Book One – Chapter One
Grayling House, and the Wildery around it

 
“It was, I ween, a lovely spot of ground,
Half-prankt with spring with sommer half imbrowned.”
 

Scene: An old baronial hall, showing grey over the woods near to the banks of a tributary of the silvery Tweed.

It wasn’t the month for the Michaelmas daisies, for it was November.

And when the chrysanthemums opened their great eyes, and turned their faces upwards to meet the light, they felt quite put about to see those flowers still in bloom. They would have been angry, but it is not in the nature of our garden, or indeed of our wild flora and hedgerow pets, to be so. For flowers are ever meek, albeit they are lovely, and methinks that meekness and beauty, hand in hand, are inexpressibly charming.

No, the chrysanthemums were not angry, but they could not help saying to each other —

“Why have the Michaelmas daisies not gone to sleep? Is not their time gone by, and is not this our month in which to bloom and beautify the garden landscape?”

Little Effie came trotting round. It was quite early yet. The sun had just got high enough to peep over the almost leafless linden trees. And wherever his beams fell on bush or brake or fern, he melted the hoar-frost, and resolved it into drops of dew, in each of which a miniature rainbow might have been seen. But round at the back of the big stone mansion, where its shadow fell athwart the old-fashioned terraced lawn, the hoar-frost still lay thick and fast.

Out from among the shrubbery somewhere came Effie Lyle. She might, as likely as not, have dropped out of a yew tree for anything any one knew to the contrary.

She stood for a moment looking up at the blue sky, – her own eyes were quite as blue, – her pretty lips half-parted in a smile, and her golden hair somewhat dishevelled, afloat on her shoulders; as fresh and pure as the morning itself she was, the one thing that had been wanting to complete the beauty of the wildery in which she stood.

Effie glanced down at the chrysanthemums with love and admiration, at the pure white ones, and the pink-and-white, and the crimson, and the bright, bright yellow; she gently smoothed their gorgeous petals that looked so like nodding plumes.

“I love you all,” she cried, “and I am going to kiss the Michaelmas daisies!”

But these grew on such long, long stalks – for they had to creep high to meet the sun – that Effie had to stand on tiptoe, and bend down their mauve clusters to her face.

A momentary sadness crept over her, because one of her pet flowers had left a drop of dew on her cheek.

“Why are my darlings crying?” she said. “Oh, I know!” she added, after a second’s thought. “Because they soon must die. The wicked frost will kill my pets, and then – oh yes, then, I’ll have the chrysanthemums to love.”

An additional ray of sunshine seemed to fall over these flowers when she said this. But a chill crept over the daisies, and their petals began to fold, as fold the wings of insects when night begins to fall.

The gardens around Grayling House were indeed a wildery, yet not a wilderness. It was the pleasure of their owner to let all growing things have a good deal of their own way. For he loved nature even more than art. So in summer time the big lawn that stretched down as far as the quiet river’s bank – where the trailing willows kissed the water, and the splendidly bedecked kingfishers darted in and out from sunshine and shade – was carpeted with flowers, buttercups and daisies and nodding plumes of grasses, and clover white and red. Yet the sun had such access to this lawn, despite the bordering trees, that those wild things never grew high, but spread and spread, and intertwined, as if they really loved each other, and would not be parted for the world. A favourite lawn this for bees of every size and colour, and for a thousand strangely-shaped and gaudily-coloured beetles, which on cloudy days were content to climb up and down the grass stems and take exercise as acrobats do, but who, when the sun burst out, opened the little cupboards on their shoulders, where their wings had been carefully stowed away from the wet, unfolded these gauzy appendages, and flew away in search of wild adventures.

There were paths through this wildery that seemed to lead nowhere, and as often as not made pretence of taking you straight back towards the house again, but landed you at last perhaps in a greenwood glade, with broad-leaved sycamores, and elms around, in which blackbirds fluted in spring, thrushes piped, and the chaffinch tried to drown the notes of every other bird with his mad merry melody. And here perhaps was a rockery, with a fountain playing and a streamlet trickling away riverwards, through the greenest of grass. On this rockery dwelt ferns that loved moisture, and creeping saxifrages, with pretty flowerets of deepest crimson, but not a bit bigger than a bee’s head.

