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Page 35
George, as I say, had not envisaged the peculiar difficulties of
his position. Nor did he until the evening of his second day at the
Marshmoreton Arms. Until then, as I have indicated, he roamed in a
golden mist of dreamy meditation among the soothing by-ways of the
village of Belpher. But after lunch on the second day it came upon
him that all this sort of thing was pleasant but not practical.
Action was what was needed. Action.
The first, the obvious move was to locate the castle. Inquiries at
the Marshmoreton Arms elicited the fact that it was "a step" up the
road that ran past the front door of the inn. But this wasn't the
day of the week when the general public was admitted. The
sightseer could invade Belpher Castle on Thursdays only, between
the hours of two and four. On other days of the week all he could
do was to stand like Moses on Pisgah and take in the general effect
from a distance. As this was all that George had hoped to be able
to do, he set forth.
It speedily became evident to George that "a step" was a euphemism.
Five miles did he tramp before, trudging wearily up a winding lane,
he came out on a breeze-swept hill-top, and saw below him, nestling
in its trees, what was now for him the centre of the world. He sat
on a stone wail and lit a pipe. Belpher Castle. Maud's home. There
it was. And now what?
The first thought that came to him was practical, even prosaic--
the thought that he couldn't possibly do this five-miles-there
and-five-miles-back walk, every time he wanted to see the place.
He must shift his base nearer the scene of operations. One of those
trim, thatched cottages down there in the valley would be just the
thing, if he could arrange to take possession of it. They sat there
all round the castle, singly and in groups, like small dogs round
their master. They looked as if they had been there for centuries.
Probably they had, as they were made of stone as solid as that of
the castle. There must have been a time, thought George, when the
castle was the central rallying-point for all those scattered
homes; when rumour of danger from marauders had sent all that
little community scuttling for safety to the sheltering walls.
For the first time since he had set out on his expedition, a
certain chill, a discomforting sinking of the heart, afflicted
George as he gazed down at the grim grey fortress which he had
undertaken to storm. So must have felt those marauders of old when
they climbed to the top of this very hill to spy out the land. And
George's case was even worse than theirs. They could at least hope
that a strong arm and a stout heart would carry them past those
solid walls; they had not to think of social etiquette. Whereas
George was so situated that an unsympathetic butler could put him to
rout by refusing him admittance.
The evening was drawing in. Already, in the brief time he had spent
on the hill-top, the sky had turned from blue to saffron and from
saffron to grey. The plaintive voices of homing cows floated up to
him from the valley below. A bat had left its shelter and was
wheeling around him, a sinister blot against the sky. A sickle moon
gleamed over the trees. George felt cold. He turned. The shadows
of night wrapped him round, and little things in the hedgerows
chirped and chittered mockery at him as he stumbled down the lane.
George's request for a lonely furnished cottage somewhere in the
neighbourhood of the castle did not, as he had feared, strike the
Belpher house-agent as the demand of a lunatic. Every well-dressed
stranger who comes to Belpher is automatically set down by the
natives as an artist, for the picturesqueness of the place has
caused it to be much infested by the brothers and sisters of the
brush. In asking for a cottage, indeed, George did precisely as
Belpher society expected him to do; and the agent was reaching for
his list almost before the words were out of his mouth. In less
than half an hour George was out in the street again, the owner for
the season of what the agent described as a "gem" and the employer
of a farmer's wife who lived near-by and would, as was her custom
with artists, come in the morning and evening to "do" for him. The
interview would have taken but a few minutes, had it not been
prolonged by the chattiness of the agent on the subject of the
occupants of the castle, to which George listened attentively. He
was not greatly encouraged by what he heard of Lord Marshmoreton.
The earl had made himself notably unpopular in the village recently
by his firm--the house-agent said "pig-headed"--attitude in respect
to a certain dispute about a right-of-way. It was Lady Caroline,
and not the easy-going peer, who was really to blame in the matter;
but the impression that George got from the house-agent's
description of Lord Marshmoreton was that the latter was a sort of
Nero, possessing, in addition to the qualities of a Roman tyrant,
many of the least lovable traits of the ghila monster of Arizona.
Hearing this about her father, and having already had the privilege
of meeting her brother and studying him at first hand, his heart
bled for Maud. It seemed to him that existence at the castle in
such society must be little short of torture.
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