CHAPTER IV
THE IMPORTUNATE BEGGAR
As Lavender had said, the Carfaxes lived at Orchards Corner.
Approaching the place you saw a line of scattered oaks and Scots firs, with straggling thorns and hollies between them along the line of a chestnut fence that had turned green with mould. Beyond the hollies and thorns rose the branches of an orchard, and beyond the orchard a plantation of yews, hollies, and black spruces. The house or cottage was hardly distinguishable till you turned down into the lane from the high road. It betrayed itself merely by the corner of a white window frame, the top of a red-brick chimney, and a patch of lichened tiling visible through the tangle of foliage.
The Carfaxes had been here a year, the mother having been ordered country air and a dry soil. They had sublet the orchard to a farmer who grazed sheep there, but had kept the vegetable garden with its old black loam, and the plot in front with its two squares of grass, filling nearly all the space between the house and the white palings. The grass was rather coarse and long, the Carfaxes paying a man to scythe it two or three times during the summer. There were flower-beds under the fence, and on every side of the two pieces of grass, and standard roses flanking the gravel path.
Eve met the man with the scythe in the lane as she walked home after her second day at Fernhill. She found her mother dozing in her basket-chair in the front garden where a holly tree threw a patch of shadow on the grass. Mrs. Carfax had her knitting-needles and a ball of white wool in her lap. She was wearing a lilac sun-bonnet, and a grey-coloured shawl.
The click of the gate-latch woke her.
“Have you had tea, mother?”
“No, dear; I thought I would wait for you.”
Mrs. Carfax was a pretty old lady with blue eyes and a rather foolish face. She was remarkable for her sweetness, an obstinate sweetness that had the consistency of molasses, and refused to be troubled, let Fate stir ever so viciously. Her passivity could be utterly exasperating. She had accepted the whole order of the Victorian Age, as she had known it, declining to see any flaws in the structure, and ascribing any trifling vexations to the minute and multifarious fussiness of the Deity.