Chapter Forty.
The Ban Again.
The Cranston party had organised a picnic to Durnley Castle.
It was May—bright, flowery, laughing May—neither spring nor summer, but something of both. The sun’s rays were not too powerful this glorious afternoon, as with a delicious warmth they poured down upon the fields studded with golden buttercups and delicate bluebells, and distilled the sweet scent from blossoming hawthorn hedges, where the linnet and grey-backed shrike sat patiently upon their eggs, secure in the recesses of their thorny covert. Fair to the eye were the velvety coppices, with their newly-donned mantles of bright green, whence issued the soft coo of the turtle-dove, and the flap of the cushat’s wing among the branches. Then, too, how light-hearted the joyous, oft-repeated note of the cuckoo, sounding over the pleasant landscape!
Durnley Castle was a fine ruin, with massive ivy-grown walls still rising to a considerable height; and standing as it did on a lofty headland, the views of the coast obtained from it were superb. Otherwise it was much like other ruins of the kind, its scarp being literally strewn with bits of sandwich paper, ancient and modern, broken bottles, and similar relics of generations of picnic parties. It was under the care of a clan of cottagers, whose thatch might be detected among the trees hard by, which care mainly consisted in taking precious good care to collect sixpences, but stopped short at clearing away the abominable rubbish aforesaid.
“Eva,” cried Ned Medlicott, the curate’s twelve-year-old, running up to his sister, a pretty girl of eighteen, to exhibit some kestrel’s eggs. “Look at these. Did you ever see such stunners!”
“‘Stunners,’ indeed,” was the laughing reply. “Why, how did you get them, Ned?”
“I didn’t take them,” explained the boy; “Mr Dorrien climbed the tree—but—”
“But the great thing is, here they are, eh, Ned?” cried Roland. “And it’s my private opinion you’ll break them before you get home.”
He was thinking how thoroughly happy the boy looked, and how easily he had been made so, and the thought seemed to please him.
“Hullo, Eustace! Late as usual,” he went on, as some new arrivals hove in sight, toiling up the steep escarpment. “Thought you had wrecked your party.”
For Eustace had brought round the rest of the party by sea, in a sailing craft, chartered at Minchkil.
“Oh, did you? Now look here. Do you know what Thought did? No? Well, I’ll tell you—Thought we had had a precious dry walk up from the boat, and lost no time in beheading one of those jolly long-necked bottles over there. Aren’t I right, Mr Medlicott?” turning to his companion.
“Oh, of course, you always are,” answered the latter with a laugh. He was the senior curate of Wandsborough, a middle-aged, scholarly man—owning a vast family, two representatives of which were with the party, as we have seen.
“Worse and worse!” said Roland, with a shake of the head, and mischievously barring the way. “Eustace, I wash my hands of you—‘fizz’ before tiffin isn’t good for little boys like you.”
“Hallo—Sophonisba!” sang out Eustace. “Cut out one of those long-necked bottles, and sail round here with it, sharp! Your dear brother-in-law’s getting mean in his old age. Marsland, tell her to. She’ll do it if you tell her,” added the mischievous dog, grinning all over his face, while his youngest sister looked viciously at him without complying.
“There, there. Go and do for yourself, Eustace,” said Roland, letting him pass. “And now that we are all here, we can gather round the festive—table-cloth. Assort yourselves, good people, and do it well; if you don’t it’s your own faults. Stewart, keep an eye on that subaltern of yours, and don’t let him have too much champagne, or my wife says you will be held responsible as his superior officer.”
Captain Stewart—in whose troop Eustace was—and who had run down with him for the occasion—vehemently declined responsibility, and set to work devoting himself to Eva Medlicott, to the no small satisfaction of that young lady.
“‘Shop!’ Bear witness all!” cried Eustace, tossing off his glass with the air of a man who had walked a mile up a steep hill at mid-day. “He’s talking arrant ‘shop.’ Roland, old chap, consider yourself fined a case of this same ‘gooseberry.’ Stewart and I will take it up to Town with us to-night.”
“Nonsense, you’re not going to-night,” said Olive.
“Am. With deep grief I say it—but—‘painful necessities,’ as the schoolmaster says upon certain occasions! If we miss that train I’m broke. Chief desperately glum—vows I’ve had four times too much leave already. Isn’t that so, Stewart?”
“For once, Ingelow, truth and the exigencies of the Service compel me to support your statement,” gravely replied the captain, whose attention was divided between his fair companion and the dispensing of a pigeon-pie to many hungry applicants.
There was a laugh at this, and then, the contagion spreading, the fun grew apace, and never a merrier party made the grey old ruins ring. It wae a model picnic party, not too large, all fairly well known to each other, or, in the case of an exception or two, acquisitions to any circle, and all young, except perhaps the curate, who was such a thoroughly good-natured man that his quietness—“slowness” we are afraid they called it—was quite forgiven him. Then there were no elderly chaperons to spoil sport with their whisperings and confounded sharp-sightedness, and not even a botanically-minded old maid to drag off some wretched youth to grub up fern-roots for her, when he would fain be wandering perdu in another direction with a very different sample of charmer.
The Dorriens had been obliged to defer their foreign trip. Business of all sorts, connected more or less with the property, which could not well be left to others, had kept cropping up in the most vexatious manner since we heard them making their plans nearly two months ago. To Roland these delays had been irritating in the extreme, but now he thought he saw the end of them, and had made up his mind to start early next month. There was one bright side to it all. He had heard no more mysterious hints. These seemed to have ceased since the departure of Johnston, who had left the neighbourhood altogether when summarily dismissed from Cranston.
