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Updated: August 17, 2024
I wondered: How on earth will he carry it off? How is he going to get across that tennis-ground? He was getting across it somehow, holding himself not quite so well as Victoria or the subalterns, but still holding himself, coming on, a little flushed and twinkling and self-conscious, but coming. The situation was, for him, most horrible; but it was worse for Viola.
"And if you want to be tried " Mrs. Ansell swept the scene with a slight lift of her philosophic shoulders "you'll find there are trials enough everywhere." Her companion started up with a glance at the small watch on her breast. "One of them is that it's already after four, and that I must see that tea is sent down to the tennis-ground, and the new arrivals looked after."
Then he shut the glazed door, and returned to the very congenial occupation in which he had been engaged, and Owen Saxham went heavily to the bedroom placed at the disposal of the locum tenens. The single window looked out upon a square garden with a tennis-ground, where the De Boursy-Williams girls had been used to play.
At the western end of Howard's Lane is a large tennis-ground belonging to a local club, while beyond is seen the advance of bricks and mortar towards the west. Carmalt Gardens leads into the Upper Richmond Road at its best part, for all the houses here are of a good style and size.
The ill-kept garden, with the tennis-ground, that never got beyond the stage of being dug up, and the rank grass behind the bamboo fence, were flooded with the soft light, every tattered detail of its ugliness showing as clearly as though it was noon. The night was very still, and the soft, scented air blew coolly round our faces.
Fancy a band of negro explorers marching uninvited through the Squire's manor, strewing his lawn and tennis-ground with all manner of rubbish; housing their belongings in his dining- and drawing- and best bed-rooms, which are at once vacated by his wife and family; turning his cook out of his or her kitchen; calling for the keys of his dairy and poultry-yard, hot-houses, and cellar; and rummaging the whole mansion for curios and heirlooms interesting to the negro anthropologist.
When the meal was over Miss Davis proposed a walk in the garden before study time. "Can you play lawn tennis?" asked Nell as they walked towards the tennis-ground. "No, I never play at anything," said Hetty sadly, "When not with my mamma," she said with a flash of the eyes at seeing Phyllis looking at her, "I have always been alone."
All this, to the initiated eye, was full of suggestion; but its significance was as nothing to that presented by the approach of two figures which, as Mrs. Ansell watched, detached themselves from the cluster about the tennis-ground and struck, obliquely and at a desultory pace, across the lawn toward the terrace.
Unloved and neglected, the Convent's spoiled darling hugged her abandonment, weaving a very pretty, ineffably silly romance, in which a noble and beautiful young Hussar lover, suddenly appearing over the corrugated-iron fence of the tennis-ground, the foliage of its fringe of pepper-trees waving in the night-breeze, strode towards the slender white figure leaning from her chamber-casement, whispering, with outstretched hands, and eyes that gleamed through the darkness: "Open the door!
He caught hold of her sleeve and whispered: "Antonia!" The colour rushed into her cheeks; she looked back across her shoulder. "Come along, old Dick!" she cried; and, flinging open the glass door, ran into the garden. Shelton followed. The tennis-ground was divided by tall netting from a paddock.
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