LITMIR.BIZ

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a ghost on him. I tell you—he’s off his nut.”

      Husband and wife looked at each other. …

      “Of course if Douglas didn’t mind just going off to oblige me,” said Sir Peter at last. …

      “It might calm him,” he explained. … “You see, it’s all so infernally awkward. …”

      “Is he back in his room?”

      “Yes. Waiting for me to decide about Douglas. Walking up and down.”

      For a little while their minds remained prostrate and inactive.

      “I’d been so looking forward to the lunch,” she said with a joyless smile. “The county—”

      She could not go on.

      “You know,” said Sir Peter, “one thing—I’ll see to it myself. I won’t have him have a single drop of liquor more. If we have to search his room.”

      “What I shall say to him at breakfast,” she said, “I don’t know.”

      Sir Peter reflected. “There’s no earthly reason why you should be brought into it at all. Your line is to know nothing about it. Show him you know nothing about it. Ask him—ask him if he’s had a good night. …”

CHAPTER III

       THE WANDERERS

       Table of Contents

§ 1

       Table of Contents

      Never had the gracious eastward face of Shonts looked more beautiful than it did on the morning of the Lord Chancellor’s visit. It glowed as translucent as amber lit by flames, its two towers were pillars of pale gold. It looked over its slopes and parapets upon a great valley of mist-barred freshness through which the distant river shone like a snake of light. The south-west façade was still in the shadow, and the ivy hung from it darkly greener than the greenest green. The stained-glass windows of the old chapel reflected the sunrise as though lamps were burning inside. Along the terrace a pensive peacock trailed his sheathed splendours through the dew.

      Amidst the ivy was a fuss of birds.

      And presently there was pushed out from amidst the ivy at the foot of the eastward tower a little brownish buff thing, that seemed as natural there as a squirrel or a rabbit. It was a head—a ruffled human head. It remained still for a moment contemplating the calm spaciousness of terrace and garden and countryside. Then it emerged further and rotated and surveyed the house above it. Its expression was one of alert caution. Its natural freshness and innocence were a little marred by an enormous transverse smudge, a bar-sinister of smut, and the elfin delicacy of the left ear was festooned with a cobweb—probably a genuine antique. It was the face of Bealby.

      He was considering the advisability of leaving Shonts—for good.

      Presently his decision was made. His hands and shoulders appeared following his head, and then a dusty but undamaged Bealby was running swiftly towards the corner of the shrubbery. He crouched lest at any moment that pursuing pack of butlers should see him and give tongue. In another moment he was hidden from the house altogether, and rustling his way through a thicket of budding rhododendra. After those dirty passages the morning air was wonderfully sweet—but just a trifle hungry.

      Grazing deer saw Bealby fly across the park, stared at him for a time with great gentle unintelligent eyes, and went on feeding.

      They saw him stop ever and again. He was snatching at mushrooms, that he devoured forthwith as he sped on.

      On the edge of the beech-woods he paused and glanced back at Shonts.

      Then his eyes rested for a moment on the clump of trees through which one saw a scrap of the head gardener’s cottage, a bit of the garden wall. …

      A physiognomist might have detected a certain lack of self-confidence in Bealby’s eyes.

      But his spirit was not to be quelled. Slowly, joylessly perhaps, but with a grave determination, he raised his hand in that prehistoric gesture of the hand and face by which youth, since ever there was youth, has asserted the integrity of its soul against established and predominant things.

      “Ketch me!” said Bealby.

§ 2

       Table of Contents

      Bealby left Shonts about half-past four in the morning. He went westward because he liked the company of his shadow and was amused at first by its vast length. By half-past eight he had covered ten miles, and he was rather bored by his shadow. He had eaten nine raw mushrooms, two green apples and a quantity of unripe blackberries. None of these things seemed quite at home in him. And he had discovered himself to be wearing slippers. They were stout carpet slippers, but still they were slippers—and the road was telling on them. At the ninth mile the left one began to give on the outer seam. He got over a stile into a path that ran through the corner of a wood, and there he met a smell of frying bacon that turned his very soul to gastric juice.

      He stopped short and sniffed the air—and the air itself was sizzling.

      “Oh, Krikey,” said Bealby, manifestly to the Spirit of the World. “This is a bit too strong. I wasn’t thinking much before.”

      Then he saw something bright yellow and bulky just over the hedge.

      From this it was that the sound of frying came.

      He went to the hedge, making no effort to conceal himself. Outside a great yellow caravan with dainty little windows stood a largish dark woman in a deerstalker hat, a short brown skirt, a large white apron and spatterdashes (among other things), frying bacon and potatoes in a frying pan. She was very red in the face, and the frying pan was spitting at her as frying pans do at a timid cook. …

      Quite mechanically Bealby scrambled through the hedge and drew nearer this divine smell. The woman scrutinized him for a moment, and then blinking and averting her face went on with her cookery.

      Bealby came quite close to her and remained, noting the bits of potato that swam about in the pan, the jolly curling of the rashers, the dancing of the bubbles, the hymning splash and splutter of the happy fat. …

      (If it should ever fall to my lot to be cooked, may I be fried in potatoes and butter. May I be fried with potatoes and good butter made from the milk of the cow. God send I am spared boiling; the prison of the pot, the rattling lid, the evil darkness, the greasy water. …)

      “I suppose,” said the lady prodding with her fork at the bacon, “I suppose you call yourself a Boy.”

      “Yes, miss,” said Bealby.

      “Have you ever fried?”

      “I could, miss.”

      “Like this?”

      “Better”

      “Just lay hold of this handle—for it’s scorching the skin off my face I am.” She seemed to think for a moment and added, “entirely.”

      In silence Bealby grasped that exquisite smell by the handle, he took the fork from her hand and put his hungry eager nose over the seething mess. It wasn’t only bacon; there were onions, onions giving it—an edge! It cut to the quick of appetite. He could have wept with the intensity of his sensations.

      A voice almost as delicious as the smell came out of the caravan window behind Bealby’s head.

      “Ju-dy!” cried the voice.

      “Here!—I mean—it’s here I am,” said the lady in the deerstalker.

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