“Can you have me driven back?” he asked.
“Certainly, doctor.”
“Good. Ah, Mary, will you ask your mistress to have dinner postponed till eight. And tell Gage to take these letters to the post. Now, Mr. Carrington, my mackintosh and I are at your service.”
“You’ll need it, doctor, and an old hat.”
A slender vein of gold gashed the dull west as they left the outskirts of the town behind. As the rent in the sky broadened, long rays of light came down the valley, making the woods and meadows a glory of shimmering green, and firing the rain pools so that they shone like brass. The farmer took the private road that ran through Ulverstone Park, a rolling wilderness of beeches and Scotch firs, whose green “rides” plunged into the glimmering rain-splashed umbrage of tall trees. Here were tangled banks of purpling heather, and great stretches of sweet woodland turf. Old yews brooded in the deeps of the domain, solemn and still, most ancient and wise of trees.
“Get up, Molly,” and Mr. Carrington shook a raindrop from his nose, and flicked the brown mare with the whip. “Clearing a little. Sorry for the people who cut their hay yesterday.”
“Somewhat damp. How is the fruit doing?”
“Oh, pretty fair, pretty fair, as far as our strawberries are concerned. The finest year, doctor, is when you have a first-class crop and your neighbors can only put up rubbish. It’s no good every one being in tip-top form. I’ve got rid of tons, and at no dirt price, either.”
Mr. Carrington’s British face beamed slyly above his angelic white mackintosh. It was a face in which stolid satisfaction and stolid woe were easily interchanged, for the heavy lines thereof could be twisted into either expression.
Murchison was listening to the hoarse rattle of the clearing shower beating upon a myriad leaves. The gold band in the west was broadening into a canopy of splendor. Had Mr. Carrington been educated up to more pushing and aggressive methods of making money, he would have seen in that sky nothing but a magnificent background for some silhouetted sky-sign shouting “Try Our Jam.”