The Court Adjourns. A novel

Front matter

DIGBY'S POPULAR NOVEL SERIES Crown Svo, Jiandsome cloth, price -zs. 6d. per Vol.^ Each Book contains about 320 pp., and is printed on superior paper from new type. Those marked • may be had in Picture Boards at us. THE BEAUTIFUL SOUL. By FLORENCE MARRYAT. Author of 4 A Fatal Silence,' &c. [fust Published. THE OTHER BOND. By DORA RUSSELL. Author of 4 A Hidden Chain,' &c. [fust Published. A LIFE FOR A LOVE. By L. T. MEADE. Author of 4 The Medicine Lady,' &c. [fust Published. FALSE PRETENCES. By ANNIE THOMAS (Mrs. Pendee Cudlip). Author of 4A Girl's Folly,' 4A Lover of the Day,' &c. [Just Published. HER LOVING SLAVE. By HUME NISBET. Author of 4 The Jolly Roger,' 4 Bail Up,' &c. With Illustrations by the Author. [fust Published, *DR. JANET OF HARLEY STREET. By ARABELLA KEN E ALY. Author of 4 Some Men are such Gentlemen,' 4 The Honourable Mrs. Spoor.' [Seventh Edition, •THE MYSTERY OF CLEMENT DUNRAVEN.

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Chapter I

The tennis set in progress on Major Harding's lawn had for the moment assumed a prominent rank among the spectacles of Crayford, a place where distractions were few and valued. The white balls glinted across the green with a refreshing energy, or thudded against the net in the critical moment of hope, to drop resignedly on the turf ; the four players darted about with an inter minable vigour, or else with the desperately sanguine bustle appropriate to the wearers of voluminous skirts ; and, at least in the earlier games, there was the promise of a struggle such as the English race finds pleasurable above all things. But the man on the other side of the net soon proved too good — a tall wiry person, rattling the ball back with deadly precision into unreachable corners, and terribly quick and lithe in dealing with returns that his opponent might have flattered himself on — a rather fascinating figure on the whole, with his hand some, alert face, and the gallant carriage of his body, playing his game with an easy mastery, which was not altogether swagger, nor quite easily distinguishable from it.

An irritating person to play against, as was probably thought on the other side of the net, where a less effective male played on with a grim British stubbornness in the face of defeat, exhausting himself in pursuit of those ugly strokes in the left-hand corner, with an energy hardly appreciated by his partner, the pretty dark-haired girl, whose slim figure was rapidly losing its buoyancy of move ment, and assuming an air of openly-confessed nonchalance. Meanwhile the victor's partner, the auburn-haired girl, whose own play was quite hopelessly ineffective, looked naturally radiant with satisfaction. Before long there was no question about the result. Such, evidently, was the conviction of an elderly gentleman in flannels, who had taken his station at the net, and begun to call the score with a certain pomp, and with an air of almost magisterial dignity on his rubicund face.

His announcement of the points now came only at eccentric intervals ; forty-love, for choice, proclaimed with sonorous gravity, which lost its due effect a little in the face of frequent correction. Discomfited at length, the elderly gentleman strolled away to rejoin his less active guests, for he was, in fact, Major Harding j.p. himself, the master of the house, and a personage of the first importance in Crayford. And apart from the ineffably prosperous air he had, his social distinction was sufficiently proclaimed by the well-tended genial look of the spacious old-fashioned garden, with the solid red-brick house, one corner warmly glowing in the sun, half concealed among trees. Still more was it proclaimed by the number of people assisting at the spectacle, seated mostly about the precincts of the tennis court, and in the comfortable neighbourhood of a table loaded with claret-cup, and other refreshments calculated to give point to the gathering.

