Chapter Thirteen.
The Alarm.
A fortnight had glided by. The dam was kept more than full by hours of stormy weather high up in the hills many miles away; but the stream had resumed its gentle course, the trout were back in their old haunts, Manners had finished one of his landscapes and begun another, and one soft, sweet, very early autumn evening three busy pairs of hands where at work at the round table plainly visible in the light cast by Mrs Drinkwater’s shaded lamp.
“No,” said Will, who was holding something in a pair of pliers in his left hand, and winding a thread of silk brought up from the mill round it with his right, “he hasn’t been near us yet. Josh and I keep running against him in the woods, or up one of the river paths; but, as soon as he sees us, he turns his back and goes in among the trees.”
“Shies at us,” interpolated Josh.
“Yes,” said Will, softly, as he wound away, his face screwed up and looking intent to a degree. “Shies! I say, Mr Manners, you, living here, see him every day, of course?”
“No, I don’t,” said the artist. “He has his breakfast before I’m down, and goes off and doesn’t come back till after dark. The missus, poor soul, told me yesterday—crying away like your old mill-wheel—that he takes a bit of bread and cheese with him and goes off to sit and mope somewhere in the woods. He never hardly speaks to her. She said, poor thing, that she’d give anything to see him back at his regular work.”
“Ha!” cried Will, holding up the something proudly upon which he had been at work. “Now, I call that something like a coachman.”