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He must have missed Faye from the company in the morning, and then failing to find me in the shut-up wagon, had gone back to camp for us. This is all easily understood, but how did that hound find the exact spot where our tent had been, even the very ashes of our stove, on that large camp ground when he has no sense of smell?
The crowd were silent too almost breathless with intent listening but, alas! not to the merry Abbey chimes. The bank door remained closed not a rattle at the bolts, not a clerk's face peering out above the blind. The house was as shut-up and desolate as if it were entirely empty. Five whole minutes by the Abbey clock did that poor, patient crowd wait on the pavement. Then a murmur arose.
The heat in the shut-up room was very great, and she was wearing only a straight white muslin tunic, through which all the soft beauty of her form could be seen, as an English face is seen through a veil. Her hair was looped back from her brows and tied simply with a piece of green ribbon, as an English girl's might have been, and flowed in its thick, black glossy waves to her waist.
It had occasionally come mistily over the Indian Ocean, in the shape of formal letters the only letters that ever visited the dull London house where she spent her shut-up childhood, and acquired the accomplishments of her teens. Mr. Bowen died on the high seas: and when his daughter met the ship at Southampton, a closed black coffin was all that remained to her of the name of father.
But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas-time, when it has come round apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.
For a man of business taking holidays, when a lady craves for gossip, disappointed her faith in him as cruelly as the shut-up, empty inn the broken hunter knocking at a hollow door miles off home. Mr. Abner, hatted and gloved and smiling, came forth. "Going out, the man meant, Lady Charlotte. At your service for five minutes."
The heat had grown intolerable, their pining after fresh air and liberty was become too strong for resistance. Benjamin's eyes glowed at the very thought of escape from the region of streets and shut-up houses, and he drank in the sense of his brother's words eagerly.
We then went together in a light bark to a neighbouring promontory, where he had a beautiful palace and gardens. The air there blew cooler and more refreshing, the trees and shrubs were clothed with fresher green than in the shut-up garden in the capital, and we passed the whole day in the open air.
"When you are as old as I am, you'll find you won't be thinking of interesting possibilities in a perfectly ordinary shut-up summer bungalow. It's a pretty enough name, of course, but I must confess it doesn't suggest a single thing to me except that I'm cold and want to get back to the fire. Come along, dearie!"
It was a new experience: she was taking it in, one would think, to look at her, with all her might, with the earnest blue eyes, the shut-up brain behind the narrow forehead, the loving heart: a contracted tenement, that heart, by-the-by, adapted for single lodgers.
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