“It’s heavenly,” said Bridget ecstatically, “but really there are an unnecessary number of rooms.”
“Not at all,” said Miss Mason firmly. “I hope you’ll be here a long time, and—one never knows,” she ended significantly. Which little speech caused Bridget to blush crimson.
“The rent,” said Miss Mason, “is my affair for the first year, at all events, till you’ve got rid of the house in Chiswick. And the furniture will be my wedding present, as I didn’t happen to know you when the ceremony took place.”
And Bridget, her eyes full of happy tears, put her arms round Miss Mason and kissed her.
CHAPTER XX
THE HEART OF NATURE
DURING the next three weeks the two conspirators were wildly busy. Money is a key which smooths many difficulties, and the path before them was triumphantly easy.
Jasper found Miss Mason a little hard to understand during these days. She had a way of looking at him and then giving vent to odd little chuckles of laughter. He hoped she was not becoming childish.
She received several letters from the donkey tourists. One, received about the tenth day, told her that another of her schemes was on the way to be started.
“We are,” wrote Barnabas, “enjoying ourselves immensely. The weather is glorious, and Pegasus a model of well-behaved donkeyness. He certainly deserves wings, even though he hasn’t got them. But I heard Pippa telling him in a consoling voice the other day that when he reached heaven he’d be provided with a pair of beautiful white ones. I fancy she sees in herself a female Bellerophon soaring aloft and through golden streets on a grey donkey. If the golden streets are anything like as beautiful as the country lanes through which we are driving we shall be happy. I wish you could see them—the lanes, I mean. They are a bower of fairy delight. Wild roses, honeysuckle, and meadow-sweet seem to vie with each other in filling the warm air with perfume. Larks—I never knew before that the world held so many—sing to us from heaven, the sweetest feathered choristers. Last night a nightingale sang to us in the light of a full moon. It was the first Pippa had heard. There was something almost terrifying in her rapture. She feels almost too keenly. She is, however, absolutely in her element, and if I had ever felt any real doubt about her being the child of Kostolitz I should only have needed to see her out here to convince me. At times she finds the most adorable bits of language in which to express her emotions. But then it is always some little thing like the colour of a flower-chalice or the glint of the kingfisher’s blue. We saw one the other day. It skimmed up a bit of transparent water and perched on a piece of stick in midstream. Pippa and I watched it, holding our breath. All at once something—I don’t know what—startled it. There was a streak of iridescent colour and it had gone. But it left us both with the joyous feeling of discovery. The bird is too rare and too beautiful to leave one entirely unmoved. Pippa could talk of that incident. It is the bigger aspects of Nature that hold her dumb. We came to a wood one evening—pines, straight and solemn as the aisles of a cathedral, the setting sun slanting down the long spaces. Pippa’s face was a marvel. She just put her hand up to her throat and held it there as if it ached with the beauty of the thing, and then she made the sign of the Cross. It was holy ground, though there had been no priestly ceremonial to proclaim it so. Only the wind was there to whisper a benediction, and the trees themselves were like priests scattering the incense of their fragrant breath. The very memory of it brings thoughts of poetry to my mind. But again to Pippa. She’s yours, and I want you to know her as I’m seeing her now, for it’s the essence of her—the spirit of Kostolitz I’m seeing. A long line of cawing rooks, whether at sunset or against the blue sky, affects her strangely. It seems to make her unutterably sad. Temporarily only, I am glad to say, for she is the gayest of children, and delights in the smallest of pleasures—namely, a pennyworth of bull’s-eyes and sticks of pink-and-white striped stuff which we buy from extremely minute shops, whose windows are crammed below with apples—foreign, of course—and nuts. Above the apples and nuts are rows of glass bottles full of pear-drops, lemon-drops, peppermints, and barley-sugar, also sugar candy the real article, rough and scrunchly on a string. And somewhere in the window, very inconspicuous, is a slit through which one can drop letters—the sweetstuff shop is always the post office. But sweets evidently take decided precedence over such minor considerations as letters and postage stamps. There is always a garden leading up to the shop, and it is always crammed with flowers, the stiff old-fashioned kind—sweet-williams, stocks, marigolds, mignonette, asters, and such-like. There are bushes, too, of lavender, and lad’s-love. I painted one of them, but somehow did not hit it off. I’ve made another sketch, though, of a pond, a willow, meadow-sweet, and blue hills, which pleases me quite a lot. In fact, I was so absorbed in it that I lost Pippa. You needn’t be anxious, because she is found again, and with her something you wanted, namely, the first candidate for your School of a Wonderful Chance. I had just finished my sketch, and having come back to the practicalities of life realized that Pippa had been absent for two hours. When lo! and behold she appeared, and with her a loose-limbed fellow of about twenty. When he fills out he will rival Dan in size—but that is beside the mark.