87VIIISUNDAY AT STOKE REVEL
On Sundays, the Stoke Revel household was expected to appear at church in full strength, visitors included.
“We meet in the hall punctually at a quarter to eleven,” it was Miss Smeardon’s duty to announce to strangers. “Mrs. de Tracy always prefers that the Stoke Revel guests should walk down together, as it sets a good example to the villagers.”
“What Nelson said about going to church with Lady Hamilton!” Lavendar had once commented, irrepressibly, but the allusion, rather fortunately, was lost upon Miss Smeardon. Mark began to picture the familiar Sunday scene to himself; Miss Smeardon in the hall at a quarter to eleven punctually, marshalling the church-goers; and Mrs. Loring,––she would be late of course, and88come fluttering downstairs in some bewitching combination of flowery hat and floating scarf that no one had ever seen before. What a lover’s opportunity in this lateness, thought the young man to himself; but one could enjoy a walk to church in charming company, though something less than a lover.
It was Mrs. de Tracy’s custom, on Sunday mornings, to precede her household by half an hour in going to the sanctuary. No infirmities of old age had invaded her iron constitution, and it was nothing to her to walk alone to the church of Stoke Revel, steep though the hill was which led down through the ancient village to the yet more ancient edifice at its foot. During this solitary interval, Mrs. de Tracy visited her husband’s tomb, and no one knew, or dared, or cared to enquire, what motive encouraged this pious action in a character so devoid of tenderness and sentiment. Was it affection, was it duty, was it a mere form, a tribute to the greatness of an owner of Stoke Revel,89such as a nation pays to a dead king? Who could tell?
The graveyard of Stoke Revel owned a yew tree, so very, very old that the count of its years was lost and had become a fable or a fairy tale. It was twisted, gnarled, and low; and its long branches, which would have reached the ground, were upheld, like the arms of some dying patriarch, by supports, themselves old and moss-grown. Under the spreading of this ancient tree were graves, and from the carved, age-eaten porch of the church, a path led among them, under the green tunnel, out into the sunny space beyond it. The Admiral lay in a vault of which the door was at the side of the church, for no de Tracy, of course, could occupy a mere grave, like one of the common herd; and here walked the funereal figure of Mrs. de Tracy, fair weather or foul, nearly every Sunday in the year.
In justice to Mrs. de Tracy, it must be made plain that with all her faults, small90spite was not a part of her character. Yet to-day, her anger had been stirred by an incident so small that its very triviality annoyed her pride. It was Mark Lavendar’s custom, when his visits to Stoke Revel included a Sunday, cheerfully to evade church-going. His Sundays in the country were few, he said, and he preferred to enjoy them in the temple of nature, generally taking a long walk before lunch. But to-day he had announced his intention of coming to service, and well Mrs. de Tracy, versed in men and in human nature, knew why. Robinette would be there, and Lavendar followed, as the bee follows a basket of flowers on a summer day. As Mrs. de Tracy, like the Stoic that she was, accepted all the inevitable facts of life,––birth, death, love, hate (she had known them all in her day), she accepted this one also. But in that atrophy of every feeling except bitterness, that atrophy which is perhaps the only real solitude, the only real old age, her animosity was stirred. It was as91though a dead branch upon some living tree was angry with the spring for breathing on it. As she returned, herself unseen in the shadow of the yew tree, she saw Lavendar and Robinette enter together under the lych-gate, the figure of the young woman touched with sunlight and colour, her lips moving, and Lavendar smiling in answer. In the clashing of the bells––bells which shook the air, the earth, the ancient stones, the very nests upon the trees––their voices were inaudible, but in their faces was a young happiness and hope to which the solitary woman could not blind herself.
Presently in the lukewarm air within, Robinette was finding the church’s immemorial smell of prayer-books, hassocks, decaying wood, damp stones, matting, school-children, and altar flowers, a harmonious and suggestive one if not pleasant. What an ancient air it was, she thought; breathed and re-breathed by slow generations of Stoke Revellers during their sleepy devotions! The very light that92entered through the dim stained glass seemed old and dusty, it had seen so much during so many hundred years, seen so much, and found out so many secrets! Soon the clashing of the bells ceased and upon the still reverberating silence there broke the small, snoring noises of a rather ineffectual organ, while the amiable curate, Rev. Tobias Finch, made his appearance, and the service began.
