Ursula was fighting hard ... and she saw that Doug had not even realized why and for what she was fighting. Subtlety prompted her to take a line which she knew would make a powerful appeal to him.

“You’re not the sort of man to be held down by furniture, Doug. Just because we moved into a house today—that’s no reason why we shouldn’t up stakes tomorrow. Furniture means comfort ... and deep down in our hearts we’re buccaneers!”

Doug wavered.... Had it not been for the memory of some jolly little contrivances he had that afternoon fixed up in his cabin—a hammock, for instance, ingeniously slung to a stout beam by cords, so that he could haul it up to the ceiling and out of the way when not in use—oh, and a ship’s bell, rusty but with a throat of sonorous silver, had it not been for these, he might have been tempted by the idea of behaving so like a buccaneer, a roystering, stouthearted, easy-come-and-easy-go sort of fellow, as to quit harbour the very day of anchoring. But that hammock—and the bell—it would be a shame not to use them. He had not told Ursula about them, meaning to surprise her. But now he poured out a full description: “... And the point is, Teddy, it’s a dinkum naval hammock—the genuine thing—canvas, you know. They’re not easy to get, but a chap I once knew in the merchant service had a brother who was ships-chandler on the quay at St. Pol ... I remembered, and slipped off there while you were bargaining for that gate-legged table. And he sold me the bell, too—a real beauty—about ten bobs’ worth of silver in it. Nothing much to look at, of course. You’ll see; I’m not going to have any clocks at all at Grey Stone, but sound the four bells and eight bells—dong—dong—dong—dong—‘All’s ... well!’”

And Ursula, defeated by the sheer stupefying force of little boys at their games, laid her head down on her arms and laughed and cried and cried; knowing well that now she would have to surrender and remain in Arcadia; knowing well that if you make your bed and do not want to lie on it, you need not; but if it be a double bed, and you have made it, and your partner will not stir, you must lie on it too. It was she, and not Doug, who had proposed their present sharp severance from Town and the Knapsack Club and all the other ties. And now they would never escape, never.... Nor again might she sufficiently want to escape.

“Teddy, Teddy darling, don’t cry. It’s only a mood—I’ve had ’em myself.... That damned hooter at Polpinnock! I’ll hot you up a toddy of rum and milk—a chap I knew at the Knapsack smuggled me through a demi-john of the real stuff from Jamaica. And honestly, you’ll feel different in the morning....”

[XIII]

AND in the morning Ursula did feel different. So different that she went up to Mr. Wright’s shop, on the pretext of buying matches and soap and a bucket; and there heard the secret history of the evening before. Mr. Wright’s beard was very knowing and triumphant over it all; and he was able to enlighten Ursula as to the mysterious vanishings after she had run into the house to fetch out Wenn from the pantry. Miss Gregson’s Eye-talian, it appeared, had coughed, and she, fearing for his Southern lungs exposed to the sea-mists, had hurried him to the “Dog and Pilchard” for a fiery drink; whereupon the American had invited the rest of the company likewise to come down into the warm bar-parlour, and there further to negotiate the matter of Parc Gooth over glasses of hot whisky. The Allingham-Joneses had accepted; but old Abbott and his wife, possibly realizing that—in melodramatic parlance—their game was up, had silently detached themselves from the others, and driven off in their jingle.... The voice of Tody, however, penetrated at intervals from the public bar, beyond the glass door, in disjointed confidences to Jeyne the landlord—“the lady and gentleman” occurred frequently in his narration, and “Tody” and Tody and Tody and Tody....

“And what’s the upshot?” Ursula asked. “Who’s going to have Parc Gooth?”

It was one of the glowing moments which made Mr. Wright’s drab life worth the living:

“I don’t think Major Allingham-Jones will live there, Mrs. Barrison,” mysteriously.

“The American, then? Wenn’s man?”

The grocer shook his head ... took down some boxes from the shelf and put them back again; opened the door which separated his parlour from the shop, and called to his daughter: “Alice, have you gone yet?... Oh, she has. Yes. Well, Mrs. Barrison, I’ll tell you this, knowing it’ll go no further, for the people here are so ignorant that they believe a man’s always pushing his own trade interests when he simply wants to befriend some one; and it would be awkward for me if my name was to be mixed up in this. Very awkward. I’m in a difficult position, you see, not being a native of the place. And they’re already saying it must have been somebody who wrote to Miss Gregson putting her on her guard. And though I remind them, carelessly, if you follow me, that the Vicar had her address as well as myself——”

George Sampson hobbled into the shop. Recognizing Ursula, he saluted her, his wistful, threadbare look holding no malice for her patronage of the rival stores. “Good day to ’ee, Mrs. Barrison. Fine weather after the fog. Wright, is it true what they’m sayin’ down tu Cove?—that Miss Gregson and her Eye-talian are comin’ back for good to live at Parc Gooth?”

“Oh!” Ursula cried in amazement.

Mr. Wright stood with rigidly guarded countenance, examining his stock of gingham aprons.

“I can’t help being sorry, in a way, that the American gentleman’s not going to live there,” Sampson went on. “Heaps o’ money ’e has, heaps; an’ he told me he was goin’ to divide his custom fair between you an’ me——”

But Wright still said nothing. All Miss Gregson’s custom went to him.

Ursula ought to have been up at Grey Stone by now, but she lingered on in the shop, absorbed, anxious to hear more....