IT is strange how a name long unspoken and unheard, once coming again within one’s ken, comes again and again before one, and in the most unlikely and unexpected ways.  
For over nine years Barnabas had not chanced to hear his friend’s name mentioned, and now there was first Pippa and her wonderful likeness to him, and then the incident of the ring, both of which had served to remind him vividly and bring the name before him. But the third incident was to be a good deal stranger, in fact it was to savour somewhat of the “Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.”
 
They stopped for their noon halt one day in the shade of a small coppice. A little beyond it they could see the roof and chimneys of a house surrounded by a high wall. Before settling down to lunch Barnabas strolled towards it and walked round the wall. There was no means of seeing over, and the only entrance was through a small green wooden door, which was shut. Ivy grew up the wall outside, and had Barnabas felt disposed he might have climbed up by it and peered over. It was, however, too hot for such exertion. Also if there were anyone in the garden and he were seen, his position would have been, to say the least of it, undignified. He strolled back to the copse and to the lunch which the others had unpacked.
 
“Where ’ave you been?” asked Pippa.
 
Barnabas nodded in the direction of the house. “Down there,” he said.
 
“What’s inside?” demanded Pippa.
 
“Don’t know,” said Barnabas, attacking the leg of a chicken; “couldn’t see over.”
 
Pippa’s eyes became far off and dreamy. “Quel domage! You couldn’t climb, ze wall ver’ much too ’igh?”
 
“It wasn’t the question of the height of the wall, but my dignity,” returned Barnabas. “What would I have looked like if I’d been caught?”
 
“Funny,” smiled Pippa, her eyes dancing with amusement.
 
“I’ve no desire to look funny,” said Barnabas. “Toss me over that bottle of cider, like a good child, and look out for flying corks. I do my best, but this weather makes the stuff too fizzy for anything.”
 
Pippa tossed the bottle and retired gravely behind Barnabas while he manipulated the cork. Then she returned to her seat near him.
 
“I do wonder what’s inside,” she said.
 
 
“Cider,” said Barnabas, pouring it into a glass.
 
“Not the bottle, méchant, the wall,” announced Pippa.
 
“Oh, the wall! I don’t know; nothing, I daresay.”
 
“An Ogre,” said Aurora. She and Alan and Dan had been too busy feeding to enter into the conversation before.
 
Pippa elevated her chin. “Je ne suis pas une bébé, moi. I know, but quite well, vere are no Ogres.”
 
“Lions, then, Miss Curiosity,” suggested Alan.
 
Pippa turned her shoulder towards him. “Imbécile, it is not a menagerie, but I have no interest in it, moi. If you wish to discover you can go and look for yourself.” And she proceeded to eat chicken delicately and haughtily with her fingers, disdaining further mention of the house within the wall.
 
After lunch they all lay down in the shade of the trees and went to sleep, lulled by the sleepy, liquid note of the wood-pigeons, and the humming of bees.
 
Barnabas was the first to awaken. When he did he discovered that Pippa was absent. He came out of the copse and looked down the little lane that ran between the trees on one side and a stretch of moorland on the other. To the left [Pg 221]it would come out on the main road, to the right it led to the wall-enclosed house.
 
Seeing no sign of the child, and not caring to coo-ee to her on account of disturbing the sleepers, he went down towards the house, thinking it more than likely, from her remarks at lunch, that she had gone to investigate the place herself.
 
“Daughter of Eve,” said Barnabas to himself, as he strolled down the sunny lane, watching the butterflies flitting over the moorland.
 
He reached the garden wall and had strolled round two sides of it when he suddenly came to a standstill, arrested by the sound of Pippa’s voice from inside the garden.
 
He paused to listen. He could hear her words distinctly. She was narrating to some one the story of Philippe Kostolitz which he had told her only a couple of days previously.
 
“And so,” Pippa ended, in her clear voice, “I am looking for my language. What is yours?” There was a note of shameless coaxing in the words.
 
“That,” returned a deep voice.
 
