CHAPTER III
Thethird thing that Verity dropped, that morning, was three pounds of salmon, right in Deborah’s blindly-descending path. She knew Deborah wouldn’t step on anything as squishy as salmon.
“I want to ask your opinion about something,” she said, leaving the salmon barrier-wise on the pavement, “so come along to the café, and be asked it like a lamb. It’s no use pretending that I’ve got scarlet fever or a new hat, or anything of that kind that you simply can’t be seen with, because I’m thoroughly bored with my own society, and I mean to have yours.”
“You want to pat me,” Deborah said fiercely, looking at her hardly with reddened eyes, “and I won’t have it! I won’t! I won’t!”
“How terribly limited you are!” Verity sighed pityingly. “I want to talk to you solely and entirely about myself. Otherwise, why should I pick you up in the pig-market on a Saturday morning, when you have pointedly cut me three times this week?”
“I shall hold you to that, if I come!” Deborah yielded weakly to the hidden strength in the demure little figure before her. “And, mind, at the first pat—I go!”
“What did you want to know?” she asked, later,seated at a table in an upstairs room, overlooking the street.
“Know?” Verity, her eyes on the traffic, was a trifle vague until Deborah’s stern gaze collected her wits with a jerk. “Oh, I wondered if by any chance you knew the author of——?”
“I don’t!” Deb got to her feet. “Good-bye!”
Verity pulled her down again.
“No, it wasn’t that. It was—let me see——” looking anxiously at the crowd—“oh, I know! Should you think red roses and green tulle——?”
“I shouldn’t!” Deb made another effort. “You’re a little wretch, Verity! You might have known I wanted to be alone.”
Verity clung to her, gazing despairingly at the stairs.
“I’ve remembered the real reason—honest Injun, I have! I just wanted to know whether the best way to manage a parson is to marry him?”
“Marry him?” Deb sank into her seat. “Now, Verity, what are you up to? Tell me at once. I won’t move till you do!”
“Oh, there’s nothing at all to worry about,” Verity replied, pouring out coffee with beautifully concealed triumph. “The question hasn’t arisen yet, in any way. I put it merely as a business proposition. Something must be done with the new parson at Cantacute, and as I’m much the bravest person in the place—sugar, dear? Here’s the cream.”
Deb opened her lips wrathfully, but got no further, for Verity was listening to somebody else,—indeed the whole café was listening,—to an intensely vitalised young person who roared directions to his chauffeur as he plunged headlong into the building, afterwards tearing up the stairs with the impetuosity of several elephants gone amok. Such was the usual advent of Larruppin’ Lyndesay.
Deb knew who was coming before the black bullet head and sturdy shoulders cannoned round the corner into Witham’s illustrious mayoress, who had looked in for an innocent glass of milk; and while he was busy picking her up and dusting her down, shooting her to the ground floor and thrusting her into his own car, she called her friend to account.
“Why did you do it?” she asked reproachfully. “You know I can’t meet any of the Lyndesays. And Larrupper will tell the whole town I am here!”
“The new parson——” Verity began innocently, and Deb leaned across the table and shook her. Then she sat down and covered her face with her hands.
“Can’t you understand,” she added, very low, “that it hurts me to meet them, seeing that I can have nothing to do with them any more?”
“Just because one berry had a grub in it, I don’t see why you need burn the whole bush!” Verity answered doggedly. “You’ve been treated abominably, scandalously! Please credit some of us with sufficient decency to realisethat. You’re behavingas though we were a crowd of savages dancing round you with assegais! And the Arevar Lyndesays had nothing to do with the affair, anyhow. Larrupper’s awfully hurt because you’ve given him the cold shoulder, and I won’t have Larrupper ill-treated. It’s like being cruel to a—a donkey. And he’s quite upset enough as it is over the Mayoress.”
The mayoral catastrophe seemed to have disorganised Larrupper completely, for, upon his volcanic return, he rushed at the nearest table and shook hands with two girls he had never seen in his life, before he discovered Verity sitting with shocked eyes fixed on the ceiling.
“Disgraceful!” she observed, looking like a disapproving tombstone. “I’m not sure that we ought to know you. Sit down and say the first three stanzas of the Catechism, just to let the steam off your voice before you speak to Deborah.”
But Larrupper, crimson with emotion to the thick roots of his inky hair, seized upon Deb’s hand without an instant’s hesitation.
“Oh, you’ve been cruel, Debbie dear!” he reproached her. “I called and called, an’ stood outside an’ swore an’ threw things, an’ they gave me the boot every time, an’ told me you weren’t seein’ anybody. We’ve always been pals, you and I, ever since we fell into the river together, tryin’ to be trout, an’ to shut your door in Larrupper’s pleadin’ face is what I’d never expected to get from you,—hanged if I did!”
“I’ve finished with the lot of you, Larry,” Deborah said gently. “I’m going to be a Lyndesay all by myself for the rest of my existence, so you can just keep on the other side of the road when you see me coming, for your poor relation doesn’t intend to know you. It’s no use arguing. I mean what I say.”
Larrupper upset both cream-jugs.
“That’s a footlin’ way of talkin’,” he said. “Haven’t I adored you always, an’ been ready to lift the roof off the world for you, as you don’t need tellin’? An’ just because things have gone to smoke through that bunglin’ bounder of a Slinker——”
“Larrupper!” Verity’s little voice was almost shrill.
