'Who cares?' said Sophie, wandering about, hairbrush in hand, to admire the illustrated weekly pictures pasted on door and cupboard.
But there was no rest for the alien soul till he had made sure of the telegraph office. He asked the Clokes' daughter, laying breakfast, while Sophie plunged her face in the lavender bush outside the low window.
'Go to the stile a-top o' the Barn field,' said Mary, 'and look across Pardons to the next spire. It's directly under. You can't miss it--not if you keep to the footpath. My sister's the telegraphist there. But you're in the three-mile radius, sir. The boy delivers telegrams directly to this door from Pardons village.'
'One has to take a good deal on trust in this country,' he murmured.
Sophie looked at the close turf, scarred only with last night's wheels, at two ruts which wound round a rickyard, and at the circle of still orchard about the half-timbered house.
'What's the matter with it?' she said. 'Telegrams delivered to the Vale of Avalon, of course,' and she beckoned in an earnest-eyed hound of engaging manners and no engagements, who answered, at times, to the name of Rambler. He led them, after breakfast, to the rise behind the house where the stile stood against the skyline, and, '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 Empire might be better than Heppelwhite? Dull gold against that pale green? It's a pity they don't make spinets nowadays.'
'I believe you can get them. Look at that oak wood behind the pines.'
