This easy view annoyed Lilias. She had a share of the Ingleton pride, and she would have liked his absence treated with more concern. She thought Mr. Bowden ought to advertise in the Agony Column of The Times, beseeching Everard to return home, but their guardian only laughed when she suggested such a course, and assured her that her brother would turn up in time when he was tired of managing for himself.
"I've been in the law for thirty years, my dear, and I know human nature better than you do," he declared indulgently.
"But you don't know Everard as I do!" protested Lilias.
She could not take Mr. Bowden's view of the case. Everard had left the Chase in such deep anger and resentment that the chances of a speedy change in his outlook seemed remote. Lilias longed to write to him, but knew of no address to which it was possible to post a letter. She worried often over his mysterious absence, and was quite angry with Dulcie for not taking the matter more keenly to heart.
"But Mr. Bowden and Cousin Clare think he's all right!" protested that easy going young damsel.
[90]"How do they know? I think you might show a little more interest in your own brother, who, after all, has been treated extremely badly. It seems to me hardly decent to circle round Carmel as you do!"
Dulcie opened her blue eyes wide.
"Do I circle round Carmel? Well, really, and why shouldn't I like her? She's my cousin, and a jolly good sort too! I believe she'll give us all a far better time at the Chase than Everard would have done. He always wanted everything just his own way. None of us ever had an innings when he was at home. I never could see why the eldest of a family should lord it so over the others."
"You never had any proper sense of propriety!" retorted Lilias indignantly. "I believe in keeping up the traditions of the Ingletons, and the estate has always descended strictly in the male line. It's only right it should have been left to Everard instead of to a girl, and I'll always say so. There!"
Dulcie shrugged her shoulders.
"Say what you like, Sister o' Mine! The twentieth century is different from the Middle Ages, and people don't bother so much nowadays as they did about descent and all that. The owner of an estate hasn't to fight for it. Oh yes, of course I'm glad I'm an Ingleton, but Carmel's[91] an Ingleton too, as much as we are, and if the Chase is hers we can't help it, and we may just as well make the best of it!"
With which piece of philosophy, Dulcie turned away, leaving Lilias to shake her head over the decay of family feeling, and the degeneracy of younger sisters.
It was perhaps Carmel's rendering of the Pastorale dance that suggested to Miss Walters a scheme of entertainment for the garden fête which the girls were to give in aid of the "Homes for Waifs and Strays." She decided that the garden of Chilcombe Hall would make an excellent background for some classic representations, and that nothing could be prettier than old Greek costumes. By a stroke of great good luck she managed to engage Miss Adams, a former pupil who had been studying classic dancing in Paris, to come for a few weeks and train the performers. Miss Adams was a tremendous enthusiast, and arrived full of ideas which she was burning to teach to the school. The girls were delighted with her methods. It was quite a new phase of dancing to trip barefooted on the lawn, holding up garlands of flowers. They liked the exercises which she gave them for the cultivation of grace, and practised classic attitudes on all occasions, with more or less success.
"You go about the school so exactly like Minerva!"[92] complained Noreen to Phillida, rather dismayed by the sudden change in her lively friend from bounding spirits to a statuesque pose. "Need you always walk as if you were thinking of the shape of your ankles?"
Phillida shook her head carefully, so as not to disarrange the Greek fillet she was wearing.
"It's been too hot lately to tear round and play tennis. I think, too, that what Miss Adams says is quite right. English girls are lacking in grace and dignity. Just look at the way Ida and Joyce are flopping about now. An artist would have fits to see them!"
"Well, of course they're not sitting for their portraits. Oh yes! I love dancing, but I don't want to worry about being graceful all day long!"
"That's just the point, though," persisted Phillida, who was a zealous convert. "The dances are to make you graceful always. You so get into the poetry of motion that it's quite impossible for you ever to flop again!"
"Is it? Oh, Kafoozalum!" burbled Noreen, exploding into a series of chuckles. "'She never flopped again!' We ought to make a parody on that from the poem of 'The White Ship.'
"Miss Adams to the school came down,
The classic wave rolled on:
And what was cricket's latest score
To those who danced alone?
