Jordan and Tom Nando walked over each evening when Jordan's work was done, and sometimes they met Mr. Mactavish there, and would adjourn to the garden cottage for fruit, a mug of ale or a pipe of tobacco. Mactavish was as great a lover of gardens as he was of houses, and the linking up of old Tom's garden with the new house and the new ground gave Mr. Mactavish room for enterprise.
"Na, na, I'll not be spoiling your garden, Mr. Nando he declared."
He was always ready to draw plans and to sketch effects with the stick of charcoal he carried in a little silver snuffbox, and when the inspiration was upon him he would draw his plans on any surface that offered itself. The whitewashed wall of the cottage was used for the plan of a formal garden in the Dutch style, with a water cistern, brick paths, and clipped yew and box trees. He sketched out a rose walk and a belvedere on the white top of the cottage table, much to the disgust of the good woman who had to scrub it. "Drat the fellow! He might have used the tail of his own shirt." In fact, there was another sort of tale about Mr. Mactavish. It was said that the madness of inspiration had once seized upon him in church, and having no surface upon which to record it, he made use of the bald head of an old gentleman sitting in front of him, who had removed his wig because of the heat.
His lean, Norse intensity was much to Jordan's liking, and in Garter Street there was intensity of a more delicate temper hidden beneath a gracious languor. Jordan still took his morning rides, and once a week he breakfasted with Mr. Stamford and Mrs. Mariana Merris. He was quite at his ease here by reason of the attitude he had assumed in his relation to Mrs. Merris. It was simple, strong and unstudied. She was his great lady, and his admiration was so open and yet so restrained that it was like the broad sunlight on a still day. It was very evident that Jordan thought her a wonderful and a mysterious creature, an Olympian, quite out of his workaday world, and that he was content to look at her in this way. He was happy and proud so sit at the same table with her and to listen to her voice.
When William Stamford sailed for Virginia Mrs. Merris remained in the Garter Street house. An ancient aunt, a Miss Julia Stamford, came up out of the wilds of the Welsh borders to keep house for her neice. She was a very mild little old lady, whose admiration for Mrs. Mariana was almost as great as Jordan's, and since Jordan was allowed to call at the house in Garter Street once a week, he came to know Miss Julia Stamford quite intimately. He brought the little old lady flowers, but he never brought flowers to Mrs. Merris, and Mariana teased her aunt about Mr. Jordan March.
"I never get flowers, Aunt Julia!"
"No, my dear; but I think the young man shows a very nice feeling."
Mrs. Merris laughed, but she understood and appreciated the subtlety of Jordan's reticence and the pretty restraint that he showed in his homage.
"And he is only a fencing-master, my dear! You would think that he was a gentleman."
"Well, perhaps he is, Aunt Julia."
"I admit that he is a young man of great sense," said Miss Stamford, "and I think that it is very gracious of you to let him call on us, my dear. But——"
Mrs. Mariana put the subject aside.
"Mr. March saved my brother from a duel, Aunt Julia; he can behave like a very great gentleman; otherwise I should not allow him to bring you those flowers."
It was Tom Nando who remarked one night at supper that Douce St. Croix had not been to see them for more than a month. Mrs. Mary looked at Jordan, who had a piece of paper by his plate on which Mr. Mactavish had drawn one of his innumerable plans. Tom Nando understood her look and the little shake of the head she gave him, but though Jordan appeared to be absorbed in Mr. Mactavish's charcoal drawing he had heard what Thomas Nando had said to Mrs. Mary.
After supper, Tom Nando being out of the room for a moment, Jordan came and stood behind Mrs. Mary's chair.
"Is it true that Douce has not been here, mother?"
"Yes, my dear."
"Is the old man ill?"
"He may be; I haven't heard."
"Someone ought to inquire," said Jordan.
Mrs. Mary said nothing which might lead him to believe that there was anything mysterious about Douce's aloofness, for she had learnt that it is better to leave young people to settle their own affairs. If Jordan wanted Douce he had only to go after her; he was within half a mile of the St. Croix's house nearly every day.
