Antony Gray-Gardener Part 11

"I am not," said Antony smiling.

"Not got a maid at all?" queried the other.

Antony shook his head.

The man opened his eyes. "Lord love 'ee, what do un want wi' a cottage, then! Yu'd best be takin' oop wi' a wife. There's a sight of vitty maids tu Byestry, and 'tis lonesome like comin' home to an empty hearth and no supper. There's Rose Darell, her's a gud maid, and has a bit o' money; or Jenny Horswell, her's a bit o' a squint, but is a fair vitty maid tu t'cleanin'; or Vicky Mathers, her's as pretty as a picter, but her's not the money nor the house ways o' Rose or Jenny," he ended with thoughtful consideration.

Antony laughed, despite the fact that inwardly he was not a trifle dismayed. He had no mind to have the belles of Byestry thus paraded for his choice. Work, he had accepted with the conditions, but a wife was a very different matter.

"Sure, I'm not a marryin' man at all, I am not," he responded, a hypocritical sigh succeeding to the laugh.

"Crossed?" queried the man. "Ah, well, doan't 'ee go for to get down on your luck for one maid. There's as gud blackberries hangin' on t'bushes as ever was plucked from them. And yu'm tu young a chap tu be thinkin' o'

yurself as a sallybat, and so I tells 'ee."

Antony smothered a spasm of laughter.

"It's not women folk I'm wanting in my life," responded he, still with hypocritical gloom.

"Tis kittle cattle they be, and that's sartain, sure," replied the other, shaking his head. "But 'twas a rib out o' the side o' Adam the first woman was, so t'Scripture do tell we, and I reckon us men folk do feel the lack o' that rib nowadays, till us gets us a wife."

Antony was spared an answer, a fact for which he sent up devout thanks.

They had made another leftward turn by now, and come upon a cottage set a little way back from the road,--a cottage with a wicket gate between two hedges, and a flagged path leading up to a small porch, thatched, as was the cottage.

"Here us be," said the man.

Antony's heart gave a sudden big throb of pleasure. The little place was so extraordinarily English, so primitive and quaint. True, the garden was a bit dilapidated looking, the apple trees in the tiny orchard to the left of the cottage quite amazingly old and lichen grown; but it spelled England for him, and that more emphatically than any other thing had done since his arrival in the Old Country.

Antony dismounted from the trap, then lifted Josephus and his bag to the ground. This done, he began to feel in his pocket for some coins. The man saw the movement.

"That bain't for yu," he replied shortly, "t' Doctor will settle wi' I."

And Antony withdrew his hand quickly, feeling he had been on the verge of a lapse.

"Here's t'key," remarked the man. "And if yu feel like a pipe one o'

these evenin's, yu might coom down tu t'village. My place is over opposite t'post office. I be t'saddler. Yu'll see t'name Allbut George over t'shop."

Antony thanked Mr. Albert George, and then watched the patriotically named gentleman turn his horse, and drive off in the direction of the coast. When the trap had vanished from sight, he heaved a sigh of relief.

"Josephus," he remarked, "it will need careful practice and wary walking, but I fancy I did pretty well." And then he opened the garden gate.

He walked up the little path, and fitted the key with which Allbut George had provided him, into the lock. He turned it, and pushed open the door.

It gave at once into a small but cheerful room, brick-floored, with a big fireplace at one side. An oak settle stood by the fireplace; a low seat, covered with a somewhat faded dimity, was before the window; there was a basket-chair, two wooden chairs, a round table, a dresser with some highly coloured earthenware crockery on it, a corner cupboard, and a grandfather's clock. There was a door behind the settle to the right of the fireplace, and, in the opposite corner, stairs leading to a room or rooms above.

Antony put his bag down on the table and went to investigate the door. It led into a tiny scullery or kitchen, provided solely with a small range, a deal table, a chair, a sink, and a pump. In one corner was a box containing some pieces of wood. In another corner was a galvanized bucket, a broom, and a scrubbing-brush. He glanced around, then came back into the sitting-room, and made his way to the stairs.

They led direct into a bedroom, a place furnished with a camp bed covered with a red and brown striped blanket; a small, somewhat rickety oak chest of drawers, a rush-bottomed chair, a small table, a corner washstand, and a curtain, which hid pegs driven into the wall. A door led into a small inner room over the kitchen scullery. Antony opened the door. The room was empty. Widow Jenkins had had no use for it, it would appear. Or, so Antony suddenly thought, perhaps all Widow Jenkins's furniture had been removed, and what at present occupied the place had been put there solely on his account.

He crossed to the window, and pushed it back. It looked on to a tiny vegetable garden, in much the same state of neglect as the front garden, and was separated from a field yellow with b.u.t.tercups by a low hawthorn hedge. Beyond the field was a tiny brook; and, beyond that again, a copse. There was not a sound to break the silence, save the dripping of the rain from the roof of the cottage, and, in the distance, the low sighing note of the sea. The silence was emphasized by the fact that for the last week Antony had had the hum of traffic in his ears, and had but this moment come from the noise of trains and the rattle of a shaky dog-cart.

He still leaned there looking out. It was even more silent than the veldt. There were no little strange animal noises to break the silence.

