“I hear a good deal about it to-day from the birds, and the sheep, and all the other voices of the Spring. They have talked about nothing else all the morning.”
Rosa looked at her anxiously for some moments. Then she gave a sound that had something of contempt in it, crying, “What rot! My dear girl, you know as well as I do that I have no intention of going away—that I do not bother my head with any notion of—of that sort of thing. I am quite content to remain here. It would take a lot of coaxing to carry me away. Come along now, I don’t trust strangers, and I certainly don’t trust April weather, and I certainly don’t trust that cloud that puts a black cap on Beacon Hill. If we are to get our baskets full in time we would do well not to wait here sentimentalizing.”
She led the way on the road by the park fence, and Priscilla was still behind her when they went round the curve, where the road had been widened in front of the pillars that supported a pair of well-worn entrance gates. Lodges were on each side, picturesque sexagonal cottages, their shape almost undiscernible through the straggling mass of the creepers that covered them.
“Do you remember the pheasants’ eggs?” whispered Rosa, when they had gone through the gates and had just passed the lodges.
“I am trying my best to forget them,” replied Priscilla. “How awful it would be if I accidentally spoke of that omelette in the hearing of some one who would mention it to Mr. Dunning!”
“It would be awful!” acquiesced Rosa.
Their exchange of confidences related to the hospitality of the wife of one of the keepers, who occupied the lodge on the right. One day during the previous year the girls had been drenched in the park, and while they were drying their clothes the good woman, who had been a cook at the Manor, made them an omelette, using pheasants’ eggs, of which quite a number were in her larder awaiting consumption.
“It was a nice omelette,” said Priscilla, “but it made me feel that old Mr. Wingfield mightn’t have been so wise after all in allowing the place to remain unoccupied for so long.”
Signs of neglect were to be observed on all sides—not by any means the neglect that suggests the Court of Chancery or an impoverished owner; merely the neglect that is the result of the absence of any one interested in the maintenance of tidiness. The broad carriage drive was a trifle green, where fresh gravel was needed, and the grass borders had become irregular. The enormous bough that had broken away from the trunk of one of the elms of the avenue was lying just where it had fallen, sprawling halfway across the drive, and much of the timber shielding of a sapling had been broken down by some animal and remained unmended, so that the bark of the young tree had been injured. These tokens that some one had been saying “What does it matter?” a good many times within the year, were not the only ones to be seen within the grounds; and when Priscilla pointed them out to Rosa, she too said, “What does it matter? Who is there to make a row? You don’t expect them to keep the place tidy for us?”
Priscilla said that nothing was further from her expectations, but still she thought—but of course beggars can’t be choosers, and after all a primrose by the river’s brim was still a yellow primrose, and a joy to the cottage hospital.