We Two [156]
"Why, father, the very greenhouse will belong to you; and such a nice piece of garden! Oh, when can we go and see it, and choose a nice room for your study?"
"I will see Mr. Woodward's executor tomorrow morning," said Raeburn. "The sooner we move in the better for there are rocks ahead."
"The 'we' refers only to you and Erica," said Aunt Jean, who had joined them. "Tom and I shall of course stay on here."
"Oh, no, auntie!" cried Erica in such genuine dismay that Aunt Jean was touched.
"I don't want you to feel at all bound to have us," she said. "Now that the worst of the poverty is over, there is no necessity for clubbing together."
"And after you have shared all the discomforts with us, you think we should go off in such a dog-in-the-mangerish way as that!" cried Erica. "Besides, it really was chiefly owing to Tom, who was the one to get hurt into the bargain. "If you won't come, I shall--" she paused to think of a threat terrible enough "I shall think again about living with the Fane-Smiths."
This led the conversation back to Greyshot, and they lingered so long round the fire talking that Raeburn was for once unpunctual, and kept an audience at least ten minutes waiting for him.
No. 16 Guilford Square proved to be much better inside than a casual passer in the street would have imagined. Outside, it was certainly a grim-looking house, but within it was roomy and comfortable. The lower rooms were wainscoted in a sort of yellowish-brown color, the upper wainscoted in olive-green. There was no such thing as a wall paper in the whole house, and indeed it was hard to imagine, when once inside it, that you were in nineteenth-century London at all.
Raeburn, going over it with Erica the following evening, was a little amused to think of himself domiciled in such an old-world house. Mr. Woodward's housekeeper, who was still taking care of the place, assured them that one of the leaden pipes outside bore the date of the seventeenth century, though the two last figures were so illegible that they might very possibly have stood for 1699.
Erica was delighted with it all, and went on private voyages of discovery, while her father talked to the housekeeper, taking stock of the furniture, imagining how she would rearrange the rooms, and planning many purchases to be made with her three hundred pounds. She was singing to herself for very lightness of heart when her father called her from below. She rand down again, checking her inclination to sing as she remembered the old housekeeper, who had but recently lost her master.
"I've rather set my affections on this room," said Raeburn, leading her into what had formerly been the dining room.
"The very place where I came in fear and trembling to make my confession," said Erica, laughing. "This would make a capital study."
"Yes, the good woman has gone to fetch an inch tape; I want to measure for the book shelves. How many of my books could I comfortably house in here, do you think?"
"A good many. The room is high, you see; and those two long, unbroken walls would take several hundred. Ah! Here is the measuring tape. Now we can calculate."
They were hard at work measuring when the door bell rang, and Tom's voice was heard in the passage, asking for Raeburn.
"This way, Tom!" called Erica. "Come and help us!"
But a laughing reference to the day of their childish disaster died on her lips when she caught sight of him for she knew that something was wrong. Accustomed all her life to live in the region of storms, she had learned to a nicety the tokens of rough weather.
"Hazeldine wishes to speak to you," said Tom, turning to Raeburn. "I brought him round here to save time."
"Oh! All right," said Raeburn, too much absorbed in planning the arrangement of his treasures to notice the unusual graveness of Tom's face. "Ask him in here. Good evening, Hazeldine. You are the first to see us in our new quarters."
Hazeldine bore traces of having lived from his childhood a hard but sedentary life. He was under-sized and narrow