Miss Phipp lay quite still on her bed for half an hour with her eyes closed, while the pain in her head grew and became almost insupportable, as she had known it would, and then, under the influence of the drug, slowly ebbed away until, exhausted as she was, her state was one of such relief as to amount to bliss. She could not afford to be angry, if she was to escape the punishment of these short-lived but agonising bursts of pain, and she had been very angry. Now she told herself that she had been foolish to upset herself about nothing. Her friend's words had borne fruit in her robust and sensible mind. It was quite true that she could not expect to exercise the same undivided authority in a private house as in a school, and she must find compensations elsewhere, which she very speedily did. At the school she had herself been under authority, and had not been able to carry out unchecked her favourite theories of education. Here she would be free of that check, for she did not suppose that Mrs. Clinton would desire to interfere with her in her teaching. And the children were bright enough. Surely there was opportunity here for doing something in a small way, which she had never been able to do at all as yet! They were nice children too, with some character. They had not given in to her, but they had held out without being in the least rude, and it was good of them, after what had happened, to want her to go with them to see their odious animals.
At this point Mrs. Clinton, who had been told of her bad headache, knocked at her door and asked if she wanted anything. She thanked her and said "No," and Mrs. Clinton further asked if she would like to drive with her, for, if she was well enough, it might do her good.
She got off her bed and opened the door, and when Mrs. Clinton saw the dark circles under her eyes she exclaimed in sympathy, and insisted upon fetching eau-de-Cologne, and performing various little services for her, which, although she now scarcely needed them, made her feel that she was cared for. She was instructed to lie still for a while longer, and something should presently be sent up to her. Then she was to lunch quietly by herself, and in the afternoon, if she was well enough, to take a short walk in the park. "It is so fine," said Mrs. Clinton, "that I expect we shall be out all day, and you will have the whole house to yourself, and can be as quiet as you like. And mind you ask Garnett—my maid, you know—for anything you want. I will tell her to keep an eye on you."
Then she went away, and left Miss Phipp in a more comfortable frame of mind and body than before. She was not used to being looked after in illness, for she had lived a lonely life, and her near relations were long since dead. She felt extraordinarily grateful to this kind, thoughtful, sensible woman, who treated her as if she were a human being and not like a mere teaching machine, and the thought began to dawn upon her, that perhaps she might come to look upon Kencote as a home, such as she had never hitherto had, and in the days of her health had scarcely missed.
Her bedroom was in the front of the house, and she had heard, without much heeding them, the wheels and the beat of horse-hoofs and the voices outside. Now she began to be a little curious as to what was going on, and rose and drew up her blind and looked out.
The scene was quite new to her, and in spite of herself she exclaimed at it. Immediately beyond the wide gravel sweep in front of the house was the grass of the park, where the whole brave show of the South Meadshire Hunt was collected. It is doubtful if she had ever seen a pack of hounds in her life, and she watched them as if fascinated. Presently, at some signal which she had not discerned, the huntsman and the whips turned and trotted off with them, and behind them streamed all the horsemen and horsewomen, the carriages and carts, and the people on foot, until the whole scene which had been so full of life and colour was entirely empty of all human occupation, and there was only the damp grass of the park and the big bare trees under the pearly grey of the winter sky. She saw the Squire ride off on his powerful horse, and admired his sturdy erect carriage, and she saw Dick and Virginia, side by side, Humphrey, the pink of sartorial hunting perfection, Mrs. Clinton in her carriage, with Miss Dexter by her side and the twins opposite to her, and for a moment wished she had accepted her invitation to make one of the party, although she did not in the least understand where they were going to, or what they were going to do when they got there. All this concourse of apparently well-to-do and completely leisured people going seriously about a business so remote from any of the interests in life that she had known struck her as entirely strange and inexplicable. She might have been in the midst of some odd rites in an unexplored land. The very look of the country in its winter dress was strange to her, for she was a lifelong Londoner, and the country to her only meant a place where one spent summer holidays. Decidedly it would be interesting—more interesting than she had thought—to gain some insight into a life lived apparently by a very large number of people in England, if this one little corner could produce so many exponents of it, but curiously unlike any life that she had lived herself or seen other people living.
She went through the course prescribed for her by Mrs. Clinton, and enjoyed the quiet of the big house and the warm airy seclusion of the schoolroom, where she read a book and wrote a little, and after lunch went to sleep on the sofa before the fire. Then at about half-past three, although she hated all forms of exercise and would have much preferred to stay indoors, she went out for a little walk.
She went down the drive and through the village, and was struck by the absence of humanity. If she had to take a walk on a winter afternoon she would have wished to take it on pavements and to feel herself one of a crowd. Here everybody she did meet stared at her, wondering, obviously, who she was, which rather annoyed her. But when she got out on to the country road and met nobody at all, she liked it still less, and walked on from a sheer sense of duty. She had no eyes for the mild beauty of the winter evening, nor ears for the breathing of the sleeping earth. She plodded doggedly on, hating the mud, and only longing to get back again to her book by the fireside. When she met a slow farm cart jogging homewards, she made no reply to the touch of the hat accorded her by the carter, but showed unfeigned terror at the friendly inquisitiveness of his dog. In her soft felt hat, black skirt, and braided jacket, she was as much out of place in the wide brooding landscape as if she had been in the desert of Sahara, and disliked the one as much as she would have disliked the other.
As she was going up the drive on her return, she felt a little glow at the sight of the lighted windows of the house. If she had thought of it she would have known that it was her first experience of the pleasures of the country in winter, for a house in a city does not arouse exactly that feeling of expectant warmth, however much one may desire to get inside it. But, even if she had been prepared to examine the causes of the impulse, she would not have been able to, for it was immediately ejected from her mind by one of terror. It was caused by the sudden sharp trot of a horse on the gravel immediately behind her. She turned round, terribly startled and prepared for instant annihilation. But the horse had only crossed the drive, and was now cantering across the turf away from her. It was riderless, the stirrups swinging against its flanks, the reins broken and trailing.
At first she did not, so entirely ignorant was she of such things, attach any meaning at all to the empty saddle. For all she knew, horses without riders might roam the wilds of the country, adding greatly to its dangers, as a matter of recognised habit. But when she had recovered from her shock, some connection between what she had just seen and something she had read or heard of or seen in a picture formed itself in her mind, and it occurred to her that probably the horse had got rid of its rider, and there might conceivably have been an unpleasant accident. Then she made a further rapid and brilliant induction, and came to the conclusion that a riderless horse which made his way home to his stable at Kencote had probably set out from Kencote with some one on his back, and, as his saddle had no pommels, that either the Squire or Dick or Humphrey had been thrown. She knew nothing about grooms and second horses, and narrowed her convictions still further by the recollection of Dick's having ridden a grey. The riderless horse was brown—it was really a bright bay, but it was brown to her. Therefore either the Squire or Humphrey must have been thrown from his horse in the hunting-field, and from scraps of recollection of old novels in which hunting scenes had occurred the outcome of such accidents presented itself to her alarmed mind as probably fatal.