Part 29

Young Nick made Buddha eyebrows and a Buddha gesture. "The sahib knows all. But if I did take it? Those men, they were going again to the big city. We away. They never miss this. They buy another. It is better we have it."

Trying to look very angry, though I knew he was dying to laugh, Sir Lionel reproached Nick for breaking a solemn promise. "You swore you'd never do such a thing in England if I brought you with me. Now you've begun again, the same old game. I shall have to send you back, that is all."

"Then I die, and that is all," replied Young Nick, calmly.

The end of the story is, that Sir Lionel found out the names of the men, who had spent the night at the Compton Arms, and had written their address in the visitors' book. He sent the tool to them, with an explanation which I should have loved to read. And it appears that, though Nick is honest personally, he is a thief for the car, and in Bengal took anything new and nice which other motors had and his hadn't.

Now, Mrs. Norton is afraid that, if Sir Lionel scolds him much, he will commit hari-kari on the threshold of the hotel, which would be embarrassing. And it does no good to tell her that hari-kari is a Japanese or Chinese trick. She says, if Nick would not do that he might do something worse.

Gliding over the perfect roads of the Forest, Apollo seemed actually to float. I never felt anything so delicious, and so like being a goddess reclining on a wind-blown cloud. No wonder motorists' faces, when you can see them, almost always look madly happy. So different from "hay motorists," as The Blot says. They generally look grumpy.

The little wild ponies were one of the Forest's surprises for me. We met lots of them, mostly miniature mothers giving their innocent-faced, rough babies an airing; delightful beastkins. And I almost liked Mrs. Senter for having a cousin who owns one of these ponies as a pet, a dwarf one, no bigger than a St. Bernard dog. It wears a collar with silver bells, follows her everywhere, thinks nothing of curling up on a drawing-room sofa, and once was found on its mistress's bed, asleep on a new Paris hat.

The enticing rose-bowered cottages we passed ought to have told me that we were back in Hampshire again, if the New Forest hadn't seemed to a poor little foreigner like a separate county all by itself. It would be no credit to a bride to clamour for love in such a cottage, and turn up her nose at palaces. She might be married at the beautiful church of Lyndhurst (a most immediate jewel of a church, with an exquisite altar-piece by Lord Leighton, a Flaxman, and a startlingly fine piece of sculpture by an artist named Cockerell), then, safely wedded, plunge with her bridegroom into the Forest, and be perfectly happy without ever coming out again. I wish I had had the "Forest Lovers" to re-read while we were there. I think Maurice Hewlett must have got part of his inspiration in those mysterious green "walks" which lead away into that land where fairy lore and historic legend go hand in hand.

Lyndhurst, which King George III. loved, is pretty, but we didn't stop to look at it, because we were coming back that way. After seeing the church which, though modern, I wouldn't have missed for a great deal, we spun on to Beaulieu Abbey, the home of a hero of motoring. There we saw a perfect house, rising among trees, and sharing with the sky a clear sheet of water as a mirror. Once this was a guest-house for the Abbey; now it's called the Palace House, and deserves its name. Its looking-glass is really only a long creek, which spills out of the Solent, but it seems like a lake; and you've only to walk along a meadow path to the refectory of the old abbey. From there you go through a mysterious door into the ruined cloisters, which used to belong to the Cistercians--the "White Monks." King John provided money for the building; which proves that it's an ill wind which blows no one any good, because the stingy, tyrannical old king wouldn't have given a penny to the abbots if they hadn't scourged him in a nightmare he had. I shan't soon forget the magnolia and the myrtle in the quadrangle, and if I were one of the long-vanished monks, I should haunt the place. There couldn't be a lovelier one.

From Beaulieu we went to Lymington, a quaint and ancient town, with a picturesque port. Everything there looked happy and sleepy, except the postillions on the Bournemouth coach, which was stopping at the hotel where we had an early lunch. They were wide awake and jolly, under their old-fashioned, broad-brimmed beaver hats.

After Lymington, we skimmed through the Forest, hardly knowing or caring whither, though we did manage to find Brockenhurst, and Mark Ash, which was almost the finest of all with its glorious trees. Our one wish was to avoid highways, and Sir Lionel was clever about that. The sweetest bit was a mere by-path, hardly to be called a road, though the surface was superb. Young Nick had to get down and open a gate, which led into what seemed a private place, and no one who hadn't been told to go that way would have thought of it. On the other side of the gate it was just another part of forest fairyland, whose inhabitants turned themselves into trees as we, in our motor-car, intruded on them. I never saw such extraordinary imitations of the evergreen family as they contrived on the spur of the moment. It was a glamorous wood, and throughout the whole forest I had more and more the feeling that England isn't so small as it's painted. There are such vast spaces not lived in at all, yet haunted with legend and history. One place we passed--hardly a place, it was so small--was called Tyrrel's Ford; and there Sir Walter Tyrrel is said to have stopped to have his horse's shoes reversed by a blacksmith, on his flight to the sea, after killing the Red King. Or no, now I remember, this was next day, between Ringwood and Christchurch!