“What, ze garden?” came Pippa’s reply.
 
Barnabas put one foot on a stout branch of ivy, and clinging to another branch above him, heaved himself noiselessly to the top of the wall.
 
 
Then he saw Pippa. She was seated on a garden bench, her hat in her hands, and on the bench beside her was an old man. His beard, long and snow-white, reached almost to his waist. His hair, also snow-white and very thick, glistened in the sunlight, for his head was uncovered. His clothes, Barnabas saw, were dark and well-cut, and his voice was peculiarly melodious and refined.
 
“Well, upon my word!” ejaculated Barnabas, quite forgetting that he was speaking aloud.
 
The old man looked up. “Ah,” he said, with a quaint smile, “so you, too, have found the ivy route.”
 
“You don’t mean to say Pippa climbed up here?” exclaimed Barnabas, absolutely forgetful of his own rather curious position.
 
“But I did,” cried Pippa joyfully, “and he saw me, and asked me to come in and see ze garden. But did you ever see such a garden?”
 
“Never!” said Barnabas enthusiastically, surveying it from his post of vantage.
 
Smooth lawns with close-clipped edges, and flower-beds a mass of colour met his eye. There were larkspurs tall and slender, from sapphire blue to turquoise. There were great tree lupins, there were roses of every shade and shape imaginable. There were crimson and blue salvias, scarlet and white phloxes, borders of African marigolds—a blaze of orange; and there was a great bed of hollyhocks, among whose silken [Pg 223]flowers butterflies innumerable were hovering. In the middle of the lawn was a marble basin full of crystal water, on whose edge white pigeons were preening themselves, and a couple of gorgeous peacocks spread tails of waking eyes to the sun.
 
“Will you not,” said the old man courteously, “follow Pippa’s example and enter the garden by the door? You will find it unfastened.”
 
Barnabas slithered down off the wall and came round to the green door. He felt as if he were suddenly walking into a fairy tale garden in which nothing that might happen would surprise him.
 
The old man came forward to meet him.
 
“I hope,” he said courteously, “that the child’s absence has not caused you anxiety. I found a pleasure in her conversation, and forgot that time was passing.”
 
“Not at all,” Barnabas assured him. “I had only just missed her. I came to look for her, and heard her voice. Forgive my unceremonious appearance.”
 
The old man smiled. “It was as delightful as her own,” he said.
 
There was a little silence. Barnabas looked towards the house. It was Elizabethan in structure, with walls stained to a variety of different colours by wind, sun, rain, and time. Roses wreathed the latticed windows, and up one [Pg 224]side of the house a great wistaria climbed, covering part of the roof and losing itself among the chimney-stacks.
 
“Will you come inside?” said the old man. “There is something I would like the child to see.”
 
Barnabas assented. The three sleepers in the coppice were forgotten. The fascination of the place and the old man’s strange and courtly personality was upon him.
 
The old man had led the way into the house. They went into a square hall, dark and cool. The floor was of inlaid wood highly polished, the walls oak and hung with pictures. They passed through the hall, and the old man led the way through an arched doorway and down two steps into a room which to the mind of Barnabas belonged most assuredly to the ancient stories of the “Arabian Nights.” In shape it was circular, and hung with draperies of a curious deep blue, like the colour of the sky at night. The floor was also polished and covered with a few old Persian rugs. There was an oak table at the far side of the room, three large oak chairs, and a kind of divan covered in sapphire-blue silk and worked with tiny crescent moons and stars.
 
But the arresting note of the room lay in a marble statue on a pedestal. It would be hard to say wherein exactly the extraordinary fascination [Pg 225]of it lay. But Barnabas looked at it almost spellbound. The old man motioned to them to sit down, and seated himself.
 
“That statue,” he said, “was given me by a friend of mine. He used to pass many months with me at a time. He loved the quietude of these surroundings as I love them. At the back of the house I had a studio built for him where he worked. When he was not working he sat in the garden. He loved it. He u............