Deb was silent, watching the long-horned cattle paddling blissfully deep in the cool water. What was the use of trying to explain that it was Lyndesay kindness that made the real difficulty? At least she would receive no unwelcome patronage from the mistress of Crump, she reflected ironically, and fell to wondering how Stanley’s wife had besieged that fortress so successfully. Presently she began to talk about the hay once more, and this time her father entered into the subject with zest. From that, they came back to the cattle again, over which he shook his head in unwilling admiration. He was a shorthorn man himself—was still one of the finest shorthorn judges in the country—and the picturesque, rough-coated beasts looked out of place to him on Crump land. Deb had the history of half the famous shorthorn herds in the kingdom before she finally escaped to her own room. That looked over the park, too. Father and daughter lived half their lives with their faces turned to Crump.
At least he was happy again, she thought, with a sigh of relief. He would settle down, now, and under Christian’s rule nothing should happen on the estate to spoil the old man’s last days. For him, at all events, there was peace ahead.
Under the big beech on the old bridge, a man and a girl sat on the low wall, looking down to the bend of the river, bringing back to the watcher in the creepered house the night when on that very spot Stanley had asked her to be his wife. Shutting her eyes, she felt again the warm darkness of the leafy arch, heard the hurry of the water under her feet, and Stanley himself as no more than a voice in the dusk. Something that was not Stanley at all had cried to her from without, and to that, and that only, had she yielded. Stanley was only its mouthpiece. Could he come back this very night, free to claim her given word, she knew that she would yield again.
CHAPTER VII
“Why not cut it down?” Mrs. Slinker asked, from the deep window seat in the hall. She had been riding, and had come straight to her favourite post, from which she could see the old pele tower of Dockerneuk through the cloud of wood.
“Why not cut it down?” she said again, and she lifted a gauntlet and shook it vindictively at some unconscious object without. “Horrid, grewly old thing, standing there gloating over the misfortunes of the house! It shouldn’t stop another day if I had the ordering of things. Why don’t you get rid of it?”
Christian, standing behind her, shrugged his shoulders as she glared at the huge cedar, centuries old, standing alone in its patch of emerald lawn, as if the hand of a witch had ringed a curse round it.
“Swank, I suppose!” he said, smiling. “I can’t think of any other particular reason. Only I can’t fancy myself setting out, on my own responsibility, to grub up the family fate. Perhaps, if I spoke the truth, I should say I was afraid! I hardly know.”
She turned and looked up at him.
“You don’t honestly believe that because, hundreds of years ago, one of your ancestors hanged another on that horrid old object, no Lyndesay of Crump will be allowed to die a natural death as long as the tree stands in its place? Laker, you’re a cuckoo!”