“In Yorkshire—within ten miles of Beverley. Do you know Beverley?”
“Yes; I was there once—a queer sleepy old place, once renowned for its corruption; now from a political point of view nil. A town with a Bar—a Bar which did something to Charles the First, I believe. Did Beverley shut him out, or did Beverley let him in after Hull had shut him out? My common or Gardiner history is at fault there.”
“Beverley is a dear old town,” asserted Eve. “I haven’t seen it since I was twelve years old, but I can remember the countenance of every house in the market-place, and the colouring of every window in the Minster. Father won a cup at the races when I was eleven, and I took it home in the carriage with me. I remember having it in my lap, a great gilt cup. I thought it was gold till my governess told me it was only silver-gilt. Heaven knows what became of that cup! Father despised it. The race was a paltry affair, I believe, and his horse was a poor creature. He had won ever so many better cups at bigger races; but I only remember the cup I carried home, and the broad, bright common, and the blazing July day, and the happy-looking people. It was my last summer in Yorkshire, my last summer in the house where I was born. Before the next summer we all came here. Mother, and the governess, and the rest of us. Peggy was a baby in long clothes, and mother was only just beginning to be seriously ill.”
“And if you could have seen this place when we first came to it you would have pitied us,” said Sophy. “A parson’s family had been living in it, an overgrown family like us, but without the faintest idea of the beautiful. The parson’s wife kept poultry, and there were horrid wired enclosures close to the parlour window, and there was no porch, and no possibility of saying ‘Not at home’ to callers. There were only vegetables in the garden, potatoes and scarlet-runners, where we have made lawns.”
“She calls those long strips of grass lawns,” interjected Peggy, irreverently disposed towards a dictatorial grown-up sister who was not the eldest. Against Eve no one rebelled.
“And think how squeezed we all must have been till father built this room, and picture to yourself the mess and muddle we had to endure all the time it was being built. It didn’t matter to him, for he was out of the worst of it.”
“He had to take mother to the South that winter,” explained Eve. “She had been in weak health for ever so long before we left Yorkshire. A weakly plant can’t bear being torn up by the roots, can it? I think that change in our fortunes broke her heart—added to—to other things.”
She did not say what the other things were, and he could not ask her; nor would he ask her what had brought about the Colonel’s ruin. He could make a shrewd guess upon the latter point. The value of landed property had gone down, and the man had kept a racing stud. Between those two facts there was ample room for change of fortune.
“Mother never came back to us,” said Eve, with a gentle sigh. “She is lying in the cemetery at Cannes. People have told me about her grave, and that it is in a lovely spot. There is some comfort in being able to think of that, after all these years.”
“I know that resting-place well,” said Vansittart. “There is no lovelier home for the dead.”