The same thought occurred to Jordan, and on the following evening he walked on from Tom Nando's garden and knocked at Mr. Sylvester's door. Douce opened it to him, a Douce whose eyes betrayed nothing.
"Mother was wondering what had happened to you, so I thought I would come and see. I hope Mr. St. Croix is not ill?"
"No, he is very well, thank you," she said with obstinate composure; "but won't you come in?"
Jordan smiled at her as he entered, but she did not return his smile. She took him into the parlour, where Mr. Sylvester was reading, and she left the two men together there and disappeared into the garden. She hid herself and waited, pulling a flower to pieces with her small white fingers.
"If he cares——" she thought.
But twilight fell and no man came in search of her, though presently she heard his voice.
"Douce, I must be getting back. Where are you?"
She remained concealed, and her little face looked pinched and stricken. She refused to surrender to the pleading of her own heart.
"He does not care enough," she said to herself. "Would he have stayed there——"
She remained hidden until she heard the closing of the gate and Jordan's footsteps in the lane.
XXIV
Jordan had fastened his horse's bridle to the spoke of a heavy cart. A gap had been cut in the hedge, which could be closed by a couple of hurdles, and within this hedge and about twenty yards from the road stood the beginnings of Thomas Nando's house of rest. The ground between the house and the hedge was all scarred with wheel marks, and since it had been raining in the night, these wheel marks were full of water.
Jordan looked about him. He saw the stacks of red bricks and the piles of freestone fresh from the mason's yard, a splodge of mortar, a pile of scaffold poles and put-logs, brick hods, barrows, odd pieces of mortar-whitened timber, the wooden hut in which tools and lime were stored. There was order in all this seeming disorder, a sense of growth and of purpose. The green surface that had been grass had been trampled in places to a stodge of mud, but Jordan knew that in six months there would be a garden here, paved walks, borders, clipped trees, a sedate beauty as Mactavish understood it. He picked up two of the red bricks, weighed them in his hands, and striking them together like cymbals, was pleased with the crisp, strong note they gave. Already the walls stood some twelve feet high, and showed the spaces for the doorway and lower windows.
Overhead hung a thin blue sky, a rain-washed sky, clear and cloudless and fresh. It was six o'clock in the morning, and Jordan had the place to himself. He stepped in through one of the window spaces and found himself in what was to be Mrs. Mary's parlour, the room inspired by that room of Mrs. Merris's in Garter Street, with its long window at either end and its double glimpse of the world without. Jordan stood and smiled. His eyes looked out through the northern window space, and he saw what he wished to see, a long stretch of turf with the early sunlight on it, and rising slightly to the edge of a little wood of well-grown oak trees. The trunks of the trees were in the shadow thrown by the fringe of the foliage. They looked very dark, a greenish black in colour, but here and there fingers of sunlight touched them and left stigmata of gold. Nothing could be seen from this northern window save the long sweep of sunlit grass, the oak wood, and the soft blurred greyness of a distant hill beyond.
"Just right—just as it should be," thought Jordan. "But why?"
There was that in him which recognized the rightness of the thing that he had planned, though he could not explain its rightness or how he had come to foresee it; but by some innate intuition he had. He had stood on this very spot with Mr. Mactavish whe
n the turf was green and untouched, and he had explained the shape of the room and the setting of the windows.
"That view there over the grass to the trees, and on this side the garden."
He remembered that Mactavish had looked at him queerly.
"For a city man, Mr. March, you have a good understanding, sir, of how a country house should be placed. There is all the deeference between the eye of one man and another."
Jordan smiled. If Mactavish had cause for surprise over the fact that a fencing-master should have ideas on the setting out of a house and garden, Jordan had come to that stage when a man is surprised by the unexpectedness of the things which happen within himself. He was a fencing-master, a big fellow who had taken the broad and none too gentle life of London into his hands, but somehow he was more than what he had been, and he knew it. There was another man inside him, a man who showed himself more strong and purposeful as each day passed, a man whose eyes saw farther, beyond the tops of the houses, over the heads of the crowd in the street. This second self had first made itself felt on those morning rides into the country. Life had suddenly enlarged itself and taken on the mystery of a new spaciousness. The boy had become merged in the man, a man whose destiny was to accomplish things.
