GWYNN OF GWYNN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14244, 15 December 1909, Page 5

GWYNN OF GWYNN.

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT.

BY HALLIWELL SUTCLTFFE, Author of "A Man of the Moors." " Ricroft

of Withers." " Toward the Dawn." " Shameless Wayns." " Mistress Barbara Cunliffe." etc [COPYRIGHT.] CHAPTER XXI. PnvnLis was downstairs again, and able to take short wallas about the farm. Once or twice Saul Dene had ventured a suggestion that he should send for one of the carriages and take her homo, but sho showed a curious unwillingness to return to the life which Gwynn and sho had left behind them when the mists came down on a certain hunting-day. She told her uncle that she still felt absurdly weak, that the 'air up here was so crisp and bracing that she could not leave it. She had twenty excuses for prolonging their stay, and had already, in a mood of independence, approached Mrs. Earnshaw on a topic that was distasteful to them both. Gwynn had ridden down to the dow-er-house this morning on some necessary business, and she had caught Mrs. Earnshaw churning in the dairy. " You're free of the house as long as you care to brighten it," said the farm-wife, stubbornly, in answer to the girl's tentative suggestion, "and no payment asked or needed. Bless the bairn, as though I was not proud to have you here."' . "That is your kindness. Now listen to worldly wisdom," Phyllis answered. There was something so infectious in her smile, eo ludicrous in her would-be air 01 business, that Earnshaw's wife regarded her much as an old tabby looks on with pride at the play of her kitten. "Oh, I'm always ready for wisdom," she put in drily. "My man has so little that I need all I can scrape up, just to help him-out, like." " You see, it is so simple. We are guests here, the three of us, and—and we propose topay some ridiculous sum, week oy week, for all your kindness to us— — "That's where we differ, you and me. Payment is as payment's earned, and we've done so little. Winter days are long up here, Mies Dene, and I'm sure you've brightened 'em for Earnshaw and me, living all alone as we do." Phyllis could say no more. There was at once an outspokenness and a reserve about this farm-wife that reminded her constantly of her uncle. Mrs. Earnshaw had the same good nature, the same hidden pride that layike bed-rock under the upper crust. She would watch cheerfully beside a sick bed,, but the suggestion of any recompense ,was apt to hurt her. It had grown easy by this time to understand that Saul Dene, the richest man in the country, had really been brought up under the low, broad rafters of the farm. Each day, as his anxiety on her behalf had lessened, Phyllis had watched him move about the stables and the fields with growing content and a growing look of ownership. " On my word, Phyllis, you did me a good turn when you fell ill," he said, meeting her in tho roadway as she re turned from her vain efforts to talk with Mrs. Ear..shaw on a business-like footing. "I've never felt —so free to stretch my legs, if you understand, since I bought the big house down yonder." "You are at home, uncle," laughed Phyllis; " and so am I, I think," she added, glancing out across the sloping fields, the rising moors, that 6cemed to breathe the north wind's sense of freedom.

"At home? You'll never know—quite— what the smell of the old house means to me. You're of the younger generation, Phyllis, and maybo the smoke of West Kensington has dulled your scent. Why, child, I can smell the herb-bed yonder marjoram and rue, lavender and tansy and fever-few, and all the rest, as .if 'twere midsummer. There's the bare old lilac— at the porch door, too—it seems to be in flower. I can nose tho scent like an old hound on the trail."

She passed a hand through his arm. Her own happiness was so close and warm that it ploased her to find Saul Den© a poet rather than a man of business.

\ It must not be Naboth's vineyard to you, uncle; you are coveting it already." " I've a secret to tell you,' chuckled Saul. "I've the greatest respect for Naboth, as it happens —fancy old Job Earnshaw's face if I called him Naboth by mistake!—and I'll make a liberal bargain with him. But buy the house I must." He could not repress his high spirits; they teamed, and bubbled like a clear, running stream that •had only the fall of heather-ground to reckon with. It was mine, after all, before I sold it to him twenty years ago. He's an interloper hero. I've set my mind on it, Phyllis. ' • " I may help you, uncle," said Phyllis, quietly. '"You, child? iiarnshaw is tough when he sets his heart on a thing. He seems to love the old house almost half as well as I do myself." Yes, but his wife does not. She came from a softer climate, and she wants him to go down into the valley. She talks of chills and rheumatism."

