“Already, the fact that the great Cowperwood is my guardian has gotten around. My furniture mover wanted to know if my guardian and the American millionaire talked of in the Chronicle were the same person.
I had to admit it.
But Arthur Tavistock seems to think it natural enough for me to have so distinguished a mentor.”
Cowperwood smiled.
“I suppose you’ve considered the servants and what they are likely to think.”
“I certainly have, dearest!
Troublesome, but necessary.
That is the reason I want us to take the trip.
Now, if you’re rested I want to show you something interesting.”
And she smiled as she signaled Cowperwood to follow her.
She led the way to a bedroom which was beyond the central hall, opened a bureau drawer and extracted from it a pair of hairbrushes, with the coat of arms of the Earl of Stane engraved on the silver backs; also a stray collar button, and several hairpins.
“If hairpins could be identified as easily as hairbrushes, these things might prove a romance,” she said, mischievously.
“But the noble lord’s secret is going to be kept by me.”
At that moment, from under the trees surrounding the cottage, came the sound of a sheep bell.
“There!” she exclaimed, as it ceased.
“When you hear that, wherever you are, you’re to come to dinner.
It’s going to take the place of a bowing butler.”
The trip, as Berenice planned it, was to start south from London, with perhaps a stop at Rochester, and then on to Canterbury.
After paying homage to that exquisite poem in stone, they were to motor to some modest streamside inn on the river Stour—no great hotel or resort to break the aesthetic simplicity of this tour—where they would enjoy a room with a fire and the simplest of English fare.
For Berenice had been reading Chaucer and books on these English cathedrals, and she hoped to recapture the spirit in which they were conceived.
From Canterbury they would go to Winchester, and from there to Salisbury, and from Salisbury to Stonehenge; from thence to Wells, Glastonbury, Bath, Oxford, Peterborough, York, Cambridge, and then home again.
But always, as she insisted, the purely conventional was to be avoided. They were to seek the smallest of inns and the simplest of villages.
“It will be good for us,” she insisted. “We pamper ourselves too much.
If you study all these lovely things, you may build better subways.”
“And you ought to be content with simple cotton dresses!” said Cowperwood.
For Cowperwood, the real charm of their vacation trip was not the cathedrals or the village cottages and inns. It was the changeful vividness of Berenice’s temperament and tastes that held him.
There was not a single woman of his acquaintance who, given a choice of Paris and the Continent in early May, would have selected the cathedral towns of England.
But Berenice was apart from others in that she seemed to find within herself the pleasures and fulfilments which she most craved.
At Rochester, they listened to a guide who talked of King John, William Rufus, Simon de Montfort, and Watt Tyler, all of whom Cowperwood dismissed as mere shadows, men or creatures who had once had their day and selfish notions of one kind or another and had moved on to pass into nothing, as would all who were here.
He liked better the sunlight on the river and the sense of spring in the air.
Even Berenice seemed a little disappointed at the somewhat commonplace view.
But at Canterbury the mood of all changed greatly, even that of Mrs. Carter, who was by no means interested in religious architecture.
“Well, now, I like this place,” she commented, as they entered one of its winding streets.
“I want to find out by which road the pilgrims came,” said Berenice.
“I wonder if it was this one.
Oh, look, there’s the cathedral!” and she pointed to a tower and spandril visible above the low roof of a stone cottage.
“Lovely!” commented Cowperwood.
“And a delightful afternoon for it, too. Do we have lunch first, or feast on the cathedral instead?”
“The cathedral first!” replied Berenice.
“And eat a cold lunch afterwards, I suppose,” put in her mother, sarcastically.
“Mother!” chided Berenice. “And at Canterbury, of all places!”
“Well, I happen to know something of these English inns, and I know how important it is not to be last if we can’t be the first,” said Mrs. Carter.
“And there you have the power of religion in 1900!” remarked Cowperwood.
“It must wait on a country inn.”
“I haven’t a word to say against religion,” persisted Mrs. Carter, “but churches are different. They haven’t a thing to do with it.”
Canterbury.
The tenth-century close, with its rabble of winding streets, and within its walls, silence and the stately, time-blackened spires, pinnacles, and buttresses of the cathedral itself.
Jackdaws fluttering and quarreling over the vantage points.
Within, a welter of tombs, altars, tablets, shrines: Henry IV, Thomas a Becket, Archbishop Laud, the Huguenots, and Edward, the Black Prince.
Berenice could scarcely be drawn away.