The big stone-paved hall was very cool, and the sound of the stream at the back came babbling through lattices open to the light of a green world. Guy could not make up his mind whether the inside of the house smelled very dry or very damp, for there clung about it that odor peculiar to rustic age, which may be found equally in dry old barns and in damp potting-sheds. He wished he could furnish the hall worthily. At present it contained only a high-back chair, an alleged contemporary of Cromwell, which was doddering beside the hooded fireplace; a warming-pan; and an oak chest which remained a chest only so long as nobody either sat upon it or lifted the lid. There was also a grandfather-clock which had suffered an abrupt resurrection of four minutes' duration when it was recently lifted out of the furniture-van, but had now relapsed into the silence of years. Leading out of the hall was a small, empty room which had been dedicated to the possession of his friend Michael Fane; together they had planned to paper it with gold and paint the ceiling black. Michael, however, had still another year at Oxford, and the room with an obelisk of lining-paper standing upright on the bare floor was now a little desolate. On the other side of the hall was the dining-room, which Guy, by taxing his resources, had managed to furnish very successfully. It was a square room painted emerald-green above the white wainscot. Two inset cupboards were filled with glass and china: there were four Chippendale chairs and an oval Sheraton table, curtains of purple silk, some old English water-colors, and two candlesticks of Sheffield plate. Beyond the dining-room was the kitchen, the corridor to which was endowed with a swinging baize door considered by the landlord to be the finest feature of the house. The problem of equipping the kitchen had seemed insoluble until Guy heard of a sale in the neighborhood. He had bicycled over to this and bought the contents of the large kitchen at auction. The result was that the dresser encroached upon the table, that the table had one leg in the fender, and that a row of graduated dish-covers, the largest of which would have sheltered two turkeys, occupied whatever space was left. All that remained of Guy's own money had been invested in his kitchen, and he accounted for the large size of everything by the fact of the auction's having been held in the open air, where everything had looked so much smaller. Now, as he contemplated dubiously the result, he wondered what Miss Peasey would say to it. She and the books would arrive together at half past nine to-night. He hoped his unknown housekeeper would not be irritated by these dish-covers, and as a precautionary measure he unhooked the largest, carried it up-stairs, and deposited it on the floor of an unfurnished bedroom. The staircase ran steep and straight up from the hall into a long corridor with more casements opening on the orchard behind. The bedroom at one end was dedicated to the hope of Michael Fane's occupation and was always referred to in letters as his: "By the way I put the largest dish-cover in your bedroom." The next two bedrooms were also empty and belonged in spirit to the friends with whom Guy had lived during his last year at Oxford. The fourth was his own, very simply and sparsely furnished in comparison with the bedroom up in the roof which was intended for Miss Peasey. The preparation of that for an elderly unmarried woman had involved a certain voluptuousness of rep and fumed oak and heavily decorated china, the fruit of the second-best bedroom in the house of the dish-covers. As Guy went up the crooked stairs and knocked his head on three successive beams, he hoped Miss Peasey would not be as disproportionately large as the kitchen dresser. Her handwriting had been spidery enough, and he pictured her hopefully as small and wizened. Miss Peasey's bower with the big dormer window surveying the tree-tops of the orchard was certainly a success, and Guy saw that Michael had with happy intuition of female aspiration hung on the wall opposite her bed a large steel-engraving of Doré's Martyrs, which had been included with two hammocks and a fishing-rod in one of the odd lots lightly bid for at the auction. There did not seem anything else she could want; so, having killed a bluebottle with a tartan pincushion, he came down-stairs.
Guy had left his own room to the last, partly because he regretted so much the delay in the arrival of those books and partly because, however inadequately equipped was the rest of the house, this room was always the final justification of his tenancy. It was a larger room than any of the others, for the corridor did not cut off its share of the back. It possessed, in addition to the usual window looking out over the western side of the valley, a very large bay which hung right over the stream, with a view of the orchard, of the church steeple, of the water-meadows beyond, and of the wold rolling across the horizon. This morning Michael and he had pushed the furniture into place, had set in order the great wicker chairs and nailed against the wall the frames of green canvas. The floor was covered with a sweet-smelling mat of Abingdon rushes; and the curtains of his old rooms in Balliol were hung in place, dim green curtains sown with golden fleurs-de-lys. The ivory image of an emaciated saint standing on the mantelshelf between candlesticks of old wrought iron was probably a Spanish Virgin, but Guy preferred to say she was Saint Rose of Lima because "O Rose of Lima" seemed a wonderful apostrophe to begin a poem. Nothing indeed remained for the room's perfection but to fill the new bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. Why had he not hired a cart in Shipcot? They would have been here by now, and he would actually have been able to begin work to-night, setting thus a noble period to these last six weeks of preparation.
