Feo threw her arms round her father’s neck and kissed him on those places of his cheeks which were clear of undergrowth. “Good old Rip,” she said. “Always on the spot. Been bored, old boy?”
Lord Amesbury laughed. “To be perfectly frank, yes,” he said. “I have missed my race meetings and my bridge at Boodles, but I have been studying the awakening of spring and the psychology of bird life, all very delightful. Also I have been watching the daily changes among the trees in the beech forest. Amazingly dramatic, my dear. But it’s good to see you again and I hope your two friends are gamblers. Possibly I can make a bit out of them.”
He patted her on the shoulder and looked her up and down with admiration not unmixed with astonishment. Among the many riddles which he had never been able to solve he placed the fact that he of all men was Feo’s father. What extraordinary twist had nature performed in making his only daughter a girl instead of a boy? Standing there in her short skirt and manly looking golf shoes with lopping tongues, her beautiful square shoulders lightly covered with a coarsely knitted sweater of chestnut brown and a sort of Tyrolean hat drawn down over her ears, she looked like a young officer in the First Life Guards masquerading in women’s clothes.
II
When Lord Amesbury mounted the box with Feo at his side and turned out of the station yard into the long road which led to the old village of Princes Risborough, the first thing that caught Lola’s eyes was the white cross cut by the Romans in the chalk of the hill, on the top of which sat Chilton Park. Again and again she had stood in front of photographs of this very view. They hung in Miss Breezy’s room, neatly framed. Many times Miss Breezy herself had explained to Lola the meaning of that cross, so far as its historical significance went, and Lola had been duly impressed. The Romans,—how long ago they must have lived. But to her, more and more as her love and adoration grew, that white cross stood as a mark for the place to which Fallaray went from time to time for peace, to listen to the wind among the beech trees, to watch the sheep on the distant hills, to wander among the gardens of his old house and forget the falsity and the appalling ineptitude of his brother Ministers. The photographs had indicated very well the beauty of this scene but the sight of it in the life, all green in the first flush of spring, brought a sob to Lola’s throat. Once more the feeling came all over her that it would be at Chilton Park that she would meet Fallaray at last alone and discover her love to him,—not as lady’s maid but as the little human thing, the Eve.
She sat shoulder to shoulder with the groom opposite to Mrs. Malwood’s maid,—Dowth, Macquarie and Mrs. Malwood in close juxtaposition. But she had no ears for their conversation. As the village approached, not one single feature of it escaped her eager eyes,—its wide cobbled street, its warm Queen Anne houses, its old-fashioned shops, its Red Lion and Royal George and Black Bull, its funny little post office up three stairs, its doctor’s house all covered with creeper, its ancient church sitting hen-wise among her children. It seemed to her that all these things, old and quiet and honest, had gone to the making of Fallaray’s character; that he belonged to them and was part of them and represented them; and it gave her a curious feeling of being let into Fallaray’s secrets as she went along.
From time to time people hatted Lady Feo and one or two old women, riddled with rheumatism, bobbed—not because of any sense of serfdom, but because they liked to do so—a pleasant though inverted sense of egotism which is at the bottom of all tradition. Rip Van Winkle saluted every one with his whip; the butchers—and there were several, although meat was still one of the luxuries—the landlords of the public houses who were not so fat as they used to be before the War, the vicar, a high churchman with an astonishingly low collar, and the usual comic person who invariably retires to such villages, lives in a workman’s cottage among the remnants of passed glory and talks to any one who will listen to him of the good old days when he tooled his team of spanking bays and hobnobbed in London, when society really was society, with men of famous names and ladies of well-known frailty. This particular gentleman, Augustus Warburgh, pronounced Warborough, made himself up to look like Whistler and wore the sort of clothes which would have appealed greatly to a character actor. What he lived on no one knew. One or two people with nasty minds were convinced that his small income was derived from blackmail,—probably a most pernicious piece of libel. On his few pounds a week, however, he did himself extremely well and lived alone in a four-room cottage as antediluvian as himself, in which there were some very charming pieces of Jacobean furniture, a collection of excellent sporting prints and numerous books all well-thumbed, “Barry Lyndon” being the most favored.
In this little place, with its old beams and uneven floors of oak, Augustus Warburgh “did” for himself, cooking his own meals, making his own bed and bringing home from his occasional trips to London mysterious bottles filled with delicatessen from Appenrodts, amazing pickles and an occasional case of unblended Balblair which he got from a relative of his who owned half of the isle of Skye. Nips of this glorious but dangerous juice he offered to his cronies in his expansive moods and delighted in seeing them immediately slide under his table with the expression worn by Charlie Chaplin after he has been plumped on the head with a meat axe. Needless to say that he and Rip Van Winkle got along together like a house on fire. They talked the same language, enjoyed the same highly spiced food, dipped back into the same period and had inevitably done the same people. The Warburgh bow as the brake passed in the High Street was not Albertian but Elizabethan.
Feo laughed as she waved her hand. “When he dies,” she said, “and I don’t think he ever will, Princes Risborough will lose one of its most beautiful notes,—like London when they did away with Jimmies. Not that I remember Jimmies, except from what you’ve told me about it. Let’s have him up to dinner one night and make him drunk.”
“You can’t,” said Lord Amesbury. “It’s impossible. There is a hole in every one of the soles of his shoes through which all the fumes of alcohol leak. You can stew him, you can pickle him, you can float him, but you cannot sink him. When everybody else is down and out, that is the time when Augustus takes the floor and rises to the eloquence and vitriolic power of Dr. Johnson.—Tell me, Feo, who is that remarkable child that you have got in tow?”