' Saul Dene laughed gently. He wore the ' absorbed look of a man who is casting a fly in ticklish waters. " Mother Earnshaw has been gossiping? I begin to think you've a gift for practical affairs, i nyllis, in spit© of your short upper lip and your familyportrait look." " Mother Earnshaw always gofeipe. She has so few people to talk to. She covets a snug little farm in the hollow, just as you covet this. And the farm in the hollow is yours, and it will be needing a tenant next Michaelmas, so she tells me." _.. "This crows interesting," said Saul. "I don't care which farm she wants, so long as she'll persuade Earnsluuv that her health demands it. I tell you, Phyllis. I shall not lie easy in my bed till I've bought back the house—the house my father lived in, with the lavender beds, and the mistals, and the sloping fields he loved." From the quiet fields, and the sunlit, rising hills, the breath of the forefathers blew keen and sweet about Phyllis of the short

upper lip. The world in which she bad revelled, from the sheer novelty of it, during these last months, grew parochial in its littleness and limitations. She realised with a depth of insight and of feeling for which she could find no reason, how big was this upper world of the hill*, how all-im-portant were th© details of the farmwork the milking, the ploughing, and sowing, the rearing of stock—without which the world could not go on. She understood the poetry of effort, spent ungrudgingly upon the land. She listened to the moorland storms, and to the after-peace that steals like a benediction over the stubborn, forthright hills. "Bless me, you're ' seeing far,' said Saul Dene, glancing at her face. " What ghosts are you seeing now?" "Oh, pleasant ones, uncle — of green fields, and brown moors, and sturdy, self-respecting farmsteads." They were pacing up and down in the soft February air. The breeze was warm with promise, and green spikes of crocus were shooting up already in the strip of garden that ran along the house-front. Peace, and the intimacy of the deep affection each had for the other, let their thoughts move unhampered. There was no need for oecrecy of any kind. Saul Deno forgot to chuckle. Ho had the • puzzled look that he had worn at Owynn Court, when Phyllis found her way by instinct to the portrait gallery. " You've answered all I was thinking just now," he said, gravely. "Do you know what was puzzling me, child?" She pressed his arm with friendly, silent question. "Half of you belongs to the life down yonder"—he waved his hand with easy contempt towards the valley-lands"but the other half is rooted herestubborn soil, I grant you, but dry and wholesome, and not so liable to mildew. What pit/.« zled me was the way you took a bee-line to the portrait gallery—the way you tumbled into the fooleries— beg your pardon, Phyllisthe manners of 'our set I couldn't understand why you failed to know the old house here at sight in *he same way. If one half of you had the Gwynn instinct, the other half ought surely—" He paused, and glanced again at Phyllis He showed an indecision foreign io Ys character. " You remember the day 1 drove you pact the farm hero?" he went on slowly. "Yes, you promised to tell mo my father's story. I've wished so often that you had not forgotten the promise." " I hadn't forgotten, but perhaps I was cowardly. —it rather gave me a twingo to rake up old days, feeling all the time that the house here was in other hands." Again the humour sounded in Saul's voice. " I'll tell you all the story now, Phyllis. I feel the place is my own again, now I know that Earnshaw'e wife is bent on shifting headquarters. Oh, I'll drive a generous bargain, as I said, but I'll make full use of the old woman's rheumatics." The eagerness to purchase the farm— wish of his since first he returned to the neighbourhoodhad taken full possession of Saul Deno now that ho had slept again under its roof. Again ho forgot the promised story, as he paced up and down and saw each point he would make when he caught Earnshaw unawares and drove his bargain. Phyllis, indeed, had to recall him from hie gallant dream of barter. " I want to know more of my father." she said. " You see, aunt always spoke of him as if ho were a skeleton in the family cupboard."

