to picture Edward as nervous or shy. Well then, he was wary—didn’t want to get involved. She mustn’t frighten him. The thing to do was to hint at something vague and say that she didn’t quite know what to do about it. It could be something that she had got on her mind—something that his Uncle James had said to her before he died. Yes, that was the way to go about it—“And, Edward, I thought you ought to know, because, you see, I’ve been away, and it’s been quite a shock to come down here and find that it is your Uncle Arnold who has come in for everything.” Yes, that would be the way to do it, only she must lead up to it gradually, so as to make sure of their having to go on meeting and talking about it. She mustn’t say too much at once—just be upset and having something on her conscience, so as to spin it out and keep him guessing. There wasn’t anything wrong about that, was there? Too silly for words to mind what a stupid old maid like Miss Silver said— The iron clang of the train came jangling through: “Dangerous—dangerous—dangerous—”
CHAPTER XIV
Edward went on being extremely busy. Taking over from old Barr was a leisurely process. Right in the middle of going through the books he would come upon an item for the repair of a roof and sit there wagging a finger and meandering through four or five generations of the family which had lived in the cottage for the past two hundred years. If Edward thought that he knew this corner of the country pretty well, he was being obliged to eat humble pie. Mr. Barr’s father and his grandfathers up to a great-great-great had lived and carried on an avocation of some sort or another upon the estate acquired in more recent times by Lord Burlingham, and what he did not know about the families rich, poor and middling within a radius of twenty miles was not worth knowing.
“Littleton Grange,” he would say—“that was a place we took over. Now my great-grandfather had a story about one of the daughters there. Round about seventeen-forty-seven it would be. The young man she was to have married had got himself mixed up with the Jacobite rebellion, and she ran off to France and married him. That was the truth of it, but the family gave out she died of smallpox. It was an empty coffin they buried. My father remembered his grandfather saying so, and when they opened the vault to put away the last of the family a matter of seventy years ago, he was there, and he said it was true enough, for he saw the coffin himself, with the side fallen in and as empty as your hand.”
Then when they had been going on for a bit he would come out with a yam about Betsey Fulgrove who was ducked for a witch on Burlingham Green—“The same his Lordship picked to take his title from. And you can say what you like, but all I know is that when my grandfather had to see about the dry rot in the floor of what used to be her cottage they came on the bones of an infant wrapped in a fine linen sheet, so when Betsey died of her ducking—and die she did—it’s likely enough she got no more than her deserts.”
Edward found it extraordinarily soothing. Old Barr, with his ruddy, wrinkled face and the tang of the country on his tongue. Rural England, and the slow procession of the individual lives which go to make its history. The rise and fall of a family. The coming in of a new fashion of farming or a new breed of cattle, accepted sometimes after long doubt and debate, more often rejected and remembered as somebody’s “Folly.” There was a fellow who said he had got a new way of brewing —that was in Barr’s great-grandfather’s time. There were fads, fancies and follies enough. There was sin, failure, and reviving. There was crime, and murder, and sudden death. There was the year when the Plague came to Embank. There was the year of the great storm that sent the spire of St. Luke’s in Littleton crashing right through the roof into the middle aisle. There were endless
CHAPTER XIV
Edward went on being extremely busy. Taking over from old Barr was a leisurely process. Right in the middle of going through the books he would come upon an item for the repair of a roof and sit there wagging a finger and meandering through four or five generations of the family which had lived in the cottage for the past two hundred years. If Edward thought that he knew this corner of the country pretty well, he was being obliged to eat humble pie. Mr. Barr’s father and his grandfathers up to a great-great-great had lived and carried on an avocation of some sort or another upon the estate acquired in more recent times by Lord Burlingham, and what he did not know about the families rich, poor and middling within a radius of twenty miles was not worth knowing.
“Littleton Grange,” he would say—“that was a place we took over. Now my great-grandfather had a story about one of the daughters there. Round about seventeen-forty-seven it would be. The young man she was to have married had got himself mixed up with the Jacobite rebellion, and she ran off to France and married him. That was the truth of it, but the family gave out she died of smallpox. It was an empty coffin they buried. My father remembered his grandfather saying so, and when they opened the vault to put away the last of the family a matter of seventy years ago, he was there, and he said it was true enough, for he saw the coffin himself, with the side fallen in and as empty as your hand.”
Then when they had been going on for a bit he would come out with a yam about Betsey Fulgrove who was ducked for a witch on Burlingham Green—“The same his Lordship picked to take his title from. And you can say what you like, but all I know is that when my grandfather had to see about the dry rot in the floor of what used to be her cottage they came on the bones of an infant wrapped in a fine linen sheet, so when Betsey died of her ducking—and die she did—it’s likely enough she got no more than her deserts.”
Edward found it extraordinarily soothing. Old Barr, with his ruddy, wrinkled face and the tang of the country on his tongue. Rural England, and the slow procession of the individual lives which go to make its history. The rise and fall of a family. The coming in of a new fashion of farming or a new breed of cattle, accepted sometimes after long doubt and debate, more often rejected and remembered as somebody’s “Folly.” There was a fellow who said he had got a new way of brewing —that was in Barr’s great-grandfather’s time. There were fads, fancies and follies enough. There was sin, failure, and reviving. There was crime, and murder, and sudden death. There was the year when the Plague came to Embank. There was the year of the great storm that sent the spire of St. Luke’s in Littleton crashing right through the roof into the middle aisle. There were endless
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