The Flood-Tide Read Online Free PDF Page A

any different.’
    Charles wondered whether Papists were supposed to bear some brand or hideous deformity that marked them out as less than human. He made another encouraging murmur, and his landlady said, ‘I suppose you'll be wanting to pay your respects, now you're here?'
    ‘Well, I think I ought,' Charles said deprecatingly. ‘Family is family, you know, even if the connection is far back.'
    ‘Oh, they talk about the Morland connection; all the old families talk about England and where they came from. We know the whole story here. I can send a boy up the river with a letter if you want.’
    Charles wrote, and the reply came inviting him most cordially to go and stay at York; and so having done a little shopping and attended to some business, Charles boarded the sailing boat that was sent for him, well primed by his hostess in the history of the family in its more sensational aspects.
    Philippe de Courcey met the boat at the landing stage, from which well-tended green lawns ran up to the house.
    The house was a pleasant surprise to Charles, for though not large, it was distinguished from its neighbours by being built of brick instead of wood. It presented a pleasant, symmetrical aspect, a long building of two storeys, with a white porch and stone chimneys at either end. White jasmine was scrambling energetically over the porch, and in beds all around the house were white rose bushes in full bloom.
    ‘Welcome, welcome, my dear Cousin Charles Morland,' de Courcey said, seizing Charles's hand in a friendly grip. Philippe was a tall, dark man, appearing taller by virtue of his great slenderness, and darker by his brown skin and blue beard-shadow, but his smile was open and friendly. ‘I hope you will not mind my calling you cousin. We think of ourselves as Morlands, you know, though we have lost the name.'
    ‘I am honoured, sir,' Charles said, following him along the broad path, while two Negro servants attended to the bags. ‘And delighted to exchange my lodgings for this beautiful house. You must be very proud of it.'
    ‘It is my second greatest joy,' he said. 'My grandfather, the first de Courcey to live here, built it. Brick, as you can imagine, was very expensive, stone even more so, and there was a great deal of jealousy amongst his neighbours, and some ill-natured inquiry as to where he got the money to afford it.' He smiled, a sudden white flashing in his dark face. ‘We in the family think we know where, but even we do not talk of it. These roses are our particular pride, sir. They are all descendants of the one bush that our ancestor Ambrose Morland brought with him from England in 1642.’
    The lawns were as fine as any Charles had seen in England, and he said so, to gratify his host. The setting, too, was beautiful in the sort of artfully natural way that English lords paid Capability Brown large sums of money to achieve. But it was evident that Nature had provided it here for nothing: pretty little creeks, spanned by rustic bridges, knolls and gentle slopes, clumps of tall graceful trees here and there. The less attractive parts of the estate were set at a good distance from the house - the scrawny cattle, the farm buildings, the long-legged fowls and the tough little black pigs, the acres and acres of corn and tobacco, and the wooden dwellings of the slaves that tended them.
    Philippe de Courcey was anxious to show Charles the house, of which he was justly proud, though the furnishing presented to Charles the curious appearance of having been assembled almost at random. Many of the pieces were useful but plain local work; others the massive, heavily-carved treasures of earlier ages; and here and there throughout them were scattered what might have been the remains of a pirate's hoard: delicate little French chairs, an English table with intricate inlay, Italian statuary and hangings, Spanish mirrors and boxes. In the chapel, de Courcey displayed the other great treasure of the house, an ivory and