" Yes, your Aunt Selina would, he snapped, roused from his abstraction. "There wasn't much of the skeleton about your father, in or out of a cupboard. He wan only half-brother to me, but well, I cared for him, Phyllis. I was ten years older, and I helped to lick the young pup into shape, and you're always fond of a dog, two-legged or four, when you've reared him up from puppyhood."

" He was brave and likeable?" asked Phyllis, eagerly. " I always knew he must be. because —because Aunt Selina was so very frostly and so very good. One could not trust her judgment." Saul's chuckle slipped out spontaneously as he heard Phyllis sum up the character of "Aunt Selina." "Yes, she was born in an east wind, as the saying goes. Anyone with a spark of dach about him, or a touch of human fun and charity, was a black sheep to her. Now, your father had dash enough for three ordinary men. Ho was well set up, too, and as handsome as I was blunt-featured. I don't want to shock you, Phyllis, but he was a terrible fellow for playing moonshine with the lassos. It wasn't so much his fault, as theirs, and it was all a boy's light frolic on his partnothing worseeven if he did break a heart or two on the way,''

" I knew ho was interesting. Please, please, go on, uncle."

CHAPTER XXII.

" And begin at the beginning of the yarn, as if you wore a bairn Bitting at my knee by firelight? Well, Tom soon tired of farming, just when he'd grown to manhood and I'd taken pains to teach him all I knew of tillage and tho rest of it. He was always longing for what ho called ' the open road,' and he was always fond c horseflesh; eo what does he do but start driving the mail that ran every day up the valley, There was no railway then"j horses were good enough for us." Phyllis laughed gently. " I am glad I asked about my father. There'* Gretna Green in the air, and my father"—there was a catch in her voice, of pride and tenderness" was the hero of it all."

"Well, as a matter of fact, it did end in a sort of Gretna," said Saul, drily 3 " but what seems fine to you didn't strike me in the same way at the time. Here was a lad, with all the makings of a good yeoman-farmer in him, throwing up the farm and everything at a minute notice, to follow a whim. However, he'd made his mind up, and you couldn't turn h n when he'd got the bit between his teetti. Ho drove his team well, of course, and kept them in the pink o' condition —I'd taught the young rascal all he knew, though— and he was soon the most popular follow on the rond. They called him Handsome Tom ; and the mail had never carried so many passengers before, they said." He stopped, glanced down at Phyllis, and looked for the moment as much a rogue as Handsome Tom himself.

" Country girls found all kinds of errands they had to do, either up or down the daleit didn't matter which, so long as Tom was on tho box-seat. If they hadn't something to buy that could only bo (jot at tho next village, they remembered some old aunt they'd neglected shamefully to visit and in a sudden fit of conscience got up beside Handsome Tom and made sheep's eyes at him." Oh, I understand," said Phyllis, demurely. "Ho was never to blame, and the poor girls always were? Uncle, are you a woman-hater?" " Not a bitjust a sane old batchelor, with a whole heart and clear eyes. As I was saying, Tom got himself into half-a-dozon entanglementshe could no moro help it than the wind could help blowing— ana he always came to me as soon as he was in the thick of the muddle and made me help him out. It was harder work than farming, Phyllis." She waited patiently enough while Saul broke off to fill his pipe and light it. There was an old-world flavour about this story of her father's life that matched the tranquil farmstead, the sunny day, the smell of the moor and fields.

" Then he lort his high spirits suddenly," went on Saul. " For a couplo of months he never brought a love-trouble to me. and he was quiet in his manner, like a doc: that's sickening with distemper ; and I wondered what ailed the lad. He blurted it all out at last. He was over ears in love; and I asked him who it was, and when he told me I laughed eo loud that he struck me. We had a bit of a fight, I remember, and he finished by knocking me into a bed of pansies. I'd taught him boxing, too, you see." (To be continued next Saturday.)