They called him from within to take his turn with the cue; he did not answer, he was so absorbed in his calculations. He was clever—in a way; he had quite sufficient penetration to see that this was no common girl. She was not beautiful—yet, she was not even pretty, and so plainly dressed; still there was something marked in her features. And she was with old Iden.
Amaryllis did not understand the meaning of his glance, but she felt that it was an insult. She looked down quickly, seized her grandfather’s arm, and drew him out from the pavement into the street, yielding a little to the current and so hoping to presently pass it.
By this time, as Ned Marks did not answer, his companions had come to the window to discover what he was staring at. “Oho!” they laughed. “It’s Miss Iden. Twenty thousand guineas in the iron box!”
Iden’s great white hat, which always seemed to sit loosely on his head, was knocked aside by the elbow of a burly butcher struggling in the throng; Amaryllis replaced it upright, and leading him this way, and pushing him that, got at last to the opposite pavement, and so behind the row of booths, between them and the houses where there was less crush. Taking care of him, she forgot to look to her feet and stepped in the gutter where there was a puddle. The cold water came through the crack in her boot.
While these incidents were still further irritating her, the old Pacha kept mumbling and muttering to himself, nodding his head and smiling at each fresh mark of attention, for though he was so independent and fearless still he appreciated the trouble she took. The mumbling in his mouth was a sort of purring. Her dutiful spirit had stroked him up to a pleasant state of electric glow; she felt like a hound in a leash, ready to burst the bond that held her to his hand. Side by side, and arm in arm, neither of them understood the other; ninety and sixteen, a strange couple in the jostling fair.
Iden turned down a passage near the end of the street, and in an instant the roar of the crowd which had boomed all round them was shut off by high walls up which it rose and hummed over their heads in the air. They walked on broad stone flags notched here and there at the edges, for the rest worn smooth by footsteps (the grave drives such a trade) like Iden’s doorstep, they were in fact tombstones, and the walled passage brought them to the porch of the Abbey church.
There he stopped, muttering and mumbling, and wiped his forehead with his vast silk handkerchief. They were no longer incommoded by a crowd, but now and then folk came by hastening to the fair; lads with favours in their coats, and blue ribbons in their hats, girls in bright dresses, chiefly crude colours, who seemed out of accord with the heavy weight as it were of the great Abbey, the ponderous walls, the quiet gloom of the narrow space, and the shadows that lurked behind the buttresses.
The aged man muttered and mumbled about the porch and took Amaryllis under it, making her look up at the groining, and note the spring of the arch, which formed a sort of carved crown over them. It was a fine old porch, deep and high, in some things reminding you of the porches that are to be seen in Spain; stone made to give a pleasant shade like trees, so cut and worked as to be soft to the eye.
He pointed out to her the touches that rendered it so dear to those who value art in stone. He knew them, every one, the history and the dates, and the three stags’ heads on a shield; there were broad folios in the smoky room at home, filled with every detail, Iden himself had subscribed forty pounds to the cost of illustrating one of them. Every scholar who visited the Abbey church, called and begged to see the baker’s old books.
Iden rubbed his old thumb in the grooves and went outside and hoisted himself, as it were, up from his crooked S position to look at the three stags’ heads on the shield on the wall; dim stags’ heads that to you, or at least to me, might have been fishes, or Jove’s thunderbolts, or anything.
Amaryllis was left standing alone a moment in the porch, the deep shadow within behind her, the curve of the arch over, a fine setting for a portrait. She stood the more upright because of the fire and temper suppressed in her.
Just outside the human letter S—crooked S—clad in sad white-grey miller’s garments, its old hat almost falling backwards off its old grey head, gazed up and pointed with its oaken cudgel at the coat of arms. Seven hundred years—the weight of seven hundred years—hung over them both in that old Abbey.
Into that Past he was soon to disappear: she came out to the Future.
Thence he took her to an arched door, nail-studded, in the passage wall, and giving her the key, told her to open it, and stood watching her in triumph, as if it had been the door to some immense treasury. She turned the lock, and he pushed her before him hastily, as if they must snatch so grand an opportunity.
XV
Within there was a gravel path, and glimpses between trees of wide pleasure-grounds. Amaryllis hesitated, and looked back; Iden drew her forward, not noticing her evident disinclination to proceed. If he had, he would have put it down to awe, instead of which it was dislike.
For she guessed they were entering the lawns in front of the Hon. Raleigh Pamment’s mansion.