Jordan stepped out through the northern window space and stood looking towards the fruit trees of Tom Nando's garden. That garden was the beginning. Its gate opened on a path of reverie, and during those few months when he stood there under the shadow of the rising house he was aware of a swift flowing of many memories, memories which provoked and challenged him. His mood was a complex of questions asked and remaining unanswered. Some of them seemed strangely irrelevant. For instance, in looking at this ground which was his, these fourteen acres or so of grass and woodland, he was somehow moved to dream in square leagues instead of in acres. His mind was expansive. It reached out beyond its reasonable limits, and its desire overstepped ditches and hedgerows. And why? Hitherto his life had gone to and fro over the flagstones of Spaniards Court. And, stranger still, why should the building of this house be linked perpetually with thoughts of Mrs. Mariana Merris? It was pleasant to accomplish things, to possess a landscape to set off the solidity of your endeavour. But why the figure of a woman, and of this particular woman?
He strolled across the grass towards the wood, and turning to look back at the square shell of the half-built house, he found himself wondering whether Mrs. Merris would ever see it completed. And what would she think of it? He answered his own questions by telling himself that the house could be of no particular interest to Mrs. Merris. It concerned Thomas and Mary Nando, and had no meaning for a very great lady who chose to be gracious to him because he had done her brother a service.
Jordan wandered into the wood, letting his eyes dwell on the tree trunks and the spread of the great branches into the mass of foliage above.
"I should like leagues of this," was his thought.
Leagues of rolling woodlands, wild and unknown! He was growing fastidious, ambitious, just because a little old lawyer in the city had put him in the way of making a sum of money! Mere luck! But was it luck? He made himself follow out the sequence of events, the cause and effect of that affair. He had done Mr. Bowyer a service. Obviously he would not have been able to render the old man that service had he not trained himself from boyhood to be the man he was with the sword. His reputation as a man of arms had been sufficient to scare other men from plundering a victim. In fact, was there such a thing as luck? Did not the fact of what a man was make certain other things happen to him?
Jordan went back to his horse. He was slow in mounting, and he let the beast walk as he pleased along the deserted lane. He was still thinking, considering the newness in himself, those changes which had come to him almost imperceptibly, but which were none the less real and surprising. His view of life was different. Almost it seemed to him that the old life was ceasing to satisfy him. There was not the same zest in it. Teaching other men to do indifferently what he could do so well, and still remaining what he was, a favoured servant in a gentleman's world. He could see himself following old Tom Nando's career, going regularly each day into the fencing-school, putting other men through their paces, pocketing the guineas, growing a little older, a little more cunning, a little slower and stiffer as the years went by. The day would come when he would need another Jordan March, just as Nando had needed him, and that meant marriage—marriage with whom?
He felt something stir in him.
"No; there must be more in it than that!"
And again he felt the overmastering spell, the lure of a broad horizon, the vague mystery of some other life in which greater things happened.
Jordan found Tom and Mary at breakfast. He sat down gravely at the familiar table, with those two familiar faces on his left and right, and he ate his breakfast in silence. He was preoccupied. He did not realize that he had grown more silent and apart during the last few months, and that these others realized it. They looked at each other across the table when Jordan left them to join Bertrand in the fencing-school.
Tom Nando seemed to understand the question in his wife's eyes.
"It may be that, mother; but I'm thinking it is not that."
"He was like that before," said she.
Nando went for his pipe, yet he did not fill it, but stood behind his wife's chair, tapping his knuckles with the pipe-stem. He had the air of not wishing to see some fact which might prove itself self-evident.
"He is taken up with the new house."
"At his age, Tom!"
"He is older than his age, my dear. Some men are."
