Mistress of Brown Furrows (2 page)

“On the other hand we shall miss the only decent train back to town if we don’t hurry. And we could always telephone Miss Hardcastle—”

“Then let’ s,” she said.

He gave her an odd, appraising glance.

“It has struck me that you are more than a little bit anxious to be gone,” he remarked. “Perhaps one can spend too many years in the same spot, even in such an enchanting backwater as this,” with a grave glance upwards at the walls of the Abbey. “Time here has stood still for centuries, and done it most attractively, but there is something the least little bit prison-like about this place, especially when one is a young girl in her ‘teens.... Or so I should imagine! Exactly how old are you, my dear?” he asked rather abruptly.

“Eighteen,” she responded quickly, praying that the front door would not open and Miss Hardcastle appear and delay

them. “Eighteen and a half,” she added, anxious to be precise.

“Ah, yes—I remember, that was what the letter said.”

He climbed into the taxi and closed the door, and, when the driver looked round for his instructions, nodded his head.

“Since there is no point in delaying, we might as well try and catch that train,” he said.

And the cab started to move forward.

Carol, gloved fingers clasped tightly in her lap, felt as if a moment she had waited for all her life had arrived. Timothy Carrington turned to look at her as they sped down the avenue, beneath the dangling tassels of the great limes, and the last of the familiar trees floated past the windows. The smooth lawns, the beds of scarlet geraniums, the old grey walls, with their crumbling brickwork—the atmosphere of the past—were all finally left behind, and something entirely new was beckoning ahead. As they passed the caretaker’ s lodge the caretaker himself was laboring busily in his small front garden, and he saluted the taxi as it sped by. The gates were open and they shot between them like a streak of controlled lightning, out into the broad, tree-lined road along which for centuries pilgrims had trudged wearily on the last lap of their journey to Selbourne, their eyes on the Abbey towers, their hope in the Abbey itself.

But Carol was being carried away from the Abbey, and all her hopes were concentrated in the future.

She wondered whether presently she might wake up, and find herself back in the familiar dormitory.

Very quietly her companion spoke to her.

“Does it mean so much—leaving it all behind?”

She looked at him, and her eyes were so clear and limpid that they confounded him a trifle, and he was reminded of a little fresh-water rivulet in which he used to fish, and which ran beside the walls of his old home in the north. They were eyes that could never be confused with the colors blue or green, for they were purely and simply grey, and the eyelashes which shadowed them were short, brown and silky, and curled upwards a little, like slim reeds bending backwards from the still waters of a lake.

A faint spot of excited color burned on each of her delicately formed cheeks, and she had dug two small white teeth into her lower lip, and it was quivering a little. Her nostrils quivered also, as a result of the excitement which hammered at her ribs and rendered her a trifle breathless, and she was leaning eagerly forward on her seat so that he could watch the fair curls bobbing on her neck, and behind her small, well-shaped ears.

And that ridiculous little hat was perched so far back on her head that it looked as if it would fall off at any moment, and in any case it reminded him of a small grey pudding-basin.

What in the world had they been thinking of—her instructors at the Abbey—that they had allowed her to buy a thing like that?

Carol was dying to know where he was taking her, but her lack of familiarity with him prevented her from asking him any questions. Apart from the fact that she had known few men in her brief lifetime, there was something experienced and man-of-the-world about this one who now sat beside her in the confined and definitely stuffy space of the local taxi which made her feel almost desperately shy. It was true that she had dreamed about him for years now, and sometimes her dreams had taken somewhat fantastic shapes which had nothing at all to do with the reality of their meeting today. In her dreams, for instance, he had not been quite so obviously attractive— perhaps not quite so young. She had been inclined to envisage him as a father, and herself in the role of a daughter thoroughly determined to make up to him for the great kindness he had displayed in making himself responsible for her and her affairs.

But in the blue eyes watching her from the opposite corner of the cab there was nothing in the least paternal—young as she was she recognized that!—and even something faintly perplexed. He wore an expression of gravity, and his well-cut lips had a thoughtful set. She felt quite sure he was not regarding her as a man regards a newly acquired daughter, and at the same time he was so unmistakably a gentleman—in the sense Miss Hardcastle would have approved—that she had no fears whatsoever of any treatment she might receive at his hands.

Instinctively she liked him, and she hoped he was going to like her. She smiled at him very shyly.

He sensed that she was anxious to know where they were going.

“I’m going to take you to a little hotel I know of in London,” he told he, “at least for a few days. A little hotel in Kensington.” He paused. “And then I’ll probably buzz you up north to the care of my sister.”

“Oh!” said Carol, and for an instant the transparent limpidness of her eyes was overcast by a shadow.

“Have you ever been north before?” he asked her.

She shook her head.

“No, never.”

“I take it that you are not very widely travelled?” with an odd smile.

“I’ve hardly even been away from Selbourne,” she confessed, “but I’ ve always wanted to get away from it badly. Whereabouts in the north does your sister live?”

“Westmorland,” he informed her. “Quite a beautiful bit of country to those who love the lakes. And the mountains, of course.”

“It sounds nice,” she said.

“It is nice,” he agreed. “And so is my sister. In fact, she’s quite extraordinarily nice.”

“Really?” she murmured, and a little of the tension seemed to have gone out of her clasped hands, and she was lying back against the seat instead of leaning impulsively forward.

“But do you actually mean to tell me that you never spent even a school holiday away from the Abbey?” he asked, with sudden curiosity. “Didn’ t any of your friends ever ask you to their homes?”

