“I’ll show you the house—it’s not more than a mile,” Herbert volunteered.
“We can’t call to-night,” said Matthew.
“What! Not with a madcap like Olive? You don’t mind my calling her Olive, do you, old man?”
“No,” laughed Matthew.
“Well, then! If I may call her Olive, why mayn’t I call on her in the evening? But that’s an argument rather in Olive’s vein, though it appears to puzzle you—ha! ha! ha! But you mustn’t bring your London etiquette down here with you, my boy,” he went on in a harangue tempered by puffs—”you’d better send it back by the carrier to-morrow if you packed it in your luggage by mistake. We’re in another world, and in an earlier century. What a superficial view to think contemporaries live in the same century! These people—as yet unsophisticated by the tourist—are living in the seventeenth century A.D. at the latest; they’d burn Olive for a witch if they knew her as I do, the droll elf, with her masculine brain and her tricksy femininity. I think I’ve lived in every place and time under the sun. I’ve been with fourteenth-century brigands and sixth-century monks. And in Jerusalem with the Jews I was back in the B.C. ages. I really think all the centuries live side by side. There must have been A.D. people in the B.C. times, just as there are B.C. people living in A.D. times. Fancy thinking these bucolics an evolutionary advance on Pericles and Horace. Evolution must move like those waves down below, sending scouts out here and there far in advance of the general march of the waters, whenever there’s a hollow curve in the coast. I’m a twenty-fifth century man myself, which makes the nineteenth call me godless and immoral. But what were we talking about?”
“Goodness knows. Oh, I know—”
“I’m aware you are goodness incarnate,” interpolated Herbert.
“I was saying we couldn’t call on Mrs. Wyndwood to-night.”
“Ah, but why shouldn’t Mrs. Wyndwood want a stroll after dinner as much as we? I told her of your wire. What more natural than that they should stroll eastward?” And Herbert smiled mysteriously, as one with experience. “I told you we made our own etiquette—laws are for the benefit of the community. We are the community, we four, the only civilized beings in a loutish world. We began as a triumvirate, but your coming has changed the form of government. You are the fourth party. We are now—what shall I say?—a constitutional quartette.”
As Herbert rattled on, Matthew felt more and more the fascination of his gay cousin, whose white teeth flashed as facetiously as in the days of yore, and whose lissome figure was a continuous pleasure to the artistic eye. Gratitude mingled with his admiration; but for Herbert’s ingenuity he would never have been a citizen of the earthly paradise that was opening before him. The smoke of his cigar rose like incense on the solemn air, upon which the sound of the wind and the sea broke like a hush. Under foot were gorse and bracken, mixed with sparse sprouts of grass; overhead a rich yellow half-moon, partly hidden by scowling clouds, but throwing a band of pale gold, that changed with the deepening dusk to rippling silver, across the sombre bay, in whose distant cliffs the lights of vague scattered villages twinkled mysteriously, suggesting romantic windows of illumined hollow chambers in the steep rock. And presently white figures were seen advancing slowly to meet them, pausing each instant as if to drink in the beauty of the night.