CHAPTER XI

GLAMOUR

Full summer had come, and with it Miss Grey.  She was not staying at the Manor, as Annie had taken a violent dislike to the idea of visitors, and Ishmael dreaded possible unpleasantness, so that he had been thankful when Blanche of her own accord suggested going into lodgings.  She wanted to bring a friend with her, she said, a girl who was peaky after too long nursing of a sick mother in London.  Therefore Vassie interviewed Mrs. Penticost, a cheery soul who rejoiced in a little old Queen Anne house called “Paradise,” a mile along the cliff-path, where it gave on the outskirts of the village.  Blanche was in raptures over the names Penticost and Paradise, and would have been in raptures over her landlady too if that worthy woman had not chosen to be rather unresponsive towards her, though frankly adoring the little friend Judith Parminter.

Judy was only nineteen, a slim, awkward girl with high cheekbones and deep-sunk hazel eyes that gave her a look not unlike that of a beautiful monkey—­so Killigrew, when he came down to take up his quarters at the inn, for a summer’s painting, declared.  He swore that Judy would be a great beauty, but that she would always be like a monkey with those deep, sad eyes and the bistre stains below them that were the only tinge of colour upon her dark skin.  She was a shy, wild creature, given to solitary roaming and much scribbling of astonishingly good poems in a little note-book.  Blanche said she had genius, and, though Blanche would have said it just then if it had been true or not, there was something not without a touch of genius animating the rough, vivid verses of the monkey-girl.  Blanche was “very fond of the little thing,” but did not see much of her.  Ishmael not unnaturally absorbed the forefront of her attention.

One day, when Blanche had been two weeks at Paradise, a morning more golden, of a stiller warmth than any yet, dawned, and she knew it would bring Ishmael over early with some plan for a picnic.  The little garden lay steeped in sunshine that turned the stonecrop on the roof to fire and made the slates iridescent as a pigeon’s breast.  The rambler that half-hid the whitewashed lintel threw over it a delicate tracery of shadow which quivered slightly as though it breathed in a charmed sleep.  Fuchsias drooped their purple and scarlet heads, dahlias, with a grape-like bloom on their velvety petals, stood stiffly staring, and against the granite wall giant sunflowers hung their heavy heads on a curve of sticky green stem.  In the sloping fields beyond the lane the stubble stood glittering and the great golden arishmows cast over it blue pools of shade.  Beyond the fields could be seen the sparkling blue of the lazily-heaving Atlantic, merging into a heat-haze which glistened with a jewel-like quality at the world’s rim.