Elizabeth's Campaign Part 17

'I'm sorry,' he said mildly. 'Because, you know--if you don't mind my saying so--it'll really take the two of you to keep your father out of gaol. The Government's absolutely determined about this thing--they can't afford to be anything else. _We're_ being hammered, and ga.s.sed, and blown to pieces over there'--he pointed eastward. 'It's the least the people over here can do--to play up--isn't it?' Then he laughed. 'But I mustn't be setting you against your father. I didn't mean to.'

Pamela shrugged her shoulders, in silence. She really longed to ask him about his wound, his staff work, a thousand things; but they didn't seem, somehow, to be intimate enough, to be hitting it off enough. This meeting, which had been to her a point of romance in the distance, was turning out to be just nothing--only disappointment. She was glad to see how quickly the other pair were coming towards them, and at the same time bitterly vexed that her _tete-a-tete_ with Arthur was at an end.

CHAPTER VI

Meanwhile Elizabeth Bremerton was sitting pensive on a hill-side about mid-way between Mannering and Chetworth. She had a bunch of autumn berries in her hands. Her tweed skirt and country boots showed traces of mud much deeper than anything on the high road; her dress was covered with bits of bramble, dead leaves, and thistledown; and her bright gold hair had been pulled here and there out of its neat coils, as though she had been pus.h.i.+ng through hedges or groping through woods.

'It's perfectly _monstrous_!' she was thinking. 'It oughtn't to be allowed. And when we're properly civilized, it won't be allowed. No one ought to be free to ruin his land as he pleases! It concerns the _State_. "Manage your land decently--produce a proper amount of food--or out you go!" And I wouldn't have waited for war to say it!

Ugh! that place!'

And she thought with disgust of the choked and derelict fields, the ruined gates and fences, the deserted buildings she had just been wandering through. After the death of an old miser, who, according to the tale she had heard in a neighbouring village, had lived there for forty years, with a decrepit wife, both of them horribly neglected and dirty, and making latterly no attempt to work the farm, a new tenant had appeared who would have taken the place, if the Squire would have rebuilt the house and steadings, and allowed a reasonable sum for the cleansing and recovering of the land. But the Squire would do nothing of the kind. He 'hadn't a farthing to spend on expensive repairs,' and if the new tenant wouldn't take the farm on the old terms, well, he might leave it alone.

The place had just been investigated by the County Committee, and a peremptory order had been issued. What was the Squire going to do?

Elizabeth fell to thinking what _ought_ to be done with the Squire's twelve thousand acres, if the Squire were a reasonable man. It was exasperating to her practical sense to see a piece of business in such a muddle. As a child and growing girl she had spent long summers in the country with a Dorsets.h.i.+re uncle who farmed his own land, and there had sprung up in her an instinctive sympathy with the rich old earth and its kindly powers, with the animals and the crops, with the labourers and their rural arts, with all the interwoven country life, and its deep rooting in the soil of history and poetry.

Country life is, above all, steeped in common sense--the old, ancestral, simple wisdom of primitive men. And Elizabeth, in spite of her cla.s.sical degree, and her pa.s.sion for Greek pots, believed herself to be, before everything, a person of common sense. She had always managed her own family's affairs. She had also been the paid secretary of an important learned society in her twenties not long after she left college, and knew well that she had been a conspicuous success. She had a great love, indeed, for any sort of organizing, large and small, for putting things straight, and running them. She was burning to put Mannering straight--and run it.

She knew she could. Organizing means not doing things yourself, but finding the right people to do them. And she had always been good at finding the right people--putting the round pegs into the round holes.

All very well, however, to talk of running the Squire's estate! What was to be done with the Squire?

Take the codicil business. First thing that morning he had sent her to that very drawer to look for something, and there lay the precious doc.u.ment--unsigned and unwitnessed--for any one to see. He made no comment, nor of course did she. He would probably forget it till the date of his son's marriage was announced, and then complete it in a hurry.

Take the farms and the park. As to the farms there were two summonses now pending against him with regard to 'farms in hand'--Holme Wood and another--besides the action in the case of the three incompetent men, Gregson at their head, who were being turned out. With regard to ploughing up the park, all his attempts so far to put legal difficulties in the way of the County Committee had been quite futile. The steam plough was coming in a week. Meanwhile the gates were to be locked, and two old park-keepers, who were dithering in their shoes, had been told to defend them.

