Elizabeths Campaign | Page 3

up of all this further end of Mannering Park. It carried very few sheep under its present management; and the herd of Jersey cattle that used to graze it had long since died out. As for the game, it had almost gone--before the war. No use, either for business or play!
Then--on this early autumn day of 1917--Sir Henry fell to musing on the vast changes coming over England in consequence of the war. 'Who would ever have believed that we--we should put ourselves to school as we have done? Military service, rations, food-prices, all our businesses "controlled," and now our land looked after! How much of it has come to stay? Well, it won't affect me much! Ah! is that the Rector?'
For a hundred yards ahead of him he perceived a clerical figure, spare and tall, in a wideawake hat, swinging towards him. The September sun was westering, and behind the approaching man lay broad stretches of wood, just showing here and there the first bronze and purple signs of autumn.
The Rector, recognizing the solitary rider, waved his hand in welcome, and Sir Henry pulled up. The two men, who were evidently personal friends, exchanged greetings.
'You're going to the Hall, Sir Henry?' said the Rector.
Sir Henry described his business.
The Rector shook his head reflectively.
'You haven't announced yourself, I hope?'
'No, I took that simple precaution. I suppose he's already pretty savage?'
'With whom? The Committee? Yes, you won't find him easy to deal with. But just at present there's a distraction. His new secretary arrived some weeks ago, and he now spends his whole time, from morning till night, dictating to her and showing her his things.'
'Secretary? A woman? Good heavens! Who is she?'
'A great swell, I understand. Oxford First Class in Mods, Second in Greats. I've only just seen her. A striking-looking person.'
'Why isn't she in France, or doing munition work?' growled Sir Henry.
'I don't know. I suppose she has her reasons. She seems patriotic enough. But I've only exchanged a few words with her, at a very hurried luncheon, at which, by the way, there was a great deal too much to eat. She and Pamela disappeared directly afterwards.'
'Oh, so Pamela's at home? What's the name of the new woman? I suppose she's to chaperon Pamela?'
'I shouldn't wonder. Her name is Miss Bremerton.'
'Beryl declares that Pamela is going to be a beauty--and clever besides. She used to be a jolly child. But then they go to school and grow up quite different. I've hardly seen her for a year and a half.'
'Well, you'll judge for yourself. Good luck to you! I don't envy you your job.'
'Good Lord, no! But you see I'm Chairman of this blessed show, and they all fixed on me to bell the cat. We want a hundred acres of the Park, a new agent, notices for three farmers, etcetera!'
The Rector whistled. 'I shall wait, on tiptoe, to see what happens! What are your powers?'
'Oh, tremendous!'
'So you have him? Well, good-day.'
And the Rector was passing on. But Sir Henry stooped over his horse's neck--'As you know, perhaps, it would be very inconvenient to my poor little Beryl if Mannering were to make a quarrel of it with me.'
'Ah, I gathered that she and Aubrey were engaged,' said the Rector cordially. 'Best congratulations! Has the Squire behaved well?'
'Moderately. He declares he has no money to give them.'
'And yet he spent eighteen hundred pounds last week at that Christie sale!' said the Rector with a laugh. 'And now I suppose the new secretary will add fuel to the flame. I saw Pamela for a minute alone, and she said Miss Bremerton was "just as much gone on Greek things as father," and they were like a pair of lunatics when the new vases came down.'
'Oh, blow the secretary!' said Sir Henry with exasperation. 'And meanwhile his daughters can't get a penny out of him for any war purpose whatever! Well, I must go on.'
They parted, and Sir Henry put his cob into a sharp trot which soon brought him in sight of a distant building--low and irregular--surrounded by trees, and by the wide undulating slopes of the park.
'Dreadfully ugly place,' he said to himself, as the house grew plainer; 'rebuilt at the worst time, by a man with no more taste than a broomstick. Still, he was the sixteenth owner, from father to son. That's something.'
And he fell to thinking, with that half-ironic depreciation which he allowed to himself, and would have stood from no one else, of his own brand-new Georgian house, built from the plans of a famous American architect, ten years before the war, out of the profits of an abnormally successful year, and furnished in what he believed to be faultless taste by the best professional decorator he could find.
'Yet compared to a Mannering, what