When we were having tea at Lyndhurst on our way back, at a hotel like a country house in a great garden, we found out that it once had been the home of your forty-second cousin, the Duc de Stacpoole, who came to England with Louis Philippe. There's his beautiful tapestry, to this day, in the dining-room, and his gorgeous magnolia tree looking wistfully into the window, as if asking why he isn't there to admire its creamy flowers, big as fat snowballs.

On our way home the rabbits of the New Forest were having a party, and were annoyed with us for coming to it without invitations. They kept "crossing our path," as people in melodramas say, so that we had to go slowly, not to run over them, and sometimes they galloped ahead, just in front of us, exactly in the middle of the road, so that we couldn't pass them. Dick kept longing to "pot" at the poor little pets, but Sir Lionel said he had lived out of England long enough to find a good deal of pleasure in life without taking that of any other creature. That isn't a very dragonish sentiment, is it?

Next day we had a delicious run (there's no other adjective which quite expresses it) through Ringwood, which is a door of the Forest, to Christchurch, another Abbey--(no, it's a Priory; but to me that's a detail) which stands looking at its own beauty in a crystal mirror. It's Augustan, not Cistercian, like Beaulieu; and it's august, as well; very noble; finer to see than many a cathedral. You and I, in other lands, have industriously travelled many miles to visit churches without half as many "features" as Christchurch. One of its quaintest is a leper's window; and a few of the beauties are the north transept, with unique "hatchet" ornamentation; a choir with wonderful old oak carvings--and the tomb of the Countess of Salisbury, of whom you read aloud to me when I was small, in a book called "Some Heroines of History." She came last in the volume because she was only a countess, and not a queen, but I cried when she said she didn't mind being killed, only being touched by a horrid, common axe, and wanted them to cut off her head with a sword. There are lots of other beautiful things in the church, too, and a nice legend about an oak beam which grew long in the night, and building materials which came down from a hill of their own accord, because one of the builders was Christ himself. That's why they named it Christchurch, you see, instead of Twyneham, as it would otherwise have been.

We stopped only long enough, after we had seen the Priory, to pay our respects to a splendid old Norman house near by, and then dashed away toward Boscombe and Bournemouth, which reminded me a little of Baden-Baden, with its gardens and fountains and running waters; its charming trees and exciting-looking shops. Just because it's modern, we didn't pause, but swept on, through scenery which suddenly degenerated. However, as I heard Sir Lionel say to Mrs. Senter: "You can't go far in this country without finding beauty"; and presently she was her own lovely self again, fair as Nature intended her to be. I mean England, not Mrs. Senter, who is lovelier than Nature made her.

We ran through miles of dense pine forests, where rhododendrons grew wild; where gulls spread silver wings and trailed coral feet a few yards above our heads; and the tang of the sea mingled with pine-balsam in our nostrils.

Soon after dull, but historic Wareham we came quite into the heart of Thomas Hardy's country. Scarcely had we turned our backs on Wareham (which I wasn't sorry to do), when I cried out at something on a distant height--something which was like a background in a mediaeval picture. It was Corfe Castle, of which I'd been thinking ever since Amesbury, because of the wicked Elfrida; but the glimpse was delusive, for the dark shape hid in a moment, and we didn't see it again for a long time--not until our curving road ran along underneath the castle's towering hill. Then it soared up with imposing effect, giving an impression of grisly strength which was heightened the nearer we approached. Distance lends no enchantment to Corfe, for the castle dominates the dour, gray town that huddles round it, and is never nobler than when you tap for admittance at its gates.

I tried to think, as we waited to go in, how young Edward felt--Edward the Martyr--when he stood at the gates, waiting to go in and visit his half-brother whom he loved, and his step-mother Elfrida, whom he hated. He never left the castle alive, poor boy! Afterward, in the ruins, I went to the window where Elfrida was supposed to have watched the young king's coming, before she ran down to the gates and directed the murder which was planned to give her own son the kingdom. It made the story seem almost too realistic, because, as you often tell me, my imagination carries me too fast and too far. There's nothing easier than to send it back ten or twelve centuries in the same number of minutes--and it's such a cheap way of travelling, too!

Corfe is in Dorset, you must know, a county as different from others as I am different from the real Ellaline Lethbridge, and the castle is at the very centre of the Isle of Purbeck, which makes it seem even more romantic than it would otherwise. I'm afraid it wasn't really even begun in the days of Elfrida, or "AElfrith," who had only a hunting lodge there; but if people will point out her window, am I to blame if I try to make firm belief attract shy facts? Besides, facts are such dull dogs in the historical kennels until they've been taught a few tricks.

Anyhow, Corfe is Norman, at worst, and not only did King John keep much treasure there, but one supposes there's some hidden still. If I could only have found it, I'd be buying a castle for you and me to live in. Sir Lionel thinks that I, as his ward, will live in his castle; and he was telling me at Corfe about the Norman tower at Graylees. But, alas, I knew better. Oh, I didn't mean that "alas"! Consider it erased; and the other silly things I wrote you the other night, please. They're all so useless.

