"It's twenty years since the boys used to come home from boarding-school for their holidays, but I haven't forgotten what young folks like," she explained to Mavis and Merle, as she helped them to unpack. "It's more like a boys' bedroom than a girls' perhaps, but I just collected anything of Master Richard's and Master Cyril's that I could find about the house. If you don't care about them we'll take them out."
"But we love boys' things," declared Merle, admiring the pictures of dogs and horses on the walls, opening the drawers of the cabinet of birds' eggs, and touching the whip and the cricket bat with friendly fingers. Mavis was already deep in Coral Island, and temporarily deaf to the outside world, but she had just sufficient sense of manners left to grunt "It's a gorgeous bookcase!" before she lost herself in the South Seas among the palm trees.
"Two very nice young ladies, and to have them here is like old times," Jessop had confided to Tom, the factotum. "The house has always seemed dull since Master Cyril went away. Miss Mavis reminds me of him, with her blue eyes and that gentle little voice of hers. Now, Miss Merle is like Master Percy. He'd a way with him! I never knew what was going to happen next when he was at home. 'Jessop' he'd say, 'you're a wonderful woman!' Then I knew he meant to coax me to let him keep his rabbits in his bedroom, or do something of that sort. Girls are quieter than boys, but these two will cheer us up a little, I dare say. We all seem to have grown old here lately."
And Tom, the factotum, polishing boots by the back door, agreed with her. Twenty years ago he had been the coachman, and, immaculate in his grey livery and silver buttons and top hat with the cockade at the side, had driven the high gig about the country lanes. It had nearly broken his heart when his master decided to give up the horses and take to motoring instead. There were tears in his eyes when he groomed Czar and Ruby for the last time. But, though Dr. Tremayne might march with the century, and visit his patients more quickly in his new automobile, he had no intention of parting with his old coachman, and determined to turn him into a chauffeur instead. So Tom learnt to drive the car, learnt almost too well, indeed, for, determined not to show the white feather, he waxed foolhardy, and would career round corners with one wheel off the ground, or dash down hills at such breakneck speed that the doctor, not usually a nervous subject, would gasp with relief to find himself alive at the bottom. Something plainly had to be done, or Tom would soon have broken the family's bones, and the question was how to shelve him without giving him offence. The riddle, fortunately, solved itself by the retirement of Dalton, the factotum-gardener. Dr. Tremayne decided to retrench and to keep only one man-servant. In future he drove his own car, and Tom was installed in Dalton's place, to weed the walks, clip the grass, polish the knives, and carry the coals. He made friends at once with Mavis and Merle, or rather he merely transferred to them the friendship he had given to their mother twenty-five years ago, when she used to spend her holidays at Bridge House, and rode Cobs, the white pony, whose grave lay at the bottom of the paddock. To Tom, motoring was the sign of a degenerate age, and he would descant to the girls about the good old days, when people were not in such a frantic hurry and could wait for the doctor until he drove up behind a well-groomed horse, and made such a case for the past times that Merle, in spite of her ambition to drive a car, began to wish Czar and Ruby and Cobs were still in the stable, and she herself could be clad in Mother's old riding-habit and flourish Cousin Percy's discarded whip as she ambled along the lanes on pony-back.
That, however, was before she had had a run in the little, yellow Deemster car. After the first trip to Chagmouth she completely changed her mind.
For a week life went on with the greatest regularity at Durracombe. Every morning the girls were called by Jessop promptly at half-past seven. They started for school at twenty minutes to nine, returned home for lunch, rushed back to The Moorings by 2.30, did their preparation and practising in the evenings, and went to bed at nine o'clock. Uncle David was nearly always out, or busy in the surgery, and Aunt Nellie sat by the fire, knitting or taking little naps. She would ask very kindly about their lessons, then, hardly giving them time to answer, would plunge into reminiscences of her boys' schooldays. Life, for her, still centred round Percy, Richard, and Cyril. When the girls wanted to talk they went to Jessop. It was to her they poured out their experiences of their new school, and she listened with the flattering interest of one who really enjoys hearing. She never read any books, so perhaps the little adventures described humorously by Mavis or Merle took the place of chapters in a serial story. She was familiar directly with the names of all the girls and teachers at The Moorings, and most delightfully ready to "take sides", and like those whom they liked and agree about the iniquities of those who offended them.
For this first week had not been all plain sailing. It is often really easier to get on in a big school than a little one. There is more elbow-room among two hundred girls than among two dozen. Nobody except Iva Westwood had seemed particularly pleased to welcome them. Opal Earnshaw palpably resented their presence.
"Miss Pollard is only supposed to take twenty pupils," she remarked, on the day after their arrival. "I know she refused two other girls, so I can't think why she should have broken her rule."
"But those girls would have been boarders," objected Iva.
"Well, where's the difference?"