There were, perhaps, thirty assembled on the lawn, and if the majority consisted of persons who quite eschewed tennis, and preferred tea as a stimulus to the rekindling of the perennial interests of conversation, it must still be said that for Crayford this gathering was magnifi cently representative. Major Harding moved about among his guests with a cheerful importance, nodding graciously to various tennis players who were now compos ing themselves after their labours, and proceeded in search of persons possessing a weightier claim to the honours of a sustained conversation. These he found apparently in two ladies, who were engaged in regarding the game with that unperturbed serenity, which seems to descend — heaven knows whence — on people who have philosophically relinquished their last claim to youth.

Besides this serenity, which they had in common, the lady who seemed the elder of the two, and whom one divined in a moment to be a prosperously married woman, had a healthy pink complexion, making a singular harmony of tint with her greyish hair and the pale lilac gown, which she not uncourageously wore — with an indefinably complacent poise, too — and brown eyes looking out on the world with an air of not being on speaking terms with its problems or other irregularities. The other, if, perhaps, without that stamp of local sovereignty about her, had a kind of distinction, which came from the firmness of the aquiline features beneath her confessedly iron-grey hair, with grey eyes, too, that had a strong, and, perhaps, very easily a hilarious life in their depths. One could divine a certain very human intelligence in their owner, and a possibility of irony as well : but on these occasions Miss Plowright displayed her cleverness largely by her reserve.

The majestic lady in lilac beamed with politeness as the Major approached. " What a charming party, Major Harding," she exclaimed ; "we were just remarking on it. Really, everyone in Crayford is here." " Very good of you to say so, Mrs. Daldy, I 'm sure," the host responded, with a complacent glance at the miscellaneous thirty around him. "Satisfactory thing to have everybody, you know, if you 'vc got room for them. There was one disappointment, by the way, though — had some hopes of seeing young Sir Walter Grayling, you know, this afternoon, but he 's non inventus — not appeared, I mean." The slight drop of the Major's voice made it apparent that the disappointment was not wholly a phrase. " Ah, yes, what a pity ! " Mrs. Daldy said, in her eminently measured accents : " but then we were only talking of Crayford people, you know."

The touch was velvety, but none the less it was a correction to overweening ambition, and the Major looked a trifle disconcerted. "Excuse me. I fancy I see the Vicar just come in ; positively I must look after him, or he may get wandering all over the tennis court," the gallant host exclaimed, and retired to show discreet attention to the cleric, whose innocence of worldly things was a Crayford proverb. " So much nicer to keep just among one's own people," Mrs. Daldy murmured to the lady next her. " Just so, if one hasn't what one likes, one must like what one has," Miss Plowright answered, perhaps a little maliciously, for Mrs. Daldy 's own parties were made up strictly on the principle she enunciated. " As you 're so dreadfully clever, dear Miss Plowright : I 'm not sure if I quite follow that," she responded cheerfully.

" But don't you think this is a very interesting game ? Not that I know anything about games — only I rather understand that both these men are a little — well — epris" — Mrs. Daldy pronounced the word with a dignified hesitation — "about Edith Harding, and she playing, too ; it 's very interesting, isn't it ? " " Oh, is the game a tournament ? That would be one way of deciding things, wouldn't it ? and perhaps as good as some others," said Miss Plowright in her disconcerting way. " I believe people think too much about games as it is," Mrs. Daldy answered solemnly. " And really, Dr. Blunt does seem to me to be THE CO UR T AD JO URNS 12 playing quite badly," she continued, more seriously still. "What a curious person he is; do you think he is melancholy or only shy ? " This alternative was a current phrase in Crayford, generally believed to sum up the personal equation of Dr. Blunt ; but, happily for the interests of general conversation, no one had yet propounded a final solution.

Nor did Mrs. Daldy press for one at the moment. " Oh, here is the dear Vicar ! " she exclaimed, in the accents of pious satisfaction. The Vicar of Crayford was well advanced in middle-life, and his tall, delicate-looking person, with the student-like stoop and aquiline, yet indecisive, contour of face, bore somehow diffused over it a pacific, absent - minded expression, which some persons would have described as harmless, and others as devotional. He was believed by many to be very ascetic, and his celibacy was, of course, an established fact, but as he advanced into the sphere of Mrs. Daldy 's influence, his expression was anything but austere, and his markedly ecclesiastical features dimpled all over with a smile that was at once gentle and highly embarrassed. " How are you, Mrs. Daldy, charming after noon, yes, is it not . he ! he !

