The Harrison-Gores came shortly after Morenas left. The Englishman
was a pink-faced old gentleman in a shabby Norfolk suit and with the
very thinnest legs on record--"mocking-bird legs," Fernolia called
them. His daughter was a gray-eyed Minerva with the skin of a baby
and the walk of a Highland piper. They found Carolina people
charming, and they secured some valuable data for their book, "The
Beginnings of American History." Everything in Hynds House pleased
them, even The Author.
Other people who do not enter into this story came and went during
that winter. But they were merely millionaires--people who motored
around the lovely country, ate Mary Magdalen's hot biscuit and fried
chicken, slept in our four-posters, paid their stiff bills
thankfully, and went about their business as good millionaires
should, and generally do. Only one out of them all was disagreeable;
he wanted to buy Hynds House out of hand for a proposed club of
which he was to be founder and president.
"It'd be just what the bunch would like," he told me. "All we'd have
to do would be to paint these wooden walls a nice cheerful light
color, change one room into a smoker, another into a billiard-room,
and a third into a grill, add some gun-racks and leather
wing-chairs, and we'd be right up to the minute in club-houses!"
When I explained that I couldn't sell he offered to compromise on
two of the carved marble mantels, the library tiles, and two inlaid
tables, "at double what you'd get from anybody else." And when I
wouldn't even let him have these trifles, he was disgusted and took
no pains to conceal it. He was rude to Alicia, who snubbed him with
terrible thoroughness, a proceeding which made him call loudly for
his "bill" and his car. The last we heard of him was his bullying
voice bawling at his sullen chauffeur.
"That pig," said The Author to me, with fury, "is undoubtedly the
lineal descendant of the one Gadarene swine that hadn't decency
enough to rush down the slope with the rest of the herd and drown
himself."
Busy as I was, it wasn't over easy for me to find time to revisit
that brown and sweet-smelling spot in the Forest of Arden where on a
gray afternoon, I had met Nicholas Jelnik and received from him a
kiss on the palm, and a broken coin. And I wanted to go back there,
as ghosts may desire to revisit the glimpses of the moon.
That is why, on the first free afternoon I had, I changed into the
selfsame brown frock, put on the brown hat with the yellow quill in
it, and slipped out of Hynds House alone. It wasn't a gray afternoon
this time, but a clear, bright, sun-shiny one, all blue and gold and
green, and with the pleasantest of friendly winds a-frolicking, and
a pine-scented air with a pungent and a vital bite to it.
I went along the highroad for a while, crossed the weedy, ferny
ditch that separated it from the fallow fields beyond, and struck
into the deserted foot-path that leads to the Enchanted Wood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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