Great Possessions

by Mrs. Wilfrid Ward

"Well, of course, I don't know, Sir Edmund, and of course the boy didn't know what was in the paper he witnessed; but the missus will have it that that paper was a will, and there'll be no getting it out of her head that the right will has been lost. I was wondering about it when I see you come into the yard, and I thought I'd just let you see the lad's letter. It could do no harm, and it might do good."

Edmund had been absolutely silent during this narrative, with his eyes fixed on the stud-groom's face.

"And where is Thomas now?" he asked, in a low voice.

"He's in North India somewhere, Sir Edmund, but that is his poor mother's trouble; we've not had a line from him these three months."

"Oh, I'll find him for you," said Edmund, and he was just going to ask what regiment Thomas was in when they were disturbed by the appearance of Billy emerging from the hunters' stable, and Edmund Grosse felt an unwarrantable contempt for a young man who dawdles away half the morning in the stable.

"Should I find you at six o'clock this evening?" he asked, in a low voice, of the stud-groom; and having been satisfied on that point, he strolled off and left Billy to talk of the horses.

Edmund Grosse felt for the moment as if the missing will were in his grasp, and he was quite sure now that he had never doubted its existence. What he had just heard was the very first thing approaching to evidence in favour of his own theory, which he had hitherto built up entirely on guess-work. Of course, the paper might have been some ordinary deed, some bit of business the General had forgotten to transact before starting. But, if so, he felt sure that it must have been business unknown to the brothers Murray, as they had discussed with Grosse every detail of Sir Edmund's affairs. One thing was certain: it would be quite as difficult after this to drive out of Edmund Grosse's head the belief that this paper was a will as it would be to drive it out of the head of Mrs. Akers.

Edmund was in excellent spirits at luncheon. In the afternoon he drove with Lady Groombridge and Rose and Molly to see a famous garden some eight miles off, the owners of which were away in the South. The original house to which the gardens belonged had been replaced by a modern one in Italian style at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was not interesting, and Lady Groombridge gave a sniff of contempt as she turned her back on it and her attention, and that of her friends, to the far more striking green walls beyond the wide terraced walk on the south side of the building.

In the midst of ordinary English country scenery, these gardens had been set by a great Frenchman who had caught the strange secret of the romance of utterly formal hedges. He could make of them a fitting framework for the glories of a court, or for sylvan life in Merrie England. There were miles of hedges; not yew, hornbeam had been chosen for this green, tranquil country. At one spot many avenues of hedges met together as if by accident, or by some rhythmic movement; it was a minuet of Nature's dancing, grown into formal lines but not petrified—every detail, in fact, alive with green leaves. If you stood in the midst of this meeting of the ways, the country round outside, seen in vistas between the hedges, was curiously glorified, more especially on one side where the avenues were shortened. There one saw larger glimpses of fields and woods and bits of common-land that seemed wonderfully eloquent of freedom and simplicity, nature and husbandry. But if you had not seen those glimpses through the lines of strange, stately, regal dignity—the lines of those mighty hedges—you would not have been so startled by their charm. That was the triumph of the genius of Lenôtre: he had seen that, framed in the sternest symbols of rule and order, one could get the freshest joy in the pictures of Nature's untouched handiwork. On the west side the avenues of hedges disappeared into distant vistas of wood, one only ending in a piece of most formal ornamental water. I don't know how it was, but it was difficult not to be infected by a curious sense of orgy, of human beings up to their tricks—love tricks, drinking and eating—perhaps murdering tricks—all done in some impish fantastic way, between those long hedges or behind them. If there were not something going on down one avenue you looked into, it was happening in another.

Somewhat of all this Edmund said to Molly as they strolled between the hedges which reached far above his head, but she felt that he was absent-minded while he did so. He had planned for himself a walk and a talk with Rose, but he had reckoned without his hostess, who had shown so unmistakably that she intended him to amuse Molly that it would have been discourteous to have done anything else. He had felt rather cross as he saw Lady Groombridge and Rose turn down one of the longest walks, one that seemed indeed to have no ending at all, with an air of finality, as if their tête-à-tête were to be as long as the path before them, and as secret as the hedges could keep it. He would never have come out driving with three women if he had not hoped to get a talk alone with Rose. He told himself that Rose's avoidance of him was becoming quite an affectation, and after all, he asked himself, what had he done to be treated like this?