“Look!” he cried. “Behind you!”
“Oh, we know that trick!” answered the escalading party, and closed upon him for the coup de grâce. But he ducked under Jean’s clutch, still pointing, and cried again, this time so earnestly that they paused indeed and turned for a look.
About half-way between the foot of the steps and the arched entrance, with one of its double doors open behind him, stood a spare shortish gentleman, in blue frock-coat, white breeches, and Hessian boots. On his head was a small cocked hat, the peak of it only a little shorter than the nose which it overshadowed; and to this nose the spare shortish gentleman was carrying a pinch of snuff as he halted and regarded the children with what, had his mouth been less grim, might have passed for a smile of amusement.
“Mademoiselle and messieurs both,” said he in very bad French, “I am sorry to interrupt, but I wish to see the propriétaire.”
“The pro—— but that will be monseigneur,” answered Pauline, who was the readiest (and the visitor’s eyes were upon her, as if he had instantly guessed this). “But you cannot see him, sir, for he lives at Nivelles, and, moreover, is ever so old.” She spread her hands apart as one elongates a concertina. “Between eighty and ninety, mamma says. He is too old to travel nowadays, even from Nivelles, and my brother Jean here is the only one of us who remembers to have seen him.”
“I remember him,” put in Jean, “because he wore blue spectacles and carried a white umbrella. He was not half so tall as anyone would think. Oh, what a beautiful horse!” he exclaimed, catching through the gateway a glimpse of a bright chestnut charger which an orderly was walking to and fro in the avenue. “Does he really belong to you, sir?” Jean asked this because the visitor’s dress did not bespeak affluence. A button was missing from his frock-coat, his boots were mired to their tops, and a black smear on one side of his long nose made his appearance rather disreputable than not. It was, in fact, a smear of gunpowder.
“He really does,” said the visitor, and turned again to Pauline, his blue eyes twinkling a little, his mouth grim as before. “Who, then, is in charge of this place?”
“My father, sir. He has been the gardener here since long before we were born, and mamma is his wife. He is in the garden at this moment if you wish to see him.”
“I do,” said the visitor, after a sharp glance around the courtyard, and another at its high protecting wall. “Take me to him, please!”
Pauline led him by a little gateway past the angle of the château and out upon the upper terrace of the garden—planted in the formal style—which ran along the main (south) front of the building and sloped to a stout brick wall some nine feet in height. Beyond the wall a grove of beech trees stretched southward upon the plain into open country.