“Ah! and secure from the shallow tongues of silly flatterers, old Margery tells me. Now, my father, as you may have noted, is at times somewhat visionary and absent. It thus may well have happened that, bringing you here a guest, he would by old habit have taken you, as he was so long accustomed, to the great barren front and lodged you so. Once lodged there, it is perfectly within his capacity to have utterly forgot your very existence.”
“But the meals—for whom were they spread, if not for me?”
“Why, simply for my father. He has, where he works, a cupboard, wherein is kept brown bread and wine, and, sometimes, when studious studies keep him close, he goes to it and will not look at better or more ordered meals. Then, again, when the fancy takes him, he will have a place put for himself in the great deserted hall, and sups there all alone. Now, this has been his mood of late, and I can only fancy that when you came the whim did change all on a sudden, and thus you inherited each day that which was laid for him, who, too studious, came not, and old slow-witted Margery, finding every time the provender was gone, laid and relaid with patient remembrance of her orders.”
“A very pretty coil indeed!—and I, no doubt, being sadly wandering afield all day, just missed thy ancient servitor each time.”
“And had you ever come in upon her heels you would have seen her hobble up one silent corridor and down another, and press a button on a panel, and so pass through a doorway that you would never find alone, from your tenement to ours. Oh, it makes me laugh to think of you pent there! I would have given a round dozen of my whitest hen’s eggs to have been by to see how you did look.”
“That had been a contingency, fair maid, which had greatly lightened my captivity,” I answered; and the lady went babbling on in the prettiest, simplest way, half rustic and half courtly in her tones, as might be looked for in one brought up as she had been.
For an hour, perhaps, we lay and basked in the pleasant warmth, while the rheums of melancholy and dampness were slowly drawn from me by the sun and that fair companionship, then she rose, and, shaking a shower of almond petals from her apron, re-knotted her kerchief, and, taking a look at the sky, said it was past midday and time for dinner. If I liked, she would guide me to her father. Up I got, and, side by side with that fair Elizabethan girl, went sauntering through her flowery walks, down past shrubberies and along the warm red old wall of her great empty house, until we came into a quiet way overgrown with giant weeds and smelling sweet of green sheep’s parsley and cool, fair vegetable odors. Here the maid lifted a latch, and led me through a well-hidden gateway into the sunny rearward courtyard.
It showed as different as could be from the dreary front. The ground was cobblestones all neatly weeded round a square of close-cut grass. On one side the great black wall of the manor-place towered windowless above us, with red roofs, mighty piles of smokeless chimney-stacks and corbie steps far overhead; and, on the other hand, at an angle to that wall, were lesser buildings to left and right, enclosing the grass plot and shining in the sun, warm, lattice-windowed, quaint-gabled. The third side of the square was open, and sloped down to fair meadows, beyond which came flowering orchards, bounded by a brook. Moreover, there was life here, plain, homely, honest country life. The wild, loose-hanging roses and eglantine were swinging in the sunshine over the deep-seated porches of these modest places; the lavender smoke was drifting among the budding branches overhead, proud maternal hens were clucking to their broods about the open doorways; there were blooming flowers growing by one deep-set window—ah! and fair Mistress Elizabeth’s snowy linen was all out on cords across that pretty sunny courtyard, struggling in sparkling, white confusion against the loose caresses of the April wind.
“And look you there,” cried Mistress Faulkener, when she saw it, pointing far down the distant meadows, “’tis there we keep our milk and cows—oh! as you are courteous, as you would wish to deserve your gentle livery, count those cattle for a minute,” and thereat, while I, obedient, turned my back and mustered the distant beasts grazing knee-deep among the yellow buttercups—she outflew upon those linens, and pulled them down and rolled them up in swathes, and set them on a bench; then tucked back some disheveled strands of hair behind her ears, and, somewhat out of breath, turned to me again.
“Here,” she said, “on this side lives old Margery and our steward, black Emanuel Marcena; there, on the other, is my room—that one with the flowers below and open lattices. Next is my father’s; below, again, is the room where we do eat; and all that yonder—those many windows alike above, and those steps going down beneath the ground—those half-hidden cobwebbed windows ablink with the level of the turf—that is where my father works.”