There were loads of interesting prisoners in Corfe Castle, at one time or another, knights from France, and fair ladies, the fairest of all, the beautiful "Damsel of Brittany," who had claims to the English crown. And kings have visited there; and in Cromwell's day a lady and her daughters successfully defended it in a great siege. It was such a splendid and brave defence that it seems sad, even to this day, to think how the castle fell after all, a year later, and to see the great stones and masses of masonry lying, far below the height, exactly where they rolled when Parliament ordered the conquered towers to be blown up by gunpowder. The Bankes family, who still own Corfe, must be proud of that Lady Bankes, their ancestress, who held the castle. And isn't it nice, the Bankes still have the old keys, where they live, at Kingston Lacy?

You like Thomas Hardy's "Hand of Ethelberta" next to "Far from the Madding Crowd." Well, Coomb Castle in that book is really Corfe Castle. I told you we were in Hardy country. After Wareham, and not very far away, at Wool, is an old, old manor-house of the Turbervilles, turned into a farmhouse now. You don't need to be reminded of what Hardy made of that, I know.

We lunched at an interesting old inn, like all the rest of the ancient houses of Corfe, slate-roofed, grim and gray. Then we coasted down the steep hill to the plain again, making for Swanage. It was dusty, but we weren't sorry, because, just when we were travelling rather fast, on a perfectly clear road, a policeman popped out like a Jack-in-the-Box, apparently from nowhere. You could tell by his face he was a "trappist," as Dick calls the motor-spies, and though Sir Lionel wasn't really going beyond the legal limit, he glared at our number as if he meant mischief. But that number-plate had thoughtfully masked itself in dust, so with all the will in the world he could work us no harm after our backs were turned. Once in a while it does seem as if Nature sympathized with the poor, maligned motorist whom nobody loves, and is willing to throw her protection over him. It would be like tempting Providence to polish off dust or mud, in such circumstances, wouldn't it?

My face was a different matter, though, and I longed to polish it. Before we got to Swanage, it felt--even under chiffon--just as an iced cake must feel. Only the cake, fortunately for its contour, never needs to smile.

We were going to Swanage because of the caves--Tilly Whim Caves. Did you ever hear of them, Parisienne mamma? Small blame to you, if not, because one can't know everything; but they are worth seeing; and the Swanage harbour is a little dream. The town is good, too. Old-world, and very, very respectable-looking, as if it were full of long-established lawyers and clergymen, yet not dull, like Wareham, which was important in Saxon days, long before Swanage was born or thought of. It's "Knollsea" in the "Hand of Ethelberta." Do you remember? And Alfred the Great had a victory close by--so close, that in a storm the Danish ships blew into what is the town now, as if they had been butterflies with their wings wet.

We climbed up, up above the village, in the motor-car, on the steepest, twistingest road I've seen yet in England, though Sir Lionel says I'll think nothing of it when we get into Devonshire; up, up to a high place where they've built a restaurant. Near by we left the motor (and Emily, who never walks for pleasure), and ho, for the caves! It was a scramble among dark cliffs of Purbeck limestone. The caves are delightfully weird, and of course there are smuggling stories about them. A strange wind blew through their labyrinths, ceaselessly, like the breathings of a hidden giant, betrayed by sleep. It was heavenly cool in that dim twilight that never knew sun, but oh, it was hot coming out into the afternoon glare, and climbing the steep path to where the motor waited! I think Mrs. Senter was sorry she hadn't stopped with Emily. She got a horrid headache, and felt so ill that Sir Lionel asked if she would care to stop all night at Swanage, and she said she would.

Fortunately, it turned out that there were good hotels, and Sir Lionel took rooms at the one we liked the best--old-fashioned in an agreeable way. Mrs. Senter went to bed, but the rest of us strolled out after dinner; and Mrs. Norton began talking to Dick about his mother, which threw Sir Lionel and me together.

We sat on the pier, where the moon turned bright pink as she dipped down into a bank of clouds like a rose-garden growing out of the sea. And even when it was dark, the sea kept its colour, the deep blue of sapphires, where, at a distance, little white yachts and sailboats looked like a company of crescent moons floating in an azure sky. I felt in the sweetest mood, kind toward all the world, and particularly to Sir Lionel. I couldn't bear to remember that I'd ever had bad thoughts, and doubts, so I was half sub-consciously nicer to him than I ever was before. Dick kept glaring at me, from his seat beside Mrs. Norton, and drawing his eyebrows together when he thought Sir Lionel wasn't looking. Going home, he got a chance for a few words, when Emily was speaking to her brother about Mrs. Senter's headache. He said that there was something he must say to me, alone, and he wanted me to come out into the garden behind the hotel, to talk to him when the others had gone to bed, but of course I refused. Then he said, would I manage to give him a few minutes next day, and intimated, gently, that I'd be sorry if I didn't. I told him that "I'd see"; which is always a safe answer; but I haven't "managed" yet.