" — the Vicar tittered in the nervous way he had on venturing outside his pale — " I beg your pardon, Miss Plowright, I am sure, I failed to see who it was, he ! he ! " — and the ecclesiastical head of Cray ford contrived at length, with more bashfulness than is usually displayed by a modern school girl, to seat himself under Mrs. Daldy's protection. " Do you know, Vicar, we are watching this game with great interest," that lady said suavely, " because there is said to be a love story mixed up with it." " A game and a love story ? dear, dear," the Vicar protested, " I fear neither is a thing on which I am qualified to pronounce an opinion." " Well, one must be worldly at moments," Mrs. Daldy said encouragingly, " and then it 's Miss Harding, you see." " Oh, Miss Harding, indeed ! and who is the happy man ?

" enquired the Vicar, politely striving to be worldly for a moment, "is it her present partner, Dr. Blunt ? " "No, I should hardly think it would be Dr. Blunt," Mrs. Daldy informed him with the accent of an authority. " Ah, it isn't settled then ? " The poor man relapsed from his effort with a mildly conjectural glance. " I hope," he continued, " that it is not blameworthy to feel a somewhat weaker interest in those matters than is natural to those who have passed through the great ordeal in person." " I agree," Miss Plowright said stoutly, " fife is really too much taken up with games and love stories : it isn't fair on us grey people. But perhaps it 's as well to discuss the marriages that are going to be, if it keeps us from discuss ing those that have been already." The Vicar glanced at her with a certain disquietude — there were moments when Miss Plowright seemed not altgether a safe person — and the conversation remained stranded, till Mrs. Daldy succeeded in guiding him safely into a discussion on the proposed new reredos, the subscription list for which had so long been open.

Presently the set was over, having ended, of course, in the triumph of the agile youth and his ineffectual partner. The players strolled back into the ranks of the general assembly, and as they met, the conqueror turned lightly to address the pretty dark-haired girl, now slightly estranged from her own cavalier by the disaster they had recently shared. " Jolly game, isn't it, Miss Harding ? " the former said buoyantly, " your court is the best in Crayford by a long ' chalk.' " " I don't know, some people like Mrs. Daldy's best," the young lady said, in a half conciliated tone. " I fancy one plays about as true as the other," the young man said — his tone revealing the fact that he was an authority on the point, " but then I like your background. It doesn't look like a bit cut out from a meadow with a black fence shoved up round it — there 's a kind of shady distance that 's rather fascinating.

I wish you would take me to explore the secret places behind the rhododendrons there. I should certainly lose myself if I ventured there alone." "I must remain at the post of duty here, you know," the girl said, toying with her racket. " But I believe you could find your way out again." " No, it 's a vast wilderness, I believe, where one would wander hopelessly till one starved," he said, with a comic intention. " Then you mustn't go, for if you were starved, Crayford tennis would collapse, and then we should all perish of mental vacuity." " There 's always Blunt to sustain the glorious sport," Maxwell said jocosely, tapping his late opponent's shoulder. " I say, old man, you weren't as brilliant as usual today; you haven't been catching the rheumatics from your patients, I hope." There was a certain touch of superiority in this address that might have been galling on the shoulders of defeat, but Dr. Blunt glanced round with a curious equanimity — with his heavily-built frame and rather impervious features, his whole physiognomy seemed to promise a rugged patience in face of a con genital want of success.