Mrs. de Tracy had entered the pew first, naturally; Miss Smeardon sat next, then Robinetta. Lavendar occupied the pew in front, alone, and through her half-closed eyelids Robinetta could see the line of his lean cheek and bony temple. He had not wished to sit there at all and he was so unresigned as to be badly in need of the soothing influences of Morning Prayer. Robinetta was beginning to wonder dreamily what manner of man this really was, behind his plain face and non-committal manner, when the muffled slam of a door behind, startled her, followed as it was by a quick step upon the matted aisle. Then93without further warning, a big, broad-shouldered boy, in the uniform of a British midshipman, thrust himself into the pew beside her, hot and breathless after running hard. Mrs. Loring guessed at once that this must be Carnaby de Tracy, the young hopeful and heir of Stoke Revel of whom Mr. Lavendar had so often spoken, but the startling and unconventional nature of his appearance was not at all what one expected in a member of his family. Robinette stole more than one look at him as the offertory went round; a robust boy with a square chin, a fair face burnt red by the sun, a rollicking eye and an impudent nose; not handsome certainly, indeed quite plain, but he looked honest and strong and clean, and Robinette’s frolicsome youth was drawn to his, all ready for fun. Carnaby hitched about a good deal, dropped his hymn-book, moved the hassock, took out his handkerchief, and on discovering a huge hole, turned crimson.
Service over, the congregation shuffled out94into the sunshine, and Mrs. de Tracy, after a characteristically cool and disapproving recognition of her grandson, became occupied with villagers. Lavendar made known young Carnaby to Mrs. David Loring, but the midshipman’s light grey eyes had discovered the pretty face without any assistance.
“This lady is your American cousin, Carnaby,” said Mark. “Did you know you had one?”
“I don’t think I did,” answered the boy, “but it’s never too late to mend!” He attempted a bow of finished grown-upness, failed somewhat, and melted at once into an engaging boyishness, under which his frank admiration of his new-found relative was not to be hidden. “I say, are you stopping at Stoke Revel?” he asked, as though the news were too good to be true. “Jolly! Hullo––” he broke off with animation as the cassocked figure of the Rev. Tobias Finch fluttered out from the porch––“here’s old Toby! Watch Miss Smeardon now! She expects to catch95him, you know, but he says he’s going to be a celly––celly-what-d’you-call-’em?”
“Celibate?” suggested Lavendar, with laughing eyes.
“The very word, thank you!” said Carnaby. “Yes: a celibate. Not so easily nicked, good old Toby––you bet!”
“Do the clergymen over here always dress like that?” inquired Robinetta, trying to suppress a tendency to laugh at his slang.
“Cassock?” said Carnaby. “Toby wouldn’t be seen without it. High, you know! Bicycles in it. Fact! Goes to bed in it, I believe.”
“Carnaby, Carnaby! Come away!” said Lavendar. “Restrain these flights of imagination! Don’t you see how they shock Mrs. Loring?”
Before the Manor was reached, Robinetta and Carnaby had sworn eternal friendship deeper than any cousinship, they both declared. They met upon a sort of platform of Stoke Revel, predestined to sympathy upon96all its salient characteristics; two naughty children on a holiday.
“Do you get enough to eat here?” asked Carnaby in a hollow whisper, in the drawing-room before lunch.
“Of course I have enough, Middy,” answered Robinetta with unconscious reservation. She had rejected “Carnaby” at once as a name quite impossible: he was “Middy” to her almost from the first moment of their acquaintance.
“Enough?” he ejaculated, “Idon’t! I’d never be fed if it weren’t for old Bates and Mrs. Smith and Cooky.” Bates was the butler, Mrs. Smith the housekeeper, and Cooky her satellite. “Nobody gets enough to eat in this house!” added Carnaby darkly, “except the dog.”
At the lunch-table, the antagonism natural between a hot-blooded impetuous boy and a grandmother such as Mrs. de Tracy became rather painfully apparent. He had already been hauled over the coals for his arrival on97Sunday and his indecorous appearance in church after service had begun.
“It does not appear to me that you are at all in need of sick-leave,” said Mrs. de Tracy suspiciously.
