The Dower House stood in the park, sundered by a mere green mile from the great house, so that the departed dowagers had been able clearly to view the scene of their ended importance, and to contrast their successors’ methods unfavourably with their own. It was of such roomy proportions as to suggest the idea that it had been planned by some foreseeing lady, providing cannily for her own days of deposition. Not having been porticoed and stone-faced, as its parent-building had been in the days when you were compelled to inhabit a sham Grecian temple, or forfeit your self-respect, it retained those modest Tudor charms of old red brick and twisted chimney-stacks, which, fashion having happily wheeled them round again into favour, might chance to remain unmutilated during our little day.
The dreaded “wood” was nothing more than the skirt of a large covert, and was easily traversed in five minutes. Although a cautious inquiry as to its length had elicited this fact, Miss Ransome quickened her pace as she entered the shade, which the still adhering leaves on the trees, and the quickly lessening daylight of a November afternoon, rendered thick and almost more than dusk.
Her companion noted with innocent surprise her nervous haste, and again asked her what she was afraid of, adding, with perfect unsuspiciousness that he himself was the cause of her fear—
“There is rather a boggy place just ahead of us in the path; I must have it looked to. Shall I give you a hand?”
She refused softly, but with such decision as provided him with a lazy sense of entertainment at the independence of her spirit, which was only equalled apparently by her absolute indifference to, and unconsciousness of, any of the sights and sounds of Nature. There was nothing very striking, it is true, in a Berkshire park—“as flat as a denial or a pancake”—on a winter afternoon, and he should not have been surprised that the lightly speaking voices of birds, whose songs were long since over, should hit unnoticed her sophisticated ear; but that the glorious colours which still stained the noble trees, that the wonderful eyebeam which the sky—smoke-coloured all day—shot from under lifted lids in good night to whitening grass and copper and rust-tinted bracken, should be apparently entirely invisible to her, gave him a slight shock. He pointed out to her one superb effect of interlacing tints, but did not repeat the experiment.
She was too civil and too anxious to please not to respond with a perfunctory superlative “Yes, too delightful!” but in a moment had dropped back into her chatter about people, a chatter which circled round the family to whom she was on her way to be introduced, and which contained exhaustive, though circuitous, inquiries as to why “Toby” was “precious.” She must know before his presentation to her why and to what extent “Toby” was “precious.” Was it merely the usual dull British adoration of the solitary male of an over-feminine family which made him so? Or was it that he was heir to something so considerable as to render his life of importance to his family stem? Also, why were they rebuilding their house?
By the time she had reached the nail-studded oak front door of the Dower House, both questions were set at rest in her mind. The house was being rebuilt, because, through the carelessness of a housemaid, it had regrettably been burnt down; happily, however, the original plans had been found, and it was being rebuilt, stone for stone, as Sir John Vanbrugh had first erected it.
Bonnybell had never heard of Sir John Vanbrugh as either architect or playwright, but she ejaculated fervently, “What a blessing!” and reckoning up mentally the sum of the information given her, said to herself, with a thankful heart, as she followed the servant into the hall, that Toby was well worth her nicest attention.
CHAPTER VIII
“Oh comme je regrette mon bras si dodu,
Ma jambe bien faite et le temps perdu.”