“Just because Slinker——” (Larry, when interfered with, always erupted louder than ever)—“just because Slinker behaved like a—a—a—low-down, crawlin’ scallywag——”
“Larrupper!”
“You think the rest of us are not good enough to be seen dead with. But we’re a fairly decent lot, for all that; Laker is, anyhow, an’ Larrupper’s quite a charmin’ imitation; an’ if you’re goin’ to give us all the go-by on Slinker’s account, you’re makin’ us responsible for somethin’ we didn’t know of any more than you; an’ if that isn’t glarin’ injustice, I’d like to hear of a better sample!”
“I’ve been hurt,” said Deb, staring at the table, “so naturally I’m looking round for somebody to getback on. And you happen to be the nearest, that’s all.”
“And what about me?” asked Verity. Deb, looking up, caught a look of real pain on the small face. “If it hadn’t been for that three pounds of salmon, you’d have lost the two people who love you best in the world, and serve you jolly well right!”
“Whereisthe salmon?” Deb put in suddenly, her conscience smiting her, and Verity blinked away her tears and laughed.
“Somewhere on the pavement, I suppose. I forgot all about it, to tell the truth. Yours is a very expensive friendship. And, by the way, it was to pay a bet I lost to the parson.”
“What parson?” Larry interjected quickly, with interest.
“The new Cantacuter. (You have to have everything repeated to you, Larry, every time we meet!) I bet him three pounds of salmon that he couldn’t get Billy-boy Blackburn to join his Young Men’s Soul-Savers or whatever he calls them; and he did, so I have to pay up. It’s for their annual bean-feast or something of the kind.”
“He seems an individual with some strength of purpose,” Deborah observed. “But why were you so anxious to know if the best way——?”
Verity kicked her without remorse.
“He has such dreadfully ‘Fall in and follow me’ views about women,” she went on. “Expects themto take a back seat when they’re not wanted, and run and work like blaz—blacks—when they are—underhim, of course. Men proudly goose-stepping in front is how he sees life; women trailing meekly behind. That’s his line throughout—though I must say he does his best to sweeten the pill with rather painfully obvious flattery. He comes to see me every other day, to ask me to join things and support things and sing in things and collect for things. He tells me I am so beloved in the village; that I have religious eyes; that my influence for good is—well, little short of the Bishop of London’s. And all the time he regards me merely as a tool for his using! I leave Voltaire and Shaw and the Pankhursts about all over the place when he calls, but he doesn’t see them—he’s too busy collecting me. It’s my face and my voice, I suppose, that make him think I’d be a fine tail to his heavenly comet. But I’ll teach him, see if I don’t!”
“You’d much better leave him alone,” Larrupper remonstrated. “What’s the use of botherin’ about him, anyway?”
“Leave him alone?” Verity’s eyes flashed. “Leave my unfortunate village to struggle with him alone? Never! I’m not a suffragette or anything else in the ironmongery line, but to have a stranger thinking he’s more influence than I in my own place is the very last thing I’ll put up with! He may have Billy-boy and the salmon; he may have his own private little gloat; but there’ll be something verywrong with the universe if Verity Cantacute doesn’t come out top in the end!”
Deb rose. “Well, I’m going,” she said. “I’m very angry with you both, but all the same you’ve warmed the cockles of my heart. No, Larry, I willnotbe taken home in your car like the remains of the Mayoress. You can come to see me if you insist, but I warn you that I shall not be over-polite to you. Oh, ofcourseI love you, you inky-headed baby! That isn’t the point. The point is that Lyndesays of Crump and Arevar can no longer be on friendly terms with Lyndesays of Kilne. So good-bye.”
Larry stood up, looking pathetic.
“An’ who’s to help me with Verity an’ the sky-pilot? It’s always like this. Just as she’s thinkin’ she might possibly make up her mind to marry me, off she goes an’ starts a hobby of some kind, an’ I get shoved into the background. Parson-squashin’s all very well, but it takes so much of her energy, an’ she forgets that I’m—well, just waitin’. And nobody has the faintest influence with her but you, Debbie darlin’, as you know. Mayn’t I really take you home? I’ve got a new——”
“Yes, I know,” Deb interrupted ruthlessly. “A new carburettor or a gudgeon-pin or a ball-bearing. You always have. Thank you, Larry. I’ve given up cars. And I won’t, I won’t, Iwon’tbe patted!”
After she had gone, Verity cried unaffectedly behind the sheltering screen, while Larry, almostweeping himself, kicked things miserably and chopped splinters off the table.
“It’s hurt her so dreadfully!” she said, “every bit of her; her pride, her affection,herself. She’ll never be the same again. And people are saying such hateful things. I could strangle them—the—the alligators! Slinker was a rotter, but he was quite decent to her—she’s bound to miss him a little. And think of all he represented! She couldn’t help but feel that. And now she’s nothing—nothing—except her name and her pride. What can we do for her? Whatcanwe? Not that it’s any use askingyou!”
“There’s Christian,” said Larrupper, slowly, and Verity looked up with a start. Their eyes met across the table, and Larrupper nodded his black head.
“Laker’s a good sort,” he went on, apparently irrelevantly. “Always goin’ about pickin’ up the cryin’ an’ the crocked. It’s just meat an’ drink an’ five rounds of golf to old Laker. There’s never any knowin’, is there, dear—I mean, old girl?”
Verity looked at him almost approvingly as she thrust various parcels into his arms, preparatory to rising.
“Larry,” she observed kindly, “I do believe you’re growing a brain!”