Then to complete the comedy the catch he had heard on Otmoor began to run in Alastair’s head. “Three naked men we be”—a far cry from this bedecked and cosseted assemblage. He had a moment of suffocation, until he regained his humour. They were all naked under their fine clothes, and for one of them it was his business to do the stripping. He caught Lord Cornbury’s eye and marked its gentle sadness. Was such a man content? Had he the assurance in his soul to listen to one who brought to him not peace but swords?
The late autumn afternoon was bright and mild, with a thin mist rising from the distant stream. The company moved out-of-doors, where on a gravelled walk stood a low carriage drawn by a pair of cream-coloured ponies. A maid brought the Duchess a wide straw hat and driving gloves, and, while the others loitered at the garden door, the lady chose her companion. “Sa singularité,” Mr. Murray whispered. “It is young Mr. Walpole’s name for her. But how prettily she plays the rustic!”
“Who takes the air with me?” she cried. “I choose Captain Maclean. He is the newest of you, and can tell me the latest scandal of Versailles.”
It was like an equipage fashioned out of Chelsea porcelain, and as Alastair took his place beside her, with his knees under a driving cloth of embroidered silk, he felt more than ever the sense of taking part in a play. She whipped up the ponies and they trotted out of the wrought-iron gates, which bounded the pleasance, into the wide spaces of the park. Her talk, which at first had been the agreeable prattle of dinner, to which he responded with sufficient ease, changed gradually to interrogatories. With some disquiet he realised that she was drifting towards politics.
“What do they think in France of the young man’s taste in womankind?” she asked.
He raised his eyebrows.
“The Prince—Charles Stuart—the Chevalier. What of Jenny Cameron?”
“We heard nothing of her in Paris, madam. You should be the better informed, for he has been some months on British soil.”
“Tush, we hear no truth from the North. But they say that she never leaves him, that she shares his travelling carriage. Is she pretty, I wonder? Dark or fair?”
“That I cannot tell, but, whatever they be, her charms must be mature. I have heard on good authority that she is over forty years old.”
It did not need the Duchess’s merry laughter to tell him that he had been guilty of a bêtise. He blushed furiously.
“La, sir,” she cried, “you are ungallant. That is very much my own age, and the world does not call me matronly. I had thought you a courtier, but I fear—I gravely fear—you are an honest man.”
They were now on the west side of the park, where a road led downhill past what had once been a quarry, but was now carved into a modish wilderness. The scarps of stone had been fashioned into grottos and towers and fantastic pinnacles; shrubs had been planted to make shapely thickets; springs had been turned to cascades or caught in miniature lakes. The path wound through midget Alps, which were of the same scale and quality as the chaise and the cream ponies and the shepherdess Duchess.
“We call this spot Eden,” she said. “There are many things I would fain ask you, sir, but I remember the consequence of Eve’s inquisitiveness and forbear. The old Eden had a door and beyond that door lay the desert. It is so here.”
They turned a corner by the edge of a small lake and came on a stout palisade which separated the park from Wychwood Forest. Through the high deer-gate Alastair looked on a country the extreme opposite of the enclosed paradise. The stream, which in the park was regulated like a canal, now flowed in rough shallows or spread into morasses. Scrub clothed the slopes, scrub of thorn and hazel and holly, with now and then an ancient oak flinging gnarled arms against the sky. In the bottom were bracken and the withered blooms of heather, where bees still hummed. The eye looked up little glens towards distant ridges to which the blue October haze gave the air of high hills.
As Alastair gazed at the scene he saw again his own countryside. These were like the wild woods that cloaked Loch Sunart side, the wind brought him the same fragrance of heath and fern, he heard the croak of a raven, a knot of hinds pushed from the coppice and plashed through a marshy shallow. For a second his eyes filled with tears.
He found the Duchess’s hand on his. It was a new Duchess, with grave kind face and no hint of petulance at her lips or artifice in her voice.
“I brought you here for a purpose, sir,” she said. “You have before you two worlds—the enclosed garden and the wild beyond. The wild is yours, by birthright and training and choice. Beyond the pale is Robin Hood’s land, where men adventure. Inside is a quiet domain where they make verses and read books and cherish possessions—my brother’s land. Does my parable touch you?”
“The two worlds are one, madam—one in God’s sight.”
“In God’s sight, maybe, but not in man’s. I will be plainer still with you. I do not know your business, nor do I ask it, for you are my brother’s friend. But he is my darling and I fear a threat to his peace as a mother-partridge fears the coming of a hawk. Somehow—I ask no