Carnaby, sensitive for all his robustness, flushed hotly, and then became impertinent. “My pulse is twenty beats too quick still, after quinsy. If you don’t believe the doctor, ma’am, it’s not my fault.”
“Carnaby has committed indiscretions in the way of growing since I last saw him,” Lavendar broke in hastily. “At sixteen one may easily outgrow one’s strength!”
“Indeed!” said Mrs. de Tracy, frigidly. The situation was saved by the behaviour of the lap-dog, which suddenly burst into a passion of barking and convulsive struggling in Miss Smeardon’s arms. His enemy had come, and Carnaby had fifty ways of exasperating his grandmother’s favourite, secrets between him and the bewildered dog. Rupert was a Prince Charles of pedigree as98unquestioned as his mistress’s and an appearance dating back to Vandyke, but Carnaby always addressed him as “Lord Roberts,” for reasons of his own. It annoyed his grandmother and it infuriated the dog, who took it for a deadly insult.
“Lord Roberts! Bobs, old man, hi! hi!” Carnaby had but to say the words to make the little dog convulsive. He said them now, and the results seemed likely to be fatal to a dropsical animal so soon after a full meal.
“You’ll kill him!” whispered Robinette as they left the dining room.
“I mean to!” was the calm reply. “I’d like to wring old Smeardon’s neck too!” but the broad good humour of the rosy face, the twinkling eyes, belied these truculent words. In spite of infinite powers of mischief, there was not an ounce of vindictiveness in Carnaby de Tracy, though there might be other qualities difficult to deal with.
“There’s a man to be made there––or to be marred!” said Robinette to herself.
99IXPOINTS OF VIEW
Evenings at Stoke Revel were of a dullness all too deep to be sounded and too closely hedged in by tradition and observance to be evaded or shortened by the boldest visitor. Lavendar and the boy would have prolonged their respite in the smoking room had they dared, but in these later days Lavendar found he wished to be below on guard. The thought of Robinette alone between the two women downstairs made him uneasy. It was as though some bird of bright plumage had strayed into a barnyard to be pecked at by hens. Not but what he realised that this particular bird had a spirit of her own, and plenty of courage, but no man with even a prospective interest in a pretty woman, likes to think of the object of his admiration as thoroughly well able to look after herself. She must needs100have a protector, and the heaven-sent one is himself.
He had to take up arms in her defense on this, the first night of his arrival. Mrs. Loring had gone up to her room for some photographs of her house in America, and as she flitted through the door her scarf caught on the knob, and he had been obliged to extricate it. He had known her exactly four hours, and although he was unconscious of it, his heart was being pulled along the passage and up the stairway at the tail-end of that wisp of chiffon, while he listened to her retreating footsteps. Closing the door he came back to Mrs. de Tracy’s side.
“Her dress is indecorous for a widow,” said that lady severely.
“Oh, I don’t see that,” replied Lavendar. “She is in reality only a girl, and her widowhood has already lasted two years, you say.”
“Once a widow always a widow,” returned Mrs. de Tracy sententiously, with a self-respecting glance at her own cap and the half-dozen101dull jet ornaments she affected. Lavendar laughed outright, but she rather liked his laughter: it made her think herself witty. Once he had told her she was “delicious,” and she had never forgotten it.
“That’s going pretty far, my dear lady,” he replied. “Not all women are so faithful to a memory as you. I understand Americans don’t wear weeds, and to me her blue cape is a delightful note in the landscape. Her dresses are conventional and proper, and I fancy she cannot express herself without a bit of colour.”
“The object of clothing, Mark, is to cover and to protect yourself, not to express yourself,” said Mrs. de Tracy bitingly.
“The thought of wearing anything bright always makes me shrink,” remarked Miss Smeardon, who had never apparently observed the tip of her own nose, “but some persons are less sensitive on these points than others.”
Mrs. de Tracy bowed an approving assent102to this. “A widow’s only concern should be to refrain from attracting notice,” she said, as though quoting from a private book of proverbial philosophy soon to be published.
“Then Mrs. Loring might as well have burned herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, Hindoo fashion!” argued Lavendar. “A woman’s life hasn’t ended at two and twenty. It’s hardly begun, and I fear the lady in question will arouse attention whatever she wears.”
“Would she be called attractive?” asked Mrs. de Tracy with surprise.
“Oh, yes, without a doubt!”
