Nightingale Wood Read Online Free

eagles ought to be left there because his father had approved them, so there they sat.
    Saxon knew the exact instant that Mrs Wither appeared at the door, though he was not looking at the house, and he stepped from the car and deftly opened its door for her, touching his cap.
    ‘Good morning, Saxon. Isn’t it a beautiful day!’
    ‘Good morning, Madam. Yes, Madam.’
    ‘So nice for Mrs Theodore,’ continued Mrs Wither, having her toes muffled by Saxon in a horrid old rug of unknown fur which Mr Wither refused to have put out of commission. ‘To come to us on a nice day, I mean.’
    ‘Yes, Madam.’
    Mrs Wither, who had once been a woman who enjoyed talking to servants, glanced at him and said no more. Saxon did not seem to like being talked to.
    The gentle reader is no doubt wondering why on earth anyone should have married Mr Wither, and must here be told that she had married him for what (it is said) is a common enough reason: she feared that she would never have the chance to marry anyone else.
    And when he was young Mr Wither had not been quite so bad; he had had a bold eye and a semi-dashing manner rather like that of a small bull-dog. He ordered waiters about, elbowed himself into hansom cabs and had a rich father. Mrs Wither, who was not romantic, had thought that a young woman might safely trust herself to Arthur Wither, and she had done so. Their marriage cannot have been so bad as some, for here they were, at seventy and sixty-four, sharing The Eagles, two daughters, the memory of a dead son, and a daughter-in-law.
    Mrs Wither was sorry for poor Arthur; he worried so. She wondered and grieved about him in his absence, and though she always enjoyed herself when he was not there and never when he was, she was fond of him; and Mr Wither in his turn disapproved of Mrs Wither less than he did of anybody, though he never showed it.
    What exalted lies are told of marriage! but one promise at least can be fulfilled: ye shall be one flesh.

CHAPTER II
     
    Saxon drove slowly, because Mrs Wither had as usual ordered the car too early, and he disliked what he called to himself ‘bloody hanging about’ outside Chesterbourne station. The country through which they moved was chiefly grazing land with some under wheat and barley, and it had the unconventional charm of Essex landscapes; the little hills with oak coppices climbing them, now in early rose-brown leaf, the loops of a river shining in a wide, tree-hidden valley to which all the roads seem to lead, and the near and distant cries of birds, like the country itself singing. The woods and hedges were alive with them; they love a land like this, flat and wooded and watery.
    The country about Sible Pelden, the village nearest to The Eagles, was not much spoilt. One main road ran near the village, but not near enough to ruin it. (All the inhabitants wished that it did.) It was a quiet tract of land, with a few shabby villages and one or two big houses belonging to wealthy people who had had connections in the district for well under a hundred years. London was just over an hour away by a good train. The sea was thirty miles away, and there were marshes between it and Sible Pelden where swans nested and rarer birds. In summer the countryside seemed quietly awake under a silvery sun (it was so flat that the sky seemed always full of light, enormously high, and falling almost like a mist) and in the winter it was surprisingly desolate. It had only two places of historical interest and no stunning beauty-spots.
    Outside Chesterbourne there were some new bungalows, and Mrs Wither, looking at them, remembered that Teddy and Viola had been talking about renting one, instead of their tiny flat in Greater London, just before Teddy died. At least Teddy had talked of it, and Viola had not said a word. Mrs Wither had gathered from this that Viola had wanted to stay in Greater London. She had also gathered that Viola was a pleasure-loving girl; dances, new frocks, lipstick, perhaps