Guy dragged a chair into the bay window and, balancing his long legs on the sill, he made numerous calculations in which Miss Peasey's wages, the weekly bills for food, and the number of times he would have to go up to London were set against £150 a year. When he woke up, the lime-trees that bordered the highroad had flung their shadows half-way across the meadow, and the air was a fume of golden gnats against the dipping sun. Within ten minutes the sun vanished, and the mists began to rise. Guy, feeling rather chilly and ashamed of himself for falling asleep, rose hurriedly and went up into the town. He interviewed the driver of the omnibus and told him to look out for his books, and as an afterthought he mentioned the arrival of Miss Peasey. He wished now he had written and told his housekeeper to spend the night in Oxford; and he hoped she would not be prejudiced against Plashers Mead by a five-mile drive in a cold omnibus after her tiring journey from Cardiff. He dawdled about the steep village street for a while, gossiping with tradesmen at their doors and watching the warmth fade out of the gray houses in the falling dusk. Then he went to eat his last meal in the Stag Inn.
After supper Guy returned to Plashers Mead, wandering round the house, dropping a great deal of candle-grease everywhere, and working himself up into a state of anxiety over Miss Peasey's advent. It would be terrible if she demanded her fare back to Wales the moment she arrived; and to propitiate her he put the best lamp in the kitchen, whence (as with such illumination it looked more than ever protuberant) he took another dish-cover up to Michael's bedroom. Since it was still but a few minutes after eight and the omnibus would not come for another hour and a half, he lit all the wax candles in his own room and wondered what to do. The tall shadows wavering in the draught were seeming cold and uncomfortable without a fire, so he restlessly threw back the curtains of the bay window to watch the rising of the moon. At that instant her rim appeared above the black hills, and presently a great moon of dislustered gold swam along the edge of the earth. Although she appeared to shed no light, the valley responded to her presence, and Guy was lured from his room to walk for a while in the dews.
Out in the orchard a heavy mist wrapped him in wet folds of silver; yet overhead there was clear starlight, and he could watch the slow burnishing of the moon's face in her voyage up the sky. It was a queer country in which he found himself, where all the tree-tops seemed to be floating away from invisible trunks, and where for a while no sound was audible but his own footsteps making a music almost of violins in the saturated grass. The moon wrought upon the vapors a shifting damascene; and far behind, as it seemed, a rufous stain showed where the candles in his room were still alight. Gradually a variety of sounds began to play upon the silence. He could hear the dry squeak of a bat and cows munching in the meadows on the other side of the stream. The stream itself babbled and was still, babbled and was still; while along the bank voles were taking the water with splashes that went up and down a scale like the deep notes of a dulcimer. Far off, an owl hooted, an otter barked; and then as he crossed the middle of the orchard he was hearing nothing but apples fall with solemn thud, until the noise of the lock-gate swallowed all lighter sounds. Here the mist had temporarily dissolved, and in the moonlight he could see water gushing forth like an arch of lace and the long bramble-sprays combing the shallows below. Soon the orchard was left behind and he was in the mist of a wide meadow, where all was silent again except for the faint sobbing of the grass to his footsteps. He walked straight into the moon's face, stumbling from time to time over molehills with an eery fragrance of fresh-turned soil, and wishing he could ever say in verse a little of the magic this autumnal night was shedding upon his fancy.
"By gad! if I can't write here, I ought to be shot," he declared.
The church clock struck the half-hour as appositely as if his own father had said something about the need for hurrying up and showing what he could do.
"Ah, but I'm not going to be hurried," said Guy, aloud. And since the clock could not answer him again, it was as good as having the best of an argument.
Guy walked on, and after a while could hear once more the purling of the stream. He thought there was something strangely human about this river in the way it wandered so careless of direction. When he had left these banks, they had been going away from him: now here they were coming back like himself towards the moon, so that presently he was able without changing his course to walk under their border of willows. The mist had drifted away from the stream, leaving the spires of loosestrife plainly visible, and more dimly on the other side the forms of huge cattle at pasture. There was, too, a smell of meadowsweet softening with a summer languor the sharp September night. The willows gave way to overhanging thickets of hawthorn, as the river suddenly swept round to make a noose that was completed but a few yards ahead of where he was standing. He could not see on account of the bushes the size of the peninsula so formed, and when suddenly he heard from the depths a sound of laughter, so full was his brain of moonshine that if he had come face to face with a legendary queen of fairies, he would hardly have been surprised. It was with the deliberate encouragement of a vision surpassing all the fantasies of moon and mist that Guy stopped; and, indeed, on a sensuous impulse to pamper his imagination with an unsolved mystery he had almost turned round to go back. Curiosity, however, was too strong; for, as he paused irresolute, the fairy mirth tinkling again from the recesses of that bewitched inclosure died away upon the murmur of a conversation, and he could not leave any longer inviolate that screen of hawthorns.
In the apogee of the river's noose two girls, clearly seen against the silver glooms beyond, were bending over a basket. Their heads were close together, and it was not until Guy was almost on top of them that he realized how impertinent his intrusion might seem. He drew back, blushing, just as one of the girls became aware of his presence and jumped up with an "oh" that floated away from her as lightly as a moth upon the moonshine. Her sister (Guy decided at once they were sisters) jumped up also and, luckily for him, since it offered the opportunity of a natural apology, overturned the basket. For a moment the three of them gazed at one another over the mushrooms that were tumbled upon the grass to be an elfin city of the East, so white and cold were their cupolas under the moon.