“In gentlemen’s eyes, I suppose you mean?” said Miss Smeardon.
“Yes, in gentlemen’s eyes,” answered Lavendar, firmly. “Those of women are apparently furnished with different lenses. But here comes the fair object of our discussion, so we must decide it later on.”
The question of ancestors, a favourite one103at Stoke Revel, came up in the course of the next evening’s conversation, and Lavendar found Robinette a trifle flushed but smiling under a double fire of questions from Mrs. de Tracy and her companion. Mrs. de Tracy was in her usual chair, knitting; Miss Smeardon sat by the table with a piece of fancy-work; Robinette had pulled a foot-stool to the hearthrug and sat as near the flames as she conveniently could. She shielded her face with the last copy ofPunch, and let her shoulders bask in the warmth of the fire, which made flickering shadows on her creamy neck. Her white skirts swept softly round her feet, and her favourite turquoise scarf made a note of colour in her lap. She was one of those women who, without positive beauty, always make pictures of themselves.
Lavendar analyzed her looks as he joined the circle, pretending to read. “She isn’t posing,” he thought, “but she ought to be painted. She ought always to be painted,104each time one sees her, for everything about her suggests a portrait. That blue ribbon in her hair is fairly distracting! What the dickens is the reason one wants to look at her all the time! I’ve seen far handsomer women!”
“Do you use Burke and Debrett in your country, Mrs. Loring?” Miss Smeardon was enquiring politely, as she laid down one red volume after the other, having ascertained the complete family tree of a lady who had called that afternoon.
Robinette smiled. “I’m afraid we’ve nothing but telephone or business directories, social registers, and ‘Who’s Who,’ in America,” she said.
“You are not interested in questions of genealogy, I suppose?” asked Mrs. de Tracy pityingly.
“I can hardly say that. But I think perhaps that we are more occupied with the future than with the past.”
“That is natural,” assented the lady of the105Manor, “since you have so much more of it, haven’t you? But the mixture of races in your country,” she continued condescendingly, “must have made you indifferent to purity of strain.”
“I hope we are not wholly indifferent,” said Robinette, as though she were stopping to consider. “I think every serious-minded person must be proud to inherit fine qualities and to pass them on. Surely it isn’t enough to giveoldblood to the next generation––it must begoodblood. Yes! the right stock certainly means something to an American.”
“But if you’ve nothing that answers to Burke and Debrett, I don’t see how you can find out anybody’s pedigree,” objected Miss Smeardon. Then with an air of innocent curiosity and a glance supposed to be arch, “Are the Red Indians, the Negroes, and the Chinese in your so-called directories?”
“As many of them as are in business, or have won their way to any position among men no doubt are there, I suppose,” answered106Robinette straightforwardly. “I think we just guess at people’s ancestry by the way they look, act, and speak,” she continued musingly. “You can ‘guess’ quite well if you are clever at it. No Indians or Chinese ever dine with me, Miss Smeardon, though I’d rather like a peaceful Indian at dinner for a change; but I expect he’d find me very dull and uneventful!”
“Dull!––that’s a word I very often hear on American lips,” broke in Lavendar as he looked over the top of Henry Newbolt’s poems. “I believe being dull is thought a criminal offence in your country. Now, isn’t there some danger involved in this fear of dullness?”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” Robinette answered thoughtfully, looking into the fire. “Yes; I dare say there is, but I’m afraid there are social and mental dangers involved innotbeing afraid of it, too!” Her mischievous eyes swept the room, with Mrs. de Tracy’s solemn figure and Miss Smeardon’s107for its bright ornaments. “The moment a person or a nation allows itself to be too dull, it ceases to be quite alive, doesn’t it? But as to us Americans, Mr. Lavendar, bear with us for a few years, we are so ridiculously young! It is our growing time, and what you want in a young plant is growth, isn’t it?”
“Y-yes,” Lavendar replied: then with a twinkle in his blue eyes he added: “Only somehow we don’t like to hear a plant grow! It should manage to perform the operation quite silently, showing not processes but results. That’s a counsel of perfection, perhaps, but don’t slay me for plain-speaking, Mrs. Loring!”
Robinette laughed. “I’ll never slay you for saying anything so wise and true as that!” she said, and Lavendar, flushing under her praise, was charmed with her good humour.
