If her eyes had not been turned inward and her ears had not been tuned only to catch her own natural complaints, this chatter of young things would have called her out to laugh and tingle and dance in the haunted wood and cry out little incoherent welcomes to the children of the earth.Something of the joy and emotion of that mother-month must have stirred her imagination and set her blood racing through her young body.She felt the call of youth and the urge to play.She sensed the magnetic pull of the voice of spring, but when, with her long brown lashes wet with impatient tears, she went to the window and looked out at the green spread of lawn and the yellow-headed daffodils, it seemed more than ever to her that she was peering through iron bars into the playground of a school to which she didn't belong.She was Joan-all-alone, she told herself, and added, with that touch of picturesque phrasing inherited from her well-read mother, that she was more like a racing motorboat tied to a crumbling wharf in a deserted harbor than anything else in the world.
There was a knock on her door and the sound of a bronchial cough.
"Come in," she said and darted an anxious look at the blond fat face of the clock on the mantelshelf.She had forgotten all about the time.
It was Gleave who opened the door, Gleave the bald-headed manservant who had grown old along with his master with the same resentfulness--the ex-prizefighter, sailor, lumberman and adventurer who had thrown in his lot with Cumberland Ludlow, the sportsman, when both were in the full flush of middle age.His limp, the result of an epoch-making fight in an Australian mining camp, was emphasized by severe rheumatism, and the fretfulness of old age was heightened by his shortness of breath.
He got no further than: "Your grandfather--""I know," said Joan."I'm late again.And there'll be a row, Isuppose.Well, that will break the monotony, at any rate." Seizing the moment when Gleave was wrestling with his cough, she slipped her letter into her desk, rubbed her face vigorously with her handkerchief and made a dart at the door.Grandfather Ludlow demanded strict punctuality and made the house shake if it failed him.What he would have said if he could have seen this eager, brown-haired, vivid girl, built on the slim lines of a wood nymph, swing herself on to the banisters and slide the whole way down the wide stairway would have been fit only for the appreciative ears of his faithful man.As it was, Mrs.Nye, the housekeeper, was passing through the hall, and her gasp at this exhibition of unbecoming athletics was the least that could be expected from one who still thought in the terms of the crinoline and had never recovered from the habit of regarding life through the early-Victorian end of the telescope.
Joan slipped into Mr.Cumberland Ludlow's own room, shut the door quickly and picked her way over the great skins that were scattered about the polished floor.
"Good morning, Grandfather," she said, and stood waiting for the storm to break.She knew by heart the indignant remarks about the sloppiness of the younger generation, the dire results of modern anarchy and the universal disrespect that stamped the twentieth century, and set her quick mind to work to frame his opening sentence.
But the old man, whose sense of humor was as keen as ever, saw in the girl's half-rebellious, half-deferential attitude an impatient expectation of his usual irritation, and so he merely pointed a shaking finger at the clock.His silence was far more eloquent and effective than his old-fashioned platitudes.He smiled as he saw her surprise, indicated a chair and gave her the morning paper."Go ahead, my dear," he said.
Sitting bolt upright, with her back to the shaded light, her charming profile with its little blunt nose and rounded chin thrown up against the dark glistening oak of an old armoire, Joan began to read.Her clear, high voice seemed to startle the dead beasts whose heads hung thickly around the room and bring into their wide, fixed eyes a look of uneasiness.
Several logs were burning sulkily in the great open fireplace, throwing out a pungent, juicy smell.The aggressive tick of an old and pompous clock endeavored to talk down the gay chatter of the birds beyond the closed windows.The wheeze of a veteran Airedale with its chin on the head of a lion came intermittently.
They made a picture, these two, that fitted with peculiar rightness into the mood of Nature at that moment.Youth was king, and with all his followers had clambered over winter and seized the earth.The red remainders of autumn were almost over-powered.Standing with his hands behind him and his back to the fire, the old sportsman listened, with a queer, distrait expression, to the girl's reading.
That he was still putting up a hard fight against relentless Time was proved by his clothes, which were those of a country-lover who dressed the part with care.A tweed shooting-coat hung from his broad, gaunt shoulders.Well-cut riding breeches, skin tight below his knees, ran into a pair of brown top-boots that shone like glass.
A head and shoulders taller than the average tall man, his back was bent and his chest hollow.His thin hair, white as cotton wool, was touched with brilliantine, and his handsome face, deeply lined and wrinkled, was as closely shaved as an actor's after three o'clock.
His sunken eyes, overshadowed by bushy brows, had lost their fire.