Hillyard

“ But Hillyard had learnt to hold his tongue when he had only inspirations to go upon, and he disclosed nothing of this to Fairbairn.
Later on, when darkness had fallen, the two men drove in a motor-car southwards round the bay and through a shallow valley to the fishing village of Torrevieja. When you came upon its broad beach of shingle and sand, with its black-tarred boats hauled up, and its market booths, you might dream that you had been transported to Broadstairs—except for one fact. The houses are built in a single story, since the village is afflicted with earthquakes. ”

“ The attendant retired, and Hillyard closed the door. But the ventilating lattice in the lower part of the door was open, and Hillyard could see the legs of the attendant. He was waiting outside—waiting for what? Hillyard smiled to himself and took down his bag from the upper berth. He had hardly opened it when the attendant knocked and entered.
"You will not forget, monsieur, to bolt your door. In these days it is not wise to leave it on the latch." ”

“ Thus Hillyard took the train to Wadi Haifa in a chastened mood. Obviously the message was of very little, if indeed of any, importance. A man can hardly swing up to extravagant hopes without dropping to sarcastic self-reproaches on his flightiness and vanity. ”

“ Hillyard sat up in his chair. He had been four days in London, and the engrossing menace of those days had quite thrust from his recollections the telegram which had, as he thought, befooled him.
"The friend of mine is possibly Paul Bendish," he said stiffly.
"Think that was the name. Graham's the man I am speaking of," and the sailor paused. "Commodore Graham," he added.
Hillyard's indignation ebbed away. What if he had not been fooled? The quenched hopes kindled again in him. There was all this talk of war—alarums and excursions as the stage-directions had it. Service! ”

“ Hillyard rose and took his hat.
"Well, I am very grateful to you, Mr. Hillyard," said Graham. "I can't say anything more to you now. Things, as you know, are altogether very doubtful. We may slip over into smooth water. On the other hand," and he twiddled his thumbs serenely, "we may be at war in a month. If that were to be the case, I might want to talk with you again. Will you leave your address with Miss Chayne?"
Hillyard was led out by another door, no doubt so that he might not meet the impatient admiral. ”

“ Hillyard shook his head.
"No good," he answered. "I told you my lungs were my weak point. I am turned down—and I am going abroad. It's not very pleasant to find oneself staying on in London, going to a little dinner party here and there where all the men are oldish, when all of one's friends have gone."
Stella Croyle's face and voice softened. ”

“ Khartum had at all events stated "There is a cablegram." At Alexandria the statement became a question: "Is there a cablegram?" In the end a weary and indifferent gentleman unearthed it. He did not show it to Hillyard, but held it in his hand and looked over the top of it and across a roll-top desk at the inquirer.
"Yes, yes. This seems to be what you are asking about. It is for us, you know"—this with a patient smile as Hillyard's impatient hand reached out for it. "Do you know a man called Bendish—Paul Bendish?"
"Bendish?" cried Hillyard. "He was my tutor at Oxford." ”

“ Hillyard was speculating for the twentieth time on these important matters with a vague hope that one day the door of the sedan chair would open, when another door opened—the door of the restaurant. A sharp-visaged man with a bald forehead, a clerk, one would say, or a commercial traveller, looked round the room and went forward to Hillyard's table. ”

“ Hillyard leaned from his donkey and took the carbine from the postman's hand. It was an ancient thing of Spanish manufacture, heavy as a pig of lead.
"But this can't be of any use," he cried. "Is the man never attacked?"
Hamet talked with the Arab in a dialect Hillyard did not understand at all; and interpreted the conversation.
"No. He has only once fired his rifle. One night—oh, a long way farther to the south—he waked up to see an elephant fighting his little donkey in the moonlight and he fired his rifle and the elephant ran away. ”

