Enormous as the gulf between their positions was, he knew that he had offered to take her over the place because he was in a sense glad to see her again.Why he was glad he did not profess to know or even to ask himself.Coarsely speaking, it might be because she was one of the handsomest young women he had ever chanced to meet with, and while her youth was apparent in the rich red of her mouth, the mass of her thick, soft hair and the splendid blue of her eyes, there spoke in every line of face and pose something intensely more interesting and compelling than girlhood.Also, since the night they had come together on the ship's deck for an appalling moment, he had liked her better and rebelled less against the unnatural wealth she represented.He led her first to the wood from which she had seen him emerge.
"I will show you this first," he explained."Keep your eyes on the ground until I tell you to raise them."Odd as this was, she obeyed, and her lowered glance showed her that she was being guided along a narrow path between trees.The light was mellow golden-green, and birds were singing in the boughs above her.In a few minutes he stopped.
"Now look up," he said.
She uttered an exclamation when she did so.She was in a fairy dell thick with ferns, and at beautiful distances from each other incredibly splendid oaks spread and almost trailed their lovely giant branches.The glow shining through and between them, the shadows beneath them, their great boles and moss-covered roots, and the stately, mellow distances revealed under their branches, the ancient wildness and richness, which meant, after all, centuries of cultivation, made a picture in this exact, perfect moment of ripening afternoon sun of an almost unbelievable beauty.
"There is nothing lovelier," he said in a low voice, "in all England."Bettina turned to look at him, because his tone was a curious one for a man like himself.He was standing resting on his gun and taking in the loveliness with a strange look in his rugged face.
"You--you love it!" she said.
"Yes," but with a suggestion of stubborn reluctance in the admission.
She was rather moved.
"Have you been keeper here long?" she asked.
"No--only a few years.But I have known the place all my life.""Does Lord Mount Dunstan love it?"
"In his way--yes."
He was plainly not disposed to talk of his master.He was perhaps not on particularly good terms with him.He led her away and volunteered no further information.He was, upon the whole, uncommunicative.He did not once refer to the circumstance of their having met before.It was plain that he had no intention of presuming upon the fact that he, as a second-class passenger on a ship, had once been forced by accident across the barriers between himself and the saloon deck.
He was stubbornly resolved to keep his place; so stubbornly that Bettina felt that to broach the subject herself would verge upon offence.
But the golden ways through which he led her made the afternoon one she knew she should never forget.They wandered through moss walks and alleys, through tangled shrubberies bursting into bloom, beneath avenues of blossoming horse-chestnuts and scented limes, between thickets of budding red and white may, and jungles of neglected rhododendrons;through sunken gardens and walled ones, past terraces with broken balustrades of stone, and fallen Floras and Dianas, past moss-grown fountains splashing in lovely corners.Arches, overgrown with yet unblooming roses, crumbled in their time stained beauty.Stillness brooded over it all, and they met no one.They scarcely broke the silence themselves.The man led the way as one who knew it by heart, and Bettina followed, not caring for speech herself, because the stillness seemed to add a spell of enchantment.What could one say, to a stranger, of such beauty so lost and given over to ruin and decay.
"But, oh!" she murmured once, standing still, with in-drawn breath, "if it were mine!--if it were mine!" And she said the thing forgetting that her guide was a living creature and stood near.
Afterwards her memories of it all seemed to her like the memories of a dream.The lack of speech between herself and the man who led her, his often averted face, her own sense of the desertedness of each beauteous spot she passed through, the mossy paths which gave back no sound of footfalls as they walked, suggested, one and all, unreality.When at last they passed through a door half hidden in an ivied wall, and crossing a grassed bowling green, mounted a short flight of broken steps which led them to a point through which they saw the house through a break in the trees, this last was the final touch of all.It was a great place, stately in its masses of grey stone to which thick ivy clung.To Bettina it seemed that a hundred windows stared at her with closed, blind eyes.
All were shuttered but two or three on the lower floors.Not one showed signs of life.The silent stone thing stood sightless among all of which it was dead master--rolling acres, great trees, lost gardens and deserted groves.
"Oh!" she sighed, "Oh!"
Her companion stood still and leaned upon his gun again, looking as he had looked before.
"Some of it," he said, "was here before the Conquest.It belonged to Mount Dunstans then.""And only one of them is left," she cried, "and it is like this!""They have been a bad lot, the last hundred years," was the surly liberty of speech he took, "a bad lot."It was not his place to speak in such manner of those of his master's house, and it was not the part of Miss Vanderpoel to encourage him by response.She remained silent, standing perhaps a trifle more lightly erect as she gazed at the rows of blind windows in silence.
Neither of them uttered a word for some time, but at length Bettina roused herself.She had a six-mile walk before her and must go.