Ten Degrees Backward. Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

CHAPTER III

       FRANK

       Table of Contents

      One afternoon a few days after the foregoing conversations, when Annabel and I were seated round (as far as it is in the power of two persons to sit round anything) the old gate-legged table in the hall at the Manor, having our respective teas, the door-bell clanged, and the butler in due sequence ushered into our midst Arthur Blathwayte and another—which other was destined to play an important part in the dawning drama of my life.

      I will try to describe him, though to my mind the Wildacres always beggared description: they were so utterly unlike everybody else that there were no known standards by which to measure them. On that April afternoon when he first crossed my path, Frank Wildacre was eighteen, and looked both more and less. He was by no means tall, but so slenderly built that he seemed taller than he really was until one compared him with other men, and this smallness and slightness added to the boyishness of his appearance. His face was neither old nor young—or, rather, it was both. It possessed somehow the youthfulness of dawn and of springtime, and of all those things which have retained their undimmed youth through the march of the centuries. It was not so much that Frank Wildacre was young; everybody has been young at some time or another, and has got over it sooner or later: it was rather that he was youth itself.

      I could not tell when first I saw him whether his face was beautiful or not: I cannot tell now; I only knew that it was wonderful, strange, glorious, unlike any other face in the world—save one: and that one I had not yet seen.

      I perceived that his hair was dark and curly, and that his eyes were of that deep and mysterious grey which sometimes looks blue and sometimes black: also that he had that pale delicacy of skin and complexion which makes other people appear coarse and clumsy by contrast. Thus far even my short-sighted eyes could carry me. But it was not by their aid that I became conscious of that strange and subtle gift, possessed to such an extreme degree by Wildacre and his children, which for want of a better name men call charm. It was elusive, it was bewitching, it was indescribable; but all the same it was there.

      It was not the usual human charm of ordinary attractive people. It was something far more magical and spell-weaving than that. In fact it was so unusual that there was almost something uncanny about it. It was the charm of fairies and of elves rather than of "golden boys and girls": it was a spell woven out of moonbeams and will-o'-the-wisp rather than out of breezes and the sunshine of a soft spring day. I never met any one with that peculiar kind of charm save Wildacre and his son and daughter, and his children—more especially the daughter—had it to a far greater extent than he. But it was that strange fascination of Wildacre's that induced Blathwayte to upset his whole scheme of existence in order to gratify Wildacre's whim, and it was that same attribute intensified in the twins that turned my world upside down and reduced its orderly routine to chaos.

      Big, ugly Arthur—looking bigger and uglier than usual beside the ethereal boy—shook hands with us, and introduced his guest, and in a few moments the fairy changeling was sitting at the gate-legged table with us three ordinary mortals, drinking tea like any English schoolboy. But he was not like an English schoolboy in any other respect.

      He was perfectly at ease with us at once, as indeed he was with everybody. There was no such word as shyness in Frank Wildacre's dictionary. But the funny thing was that—quite unconsciously to himself—he seemed to be bestowing a favour upon Annabel and me in condescending to drink tea with us, while (if the truth must be told) Annabel and I generally considered it rather an act of graciousness on our part to invite any one to tea at Restham Manor. I think it must have been the Winterford blood bubbling in our veins that produced this exclusive and archaic feeling, or it might have been merely a symptom of the general grooviness of single middle age.

      Frank was delighted with Restham, and hastened to tell us so, thereby grappling Annabel to his soul with hoops of steel. Blathwayte had already told him the history and legends of the place; and he had assimilated these as if he had known them for years. And he not only assimilated them: he seemed to give them back again to us so enriched with the decoration of his fancy that we—who had been brought up on them—realised for the first time how beautiful they were.

      "So Mr. Blathwayte has told you that we are situated on the Pilgrim's Road," said Annabel, after the conversation had flowed for some minutes like a river in spate.

      "Of course he has," replied the boy, his delicate face aglow; "and that is one of the things that has made Restham so awfully interesting. But what makes it even more thrilling to me is that the road was a Roman road too, and so was trodden by Cæsar's legions before such things as pilgrims were ever invented. Do you know, Miss Kingsnorth, I'm not tremendously keen on pilgrims myself? They seem to have made themselves so unnecessarily uncomfortable, with peas in their shoes, and hair-shirts, and things of that kind. And they were so dirty, too, and seemed to think there was some sort of virtue in not having a bath when they needed one."

      "And they were Papists also," added Annabel.

      Frank, however, treated this fault with considerable leniency. "I don't mind so much about that; you see you had to be a Papist in those days or else a heathen; and though I am nuts on heathens myself, I know that lots of people don't approve of them. Of course I don't care for the modern sort of common or garden heathens, who wear black skins instead of clothes, and are the stock-in-trade of missionaries. What I like are the dear old Greek and Roman heathens, who worshipped the gods and the heroes, and who had groves instead of churches, and vestal virgins instead of nuns."

      To my surprise Annabel was not at all shocked by this, as she ought to have been. But you never can tell what will shock or will not shock a thoroughly nice-minded woman. "I am glad you do not approve of nuns," was all she said, and she said it quite amiably.

      "Oh, I can't bear them," replied Frank; "their dresses are so hideous—just like mummy-costumes; and pilgrims, you know, were all more or less on the same lines—trying to make themselves as ugly and as uncomfortable as possible. I'll bet you anything that when they came to the top of Restham Hill they were looking down and counting their beads instead of revelling in the view of the weald and the wind over the downs, and all the rest of the open-air jolliness."

      Here Blathwayte gently interposed. "I think, my dear boy, that you are rather mixing up the Greek and the Roman periods. Remember they were two distinct civilizations."

      "But the principle was the same," retorted Frank airily; "gods and goddesses and marble temples, instead of priests and pilgrims and stuffy churches. No, Miss Kingsnorth," he added, flashing his brilliant smile on Annabel, as if it had been a searchlight, "none of your mediæval pilgrims on the Canterbury Road for me, but rather the Roman Johnnies making a bee-line for London, with the adventures of a new country shouting to them to come on. Of course they'd think that if the England south of Restham was so jolly, the England north of Restham would be ten times jollier, because the things in front always seem so much nicer than the things behind, don't you know!"

      "Only when you are young," I remarked. "I believe it was merely the young Roman legionaries who felt like that. I expect the older ones longed to stay in the pleasant Kentish county for fear that by going further they would eventually fare worse."

      The boy laughed gaily. "No, no, Sir Reginald, they