''While you sat and played toccatas stately, at the clavichord,'' Sophie hummed, and, head on one; side, nodded to where the perfect mirror should hang:
Then they found bedrooms with dressing-rooms and powdering-closets, and steps leading up and down--boxes of rooms, round, square, and octagonal, with enriched ceilings and chased door-locks.
'Now about servants. Oh!' She had darted up the last stairs to the chequered darkness of the top floor, where loose tiles lay among broken laths, and the walls were scrawled with names, sentiments, and hop records. 'They've been keeping pigeons here,' she cried.
'And you could drive a buggy through the roof anywhere,' said George.
'That's what I say,' the old man cried below them on the stairs. 'Not a dry place for my pigeons at all.'
'But why was it allowed to get like this?' said Sophie.
'Tis with housen as teeth,' he replied. 'Let 'em go too far, and there's nothing to be done. Time was they was minded to sell her, but none would buy. She was too far away along from any place. Time was they'd ha' lived here theyselves, but they took and died.'
'Here?' Sophie moved beneath the light of a hole in the roof.
'Nah--none dies here excep' falling off ricks and such. In London they died.' He plucked a lock of wool from his blue smock. 'They was no staple--neither the Elphicks nor the Moones. Shart and brittle all of 'em. Dead they be seventeen year, for I've been here caretakin' twenty-five.'
'Who does all the wool belong to downstairs?' George asked.
'To the estate. I'll show you the back parts if ye like. You're from America, ain't ye? I've had a son there once myself.' They followed him down the main stairway. He paused at the turn and swept one hand toward the wall. 'Plenty room, here for your coffin to come down. Seven foot and three men at each end wouldn't brish the paint. If I die in my bed they'll 'ave to up-end me like a milk-can. 'Tis all luck, dye see?'
He led them on and on, through a maze of back kitchens, dairies, larders, and sculleries, that melted along covered ways into a farm-house, visibly older than the main building, which again rambled out among barns, byres, pig-pens, stalls and stables to the dead fields behind.
'Somehow,' said Sophie, sitting exhausted on an ancient well-curb--'somehow one wouldn't insult these lovely old things by filling them with hay.'
George looked at long stone walls upholding reaches of silvery-oak weather-boarding; buttresses of mixed flint and bricks; outside stairs, stone upon arched stone; curves of thatch where grass sprouted; roundels of house- leeked tiles, and a huge paved yard populated by two cows and the repentant Rambler. He had not thought of himself or of the telegraph office for two and a half hours.
'But why,' said Sophie, as they went back through the crater of stricken fields,--' why is one expected to know everything in England? Why do they never tell?'
'You mean about the Elphicks and the Moones?' he answered.
'Yes--and the lawyers and the estate. Who are they? I wonder whether those painted floors in the green room were real oak. Don't you like us exploring things together--better than Pompeii?'
George turned once more to look at the view. 'Eight hundred acres go with the house--the old man told me. Five farms altogether. Rocketts is one of 'em.'
'I like Mrs. Cloke. But what is the old house called?'
George laughed. 'That's one of the things you're expected to know. He never told me.'
The Clokes were more communicative. That evening and thereafter for a week they gave the Chapins the official history, as one gives it to lodgers, of Friars Pardon the house and its five farms. But Sophie asked so many questions, and George was so humanly interested, that, as confidence in the strangers grew, they launched, with observed and acquired detail, into the lives and deaths and doings of the Elphicks and the Moones and their collaterals, the Haylings and the Torrells. It was a tale told serially by Cloke in the barn, or his wife in the dairy, the last chapters reserved for the kitchen o' nights by the big fire, when the two had been half the day exploring about the house, where old Iggulden, of the blue smock, cackled and chuckled to see them. The motives that swayed the characters were beyond their comprehension; the fates that shifted them were gods they had never met; the sidelights Mrs. Cloke threw on act and incident were more amazing than anything in the record. Therefore the Chapins listened delightedly, and blessed Mrs. Shonts.
'But why--why--why--did So-and-so do so-and-so?' Sophie would demand from her seat by the pothook; and Mrs. Cloke would answer, smoothing her knees, 'For the sake of the place.'
'I give it up,' said George one night in their own room. 'People don't seem to matter in this country compared to the places they live in. The way she tells it, Friars Pardon was a sort of Moloch.'
'Poor old thing!' They had been walking round the farms as usual before tea. 'No wonder they loved it. Think of the sacrifices they made for it. Jane Elphick married the younger Torrell to keep it in the family. The octagonal room with the moulded ceiling next to the big bedroom was hers. Now what did he tell you while he was feeding the pigs?' said Sophie.
'About the Torrell cousins and the uncle who died in Java. They lived at Burnt House--behind High Pardons, where that brook is all blocked up.'
'No; Burnt House is under High Pardons Wood, before you come to Gale Anstey,' Sophie corrected.
'Well, old man Cloke said--'
Sophie threw open the door and called down into the kitchen, where the Clokes were covering the fire 'Mrs. Cloke, isn't Burnt House under High Pardons?'
'Yes, my dear, of course,' the soft voice. answered absently. A cough. 'I beg your pardon, Madam. What was it you said?'
'Never mind. I prefer it the other way,' Sophie laughed, and George re-told the missing chapter as she sat on the bed.
