Chapter Ten.
In Duddington.
When the winter rains made London dreary, rendering the Strand a veritable quagmire, and when the shops began to display Christmas cards and Christmas numbers, I went South, as I did each year, accompanied by my married sister and her husband, in search of sunshine. I knew the Riviera well. I had enjoyed the rather dull exclusiveness of Cannes; I had stayed one season at the Grand at Nice and capered through Carnival in a clown’s dress of mauve and green; I had spent a fortnight once in Mentone, that paradise of the consumptive; and I had paid some lengthy bills at the Hotel de Paris at Monte Carlo. My brother-in-law, however, had taken a little white villa on the olive-clad hillside at Beaulieu, which we found was on the verge of everything.
But to me life on the Riviera soon becomes tiresome. A couple or three visits to “the Rooms;” a “five o’clock” or two at La Reserve; tea in a wicker chair in the entrance-hall of that colossal hotel, the Excelsior, at Cimiez, which is patronised by Her Majesty; a dinner at the London House at Nice, and one at the Hermitage at “Monty,” and I become tired of the ever-azure sea, of the Noah’s Ark gardens, of the artificiality and of the constant brightness of the Riviera “season.” I long for my old English home in the country where, in the springtime, all the beauties of the outdoor world come to one with a sense of novelty after the winter’s cold and frost.
Therefore at the end of March I returned, passing through London, and travelling down to my father’s place at Tixover, which was, as always, my pleasant home.
What though the trees were still leafless, and the flowers few; every day, almost every hour, fresh green buds were swelling and opening in the balmy air; the delicate pink of the almond blossom was flushing the bare twigs in the kitchen-garden, primroses were coyly showing themselves in the coppices and hedgerows, as I drove along from Stamford, while in the sheltered places in the woods as I passed I saw sheets of wild hyacinths, “like strips of the sky fallen,” delicate snowdrops, and a wealth of daffodils.
As I drove along that morning through Worthorpe and Colly Weston to Duddington, the quaint little old Northamptonshire village within a mile of which lies Tixover Hall, it was, though a trifle chilly after the Riviera, one of those bright days which make even the elderly feel young and sprightly again; days on which even the saddest among us are influenced by the infectious brightness of the atmosphere. At no other season of the year is there that delicious sensation of life, of resurrection in the very air, as the grey old earth awakens from her winter sleep and renews her youth again.
As the old bay mare trotted down the short, steep hill from the cross-roads, and Banks was telling me all the gossip of the countryside—how my old friend Doctor Lewis, of Cliffe, had taken to cycling, how an entertainment had been held at the schools, and how somebody in the Parish Council had been making himself obnoxious—we suddenly entered Duddington, the queer old village with its rows of comfortable, old-fashioned cottages, with their attics peeping from beneath the thatch. In the air was that sweet smell of burnt wood peculiar to those peaceful Midland villages, and as we passed the inn, and turning, crossed the bridge which led out to the right to Tixover, a couple of villagers pulled their forelocks as a token of respect, I felt tired after two days of incessant travelling, nevertheless there was about that old-world place a home-like feeling, for I had known it ever since I had known myself. Those elderly people who peered out of their cottage doors as we passed, and who gave me a merry, laughing greeting, had known me ever since the days when my nurse used to take me for drives in the donkey-cart, while those broad, green meadows on either side of the wandering river had belonged to my family for generations.