Mrs. Mary half turned in her chair, and Tom Nando saw the troubled look in her expressive, thrush-like eyes.
"Tom, supposing he is growing out of us?"
"Growing out of us, mother!" And he winced. "What do you mean?"
"I have never forgotten it."
"What, my dear?"
"That he is not our child. It might be in the blood, Tom. Why, look at the new house he is building. It's for us, but it's a gentleman's house."
"Tut, tut!" said her man. "Why shouldn't a big fellow have big ideas? I think it's time that Jordan got married."
His wife rose up, and going to the window, sat down on the blue settee.
"I used to say that, Tom."
"So you did—so you did. Well, weren't you hinting that old Sylvester's girl?"
Mrs. Mary did not turn her head.
"She wants him, but he does not want her, Tom."
"Sure?"
"I think that I am quite sure," said Mrs. Mary; "and now I come to think of it, I wish I wasn't so sure. One comes to learn, Tom, that a bird in the hand——"
"Even if it is a small bird, my dear!"
"Why, just so. Isn't being happy just knowing how big your larder is and how much you can keep in it? Strange meats, Tom, beyond a man's stomach, don't make him so happy."
"Ha, victuals, old girl! Get the lad a good little housewife and a family! Well, why not Douce? She's a pretty thing."
"Tom," said Mrs. Mary, "what's the use of that if Jordan isn't taken with that sort of dish?"
Jordan went mechanically through the morning's work. He gave lessons to two gentlemen up from the country, who had been told that it was the proper thing to go to Nando's. They were very rough and clumsy, they had loud voices, and they spoke to Jordan as though he were a superior sort of groom.
"Now, my lad, let us see some of your trick play."
Jordan smiled in the man's stupid red face.
"You are not ripe for that, sir, yet."
"What! And me the best shot at a bird in the whole county of Norfolk! Why, man, I used to be some boy with the skewers!"
"What do you want me to do, sir?"
"Why, see if you can keep me from hitting you. Let's have some life in the game. Damn it, don't I pay for it?"
"Just as you please, sir," said Jordan.
He fenced with the gentleman as he would have played with a c
hild. His thoughts were elsewhere. He was amused by the young Norfolk squire's fierce red face, the way his blue eyes gave a sort of blink every time he tried a thrust at him. It was a stupid, hectoring, coarse-skinned face, with a Roman nose, high cheek bones and cruel lips. The man was both arrogant and clumsy. Jordan could imagine him cursing his servants and being rough with women, "And you," he thought, "are a gentleman of property; you may number your acres by the thousand; you have your great house; you go out with your gun and your horse. What a life I could make of that!"
Next moment he felt the foil's button under his ribs. It hit him hard and true, and he was startled. He saw the insolent smile on the squire's face, his red mouth opening like the beak of a crowing cock.
"Ha, ha, Mr. Fencing Master! I got you fair and square."
Jordan smiled, but he had come back out of his dreams. Never in his life had he been so pinked by a country bumpkin.
"So you did, sir."
"Dick," said the man from Norfolk, turning with a wink and a swagger to his friend, "these London cocks don't fight much better than the cocks on our dunghills."
"Fudge!" said his friend; "he let you hit him just to please you."
"Not so, gentlemen," said Jordan. "It was a fair hit, and I own to it."
"Well, my lad, you are a sportsman, anyway. See if you can hit me."
"I'll do it before your friend counts ten, sir."
"Right, by God! There's a guinea on it. Start the clock, Dick."
But Jordan made his hit before the other gentleman had counted five. He had ceased dreaming about acres, and had remembered that it was his business to handle a sword.
Jordan went in to his dinner with a thoughtful face. He sat down at the table without smiling at Mrs. Mary, and his silence and his preoccupation made the two other elders look meaningly at each other. "It—is—a woman," said Mrs. Mary's eyes; "it must be a woman." Tom cut himself a slice of bread, and rallied Jordan on his solemn face.
"Who has been preaching you a sermon, my lad?"
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