Now Lead Us Home [antikvár]

Three miles from Ferncleft, on the coast, was the castle of Glii^ey, a large distinguished building composed in many styles in a kind of stammering creative reverie by the family of lords who had lived there for three centuries, adding a bit here and there until they sold out to an ascendant coal-owner in the early years of this century. We remembered vaguely the last lord who had lived at Glimley. He was a huge, sad man who had never come even for an instant into our town of Ferncleft. For that we could not blame him. It was a place where beauty was kept as secret as the sewage, and as cramped, whereas the lord had within his walls as much space to roam about in, a singing, unspoiled glee of woods and lawns, as we had to live in in the whole of Ferncleft. In his later years the lord became quite unsocial in his outlook. He would come to a spot on the northern wall of his estate, wearing a tweed suit almost as thick as the wall, a deerstalker hat with a feather in it, and holding a gun. He would fondle the gun for hours and stare vindictively down into Ferncleft, as if wondering whether he could disperse the whole ramshackle, unclean place with a whifF of buckshot. If we, as lads, approached the limits of his domain, he would bawl on us, from a face almost the colour of the autumn fern, to be gone, and, as we had no wish to be winkling shrapnel from our backs for pleasure as well as wooing a cold earth for a living, we went. And as he shouted, the tall feather in the grey hat nodded like one of his approving ancestors. He sold Ferncleft at last and went to live in a castle he owned in Scotland where he became busy at the killing of deer which, he was once heard to say, had the same knobby-headed, pensive, exasperatingly gentle look as we had. This, when we heard it, made Mark Lane, a leading sage in the draughts-room of the Library and Institute, say that if we had been antlered as well as shy when we enraged that lord with our innocent attempts at trespass, he would have let us have it with both barrels and we would at last have gained admit- 5