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Mr. Audley wondered where all this was to lead to, and how long he would have to sit by the sick man's bed, hearing a conversation that had no meaning to him. "If you remember that much, maybe you'll remember more, mother," said Luke. "Can you call to mind my bringing some one home here one night, while Atkinsons was stackin' the last o' their corn?" Once more Mr.
"What makes it rather embarrassing for the dear Jervaises," Miss Tattersall confided to me, "is that the other things aren't ordered till one the Atkinsons' 'bus, you know, and the rest of 'em. Brenda persuaded Mrs. Jervaise that we might go on for a bit after the vicar had gone." I wished that I could get away from Miss Tattersall; she intruded on my thoughts.
"Anyhow," she said, "it's a great deal better than to be out in the storm. I am sure auntie will be very glad when she knows we were safe here, and it isn't as if you had come to a perfectly strange house. The Atkinsons are your friends, and they won't mind a bit our coming here for shelter. I know they won't. They'd be very hard-hearted if they did mind."
But with them it was only an accessory of position, everything was on a foundation of reality, it all represented a substantial wealth displaying itself without effort. The Sherburnes were there, the Atkinsons, the Pickerings, Governor Wentworth, the first of the Governors after New Hampshire separated from Massachusetts and went into business for itself, and others of the Wentworth family.
The Atkinsons had also brought back their only child, a son born on the Siberian steppe, a wonderfully bright youngster, whom they destined for the British navy. He bore a name which I fear may at times have proved a burden to him, for his father and mother were so delighted with the place in which he was born that they called him, after it, ``Alatow-Tam Chiboulak.
To achieve this end he had first been compelled to master the grammar and understand the syntax of odors, learning the secret of the rules that regulate them, and, once familiarized with the dialect, he compared the works of the masters, of the Atkinsons and Lubins, the Chardins and Violets, the Legrands and Piesses; then he separated the construction of their phrases, weighed the value of their words and the arrangement of their periods.
"We can't hear a sound except the wind among the trees, and the robins singing. There doesn't seem to be a soul about. Who lives here, Dimple?" "The Atkinsons. Mamma and papa know them." "Are there any little children?" "Not now; there used to be a little girl named Stella, but she died two years ago, and now there is only their eldest son living; he has just gone abroad with his mother.
"She's sound asleep," said she, "and I didn't think there was any need of waking her. We'll send word by John that we've been here. And oh! you can't imagine how snug and happy she did look, lying there in her comfortable bed, in that nice, airy room. I'll tell you what it is, if it wasn't for the neighbors, and especially the Atkinsons, I wouldn't go back one step."
It is almost impossible to walk anywhere without stepping on a governor. You grow haughty in spirit after a while, and scorn to tread on anything less than one of His Majesty's colonels or secretary under the Crown. Here are the tombs of the Atkinsons, the Jaffreys, the Sherburnes, the Sheafes, the Marshes, the Mannings, the Gardners, and others of the quality.
As I turned off the road and breasted the lower slopes of the hill, I was constructing the details of the Jervaises' explanatory visit to the Atkinsons. I had reached the point of making Mrs. Jervaise repeat the statement she had made in the Hall that "dear Brenda was so impossibly headstrong," when I heard the sweet, true notes of some one ahead of me, whistling, almost miraculously, in tune.
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