“ Hillyard selected the camel on which they were packed and Rayne called a Sudanese sergeant to take them into the mess.
"Now we will go upstairs. I expect that you can do with a whisky-and-soda," he said.
Hillyard was presented to a Doctor Mayle, who was conducting a special research into the cause of an obscure fever; and to the other officers of this headquarters of a Province. They were all young, Hillyard himself was older than any of them.
"Oh, we have got some married ones, too," said Rayne, "but they live in houses of their own like gentlefolk." ”

“ Once more the company laughed at Sir Chichester's apology for his foible.
Lady Splay turned to Hillyard.
"And who is the ingenious man who discovered this way of keeping the peace at Senga?"
Hillyard suddenly hesitated.
"A great friend of mine," he answered with his eyes on Millie Splay's face. "He was with me at Oxford. A Captain Luttrell."
But it was clear almost at once that the name had no associations in Lady Splay's mind. She preferred to entertain her friends in the country than to live in town. She knew little of what gossip might run the streets of London ”

“ I think you should pack your affs. and hurry along to Senga, where I shall expect you." Martin Hillyard folded the letter and put it away in his pocket.
"He will find food in our camp," he said to Hamet, with a nod towards the postman. "We may as well go on."
Even if he returned to camp at once, it would be too late to start that day. The sun would be high long before the baggage could be packed upon the camels. The little party went on to the creek and built a tiny house of reeds and boughs, in which Hillyard sat down to wait for the deer to gather. ”

“ The thoughtful soul to solitude retires"
Stella Croyle quoted the verses gaily, and Hillyard, lost in the anticipation of his journey, never noticed that the gaiety rang false.
"And where are you going?" she asked. ”

“ For a year the great house rising on the summit of Prospect Hill had been an object of interest and observation, and a chief subject for talk to the quiet country neighborhood surrounding it. Hillsdale was an old town—a still, steady-going farming place—where the young men ploughed the unwilling fields, and coaxed reluctant crops out of the hard-hearted New England soil, as fathers and grandfathers had done before them. But in all the generations since the town was settled, no one had ever thought of building on Prospect Hill. ”

“ Hillborough is reached by turning in a further mile to the right, off the high road, at a point where a meadow is situated locally known as “Palmer’s Piece.” Palmer, it appears, was a farmer who drowned his wife in the Avon, and was gibbeted on this spot for the crime.
A mile’s journey along narrow roads, down towards the river, brings the pilgrim to Hillborough. Now Hillborough is not a village: it is not even a hamlet, p. 154and is indeed nothing but the remaining wing of an old manor-house, now a farm, and in a very solitary situation. ”

“ An innate passion for all that was thus distinguished and exceptional made her revere Hillbridge as the native soil of those intellectual amenities that were of such difficult growth in the thin air of East Onondaigua. At the first suggestion of a visit to Hillbridge--whither she went at the invitation of a girl friend who (incredible apotheosis!) had married one of the University professors--Claudia's spirit dilated with the sense of new possibilities. ”

“ Early impressions are lasting; and among the images that frequently recurred to the memory of our hero, were those of a certain old farm-house in the interior of Pennsylvania, and its kind and simple-hearted inhabitants. The farmer, whose name was Abraham Hilliard, had been in the practice of occasionally bringing to Philadelphia a wagon-load of excellent marketing, and stopping with his team at the doors of several genteel families, his unfailing customers. ”

“ It is usually dark when the shabby little narrow-gauge train brings us home to Hillsboro from wanderings in the great world, and the big pond by the station is full of stars. Up on the hill the lights of the village twinkle against the blurred mass of Hemlock Mountain, and above them the stars again. It is very quiet, the station is black and deserted, the road winding up to the village glimmers uncertainly in the starlight, and dark forms hover vaguely about. Strangers say that it is a very depressing station at which to arrive, but we know better. ”

“ Hilliard did not put in his re-appearance. (Mr. Hilliard, it may be explained, was struggling with the tricky lock of his satchel, kneeling on the floor of the car.)
"If he comes back he will think we have got tired of his society," said Gerald. But presently Philip and he, holding each other's hands, were stepping airily from one beam to another of the unplanked floor of the new building.
"I suppose he hasn't found what he went for," conjectured Philip. "Suppose we climb up that stair yonder. It's certain to be breezier overhead. Mr. Hilliard will shout if he can't find us." ”