At bottom, Elizabeth was tolerably convinced that the Squire would not land himself in gaol, cut off from his books and his bronzes, and reduced to the company of people who had never heard of Pausanias. But she was alarmed lest he should 'try it on' a little too far, in these days when the needs of war and the revolutionary currents abroad make the setting down of squires especially agreeable to the plebeians who sit on juries or county committees.

Of course he must--he certainly would--climb down.

But somebody would have to go through the process of persuading him! That was due to his silly dignity! She supposed that somebody would be herself. How absurd! She, who had just been six weeks on the scene! But neither of the married daughters had the smallest influence with him; Sir Henry Chicksands had been sent about his business; Major Mannering was out of favour, and Desmond and Pamela were but babes.

Then a recollection flashed across the contriving mind of Elizabeth which brought a decided flush to her fair skin--a flush which was half amus.e.m.e.nt, half wrath. That morning a rather curious incident had happened. After her talk with Major Mannering, and because the morning was fine and the Squire was away, she had dragged a small table out into the garden, in front of the library, and set to work there on a part of the new catalogue of the collections, which she and Mr. Leva.s.seur were making. She did not, however, like Mr.

Leva.s.seur. Something in her, indeed, disapproved of him strongly.

She had already managed to dislodge him a good deal from his former intimacy with the Squire. Luckily she was a much better scholar than he, though she admitted that his artistic judgment was worth having.

As a shelter from a rather cold north wind, she was sitting in full sun under the protection of a yew hedge of ancient growth, which ran out at right angles to the library, and made one side of a quadrangular rose-garden, planted by Mrs. Mannering long ago, and now, like everything else, in confusion and neglect.

Presently she heard voices on the other side of the hedge--Mrs.

Strang, no doubt, and Mrs. Gaddesden. She did not take much to either lady. Mrs. Strang seemed to her full of good intentions, but without practical ability to fit them. For Mrs. Gaddesden's type she had an instinctive contempt, the contempt of the clever woman of small means who has had to earn her own living, and to watch in silence the poses and pretences of rich women playing at philanthropy. But, all the same, she and the servants between them had made Mrs. Gaddesden extremely comfortable, while at the same time rationing her strictly. 'I really can be civil to anybody!'

thought Elizabeth complacently.

Suddenly, her own name, and a rush of remarks on the other side of this impenetrable hedge, made her raise her head, startled, from her work, eyes and mouth wide open.

It was Mrs. Gaddesden speaking.

'Yes, she's gone out. I went into the library just now to ask her to look out a train for me. She's wonderfully good at Bradshaw. Oh, of course, I admit she's a very clever woman! But she wasn't there.

Forest thinks she's gone over to Holme Wood, to get father some information he wants. She asked Forest how to get this this morning.

My dear Margaret,' with great emphasis, 'there's no question about it! If she chooses, she'll be mistress here before long. She's steadily getting father into her hands. She was never engaged, was she, to look after accounts and farms? and yet here she is, taking everything on. He'll grow more and more dependent upon her, and you'll see!--I believe he's been inclined for some time to marry again. He wants somebody to look after Pamela, and set him free for his hobbies. He'll very soon find out that this woman fills the part, and that, if he marries her, he'll get a cla.s.sical secretary besides.'

Mrs. Strang's voice--a deep husky voice--interposed.

'Miss Bremerton's not a woman to be married against her will, that you may be sure of, Alice.'

'No, but, my dear,' said the other impatiently, 'every woman over thirty wants a home--and a husband. She'd get that here anyway, however bad father's affairs may be. And, of course, a _position_.'

The voices pa.s.sed on out of hearing. Elizabeth remained transfixed.

Then with a contemptuous shake of the head, and a bright colour, she returned to her work.

But now, as she sat meditating on the hill-side, this absurd conversation recurred to her. Absurd, and not absurd! 'Most women of my sort can do what they have a mind to do,' she thought to herself, with perfect _sang-froid_. 'If I thought it worth while to marry this elderly lunatic--he's an interesting lunatic, though!--I suppose I could do it. But it isn't worth while--not the least. I've done with being a woman! What interests me is the bit of _work_--national work! Men find that kind of thing enough--a great many of them. I mean to find it enough. A fig for marrying!'

All the same, as she returned to her schemes both for regenerating the estate and managing the Squire--schemes which were beginning to fascinate her, both by their difficulty and their scale--she found her thoughts oddly interfered with, first by recollections of the past--bitter, ineffaceable memories--and then by reflections on the recent course of her relations with the Squire.

