Читать книгу Vixen - Мэри Элизабет Брэддон - Страница 4

Volume I

Chapter 1

A Pretty Horsebreaker.

The moon had newly risen, a late October moon, a pale almost imperceptible crescent, above the dark pine spires in the thicket through which Roderick Vawdrey came, gun in hand, after a long day’s rabbit-shooting. It was not his nearest way home, but he liked the broad clearing in the pine wood, which had a ghostly look at dusk, and was so still and lonely that the dart of a squirrel through the fallen leaves was a startling event. Here and there a sturdy young oak that had been newly stripped of its bark lay among the fern, like the naked corpse of a giant. Here and there a tree had been cut down and slung across the track, ready for barking. The ground was soft and spongy, slippery with damp dead leaves, and inclined in a general way to bogginess; but it was ground that Roderick Vawdrey had known all his life, and it seemed more natural to him than any other spot upon mother earth.

On the edge of this thicket there was a broad ditch, with more mud and dead fern in it than water, a ditch strongly suspected of snakes, and beyond the ditch the fence that enclosed Squire Tempest’s domain–an old manor house in the heart of the New Forest. It had been an abbey before the Reformation, and was still best known as the Abbey House.

“I wonder whether I’m too late to catch her,” speculated Roderick, shifting his bag from one shoulder to the other; “she’s no end of fun.”

In front of the clearing there was a broad five-barred gate, and beside the gate a keeper’s cottage. The flame of a newly-lighted candle flashed out suddenly upon the autumn dusk, while Roderick stood looking at the gate.

“I’ll ask at the lodge,” he said; “I should like to say good-bye to the little thing before I go back to Oxford.”

He walked quickly on to the gate. The keeper’s children were playing at nothing particular just inside it.

“Has Miss Tempest gone for her ride this afternoon?” he asked.

“Ya-ase,” drawled the eldest shock-headed youngster.

“And not come back yet?”

“Noa. If she doant take care her’ll be bogged.”

Roderick hitched his bag on to the top of the gate, and stood at ease waiting. It was late for the little lady of Tempest Manor to be out on her pony; but then it was an understood thing within a radius of ten miles or so that she was a self-willed young person, and even at fifteen years of age she had a knack of following her own inclination with that noble disregard of consequences which characterises the heaven-born ruler.

Mr. Vawdrey had not waited more than ten minutes when there came the thud of hoofs upon the soft track, a flash of gray in the distance, something flying over those forky branches sprawling across the way, then a half-sweet, half-shrill call, like a bird’s, at which the keeper’s children scattered themselves like a brood of scared chickens, and now a rush, and a gray pony shooting suddenly into the air and coming down on the other side of the gate, as if he were a new kind of skyrocket.

“What do you think of that, Rorie?” cried the shrill sweet voice of the gray pony’s rider!

“I’m ashamed of you, Vixen,” said Roderick, “you’ll come to a bad end some of these days.”

“I don’t care if I do, as long as I get my fling first,” replied Vixen, tossing her tawny mane.

She was a slim young thing, in a short Lincoln-green habit. She had a small pale face, brown eyes that sparkled with life and mischief, and a rippling mass of reddish-auburn hair falling down her back under a coquettish little felt hat.

“Hasn’t your mamma forbidden jumping, Vixen?” remonstrated Roderick, opening the gate and coming in.

“Yes, that she has, sir,” said the old groom, riding up at a jog-trot on his thickset brown cob. “It’s quite against Mrs. Tempest’s orders, and it’s a great responsibility to go out with Miss Violet. She will do it.”

“You mean the pony will do it, Bates,” cried Vixen. “I don’t jump. How can I help it if papa has given me a jumping pony? If I didn’t let Titmouse take a gate when he was in the humour, he’d kick like old boots, and pitch me a cropper. It’s an instinct of self-preservation that makes me let him jump. And as for poor dear, pretty little mamma,” continued Vixen, addressing herself to Roderick, and changing her tone to one of patronising tenderness, “if she had her way, I should be brought up in a little box wrapped in jeweller’s wool, to keep me safe. But you see I take after papa, Rorie; and it comes as natural to me to fly over gates as it does to you to get ploughed for smalls. There, Bates,” jumping off the pony, “you may take Titmouse home, and I’ll come presently and give him some apples, for he has been a dear, darling, precious treasure of a ponykins.”

She emphasised this commendation with a kiss on Titmouse’s gray nose, and handed the bridle to Bates.

“I’m going to walk home with Mr. Vawdrey,” she said.

“But, Vixen, I can’t, really,” said Roderick; “I’m due at home at this moment, only I couldn’t leave without saying good-bye to little Vix.”

“And you’re over due at Oxford, too, aren’t you?” cried Vixen, laughing; “you’re always due somewhere–never in the right place. But whether you are due or not, you’re coming up to the stables with me to give Titmouse his apples, and then you’re coming to dine with us on your last night at home. I insist upon it; papa insists; mamma insists–we all insist.”

“My mother will be as angry as–”

This is a free sample. Please purchase full version of the book to continue.