Nothing but that drip, drip of the rain, and that soft distant sighing of the sea.

A curious sense of loneliness fell upon him, a loneliness altogether at variance with the loneliness of the veldt. He could not have defined wherein the difference lay, yet he was well aware that there was a difference. It was one of those subtle differences, exceedingly apparent to the inner consciousness, yet entirely impossible to translate into terms of speech. The nearest approach he could get to anything like a definition of it, was that it was less big, but more definitely poignant.

Beyond that he did not, or could not, go. For some five minutes or so he leant at the little cas.e.m.e.nt window, gazing at the gold of the b.u.t.tercups seen through a blurred mist of rain. Then he pulled the window to, and came down into the parlour.

The hands of the grandfather's clock pointed to ten minutes to five.

Antony, remembering the box of wood in the scullery, bethought himself of a cup of tea. His bag contained all the requirements. Long practice had taught him to provide himself with necessities, and also, on occasions, to subst.i.tute lemon for milk, as a complement to tea.

He was just about to go and fetch a handful of sticks, preparatory to lighting a fire, when he heard the click of his garden gate. Turning, and looking through the window, he saw a big man coming up the path.

CHAPTER XI

DOUBTS

Doctor Hilary was returning from his rounds. His state of mind was nearly as grey as the atmosphere.

It is one thing to agree to a mad-brained scheme in the first amused interest of its propounding, even to mould it further, and bring it into shape. It is quite another to be actually confronted with the finished scheme, to realize that, though you may not be its veritable parent, you have at all events foster-fathered it quite considerably, and that, moreover, you cannot now, in conscience, cast off responsibility in its behalf.

The fact that you had excellent reasons for adopting the scheme in the first place, will doubtless be of comfort to your soul, but that particular species of comfort and ordinary everyday common sense are not always as closely united as you might desire. In fact they are occasionally apt to pull in entirely opposite directions, a method of procedure which is far from consoling.

Doctor Hilary found it far from consoling.

Conscience told him quite plainly that his real and innermost reason for foster-fathering the scheme was simply and solely for the sake of s.n.a.t.c.hing at any mortal thing that would, or could, bring interest into an old man's life. Common sense demanded why on earth he had not suggested an alternative idea, something a trifle less mad. And it was mad. There did not now appear one single reasonable point in it, though very a.s.suredly there were quite a vast number of unreasonable ones.

In the first place, and it seemed to him nearly, if not quite, the most unreasonable point, Nicholas had known nothing whatever about the young man he had elected to make his heir,--nothing, that is, beyond the fact that he had known the young man's father, and had once seen Antony himself when Antony was a child. There had even been very considerable difficulty in obtaining knowledge of his whereabouts.

In the second place, it appeared quite absurd to appoint the young man to the position of under-gardener at the Hall. It was more than probable that he knew nothing whatever about gardening. It was true that, if he did not, he could learn. But then Golding, the head gardener, might not unreasonably find matter for amazement and comment in the fact that a young and ignorant man, who was paid a pound a week and allowed to rent a furnished cottage, should be thrust upon him, rather than an experienced man, or an ignorant boy who would have received at the most eight s.h.i.+llings a week, and have lived at his own home. Amazement and comment were to be avoided, that had been Nicholas's idea, and yet, to Doctor Hilary's mind they ran the risk of being courted from the outset. In the third place, how was it likely that a man of education--and it had been ascertained that Antony was a university man--could comport himself like a labourer in any position,--gardener, farm-hand, or chauffeur? The conditions had stated that he was to do so. But could he? There was the point.

The more Doctor Hilary thought about the conditions, the madder they appeared to him. Yet, having undertaken the job of carrying the mad scheme through, he could not possibly back out at the eleventh hour. He could only hope for the best, but it must be confessed that he was not exceedingly optimistic about that best. And further, he was not exceedingly optimistic about the young man. He could imagine himself, in a like situation, consigning Nick and his conditions to the nether regions; certainly not submitting meekly to a year's effacement of his personality for the sake of money. Such conditions would have enraged him.

No; he was not optimistic regarding the man. He pictured him as either a bit of a fawner, who would cringe through the year, or a keen-headed business man, who would go through it with a steel-trap mouth, and an eye to every weakness in his fellow-workers. Certainly neither type he pictured appealed to him. Yet he felt confident he would find one of the two, and had already conceived a strong prejudice against Antony Gray.

From which regrettable fact it will be seen that he was committing the sin of rash judgment.

It was not altogether surprising, therefore, that his mood was nearly as grey as the atmosphere.

He sighed heavily, and shook his head, somewhat after the fas.h.i.+on of a big dog. Reasons, partly mental, partly physical were responsible for the shake. In the first place it was an attempt to dispel mental depression; in the second place it was to free his eyebrows and eyelashes from the rain drops clinging to them, since the rain was descending in a grey misty veil.

With the shake, an idea struck him.

Why not confront the embodied scheme at once? Why not interview this preposterous young man without delay, and be done with it?

He gave a brief direction to his coachman.

Five minutes later saw him standing at the gate of Copse Cottage, his dog-cart driving away down the lane. It had been his own doing. He had said he would walk home. An idiotic idea! What on earth had suggested it to him?