I asked the name, and even as I asked I think I guessed the answer.
“Hardriding,” she said. “A little old place in the Borders. My family lived there long ago, and I have always meant to make a pilgrimage to it. Caroline Amysfort is going to Bayreuth, so I shall set up as hostess on my own account. If I can’t get Hardriding I must have Cauldshaw. Will you come and stay with me?”
I listened to her, I hope, with an impassive face, but inwardly I was a volcano of excitement. Hardriding and Cauldshaw! Home and Douglas! Was the circuit by some amazing chance to be completed? I wondered how soon I could decently make an appointment with Miss Virginia and get the whole story. She was going away for the week end, but would be free on Tuesday, rather late. I hugged my impatience for three beastly days.
I had expected a fragment, and found instead a complete and well-authenticated tale. I blessed that lovable American seriousness about genealogies. There was the pedigree neatly inscribed, with excerpts from registers and letters, as businesslike, as irrefutable, as a share certificate. After old Sir Piers fell at Preston his eldest son, Gideon, fled to France, and thence to the Canadas. He fought under the French flag, and rose to a colonelcy before he fell at Quebec. He had married a Frenchwoman, and their son—Lewis, I think—took to the sea and did good trade in the smuggling and privateering line along the New England coast. He settled in North Carolina, and, being rich from his ventures, bought a handsome property, and built a manor-house in the colonial style. With his granddaughter the male line of Home—Miss Virginia pronounced it to rhyme with “loam”—ended. She married a Dasent, son of a neighbouring squire, and was Miss Virginia’s grandmother. There it was, all set down in black and white, and very prettily she expounded it to me. I had found the Hardriding stock at last. It had come back to me out of the mist with ample credentials.
Miss Virginia at Cauldshaw, Linford at Hardriding, and between them the Green Glen! Surely the stag was being set at last for the play. My first impulse was to tell her the whole romance. I pictured her delight; I saw the prosaic Linford take on the colour of poetry. But a scruple deterred me. It would be breaking faith with the Green Glen. If the spell were there it needed no preparation of mine for its working. Those starry influences called for respectful treatment. I would go to Hardriding, and some day—some mellow autumn day—Miss Virginia would cross the hills, and Linford would be there by the Bower to meet her!
Meanwhile all that summer the course of true love ran badly. The two were friends after a fashion, but Linford was such a clumsy and uneasy being, and Miss Virginia so swift and evasive, that it seemed impossible that that friendship could ripen. I got very sick of the whole business, angry with Linford, and puzzled about the lady. At one moment I called her inhuman, at another angelic: but, whatever view one took (and after all they came to the same conclusion), she was the most heartbreaking beauty. Her wild childlike eyes looked through one as if to a pleasant country beyond. There is a Greek fable, isn’t there? about some hero who needed the touch of his mother the Earth to give him strength. I wondered if she would ever find that earthkinship, which means common humanity.
IX
In early August the Lammas floods were high, so that sultriness was purged from the air and the world left clean and rain-washed and sweet-scented. I was staying at Cauldshaw, in a small party which tried in vain to induce its dancing hostess to be still. She was in wild spirits, out at all hours, a crony of shepherds, already learned in the ways of the moors. She had come back, she said, to her own country, and lived every hour in a whirl of delight and wonder. The long round-shouldered hills, the clear burns, the very homely simplicity of the old land ravished her heart. I counted the days till I could take her to the Green Glen.
Then the party melted away, and it was arranged that she should pay a visit of state to Hardriding. I also was bidden, and Linford spent his days in a fever of expectation. Miss Virginia was scrupulous about the details. She would walk across the hills by the old raiding road from Cauldshaw. I showed her the way, which traversed the Green Glen, and on the map I pointed out the Bower. She clapped her hands with delight at my tale—the barest sketch—of the Home doings. “What an adventure!” she cried. “I shall tell you all about it at dinner. I feel like a princess coming home to her kingdom.”
I sincerely hoped that she was. If the Fates were kind this airy spirit should feel the antique spell of earth, and I dared to think that two wanderers might find a home.
To this hour I remember every incident of that autumn day. It was the 3rd of September. The morning broke cold and misty, but by ten o’clock the sun had burned up the rime, and the hills slept in a bright windless calm. I was shooting with Linford, and set out from Cauldshaw at eleven o’clock. Miss Virginia was to leave after luncheon, and, if she followed my directions, would be at Hardriding by six. She would reach the Green Glen about four o’clock, and I laid my plans accordingly.
I shot vilely, for I was full of a curious sense of anticipation. So was Linford, but nothing could impair his skill. We talked