" No, I am all right — only I must inoculate you with a touch of gout before we take our revenge," he said pleasantly enough. " ' Let him that doeth evil before his Maker fall into the hand of the physician,' " Maxwell quoted hilariously. " But I bet you don't know the authority that comes from. Do you, Miss Harding . No ? — but that's a confession, though, for they read it in Church. I trust the Vicar isn't listening to my profanity." The Vicar had already escaped from the mundane influences of the garden party, and the rest of the Crayford aristocracy were now streaming away in a little spasmodic proces sion across the warm emerald streaks of evening light, dappling the halfshaded turf between the tennis - court and the house. Major Harding was throwing his farewells right and left with an immense cordiality, but his daughter had not detached herself from the small group composed of the four recent B players, the two men both lingering on to share a conversation much broken by the inroads of people who felt it incumbent on them to say, "Good evening" to "dear Miss Harding," and reduplicate their expressions of gratitude for the extreme pleasure they had derived from the afternoon.

" You ought to have a summer dance here, Miss Harding, and hang Burmese lamps among the trees ! " Maxwell was saying. " It would be like something in the ' Arabian Nights,' you know." "It would be too lovely!" both girls ex claimed at once. " And a novelty in Crayford — the first for twenty years," added the possessor of the auburn hair. "It might be made pretty, and it's only a fair ransom to pay for having a garden like this," Mr. Maxwell said, continuing to enlarge, with great imaginative force, on the effect of coloured lanterns among foliage, and mean while Dr. Blunt stood by, with the hope deferred of an opening that might arrive. But it failed to arrive, or if it did, required more agility of wit than the Doctor perhaps pos sessed to take advantage of it, for Maxwell's eloquence held the field until the four were left solitary in the garden.

" Coming my way, Blunt ! " he said then, with that easy, masterful touch of his on the other's shoulder, and since all the world had only one way from Major Harding's house to Crayford, the Doctor had plainly no choice but to accompany him. Thus left alone, the two girls composed themselves on one of the garden seats for a secret debate. "What a turmoil of excitement!" one ex claimed. "And everyone in Crayford here!" said the other, in a curious, mimicking tone. And then, for some mysterious reason, they both broke at once into silvery laughter. Edith Harding herself seemed scarcely to be a young lady of the essentially facetious type. With her tall, reed -like figure, and finely - moulded features, just a trifle too girlish to be Greek, she was, indeed, rather daintily imposing, and her full grey eyes, be neath a brow amply rounded, even if the youthful abundance of hair covered it too low for any air of intellectual weight, still pos sessed a significance and pleasant gravity not altogether common.

And naturally, that air of the young goddess she had, with only her four - and - twenty summers behind her, was vague and undecided as yet, with the poten tiality of fine and womanly things visible in it certainly, and traces of the kitten stage of youth visible in it too, and in her quick, light movements especially, leaving one's impression a little insecure. Her companion, Ethel Hargreave, the young lady of the auburn hair, looked a year or two older, and looked also a plighted member of the facetious order ; a rather acutely glancing pair of eyes and a mobile, puckering mouth gave her completely the expression which Crayford folk described as "quizzical," an epithet aptly hitting off the function in life to which Miss Ethel had, to all appearance, devoted herself. Even allowing for the narrow range of selection offered by Crayford, the fact that these two were intimate friends was curious — a little disconcerting, perhaps, to one's triumphant reading of our odd, many facetted humanity.

"All Crayford here!" Miss Ethel repeated lugubriously. "As if all Crayford wouldn't come to anything that was going on. But I know one person who wasn't here, Edith, that was your poor friend, little Simpson." "Oh! poor little Simpson, I didn't want to have him asked, you know," Edith said, with an effort to respect a pathetic subject. Her friend clearly found the subject piquant. "Oh, Edith! ever since you refused him," she broke out hilariously, " he has done nothing but career about on his bicycle, looking so fierce, with his little person all double." "Yes, I know; sometimes I meet him in his furious course " — the gentle Edith failed to resist the comic suggestions of the picture — " and then he glares stonily in front of him as though he was rushing into the jaws of death, and takes no notice of me whatever."

