The Wicked Marquis Part 27

"You forget," he said, "that this is not early for me. All my life I have risen with the sun and gone to bed with it. Come inside, David.

I'll get this muck off my hands. You spoke of the afternoon."

"I came direct from the village," David replied, as he followed his uncle into the house. "I came because I thought you would like to know that there is another visitor on the way to see you."

Richard Vont looked round and faced his nephew. His s.h.i.+rt was open at the throat, his trousers were tied up with little pieces of string. In whatever labour he had been engaged, it had obviously been of a strenuous character. He wiped the perspiration from his forehead.

"What's that, David?" he demanded. "A visitor?"

"Marcia is at the Mandeleys Arms," David told him. "I am taking it for granted that she is on her way to see you."

Vont turned deliberately away, and David heard his heavy feet ascending the staircase. In a few moments he called downstairs. His voice was as usual.

"Step round this afternoon, lad, if you think it's well."

David pa.s.sed out of the little garden, crossed the strip of park, and, taking the wheel, drove slowly round by the longer route to Broomleys.

He pa.s.sed before the front of the Abbey--a mansion of the dead, with row after row of closed blinds, ma.s.ses of smokeless chimneys, and patches of weeds growing thick in the great sweep before the house.

Even with its air of pitiless desertion, its severe, semi-ecclesiastical outline, its ruined cloisters empty to the sky on one wing, its unbroken and gloomy silence, the place had its atmosphere. David slackened the speed of his car, paused for a moment and looked back at the little creeper-covered cottage on the other side of the moat. So those two had faced one another through the years--the Abbey, silent, magnificent, historical, with all the placid majesty of its countless rows of windows; its chapel, where Mandeleys for generations had been christened and buried,--at its gates the little cottage, whose garden was filled with spring flowers, and from whose single stack of chimneys the smoke curled upwards. Even while he watched, Richard Vont stood there upon the threshold with a great book under his arm.

David s.h.i.+vered a little as he threw in the clutch, pa.s.sed on round the back of the building and through the iron gates of the ancient dower house. He felt a little sigh of relief as he pulled up in front of the long, grey house, in front of which Sylvia Laycey was waiting to receive him. She waved her hand gaily and looked with admiration at the car.

"They are all here, Mr. Thain," she exclaimed,--"Mr. Merridrew and father and your own builder. Come along and quarrel about the fixtures. I thought I had better stay with you because dad loses his temper so."

David descended almost blithely from his car. He was back again in a human atmosphere, and the pressure of the girl's fingers was an instant relief to him.

"I am not going to quarrel with any one," he declared. "I shall do exactly what Mr. Muddicombe tells me--and you."

She was a very pleasant type of young Englishwoman--distinctly pretty, fair-skinned, healthy and good-humoured. Notwithstanding the fact that their acquaintance was of the briefest, David was already conscious of her charm.

"You'll find me, in particular, very grasping," she declared, as they entered the long, low hall. "I want to make everything I can out of you, so that daddy and I can have a real good two months in London. I don't believe you know the value of things a bit, do you--except of railways and those colossal things? Cupboards, for instance? Do you know anything about cupboards? And are you going to allow us anything for the extra bathroom we put in?"

"Well, I am rather partial to bathrooms," he confessed, "and I should hate you to take it away with you."

She drew a sigh of relief.

"So long as you look upon the bathroom matter reasonably, I am quite sure we shan't quarrel. Tell me about Lady Let.i.tia, please? Is she quite well--and the Marquis and all of them? And when are they coming down?"

"They are quite well," he told her, "and Lady Let.i.tia sent you her love. They talk of coming down almost at once."

"I do hope they will," she replied, "because when we leave here dad and I are going to stay for a week or so with some friends quite near.

There! Did you hear that noise? That's daddy stamping because he is getting impatient."

"Then perhaps--" David suggested.

"I suppose we'd better," she interrupted. "Be lenient about the bathroom, please. And if you could manage not to notice that the dining room wants papering, you'd be an angel. This way."

CHAPTER XIX

David proved himself such a very satisfactory incoming tenant that the Colonel insisted upon his staying to lunch and hastened off into the cellar to find a bottle of old Marsala, of which he proposed that they should partake with a dry biscuit before Mr. Merridrew's departure.

Sylvia sank into a low chair with a little exclamation of despair.

"Now daddy's done it!" she exclaimed. "Are you hungry, Mr. Thain?"

"Not very--yet," David replied, glancing at his watch. "You see, it's only half-past eleven."

"Because," she said impressively, "there are exactly three rather skinny cutlets in the house. All the servants left this morning--'all', I said. We only have two!--and an old woman from the village is coming up at half-past twelve to cook them. One was for me and two were for father. Perhaps you will tell me what I am to do?"

David smiled.

"Well," he observed, "I was distinctly asked to luncheon, and I accepted. Haven't you anything--"

"Anything what?" she asked patiently.

"Tinned in the house, or that sort of thing?" he suggested, a little vaguely.

"Of course we haven't," she replied. "Don't you know that we are all packed up and leaving to-morrow? It's the biggest wonder in the world that we have any biscuits to eat with that precious Marsala."

"Why not," he proposed hopefully, "put on your hat and motor into Fakenham with me? I suppose there is a butcher's shop there. We can buy something together."

She sprang to her feet.

"And you can choose exactly what you like!" she exclaimed. "Mr. Thain, you are delightful! That is the best of you Americans. You are full of resource. I shan't be a minute getting a hat and a pair of gloves."

David strolled about the gardens of his new demesne until Sylvia reappeared. She had pinned on a blue tam-o'-shanter and was wearing a jersey of the same colour.

"I shall love a spin in your car!" she exclaimed. "And you drive yourself, too. How delightful!"

They swung off through the more thickly wooded part of the park, driving in places between dense clumps of rhododendrons, and coming unexpectedly upon a walled garden, neglected, but brilliant with spring and early summer flowers.

"Isn't it queer to have a garden so far away from the house," the girl remarked, "but I dare say you've heard that the late Marquis of Mandeleys was mad about underground pa.s.sages. There is one existing somewhere or other to the summer house in that garden from the Abbey, and lots of others. I am not at all sure that there isn't one to Broomleys."

"Haven't you been afraid sometimes lest the ghosts of the dead monks might pay you an unexpected visit?"

She shook her head.

"They always held the funeral services in the chapel," she explained, "but the burying place is at the side of the hill there. You can see the Mandeleys vault from here."

"And the cypress trees," David pointed out. "I wonder how old they are."

"The American of you!" she scoffed. "You ought to love Mandeleys--and Broomleys. Everything about the place is musty and ancient and worn out. You know the Marquis, don't you?"

"Slightly," David a.s.sented.

"Is he really human," she asked, "or is he something splendidly picturesque which has just stepped out of one of the frames in his picture gallery? I can never make up my mind. He is so beautiful to look at, but he doesn't look as though he belonged to this generation, and why on earth they ever used to call him 'The Wicked Marquis' I can't imagine. I've tried him myself," she went on ingenuously, "in no end of ways, but he treats me always as though I were some grandchild, walking on stilts. Of course you're in love with Lady Let.i.tia?"

"Must I be?"