“ All of which preamble leads up to the fact that Francis Hilliston was a lawyer of the new school, despite his sixty and more years. In appearance he was not unlike a farmer, and indeed owned a few arable acres in Kent, where he played the rôle of a modern Cincinnatus. There he affected rough clothing and an interest in agricultural subjects, but in [pg 20] town in his Lincoln's Inn Fields' office he was solemnly arrayed in a frock coat with other garments to match, and conveyed into his twinkling eyes an expression of dignified learning. ”

“ A very quiet place is the Hillside; beautiful and picturesque in its environments. Sequestered like a nest among the hills, it is a sweet, wild, rural abode, every way fitted to be a child’s paradise, and the nursery and school of that species of genius which feasts on natural beauty and unfolds most successfully in solitude. ”

“ Apparently the house dates from Tudor times, but bears traces of several later additions and alterations. The interior contains an interesting survival in the shape of ascham or locker for bows and arrows in the corner of one of the oak–panelled rooms.
Hillborough seems chiefly noted nowadays for its profusion of fruit, the trees in the garden bearing such heavy crops as to necessitate their being propped in order to sustain them; whilst peaches and even grapes ripen and come to maturity on the sunny south walls as they do in few places in the county. ”

“ The Hilltop School stood on a blessed site. Lifted high above the village, it held the crest of the last gentle wave of the mountains that filled the south with crowding billows, ragged and tumultuous. Northward, the great plain lay at our feet, smiling in the sun; meadows and groves, yellow fields of harvest and green orchards, white roads and clustering towns, with here and there a little city on the bank of the mighty river which curved in a vast line of beauty toward the blue Catskill Range, fifty miles away. ”

“ It is like coming into a warmed and lighted room, full of friendly faces, after wandering long by night in a forest peopled only with flitting shadows. In the phantasmagoric pantomime of the city, we forget that there are so many real people in all the world, so diverse, so unfathomably human as those who meet us in the little post-office on the night of our return to Hillsboro.
Like any other of those gifts of life which gratify insatiable cravings of humanity, living in a country village conveys a satisfaction which is incommunicable. ”

“ It was in a place called Heath Falls, on the Connecticut River, the trader told her; but he could not find words strong enough to advise her against trying the trip.
The trail lay through thick woods, filled with all the terrors of early New Englanders—bears and wolves and catamounts. And when she got to Heath Falls, she would find it a very different place from Hillsboro, where people took you in gladly for the sake of the news you brought from the outside world. ”

“ When he set out again the rest of the village folk were all in the meeting-house. The sight of the deserted street, walled in by the forest, lying drowsily in the spring sunshine, was like balm to him. He loitered along, free from observation, his eyes shining. A fat, old negro woman sat on a doorstep in the sun, the only other person not in meeting. She was a worn-out slave, from a Connecticut seaport, who had been thrown in for good measure in a sharp bargain driven by the leading man of Hillsboro. ”

“ Mr Bostock (a younger brother of the senior partner in the famous firm of Bostocks, drapers, at Hanbridge) was lounging about the tennis-court attached to his house at Hillport. Hillport has long been known as the fashionable suburb of Bursley, and indeed as the most aristocratic quarter strictly within the Five Towns; there certainly are richer neighbourhoods not far off, but such neighbourhoods cannot boast that they form part of the Five Towns—no more than Hatfield can boast that it is part of London. ”

“ Probably you think at once of the particular New England old town you know, and imagine Hillsboro of that date as an elm-shaded, well-kept street, with big, white, green-shuttered houses, full of shining mahogany furniture and quaint old silver. But my grandmother gives an entirely different picture of old times in this corner of Vermont. Conditions here, at that time, were more as they had been in Connecticut and Massachusetts a hundred and forty years before. Indeed, the Pilgrim Fathers endured no more hardships as pioneers in a wild, new country than did the first Vermonters. ”