[93]
"From dawn they practised attitudes
Until the sun did wane;
And fast confirmed in Grecian pose,
They never flopped again!"
"You may mock as much as you please!" retorted Phillida, "but it's sheer envy because you know you won't be chosen as a wood nymph. Play cricket and tennis if you wish, by all means! But I think when we're having a performance we may just as well give our minds to it, and do it properly, especially when Miss Adams is here to teach us."
"Right you are! Float on, O goddess! You're getting too ethereal for the school. I shall be glad when the entertainment's over, and we can have a cricket match again. It's decidedly more in my line!"
Miss Adams, with all the enthusiasm of youth and a new vocation, was determined to make the entertainment a success. She spared no trouble over constant rehearsals, and having weeded out those girls who could not adapt themselves to her methods, she kept the rest well at work in any time that was available. She determined not only to have dances, but to give in addition a short Greek play, and selected for that purpose the famous fifteenth idyll of Theocritus.
"But we're not to act it in Greek, surely!" objected Edith in alarm.
[94]"It's bad enough to have to learn French plays! We'd never be able to tackle Greek!" urged Dulcie, absolutely aghast.
"Don't look so scared!" laughed Miss Adams. "I'm not going to ask you to give it in Greek. Probably few people would understand it if you did! I have a delightful translation here. It ought to take very well indeed with the audience. Come and squat on the grass, and I'll read it aloud to you first, and then I'll allot parts."
"Is it very stiff and educational?" groaned Dulcie, obeying unwillingly.
"Wait and see! Come under the shade of the lilac bush, it's so hot to sit in the sun."
The girls composed themselves into attitudes of more or less classic elegance, and Miss Adams, book in hand, began to read.
"IDYLL XV
"Gorgo. Is Praxinoë at home?
"Praxinoë. Dear Gorgo, how long it is since you have been here! She is at home. The wonder is that you have got here at last. Eunoë, see that she has a chair. Throw a cushion on it, too.
"Gorgo. It does most charmingly as it is.
"Praxinoë. Do sit down.
"Gorgo. Oh, what a thing spirit is! I have scarcely got to you alive, Praxinoë! What a huge crowd! What hosts of four-in-hands! Everywhere cavalry boots, everywhere men in uniform. And the road is endless: yes, you really live too far away!
[95]"Praxinoë. It is all the fault of that madman of mine! Here he came to the ends of the earth, and took—a hole, not a house, and all that we might not be neighbors. The jealous wretch, always the same, ever for spite!
"Gorgo. Don't talk of Dinon, your husband, like that, my dear girl, before the little boy. Look how he is staring at you! Never mind, Zopyrion, sweet child, she is not speaking about papa.
"Praxinoë. Our Lady Persephone! The child takes notice!
"Gorgo. Nice papa!
"Praxinoë. That papa of his the other day—we call every day 'the other day'—went to get soap and rouge at the shop, and back he came to me with salt—the great, big endless fellow!"
"But, Miss Adams," interrupted Dulcie, "surely this isn't an old Greek play? It sounds absolutely and entirely modern!"
"As a matter of fact, it was written by Theocritus about the year 266 b. c. It describes the visit paid by two Syracusan ladies residing in Alexandria to the festival of Adonis. Their manners and talk then must have been very similar to ours of to-day. Listen to the part where they are getting ready to start.
"Gorgo. It seems nearly time to go.
"Praxinoë. Idlers have always holidays. Eunoë, bring the water, and put it down in the middle of the room, lazy creature that you are! Cats always like to sleep soft! Come, bustle, bring the water—quicker! I want water first, and how she carries it! Give it me all the[96] same: don't pour out so much, you extravagant thing! Stupid girl! Why are you wetting my dress? There, stop, I have washed my hands, as heaven would have it! Where is the key of the big chest? Bring it here.
"Gorgo. Praxinoë, that full body becomes you wonderfully. Tell me, how much did the stuff cost you just off the loom?
"Praxinoë. Don't speak of it, Gorgo! More than eight pounds in good silver money—and the work on it! I nearly slaved my soul out over it.
"Gorgo. Well, it is most successful: all you could wish.