Had you wished to return from this delightful lonesome glade – and sooner or later you would be sure to wish to go back, notwithstanding its beauty – you would probably have taken a wrong turning, and after a while found yourself in a rose-covered, heather-roofed, rustic summer-house, with a little window opening over the river itself, and seats and lounges inside.

Here, on a summer’s day, if possessed of a nice book, you would have found it a pleasure indeed to enjoy a rest. Not that you would have read much, had the book been ever so nice, for as soon as you had got fairly settled, and animated nature around you had got used to your presence, there would have been quite a deal to watch and wonder at. Bright-eyed birds, who had sung in the boughs till their throats were dry, would have come down to slake their thirst and bathe and plash in the sandy-bottomed shallows, scaring the gladsome minnows away into deeper, darker water, where under the weeds lived fate in the shape of a gruesome pike, with terrible teeth and eyes that never closed. Or while you were trying to read, a rabbit or even a hare would come hopping along, and stand up to stare at you. A weasel would sneak past bent on no good. A beautiful squirrel would leap to the ground, and run around on the moss, with his wondrous tail like a train behind him. Bees and beetles would go droning past, or come in by the door, and fly out through the open window, making the great spider that had his web in the corner move his horizontal jaws in hungry expectancy. Meanwhile every now and then a glad fish would leap up and ripple the stream, and the stream itself would keep on chatter-chattering, and telling the nodding, listening trees such a long story in so drowsy a monotone, about where it had been, and where it was going, and what it had seen, that presently you would get listening to the story yourself, and nodding like the trees till the book would drop out of your grasp, and you would be at the back of the north wind.

When you wakened at last, you would be unable for a time to tell where you were, till on looking out you saw the trees again, and the green moss, with the squirrel on it still seeming to look for something, and the tall crimson foxgloves smiling at you through the greenery of ferns; then you would remember that you had fallen asleep while trying to read on a summer’s day in a cosy, drowsy summer cot by the banks of one of the most lovely streams that roll their waters into the silvery Tweed.

But at the time our story opens autumn, not summer, was reigning in the lovely wildery round Grayling House.

The leaves were nearly all gone off the trees, except from the oaks, those sturdiest children of our soil. Their leaves were withered and yellow, but would remain on for months to come. The oak and the beech are the wisest of all our broad-leaved trees; they put not forth their green leaves till spring sunshine has warmed the air, and long after the powdery snow has begun to fall, and other trees are bare and shivering in the blast, they still are clothed in their weather-stained garments of leaves.

Effie stooped once more to kiss and caress the chrysanthemums, then she hurried away, because she had heard her brother’s voice calling, —

“Effie, Effie, Effie!”

“Coming, Leonard – coming – coming – coming!” was Effie’s reply, as she ran round through the shrubbery to the terraced lawn behind.

“Come and see me jump from winter into spring,” cried Leonard, making a bound like a young antelope right off the lowest terrace, still white and crisp with frost, to the lawn where the grass was wet with dew, and green.

“Oh, Leonardie, Leonardie!” said Effie, pouting with her rosy lips, “why so cruel as to call me away from my flowers to see you jump?”

“You couldn’t do it, Effet,” said Leonard, nodding his head.

“Oh, I could! You see now.”

Next moment both were at it, running up and running down, leaping from winter into spring, bounding up from sunshine into shade, and keeping up the merry game till the cheeks of each were as red as roses, and their eyes as bright as drops of dew.

As handsome a boy was Leonard at the age of ten as one could wish to see. Twins the two were, though he was the taller, as became his sex, and I do not think they had been one hour parted since the bells of the village church were set ringing to announce the double birth.

Leonard threw himself down to rest on the frosty grass, and Effie stood laughingly looking down at him.

The boy was a young Scot, and wore that most picturesque of all costumes, the garb of old Gaul, but he was not afraid of getting his bare knees frozen as he lay there. In fact, I do not think that Leonard was afraid of anything.

As I have said the lad was a Scot, there is little need to add that Grayling House and the beautiful river that went wimpling by it were on the northern side of the Tweed.