“Only once or twice,” she answered quietly. “You see,” she explained, “I was never in a position to be able to ask any of them back anywhere, and Miss Hardcastle was of the opinion that it might prove a little unsettling for me. And I was never really tremendously popular,” candidly, “because to be popular you have to take a terrific interest in all kinds of sports, and not only to be interested in them but to shine at them, and to have a rich father and mother to boast about and supply you with unlimited pocket money.”

“And you never had very much pocket money?”

“Not much. ”

“I see,” he said, rather a gentle note in his voice. “And it is not your ambition to become one of our future athletes?”

“I’m a duffer at all games,” she confessed. “I much prefer reading poetry, and taking long, lonely walks, and keeping a dog—I do hope I’ ll have a dog of my own one day! ” with almost fierce wistfulness.

“We’ll earmark that one for future consideration,” her guardian replied quietly. And then added: “I see you’ll fit in very well with Brown Furrows.”

“Is that the name of your sister’ s house?”

“Well, actually it’ s my house, but she runs it for me, and looks after me as well when I’ m not wandering abroad—which I seem to be doing very often! ”

A more hopeful expression crept into her face as she looked up at him, and he smiled a little.

“Then you are there sometimes?”

“Oh, yes—quite frequently. On other occasions I get bitten by a bug called the wanderlust, and off I go! ”

“That seems a pity,” she remarked, while her clear eyes studied him. “Especially as it’s such a nice name for a house.”

“You think so?” he asked. “Well, I think it’s a very nice house”—he seemed to be already affected by her preference for simple adjectives—”but it ought really to be called Lonely Furrows, because it’s so much off the beaten track. But if you don’t mind loneliness that’s all to the good. And it’s a very beautiful Elizabethan farmhouse, with a parcel of goodly acres adjoining.”

“Then you are a farmer?” she suggested. “Or, at least,” she added, “you are when you are at home?”

The idea seemed to cause him some faint amusement. “I’ ve never thought of myself in that light before,” he admitted. “But it might be a good plan to begin now.... He regarded her with a strange, subdued twinkle in his eyes. “A very good plan....”

She colored with swift embarrassment, afraid that he thought her naive.

“Oh, I see what you mean,” she said quickly. “Someone else farms it for you?”

“At the moment,” he agreed. “And in my father’s time— and, I believe, my grandfather’ s and great-grandfather’ s time— it was always somebody else who did the farming. But that’s no reason why we shouldn’ t some day introduce a change. In fact, I think it might be quite a good idea! ” The taxi had stopped outside the station, and they were about to be decanted from it and into the London train, which was actually just then steaming into the station. He helped her out while his eyes still twinkled a little, and she was glad of the excuse to hurry.

“My sister Meg is always wanting me to settle down,” he told her. “And perhaps one day I will! ”

CHAPTER THREE

CAROL awakened next morning to such an unaccustomed sensation of deep comfort that she almost went right off to sleep again. Until she realized that there was a chambermaid in the room, drawing back the curtains, and indicating a tea-tray on a little table beside the bed.

Carol struggled up into a sitting position, and the

chambermaid smiled at her.

“The gentleman told me not to wake you too early, but it’s close on ten o’clock, and I thought perhaps you’d like to be stirring.”

“Goodness, I should think so!” exclaimed Carol in horror. The early rising bell at the Abbey went at seven o’ clock each morning, and breakfast was at a quarter to eight, and here she was still in bed at this appallingly late hour. “I must have been terribly tired last night, or I overslept, or something,” she apologized.

She scrambled out of bed and into her red candlewick dressing gown—the only thing at variance with the quiet luxury of the room—and the chambermaid offered to turn on her bath water for her.

“And then I’ll bring you your breakfast,” she said, “or you won’t get any!”

It was a fine morning—one of those mornings when London is almost beautiful because of the sunlight gilding the streets, and an almost Neapolitan touch in the blueness of the sky. It was Carol’ s first visit to London—her first visit to the heart of any great and thriving built-up area—and the unaccustomed noises which came in at her open window excited her and filled her with curiosity.

She had never slept so long in her life before. But then she had never lived through such a period of emotional upheaval and disturbance—as well as the acute anxiety which had beset her at times—as on the day before, when she had been waiting for her guardian to arrive. And the knowledge that she could all at once relax had resulted in her being overcome by such a sensation of weariness—largely a weariness of the mind, behind which was a tremendous, spreading sensation of relief—that she had not been able to fight against it, and sleep had engulfed her and taken possession of her for hours.

But she was fresh enough this morning, and her major worry was what to wear once she had discarded the red candlewick dressing-gown. The severe tailored suit chosen by Miss Mackintosh, which, despite the obvious excellence of its cloth, was somehow not quite
right,
was also a trifle heavy for a fine summer morning in London. And apart from a solitary summer-weight dress, which had actually been bought as a party dress, and ran slightly to frills and furbelows, she had nothing but her school uniform in which to make her appearance downstairs in the dignified hotel lounge which had seemed to her on the previous evening to be full of starched elderly gentlemen and

disapproving elderly ladies.

In the end the suit won, for, as Miss Mackintosh had pointed out, it was, at least, essentially lady-like, and the plain little white blouse she wore with it, with its prim little turned-down collar, was quite attractive in its puritan neatness. Her figure was almost childishly slender, and the suit did somewhat tend to angularize her proportions, particularly as the skirt was unfashionably short, and displayed a length of colt-like leg. But she carried herself with a slim uprightness, and had a certain rather timid grace. And her head was set gracefully on her slender shoulders, and her fair curls required only a quick, upward movement of the comb to lie in the way she wanted them.

She hesitated over applying an inexperienced dab of powder to her nose, and in the end used only the merest trace of lipstick. But it was not exactly the right shade of lipstick, although it had been heartily recommended by the young lady in the chemist’ s shop at Selbourne.