"I know. Like Captain Hatteras looking for the North Pole. I believe he thinks that if he can ride to London — is it a hundred miles or two hundred? I always forget — then you will relent." The girls joined in a silvery ripple of laughter. " Poor little thing," Edith said penitently. " Oh, but such an impossible little thing, with his arms and legs jumping about like galvanic wires ! But isn't it cruel, what a famine of men there is in Crayford ? " the mercurial Ethel went on gaily, "and no rein forcement ever comes, that is, no one since Mr. Maxwell, who, of course, was a perfect godsend. Don't you think so ? I think he is delightful myself." ' ' I think he sparkles so much on the surface that one can't tell what's behind," Edith said judicially, on which Miss Ethel inclined her quaint little head on one side, and considered her roguishly for some moments.

" You are thinking about him very seri ously," she observed. "Now confess." " But there 's nothing to confess." Edith shook her head, smiling ; but a moment after a far-off look came into her eves, and she gazed across the sunny grass and brilliant flower beds with a very curious wistfulness. " Nothing really ? " her friend persisted. " No, nothing." "Then why look so mournful ? " Ethel queried triumphantly. "Because — oh, don't you know? Doesn't all this seem very empty to you somehow, all this round of tennis parties and dances, with just the same faces coming in again, like a set of old pictures — always these little amusements, and a few poor old women to visit in between, as if one took them like a drop of medicine, and always the same existence, and always about nothing." " How very tragical, dear Edith, and how very amusing of you, seeing it's just a matter of course."

"Ah! but I mean don't you remember when a dance quite set you all ablaze, when one thought about it with a thrill for days beforehand, and it seemed too delightful to be true ! Even a tennis party used to seem splendid, though, of course, one pretended to take them casually. And now one doesn't have to pretend," Edith ended almost pathetically. "What business have you to be feeling such things ? " Miss Ethel enquired sternly. "There's always a way of escape for you." Edith shivered a little. " One isn't driven to that yet," she said defiantly. " But there 's a chance of escape for you, too," she added laughing, suddenly recovering all her brightness with that turn of the subject. "Oh, I don't count in that race," Ethel said grimacing, as though to express complete scorn of her own attractions.

" Whatever happens to me is certain to be quite humdrum, quite provincial. I feel like settling down by the fire to be cosy for the winter." "That would be so restful," Edith responded. " I feel like going out to sea, out into a horizon all covered with clouds. " Oh, how gloomy we are ! Do cheer up, and let 's pull our friends to pieces a little. Let me see, who is there wants criticising ? " — the malign young person pondered a moment over the embarrassing choice. " I know, of course, Dr. Blunt," she cried with a happy inspiration — " let 's criticise him. We can take it for granted he is shy, and I don't wonder at it, for a clumsier creature never was, and as dull as a turnpike road besides. And it isn't as if he was really vacant, like poor little S., I believe he is rather clever at science and those impossible things, but he just choses to keep his wisdom to himself.

Not that one wants his wisdom, far from it, but it 's so aggravating, you know, that silence of superi ority. He is so precisely a man ! " " Do you know I have the bad taste to like him rather," Edith said, when the torrent of her eloquence was dry. " Somehow he seems to me so real." "I know just what you mean — there's a sort of honest look in his eyes, like a good dog. But think how indescribably stupid he must feel all those evenings he spends at home. He must be wonderfully relieved when some of his patients are quite at the last gasp." " I fancy he prefers science to billiards," Edith said, with a touch of primness. " Which do you like best, Edith, him or Mr. Maxwell ? " her friend asked, with an innocent irrelevance. " Suppose I haven't troubled to make the comparison," said Edith, rather loftily.