It was very still and quiet all round Grayling House to-day, and the sky was very bright and almost cloudless. There was not wind enough to bend the course of the spiral wreaths of smoke that rose straight up into the frosty air, higher than the dark-roofed pines, before it melted away into a white haze across the woods.

High up yonder among the sturdy arms of the elms were many huge nests, but the rooks were far away foraging in some farmer’s field. In the other trees many an old nest was visible that could not have been seen in summer – nests of the chattering magpies, in the moss and lichen-covered larches; nests of the tree-sparrows everywhere high or low, great untidy wisps of weeds, with feathers sticking here and strings hanging there, nests that any other bird except a sparrow would feel ashamed to enter or go near. Then there were nests of the bold, bright-voiced cheery chaffinch close to the trunk of beech or elm, little gems of nests tricked out with lichens white and red, and looking all over like shapely bits of coral; and nests of the missel-thrush, so sturdily fixed between the tree forks that storm or tempest could not blow them down.

“I say, Effet,” said Leonard, looking up, “the birds are almost too clever for me. I can count dozens of nests now up there that I couldn’t find in summer. Wait till spring comes – I’ll be wiser then.

“Listen,” he continued, “was that a mole?”

“No,” said his sister, “it was only a sycamore leaf; I saw it falling.”

“Hullo! here comes another, and another, and another.” And off he flew, cap in hand, to catch the leaves as they fell.

He soon tired, however.

“I say, Effet, I don’t call this keeping a holiday. Let’s have some real fun.”

“Shall we go to Castle Beautiful, and read a story to the menagerie?”

“No, not yet. Let us try to hook old Joe.”

Old Joe was a monster pike, who lived in a monster pond or pool, big enough almost to be called a lake, for it covered three acres of ground, and one part of it, right in the centre, was said to be deep enough to bury the village church and steeple. It was down at the bottom of this deep dark hole that Joe lived.

Now it was somewhat funny, but nobody about Grayling House – with one solitary exception, namely, Peter the butler, who had been at the mansion, man and boy, for fifty years – could tell where this monster pike had come from, or when or why he had come.

The facts are these: the loch was fed by springs, and the only outlet for the water was a lead that had to pass over a big mill-wheel, that ground oats and barley for every one in the parish. The pike could not have come over the mill-wheel. Again, he had not been there ten years, and as he weighed, to all appearance, full thirty pounds, he must have been a monster when he got there.

Captain Lyle, Leonard’s and Effie’s father, believed he had scrambled over the grass some dark, dewy night, and taken up his quarters in the loch. This was strange if true, and it might have been, because, at the time the pike first appeared, a tenant of the same kind was missed from a deep tree-shaded pool in the river.

The country people, however, would not share the captain’s belief. There was something uncanny about the beast, they averred, and the less any one had to do with him the better.

He was a very matter-of-fact pike, at all events; for no sooner had he taken possession of his new quarters than he proceeded at once to turn out all the old tenants. Or rather – to speak more to the point – he turned them in, for he ate them. Captain Lyle had, years before the reign of this king-pike, stocked the water with trout, and they had done well, but now none were ever seen.

Sometimes the pike condescended to show himself, or even to take a bait, when some person more daring and less superstitious than his fellows tried to catch him. More than once he had been pulled above the water, but disappeared again, hook and all, with a splash.

When he had swallowed a hook it was Joe’s custom to sulk for a fortnight at the bottom of his pool, and having duly digested the morsel of blue steel, he appeared again livelier and more audacious than ever.

His size was reported to be something enormous by those who had raised him. They said his head was as big as that of Farmer Kemp’s great mastiff-dog.

It was also said that Joe had once upon a time swallowed a sow and a litter of young. This tale was always retailed to strangers who happened to come to the district to fish. It was, in fact, a catch, for Joe really had done this deed; but then the sow was a guinea pig, and the young ones mere hop-o’-my-thumbs.

“Yes, Leonardie,” said Effie, “let us go and try to hook old Joe.”

So while Effie ran to the hall for the fishing tackle, her brother went and dug some great garden worms, and half an hour afterwards they were both in the middle of the lake, with the line sunk, and sitting patiently in the little boat to see whether or not Joe would condescend to bite.