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They were looking into a combe half full of old, high furze in gay bloom that ran up to a fringe of brambles and a dense wood of mixed timber and hollies. It was as though one-half the combe were filled with golden fire to the cliff's edge. The side nearest to them was open grass, and fairly bristled with notice-boards. "Fee-rocious old cove, this," said Stalky, reading the nearest.
Doris, standing with her hands behind her back, was looking at The Hollies, and deep in conversation with an alert and natty little man who was evidently absorbed in what she was saying.
He could not guess that his host was pining for human companionship. He could not fathom Grant's disappointment, on reaching The Hollies, at finding no telegram from a trusted friend, Walter Hart. And he was equally unconscious of the immense service he rendered by compelling his host to talk and act naturally. He enlightened Grant, too, in the matter of inquests.
Then P. C. Robinson entered the box, and contrived to bring about the second "incident." He told how, "from information received," he went to The Hollies, and found Mr. Grant standing near the river with a dead body at his feet. "One side of Mr. Grant's face was covered with blood," he went on. If the policeman was minded to create a sensation, he certainly succeeded.
There, purple magistrates relaxed themselves from the pursuit of municipal ambition; cocked hats paraded soberly about the garden and in and out among the hollies; authoritative canes drew ciphering upon the path; and at night, from high upon the hills, a shepherd saw lighted windows through the foliage and heard the voice of city dignitaries raised in song. The farm is older.
The youthful earl made no attempt to join his followers, but having gazed on the ancient pile before him till its battlements and towers grew dim in the twilight, he struck into a footpath leading across the park towards Datchet, and pursued it until it brought him near a dell filled with thorns, hollies, and underwood, and overhung by mighty oaks, into which he unhesitatingly plunged, and soon gained the deepest part of it.
There is great store of Cedars, Cypresses, Bayes, Palme trees, Hollies, and wilde Vines, which climbe vp along the trees and beare good Grapes. There are also Plum-trees, which beare very faire fruite, but such as is not very good. There are Raspasses, and a little berrie which we call among vs Blues, which are very good to eate.
Grant startled by the face at the window, and actually searching outside the house for the ghostly visitant, while Miss Doris was gazing at The Hollies from the other side of the river, and not a sound was heard, though it was a summer's night, without a breath of wind, and at an hour when the splash of a fish leaping in the stream would have created a commotion.
The carriage lamps wavered wildly on the great junipers and hollies, the clumps of blossoming gorse, that sprinkled the mountain; sometimes in a pause of the wind, there would be a roar of water, or a rush of startled sheep. Tumult had taken possession of the fells no less than of the girl's heart. Once she was thrown against the Squire's shoulder, and murmured a hurried "I beg your pardon."
Elfride glided downstairs on tiptoe, and out to the precise spot on which she had parted from Stephen to enable him to speak privately to her father. Thence she wandered into all the nooks around the place from which the sound seemed to proceed among the huge laurestines, about the tufts of pampas grasses, amid the variegated hollies, under the weeping wych-elm nobody was there.
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