The Shadow in the Place.
A fortnight had gone since Melian’s arrival at Heath Hover, and she had picked up to such an extent that both she and her uncle found it difficult to realise that she had been seriously ill at all. He took her for drives, always carefully wrapped up, and she had revelled in the beauties of the surrounding country, winter as it was—the wide vistas of field and wood, and the line of downs, sometimes near, sometimes far, stretching east and west as far as the eye could travel. But he absolutely refused, with a bracing sturdiness, to allow any practical incursions into the domain of archaeology.
“That will keep,” he declared. “Old stones spell damp. You’ve got to steer clear of that for some time to come.”
Then, as she got stronger, they had walked too, and the breezy, open uplands, contrasting with fragrant wood, did their share of the tonic. But this was not to last. A damp, muggy thaw set in, and the trees and hedges wept, the day through, under the unbroken murk of a wholly depressing sky; and you wanted very thick boots for underfoot purposes. Mervyn began to look anxiously at his charge.
“I’m afraid you’ll be getting awfully fed up with this, dear,” he said one morning, when the thin drizzle and the drip-drip from bare, leafless bough and twig seemed rather more depressing than ordinarily. “What can be done for you? Frankly I’m too poor to take you away to a more sunshiny climate—or I would, like a shot. For my part I’m used to this sort of thing, and it doesn’t ‘get upon’ me any. There was a time when it would have, but that time’s gone. But for you—why it’s devilish rough.”
Then Melian had reassured him—had abundantly reassured him. She didn’t find it heavy, she declared—not she. Why, on top of her experience of bearleading a brace of utterly uninteresting and unengaging children—and being at the beck and call of their detestable underbred mother, this was ideal. And she somehow or other managed to convey that her sense of the improvement was not merely a material one. Did they not get on splendidly together? Had they not any number of ideas in common—those they had not, only serving to create variety by giving rise to more or less spirited but always jocose arguments? Rough on her? Dull for her? It was nothing of the sort, she declared with unambiguous emphasis. And the fascination of the open country, even with the weeping woodlands and soggy, miry underfoot, was coming more and more over her, she further declared. And her uncle was hugely gratified, more so than he cared to realise. This bright young presence lightening his lonely existence from morn till night—how on earth would he be able to do without it again? Those long rambles, not by himself now, beset as they had been with uncheering thoughts of the past and a less cheering vista of the future; the now cosy snug evenings by his own fireside, with the after-dinner pipe, listening to the girl’s bright talk and entering into her ideas while the lamplight gleamed upon her golden head and animated eyes—and she herself made up such a picture sitting framed in the big armchair opposite—the little black fluffy kitten curled up on her lap. Of a truth life held something yet for him after all, if only this were going to last. But now he said:
“How about getting that nice girl you were chumming with—and she must be a nice girl from the way she wrote about you—down here to stop with you a bit, dear? Make a kind of relief from me, you know. Always stewed up from morning till night with an old fogey—the same old fogey at that—can’t be altogether lively.”
“Violet? She couldn’t come, if she wanted to ever so,” was the answer. “She’s entirely dependent on her job—and, as it was, her people cut up rusty if she chucked it for a day or two when I was ill. What beasts people are—aren’t they. Uncle Seward?”
“We shan’t quarrel on that question,” answered Mervyn, sending out a long puff of smoke, and meditatively watching it resolve itself into very perfect rings in mid air. “A very large proportion are, and that just the proportion which could best afford not to be. Doesn’t she ever get any time off then? Holidays?”
“She’ll get about four days off at Easter time. It would be jolly to get her down here then, poor old Violet. She does work, and she’s a good sort. It’s precious lucky I had her to go to when I did.”