" I shan't suppose anything so ridiculous," the other replied, with great vigour. "You know perfectly well they are the two." " The dread alternative ! " Edith shook her fair young head with a singular air of remote ness from all that. " Yes, of course, and I am burning to know which you will take." " It 's very kind of you to be so concerned," Edith said demurely. " It 's natural, of course, which means horribly selfish. Don't you see, whichever you take, the other's left as hope's beacon for me, so I can't help being curious." And Ethel Hargreave said all this with the little self-depreciatory grimace she had, like a young woman who had perfectly measured the chances of existence held out to her with a sort of cool perspicacity, which nourished no young ladyish illusions, and an absence of vanity, for which she compensated herself by a little tang of cynicism that seemed as natural to her as breathing.

And without either money or beauty, she somehow derived a fair share of satisfaction from life, and that without even being compelled to fall back on the refuge provided by piety, or self-devotion to any of the various " causes " that are beneath the sun. "You see," she concluded, "there aren't more than three marriageable men in Crayford, all told, and here we are, and life, you observe, is life. Dear me, sometimes one washes it was something different." And so, with a farewell to Edith Harding, kindly enough to seem odd in her, she took her way homewards, carrying her mystery with her, to the little house in that less brilliant quarter of Crayford down by the bridge where the Hargreave family had so long crowded together, and squabbled, and subsisted. Observant acquaintances fancied that you must always have some one else's elbows running into you in that house; and, indeed, the Hargreave family was typically British, in so far that it had steadily increased for a considerable number of years, while the income it had to subsist on as steadily diminished.

But Miss Ethel still seemed to hold on her way with a species of rejoicing. Things were vastly different in the big warm tinted house, where Edith Harding and her father, the major, lived together with so much space to spare in those ample, rather solemnly extensive rooms and that generous expanse of garden, that their existence, comparatively speaking, was almost a solitude. The major had long since retired from warlike pursuits, and — as one might surmise from his majestic manner — had devoted himself to the problems of local government with an assiduity that was only equalled by his importance. Although all Crayford called him so, he was not, precisely speaking, a real major, having, in fact, acquired that title in the militia, and therefore, perhaps, he bore it a shade more boisterously than would otherwise have been the case.

In Crayford he was imperial ; he was chairman of everything a man could be chairman of, and he bore his dignities with an ever fresh contentment. Probably Major Harding needed little outside Crayford ; he very seldom left the borough for long, and having a daughter at home to charm his moments of comparative relapse, we may believe he had at least his share of felicity.

Chapter II

Crayford was an entirely insignificant place, merely one of the small struggling towns that are counted in their hundreds up and down the United Kingdom, and remain to the general public a name hidden away in the obscurer pages of Bradshaw. To its inhabitants, it was naturally a warm focus of existence, possessing at least that kind of attraction which habit subtly interweaves with the homely look of streets one has walked through the wet or fine of the dimly accumulating years, and shops where one's small habitual purchases have been made, till the narrow range of choice and the insuper able limitations of our purse, have alike come to be matters of a mutual and amicable under standing. But even among its inhabitants, those who were touched by some remote emanation of the modern spirit — a spirit which seems to travel farthest in its least inviting forms — had, of recent years, exchanged the old-fashioned local patriotism for a more or less tolerant recognition of a certain absurdity about the stagnant little place, and regarded themselves as its victims rather than its citizens.

Of visitors there were practically none, and indeed the most loyal of the Crayford folk shrugged their shoulders at the idea of any one coming there without a strong degree of compulsion. Lying far down in the eastern Midlands, Crayford was surrounded by a country very largely given up to pasture, bare fields with their sparse hedgerows rolling on indefinitely, green in spring, but verging through the long months of winter to a dull greyish hue. Monotonous always in their chessboard regularity, for that parsimonious region eschewed anything of the nature of wood, and the vaguely undulating sweep of it was only broken by the trees that lined the hedges at regular intervals, exposing their smallness against the sky-line with a certain air of unexpectant poverty. From time to time young people at Crayford had set themselves with a desperate idealism to believe that Nature was beautiful ; but these rare spirits had generally seen the light rather in the middle part of the present century, and now that they had been abroad or grown old, Nature was generally regarded there as a little depressing, as a stolid barrier inter posed between oneself and the distractions of London.