He had greeted her that morning without a single reference to the incidents of the night before, had seemed in excellent spirits, and before going up to town had given her in twenty minutes, _a propos_ of some difficulty in her work, one of the most brilliant lectures on certain points of Homeric archaeology she had ever heard--and she was a connoisseur in lectures.

Intellectually, as a scholar, she both admired and looked upon him--with reverence, even with enthusiasm. She was eager for his praise, distressed by his censure. Practically and morally, patriotically, above all, she despised him, thought him 'a worm and no man'! There was the paradox of the situation and as full of tingling challenge and entertainment as paradoxes generally are.

At this point she became aware of a group on the high road far to her right. A pony-cart--a girl driving it--a man in khaki beside her; with a second girl-figure and another khaki-clad warrior, walking near.

She presently thought she recognized Pamela's pony and Pamela herself. Desmond, who was going off that very evening to his artillery camp, had told her that 'Pam' was driving Aubrey over to Chetworth, and that he, Desmond, was 'jolly well going to see to it that neither old Aubrey nor Beryl were bullied out of their lives by father,' if he could help it. So no doubt the second girl-figure was that of Beryl Chicksands, and the other gentleman in khaki was probably Captain Chicksands, for whom Desmond seemed to cherish a boyish hero-wors.h.i.+p. They had been all lunching together at Chetworth, she supposed.

She watched them coming, with a curious mingling of interest in them and detachment from them. She was to them merely the Squire's paid secretary. Were they anything to her? A puckish thought crossed her mind, sending a flash of slightly cynical laughter through her quiet eyes. If Mrs. Gaddesden's terrors--for she supposed they were terrors--were suddenly translated into fact, why, all these people would become in a moment related to her!--their lives would be mixed up with hers--she and they would matter intimately to each other!

She sat smiling and dreaming a few more minutes, the dimples playing about her firm mouth and chin. Then, as the sound of wheels drew nearer, she rose and went towards the party.

The party from Chetworth soon perceived Elizabeth's approach. 'So this is the learned lady?' said the Captain in Pamela's ear. She had brought him in her pony-carriage so far, as he was not yet able for much physical exertion, and he and Beryl were to walk back from Holme Wood Hill.

He put up his eye-gla.s.s, and examined the figure as it came nearer.

'She's just come up, I suppose, from the farm,' said Pamela, pointing to some red roofs among the trees, in the wide hollow below the hill.

'"Athene Ageleie"!' murmured the Major, who had been proxime for the Ireland, and a Balliol man. 'She holds herself well--beautiful hair!'

'Beryl, this is Miss Bremerton,' said Aubrey Mannering, with a cordial ring in his voice, as he introduced his fiancee to Elizabeth. The two shook hands, and Elizabeth thought the girl's manner a little stand-off, and wondered why.

The pony had soon been tied up, and the party spread themselves on the gra.s.s of the hill-side; for Holme Wood Hill was a famous point of view, and the sunny peace of the afternoon invited loitering.

For miles to the eastward spread an undulating chalk plain, its pale grey or purplish soil showing in the arable fields where the stubbles were just in process of ploughing, its monotony broken by a vast wood of oak and beech into which the hill-side ran down--a wood of historic fame, which had been there when Senlac was fought, had furnished s.h.i.+p-timber for the Armada, and sheltered many a cavalier fugitive of the Civil Wars.

The wood indeed, which belonged to the Squire, was a fragment of things primeval. For generations the trees in it had sprung up, flourished, and fallen as they pleased. There were corners of it where the north-west wind sweeping over the bare down above it had made pathways of death and ruin; sinister places where the fallen or broken trunks of the great beech trees, as they had crashed down-hill upon and against each other, had a.s.sumed all sorts of grotesque and phantasmal att.i.tudes, as in a trampled melee of giants; there were other parts where slender plumed trees, rising branchless to a great height above open s.p.a.ces, took the shape from a distance of Italian stone palms, and gave a touch of southern or romantic grace to the English midland scene; while at their feet, the tops of the more crowded sections of the wood lay in close, billowy ma.s.ses of leaf, the oaks vividly green, the beeches already aflame.

'Who says there's a war?' said Captain Chicksands, sinking luxuriously into a sunny bed of dry leaves, conveniently placed in front of Elizabeth. 'Miss Bremerton, you and I were, I understand, at the same University?'

Elizabeth a.s.sented.