Actions and Reactions | Page 5

"I wonder what we
shall find now," said Sophie, frankly prancing with joy on the grass.
It was a slope of gap-hedged fields possessed to their centres by clumps
of brambles. Gates were not, and the rabbit-mined, cattle-rubbed posts
leaned out and in. A narrow path doubled among the bushes, scores of
white tails twinkled before the racing hound, and a hawk rose,
whistling shrilly.
"No roads, no nothing!" said Sophie, her short skirt hooked by briers. "I
thought all England was a garden. There's your spire, George, across
the valley. How curious!"
They walked toward it through an all abandoned land. Here they found
the ghost of a patch of lucerne that had refused to die: there a harsh
fallow surrendered to yard-high thistles; and here a breadth of rampant
kelk feigning to be lawful crop. In the ungrazed pastures swaths of dead
stuff caught their feet, and the ground beneath glistened with sweat. At
the bottom of the valley a little brook had undermined its footbridge,
and frothed in the wreckage. But there stood great woods on the slopes
beyond--old, tall, and brilliant, like unfaded tapestries against the walls
of a ruined house.
"All this within a hundred miles of London," he said. "Looks as if it
had had nervous prostration, too." The, footpath turned the shoulder of

a slope, through a thicket of rank rhododendrons, and crossed what had
once been a carriage drive, which ended in the shadow of two gigantic
holm-oaks.
"A house!" said Sophie, in a whisper. "A Colonial house!"
Behind the blue-green of the twin trees rose a dark-bluish brick
Georgian pile, with a shell-shaped fan-light over its pillared door. The
hound had gone off on his own foolish quests. Except for some stir it
the branches and the flight of four startled magpies; there was neither
life nor sound about the square house, but it looked out of its long
windows most friendlily.
"Cha-armed to meet you, I'm sure," said Sophie, and curtsied to the
ground. "George, this is history I can understand. We began here." She
curtsied again.
The June sunshine twinkled on all the lights. It was as though an old
lady, wise in three generations' experience, but for the present sitting
out, bent to listen to her flushed and eager grandchild.
"I must look!" Sophie tiptoed to a window, and shaded her eyes with
her hand. "Oh, this room's half-full of cotton-bales--wool, I suppose!
But I can see a bit of the mantelpiece. George, do come! Isn't that some
one?"
She fell back behind her husband. The front door opened slowly, to
show the hound, his nose white with milk, in charge of an ancient of
days clad in a blue linen ephod curiously gathered on breast and
shoulders.
"Certainly," said George, half aloud. "Father Time himself. This is
where he lives, Sophie."
"We came," said Sophie weakly. "Can we see the house? I'm afraid
that's our dog."
"No, 'tis Rambler," said the old man. "He's been, at my swill-pail again.
Staying at Rocketts, be ye? Come in. Ah! you runagate!"
The hound broke from him, and he tottered after him down the drive.
They entered the hall--just such a high light hall as such a house should
own. A slim-balustered staircase, wide and shallow and once
creamy-white, climbed out of it under a long oval window. On either
side delicately moulded doors gave on to wool-lumbered rooms, whose
sea-green mantelpieces were adorned with nymphs, scrolls, and Cupids
in low relief.

"What's the firm that makes these things?" cried Sophie, enraptured.
"Oh, I forgot! These must be the originals. Adams, is it? I never
dreamed of anything like that steel-cut fender. Does he mean us to go
everywhere?"
"He's catching the dog," said George, looking out. "We don't count."
They explored the first or ground floor, delighted as children playing
burglars.
"This is like all England," she said at last. "Wonderful, but no
explanation. You're expected to know it beforehand. Now, let's try
upstairs."
The stairs never creaked beneath their feet. From the broad landing
they entered a long, green-panelled room lighted by three full-length
windows, which overlooked the forlorn wreck of a terraced garden, and
wooded slopes beyond.
"The drawing-room, of course." Sophie swam up and down it. "That
mantelpiece--Orpheus and Eurydice--is the best of them all. Isn't it
marvellous? Why, the room seems furnished with nothing in it! How's
that, George?"
"It's the proportions. I've noticed it."
"I saw a Heppelwhite couch once"--Sophie laid her finger to her
flushed cheek and considered. "With, two of them--one on each
side--you wouldn't need anything else. Except--there must be one
perfect mirror over that mantelpiece."
"Look at that view. It's a framed Constable," her husband cried.
"No; it's a Morland--a parody of a Morland. But about that couch,
George. Don't you think