"And had they?" asked Guy, encouragingly.
"Not one of them," said Mr. Godbold. "And I thought to myself as I was walking up home, I thought now what if there wasn't no such thing as a Pope any more than there's women with fish-tails and all this rubbish you read of in books. If you ask my opinion of books, Mr. Hazlewood, I tell you that I think books is as bad for some people as wireworms is for carnations. They seem to regular eat into them."
Guy laughed. Misgivings about the wisdom of his choice vanished, and he was being conscious of a very intimate pleasure in thus driving back to Wychford from the station. The country tossed for miles to right and left in great stretches of pasturage, and when Mr. Godbold pulled up for a moment to look at a trace, the air, brilliantly dusted with autumnal gold, seemed to endow him with the richness of its silence; along the sparse hedgerow chicory flowers burned with the pale intense blue of the September sky above, and Guy felt like them, worshipful of the cloudless scene. The road ran along the upland for half a mile before it dipped suddenly down into the valley of the Greenrush, from which the spire of Wychford church came delicately up into the air, like a coil of smoke ascending from the opalescent corona that hung over the small town clustered against the farther hillside. Down in that valley close to the church was Plashers Mead, and Guy watched eagerly for the first sight of his long, low house. Already the sparkle of the more distant curves of the Greenrush was visible; but Plashers Mead was still hidden by the slope of the bank. Presently this broke away to a ragged hedge, and the house displayed itself as much an integral part of the landscape as an outcrop of stone.
"Tasty little place," commented Mr. Godbold while the trap jolted cautiously down the last twist of the hilly road. "But I reckon old Burrows was glad to let it. You're young, though, and I dare say you won't mind being flooded out in winter. Two years ago Burrows's son's wife's nephew was floating paper boats in the front hall. But you're young, and I dare say you'll enjoy it."
The pony swept round the corner and pulled up with a jerk at the wooden gateway in the gray wall overhung by lime-trees that concealed from the highroad the moist fields and garden of Plashers Mead.
"I'm sleeping here to-night, you know, for the first time," said Guy. He had tried all the way back not to make this announcement, but the sight of his own gateway destroyed his reserve.
"Well, you'll have a fine night, that's one good job," Mr. Godbold predicted.
"And the moon only just past the full," said Guy.
"That's right," Mr. Godbold agreed; and the tenant passed through the gateway into the garden, where every path had its own melody of running water. He examined with proprietary solicitude the espaliers of apple-trees, and admired for the twentieth time the pledge they offered by their fantastic forms of his garden's antiquity. He pinched several pippins that seemed ripe, but they were still hard; and he could find nothing over which to exert his lordship until he saw by the edge of the path a piece of groundsel. Having solemnly exterminated the weed, Guy felt that the garden must henceforth recognize him as master, and he walked on through a mass of dropsical cabbages and early kale until he came face to face with the house, the sudden view of which like this never failed to give him a peculiar pleasure. The tangled garden, long and narrow, was bounded on the right, as one entered, by the Greenrush, over which hung a thicket of yews that completely shut out the first straggling houses of Wychford. On the left the massed espaliers ended abruptly in a large water-meadow reaching to the foot of the hill along which the highroad climbed in a slow diagonal. By the corner of the house the garden had narrowed to the apex of a thin triangle, so that the windows looked out over the water-meadow and, beyond, up the wide valley of the Greenrush to where the mighty western sky rested on rounded hills. At this apex the Greenrush flung a tributary stream to wash the back of the house and one side of the orchard, whence it wound in extravagant curves towards the easterly valley. The main branch, damned up to form a deep and sluggish mill-stream, flowed straight on, dividing Guy's domain from the churchyard. At the end of the orchard on this side was a lock-gate through which a certain amount of water continuously escaped from the mill-stream, enough, indeed, to make the orchard an island, as it trickled in diamonded shallows to reinforce the idle tributary. Somewhere in the farther depths of the eastern valley all vagrant waters were united, and somewhere still more remote they came to a confluence with their father the Thames.
Guy sat upon the parapet of the well under the shade of a sycamore-tree and regarded with admiration and satisfaction the exterior of his house. He looked at the semicircular porch of stone over the front door and venerated the supporting cherubs who with puffed-out cheeks had blown defiance at wind and rain since the days of Elizabeth. He counted the nine windows, five above and four below, populating with the shapes of many friends the rooms they lightened. He looked at the steep roof of gray-stone tiles rich with the warm golden green of mossy patterns. He looked at the four pear-trees against the walls of the house barren now for many years. He looked at himself in silhouette against the silver sky of the well-water; and then he went indoors.