"Praxinoë. Thanks for the pretty speech. Eunoë, bring my shawl, and set my hat on my head, the fashionable way. No, Zopyrion, I don't mean to take you! Boo! Bogies! There's a horse that bites! Cry as much as you please, but I cannot have you lamed. Let us be moving. Phrygia, take the child, and keep him amused, call in the dog, and shut the street door!"
"It's exactly like anybody going out to-day!" commented Carmel, as Miss Adams came to a pause.
"Why does it seem so modern?" asked Dulcie.
"Because it was written during the zenith of Greece's history, and one great civilization always resembles another. England of to-day is far more in touch with the times of ancient Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Rome, than with the Middle Ages. Read Chaucer, and you find his mental outlook is that of a child of seven. In the days of the Plantagenets grown men and women enjoyed stories of a crude simplicity that now only[97] appeals to children. The human race is always progressing in great successive waves of civilization; after each wave breaks, a time of barbarism prevails, till man is again educated to a higher growth. We're living at the top of a wave at present!"
"I remember," said Carmel, "when Mother and Daddy took me to Rome, we saw the busts of the Emperors, and of all sorts of clever people, who'd lived in about the first century, and we all said: 'Oh, aren't their faces just like people of to-day?' We amused ourselves with saying one was a lawyer, and another a doctor, and calling some of them after our friends. Then we went afterwards to an exhibition of sixteenth-century portraits; perhaps the artists hadn't learnt to paint well, but at any rate the faces were utterly different from people of to-day. They seemed quite another type altogether—not so intelligent or so interesting. We were tremendously struck with the difference."
"It marks my point," said Miss Adams.
"What else do Gorgo and Praxinoë do?" asked Edith.
"They go into Alexandria for the festival, and find the streets so crowded that they are almost frightened to death, and have hard work not to lose Eunoë, the slave girl, whom they have taken with them; she nearly gets squeezed as they pass[98] in at the door. They go into raptures over an exhibition of embroideries. 'Lady Athene,' says Praxinoë, 'what spinning-women wrought them? What painters designed their drawings, so true they are?' I haven't time to read it all to you now, but I must just give you the little bit where they quarrel with a stranger. It's too absolutely priceless.
"A Stranger. You weariful women, do cease your endless cooing talk! You bore one to death with your eternal broad vowels!
"Gorgo. Indeed! And where may this person come from? What is it to you if we are chatterboxes? Give orders to your own servants, sir. Do you pretend to command ladies of Syracuse? If you must know, we are Corinthians by descent, like Bellerophon himself, and we speak Peloponnesian. Dorian women may lawfully speak Doric, I presume?"
"Oh, do let me be Gorgo!" begged Dulcie. "I love her; she's so smart and sarcastic. Isn't it exactly like somebody talking during a concert, and a person in the row in front objecting, and a friend butting in with rude remarks? That's what generally happens."
"Did people's accent matter in Greek as much as it does in English?" asked Prissie.
"Evidently. The Alexandrian gentleman—who sounds a decided fop—did not approve of a Doric pronunciation. No doubt broad vowels were out of fashion. I believe I shall give his[99] part to Edith. It's a small one, but it has scope for a good deal of acting."
"And who is to be Praxinoë, please?"
"I think I must choose Carmel. She ought to act in an idyll by Theocritus, as he was a Sicilian like herself. Would he find Sicily much altered, Carmel, if he came back? Or is it the same after two thousand years?"
"There are still goatherds on the mountains, though we don't see wood nymphs now!"
"No, the wood nymphs have all trotted over to England, and are going to give a performance in aid of the 'Waifs and Strays!'" said Dulcie. "I hope Apollo will remember them, and send them a fine day, if he's anything to do with the weather over here. Perhaps his sun chariot only runs on the Mediterranean route."
"Surely he's got an aeroplane by now!" laughed Edith. "We'll send him a wireless message to remind him of his duty. 'Nymphs dancing Thursday week at 2.30 p. m. Kindly cable special supply of sunshine.'"
"Now, girls, you're getting silly!" said Miss Adams, shutting her book and rising. "If we want to make a success of our classic afternoon, we've plenty of hard work before us. I'm going on with costumes at present, and anybody who cares to volunteer can fetch her thimble and a needle and cotton, and hem a chiton."
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