Chapter Nine.
“Uncle James was always calling me a fool,” said Tom the next morning; “and I must be, or I shouldn’t have thought poor Uncle Richard half crazy. What a lot of stuff I did get into my head.”
He was dressing with his window wide open; the sun was shining warmly, though it was only about six o’clock, and a delicious scent floated in from the garden and the pine-woods beyond.
“Grinding corn and turning miller!” he said, and he burst into a merry fit of laughter, and then stopped short with a hair-brush in his hand, staring at his face in the glass, for he hardly knew it; he looked so different to the sad, depressed lad whose countenance had gazed wearily at him from the mirror when he rose of a morning in London.
“It must be the fresh country air,” he said to himself; but all the same he felt that it must be something more, and he hastened to finish dressing and go down, so as to have a good look round before breakfast punctually at eight.
“Seems like coming out for a holiday, or being at home again,” he thought, as he went down-stairs softly, wondering whether he could easily get out, but to find that the front door was wide open, and hear the servants busy in the kitchen; while, as he stepped out on to the lawn, he suddenly heard the musical sound of a scythe being sharpened, and the next minute he was alongside of David, who had just begun to sweep the keen implement round and lay the daisies low.
“Mornin’, sir, mornin’. Going to be reg’lar hot day.—Eh? Want to get up into the pine-woods. Best go straight to the bottom of the garden, and out into the field, and then strike up to your left.”
Tom hurried through the bright grounds, followed the directions, and in a few minutes he was climbing a slope of rough common-land, here velvety short turf full of wild thyme, which exhaled its pungent odour as his feet crushed its dewy flowers, there tufted with an exceedingly fine-growing, soft kind of furze, beyond which were clumps of the greater, with its orange and yellow blooms, and rough patches of pale-bloomed ling and brilliant yellow broom.
Beyond this wide strip the closely-growing fir-trees began, forming a dense, dark-green wood.
It was for this that he was aiming; but as he reached the edge, he turned to stand in the bright sunshine looking down at the village.