Then Old Martin went into the parlour and found Young Martin there, cleaning a gun. He clapped him on the shoulder, and the young man, looking up, saw that something had gone out of his elder's eyes and face.
"Now, my lad!" said Old Martin cheerily. "You can marry the girl—and you can go and make the arrangements this morning. And while you're there you can give this packet to Richard Sutton—he'll understand what it is."
Then, before his nephew could find his tongue, Martin Nelthorp strode over to the kitchen door and called lustily for his breakfast.
CHAPTER IX
AN ARCADIAN COURTSHIP
Sweetbriar Farm, when I went to visit my cousin there, seemed to me a crystallization of all the storied sweets of Arcadia as one reads of them in the poets and the dreamers. The house itself was some five hundred years old; it had diamond-paned windows framed in ivy; on one side, where there was no ivy, the grey walls were covered with clematis and honeysuckle and jessamine. There was a walled garden, gay with blossom; there was an orchard, where the blossom fell on lush grass in which golden daffodils sprang up. At the end of the orchard ran a stream, brown and mysterious, in whose deeper pools lurked speckled trout. All about the house and the garden and the orchard the birds sang, for the nesting and breeding season was scarce over, and at night, in a coppice close by, a nightingale sang its heart out to the rising moon.
Within the old farmstead everything was as Arcadian as without. The sitting-room—otherwise the best parlour—was a dream of old oak, old china, old pewter, and old pictures. It smelt always of roses and lavender—you could smoke the strongest tobacco there without offence, for the flower-scent was more powerful. A dream, too, was my sleeping-chamber, with lavender-kept linen, its quaint chintz hangings, and its deep window-seat, in which one could sit of a night to see the moonlight play upon garden and orchard, or of an early morning to watch the dew-starred lawn sparkle in the fresh sunlight. And, once free of the house, there was the great kitchen to admire, with its mighty hearth, its old brass and pewter, its ancient grandfather clock, its flitches and hams hanging, side by side with bundles of dried herbs, from the oaken rafters; and beyond it the dairy, a cool and shadowy place where golden butter was made out of snow-white cream; and beyond that, again, the deep, dungeon-like cellar where stood the giant casks of home-brewed ale—nectar fit for the gods.
Nor were the folk who inhabited this Arcadia less interesting than the Arcadia itself. My cousin Samuel is a fine specimen of an Englishman, with a face like the rising sun and an eye as blue as the cornflowers which grow in his hedgerows. There was his wife, a gay and bustling lady of sixty youthful years, who was never without a smile and a cheery word, and who, like her good man, had but one regret, which each bore with admirable resignation—that the Lord had never blessed them with children. There were the people who came and went about the farm—ruddy-faced and brown-faced men, young maidens and old crones, children in all stages of youthfulness. And there was also John William and there was Susan Kate.
John William Marriner—who was usually spoken of as John Willie—was the elder of the two labourers who lived in the house. He was a youth of apparently one-and-twenty years of age, and as straight and strong as a promising ash-sapling. Whether in his Sunday suit of blue serge, or in his workaday garments of corduroy, John Willie was a picture of rustic health—his red cheeks always glowed, his blue eyes were always bright; he had a Gargantuan appetite, and when he was not smiling he was whistling or singing. Up with the lark and at work all day, he spent his evenings in the company of Susan Kate.
Susan Kate was the maid-of-all-work at Sweetbriar Farm—a handsome, full-blown English rose of nineteen, with cherry cheeks and a pair of large, liquid, sloe-black eyes which made her white teeth all the whiter. It was an idyll in itself to see Susan Kate—whose surname was Sutton—milking the cows, or feeding the calves out of a tin bucket; it was still more of an idyll to watch her and John William hanging over the orchard gate of an evening, the day's work behind them and the nightingale singing in the neighbouring coppice.