And then to Giles’s great astonishment the gardener looked straight at him and added:
‘Were you thinking of that shell, Sir, by any chance?’
Giles could not yet decide how much the man knew. The jacket had been hanging on a tree six paces away.
‘Er—yes; I was,’ he said at last.
‘Oh, well, I’ve seen lots stranger things than that in foreign lands. Queer deeds—where a man couldn’t believe his own eyes. Yet there they were, happening in front of him.’
The frown deepened on the face of the King’s Finder. Suddenly he stepped forward and lowered his voice.
‘Do you mean to tell me, Geoffrey, you knew about the shell? How—it—er—’
‘How it whispers?’ put in the gardener as the other hesitated. ‘Grows hot when others speak of you? Yes, Sir. I was listening to it a few minutes before you came along.’
He turned back to his work on the rose tree. Giles could not make him out at all.
‘You meant to keep it, then?’ he asked at last, glancing at the jacket on the tree-limb.
‘No, indeed. What would I want it for? To hear people talk about me? No. People have to talk, Sir. And if they want to talk about me, let ’em, I say. But listen to them?’ A smile came over the Gipsy’s calm, lean face. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time, Sir, lying in meadows watching the clouds sail over me, changing their drifting shapes. But I haven’t got time for listening to folks chatter about me. If I could hear ’em talk of someone else, or tell stories or something, maybe ’twould be different.’
‘Were you, then, going to sell it for money?’
‘Money, Sir?’ The gardener shook his head. ‘No. The King’s wage is enough for all I need.’
He drew a pruning-knife from his belt and cut a faded bloom from the white rose tree.
‘Well, what did you mean to do with it, then?’ asked Giles. ‘You had put it in your pocket.’
‘I was going to grow ferns in it, Sir. It would look elegant in the rockery behind the Queen’s bench—with maidenhair and maybe myrtle. I’d planned to set it there when I was done with the roses. But if you want it, Sir, of course that’s—’
Geoffrey the Gipsy gazed after the young knight, who had suddenly walked away from him down the terrace. He put his pruning-knife back in his sheath and went to work again with the spade.
‘Drat these moles!’ he muttered.
But as he bent over the fresh-turned earth he did not see that the King’s Finder had halted again—this time at a distant bend in the terrace—and was now gazing back at him.
Giles was accustomed to find himself in thoughtful mood when he had come to the end of a talk with Geoffrey. But this calm and sunny morning he felt more stirred and uneasy in his heart than he had ever been before. He wondered why he had broken off the chat and hurried away. And then with sudden queer shame he knew he had been afraid—afraid lest when he had done cross-questioning, Geoffrey the Gipsy would turn and ask him what he meant to do with the shell.
He had come out this morning to get it for the Princess Sophronia. Now that the King had done with it he must make good his promise, and she should be allowed to listen to all the praise and flattery she could get. He found that he had to take it from a Gipsy gardener to carry it to a Princess Royal. And he did not like his mission at all. Those smooth-tongued courtiers, he thought to himself, would have said that he was taking it from the lowliest in the land to the highest. But as he looked back, that peaceful figure delving in the earth about the roses suddenly seemed to grow and grow against the sky—taller, stronger and more lasting than the towering castle itself. And when he put the shell in his pocket and turned to go on, Giles knew in his own heart that he was really taking it from the greatest to the smallest.
At the foot of the stone steps leading up to the courtyard, his mood was pleasantly changed by his meeting with the Countess Barbara. She was close to his own age of eighteen years, shorter than he but tall for a girl, graceful and slender. And Giles was reminded of the white roses he had just left as she smiled down a greeting to him. She was on her way, with two frisky black spaniels, to get water-lilies for the Queen Mother from the Lower Lake. Giles begged her to wait for him a moment while he did an errand. She said she would, if he would not be too long.
He dashed into the castle and up the great stairs to the Princess’s rooms.
Sophronia’s joy at getting the shell for her own at last seemed to Giles almost sad as she grabbed it from his hand with a happy squeal. Of late she had been growing a little hard of hearing; and in her fumbling eagerness to see if it still worked she nearly dropped it more than once. But at last she got it, growing warm already, to her ear. She heard the foreign prince—the one she hoped to marry—telling the Queen Mother that no stars in the heavens were so beautiful or bright as the eyes of his beloved Sophronia. (What the prince was really thinking was that no coins would look so beautiful or bright as the dowry-money he hoped to get from the King when he married his pest of an aunt. But he didn’t say that, so it didn’t spoil the Princess’s joy.)
And when Giles left her and went running down the steps to the Countess Barbara, the romantic Sophronia was seated at the window with the cold shell still clutched to her ear, smilingly waiting for more.
4 At the lower lake
The Lower Lake was one of the most beautiful parts of the castle grounds. It, too, had been dear to the heart of the old King, the lover of gardens, who had himself seen to its laying out with the help of a landscape architect very famous in his day. It had been purposely left quite wild in order that the waterfowl and the deer from the game park should make of it a place of quiet and safe retreat. In the centre of a wide meadow, edged with bulrushes, patched with water-lilies, its clear waters reflected the moods of the sky—and sometimes the images of peacefully dabbling diver-ducks or the handsome antlers of a drinking stag. And often, when stormy weather drove the bird life inland from the sea, its ruffled surface was alive with wild geese, gathered there as the old King planned they should, to enjoy the protection and hospitality of a royal estate.
But today, arriving at its sedgy banks, Giles and the Countess Barbara found not a ripple to disturb its calm blue mirror, asleep beneath a cloudless, windless heaven. This quiet did not last for long, however, for the spaniels, Maggie and Mollie, soon scented out an otter from the osiers at the north end. And in a moment the two dogs were thrashing about in the water in boisterous and vain pursuit.
From the shore, with the aid of hooked hazel poles, plenty of lilies could be gathered without wading. And it took Giles barely fifteen minutes to collect more than an armful for Barbara to take back to the Queen. The two then fell to throwing sticks into the water for the spaniels to fetch. This grew into a sort of game, Giles betting on Mollie and Barbara on Maggie, to see which was the faster swimmer.
It was a keen and hard-fought, splashy battle. But in the end Maggie proved herself the champion beyond all doubt or question. And presently Barbara said it was time to return to the castle.
But Giles did not want the game to end. On the way here the Countess had seemed a trifle sad and serious. The play with the dogs had cheered her up. A healthy flush had now come into her cheeks and a livelier sparkle to her glorious blue eyes. She was standing by the bank gathering the lilies one by one into her arms. Their wet red stems glistened in her slender, well-shaped fingers. Behind her rose the wonderful sweep of the castle hill, dotted with clumps of oaks, topped by the grey towers of the King’s palace. And again, as when he had first seen her, Giles thought that surely the world never held a creature of more grace or fairer beauty.