Luncheon over, the party dispersed themselves abroad according to taste—in pairs or in squads. Others preferred taking things easy where they were. Besides those named, there were half a dozen other people who are not specially concerned with this history.
“Hallo! Who are these chaps, I wonder?” suddenly exclaimed Eustace, who was having a quiet weed with his brother-in-law, in a snug, sunny corner of the ruin. Two men were strolling leisurely towards them, stopping every now and then, as if admiring the view to seaward. The foremost had a telescope slung round him, while the other carried a butterfly-net and specimen box. They might have been a brace of well-to-do tradesmen.
“Where? Oh! The advance-guard of a cheap trip, most likely. Two waggonettes of hooraying yahoos to follow,” was the somewhat dissatisfied reply.
“Beg pardon, sir,” said the foremost of the new arrivals. “Excuse my asking, but is there any objection to me and my friend going over the castle.”
“None whatever, as far as I know,” answered Roland good-naturedly. “By the way, is there a trip behind you?”
The men looked mystified for a moment, then the naturalist replied.
“Oh, no, gentlemen, only we two. We walked over from Wandsbro’, we two did, just to look at the view from here, and catch a few butterflies.”
“Caught any?”
“Not to speak of, sir. Just these two or three,” opening his green box. A tortoiseshell of dissipated aspect, and a couple of orange tips stood displayed.
“H’m! Well, as far as I know you’ll find nothing to prevent you going where you like. Only I should advise you to be careful in walking about the walls, because they’re unsafe in parte.”
The men thanked him and walked away. Eustace and Roland, grateful that the invasion took so mild a form, puffed their cigars lazily, and straightway forgot all about it. Had they been aware of it, what matter to them that the strangers, exploring round the ruins, should light upon the Cranston footman, lunching on the relics of the spread, and that the said strangers, being of an engaging manner after their kind, should, in a trice, find themselves on the best of terms with James, resulting in much friendly consumption of Cranston ale, all round.
“That your governor, up there?” said he of the telescope presently, jerking a thumb in the direction he had just left.
“Which?” asked James laconically.
“Tall gent—light clothes—talks like God Almighty.”
“Yes, that’s him.”
“Good governor?” said the butterfly-catcher.
“So, so. Too much shirt, though—rather.”
“Hey?”
“Too shirty, for them as doesn’t like it,” explained James.
Then, with tongue loosened by a liberal allowance of ale, indiscriminately poured upon the absorption of the residue of unfinished champagne bottles, the faithful James proceeded to give his new friends a full, true, and above all, humorous account of his master’s idiosyncrasies, whereat the strangers laughed till they could no longer sit upright. But even the graphic James missed the real humour of the thing, as conveyed from one to the other of his listeners in a swift and irresistibly comic glance.
The afternoon had reached the debatable ground lying between itself and evening, and the diverse and errant members of the party had found their way back to the rendezvous. And last of all arrived Marsland and Sophie, trying to look as if they had been there all the time; and the latter, catching her brother’s eye, read therein a mute and satirical assurance that she had not heard the last of her tardy arrival and eke of its circumstances.
“Don’t wait for me, anybody who wants to stroll on,” said Olive, who was superintending the putting away of the things. “I’ll come on afterwards.”
“And, by the way, Stewart, do you mind taking the ribbons going back?” said Roland. “I’m going home by way of the angry deep.”
The Captain declared himself delighted, as in fact he was. A smart whip, he flattered himself he would show those four slashing bays of Dorrien’s at their best.
“Ta-ta, Stewart. Good people, I hope all your lives are insured! I know what Stewart on the box means,” sung out the irrepressible Eustace, with a fiendish chuckle over the misgiving which he had flung in among the driving party. “And now for the rolling deep?”
We will follow the party in the boat. Besides Eustace and Roland there were two young ladies from Wandsborough and Mr Medlicott and Ned. Item, an amphibious youth from Minchkil, who represented the “crew.”
It was a lovely evening. There was just enough breeze to propel them gently and without rocking, and a fragrant whiff of sweet hawthorn reached them even there. As they stood out to sea, the moon shone out brighter and brighter in the clear sky, glancing upon the tiny ripples as though its light were touching the moving spear points of a host. Then, as they presently rounded the headland, a hollow and tuneful echo seemed wafted back to them as the waves plashed against the semi-circle of cliff with the inflowing tide.
Eustace and the two Wandsborough girls were deep in a wordy war of banter and laughter, the former steering villainously in consequence. Roland and the curate were puffing at their cigars and lazily conversing in the fore part of the boat, and young Ned was playfully pulling Roy’s ears. Suddenly through the stillness of the night, above the musical ripple as the bow of the boat cleft the water, above the bell-like plash of the waves upon the shore, a strange, mysterious sound came wafting over the moonlit sea, a sound as of the deep-toned howling of a dog.
The sky, studded with stars, is without a cloud. Yonder, shadowed by the lofty headland, the grey rock-turrets of The Skegs stand forth spectral under the clear moon. Again that most dismal sound floats out upon the night air, but no one seems to hear or notice it. No one? One—that is. One who has heard it before. The curate, glancing at his host, is surprised and alarmed at the latter’s face, for it is ashy white; and following the set and rigid gaze, behold! a dark shadow is resting blackly upon the summit of the haunted rock. And Roy, with his hackles erect and gums drawn back, is snarling aggressively in response.
The terrible and grisly Ban once more. What does it portend?