“America’s a very large country, is it not?” enquired Miss Smeardon with her usual brilliancy. “What is its area?”
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“Bigger than England, but not as big as the British Empire!” suggested Carnaby, feeling the conversation was drifting into his ken.
“It’s just the size of the moon, I’ve heard!” said Robinette teasingly. “Does that throw any light on the question?”
“Moonlight!” laughed Carnaby, much pleased with his own wit. “Ha! ha! That’s the first joke I’ve made this holidays.Moonlight!Jolly good!”
“If you’d take a joke a little more in your stride, my son,” said Lavendar, “we should be more impressed by your mental sparkles.”
“Straighten the sofa-cushions, Carnaby,” said his grandmother, “and don’t lounge. I missed the point of your so-called joke entirely. As to the size of a country or anything else, I have never understood that it affected its quality. In fruit or vegetables, for instance, it generally means coarseness and indifferent flavour.” Miss Smeardon109beamed at this palpable hit, but Mrs. Loring deprived the situation of its point by backing up Mrs. de Tracy heartily. She had no opinion of mere size, either, she declared.
“You don’t stand up for your country half enough,” objected Carnaby to his cousin. (“Why don’t you give the old cat beans?” was his supplement,sotto voce.)
“Just attack some of my pet theories and convictions, Middy dear, if you wish to see me in a rage,” said Robinette lightly, “but my motto will never be ‘My country right or wrong.’”
“Nor mine,” agreed Lavendar. “I’m heartily with you there.”
“It’s a great venture we’re trying in America. I wish every one would try to look at it in that light,” said Robinette with a slight flush of earnestness.
“What do you mean by a venture?” asked Mrs. de Tracy.
“The experiment we’re making in democracy,” answered Robinette. “It’s fallen to110us to try it, for of course it simply had to be tried. It is thrillingly interesting, whatever it may turn out, and I wish I might live to see the end of it. We are creating a race, Aunt de Tracy; think of that!”
“It’s as difficult for nations as for individuals to hit the happy medium,” said Lavendar, stirring the fire. “Enterprise carried too far becomes vulgar hustling, while stability and conservatism often pass the coveted point of repose and degenerate into torpor.”
“This part of England seems to me singularly free from faults,” interposed Mrs. de Tracy in didactic tones. “We have a wonderful climate; more sunshine than in any part of the island, I believe. Our local society is singularly free from scandal. The clergy, if not quite as eloquent or profound as in London (and in my opinion it is the better for being neither) is strictly conscientious. We have no burglars or locusts or gnats or even midges, as I’m told they unfortunately111have in Scotland, and our dinner-parties, though quiet and dignified, are never dull.... What is the matter, Robinetta?”
“A sudden catch in my throat,” said Robinette, struggling with some sort of vocal difficulty and avoiding Lavendar’s eye. “Thank you,” as he offered her a glass of water from the punctual and strictly temperate evening tray. “Don’t look at me,” she added under her voice.
“Not for a million of money!” he whispered. Then he said aloud: “If I ever stand for Parliament, Mrs. Loring, I should like you to help me with my constituency!”
The unruffled temper and sweet reasonableness of Robinette’s answers to questions by no means always devoid of malice, had struck the young man very much, as he listened.
“She is good!” he thought to himself. “Good and sweet and generous. Her loveliness is not only in her face; it is in her heart.” And some favorite lines began to112run in his head that night, with new conviction:––
He that loves a rosy cheek,Or a coral lip admires,Or from star-like eyes doth seekFuel to maintain his fires,––As old Time makes these decay,So his flames will waste away.But a smooth and steadfast mind,Gentle thoughts and calm desires,Hearts with equal love combined––
but here Lavendar broke off with a laugh.
“It’s not come to that yet!” he thought. “I wonder if it ever will?”
113XA NEW KINSMAN
Young Mrs. Loring was making her way slowly at Stoke Revel Manor, and Mrs. de Tracy, though never affectionate, treated her with a little less indifference as the days went on. “The Admiral’s niece is a lady,” she admitted to herself privately; “not perhaps the highest type of English lady; that, considering her mixed ancestry and American education, would be too much to expect; but in the broad, general meaning of the word, unmistakably a lady!”
Mrs. Benson, though not melting outwardly as yet, held more lenient views still with regard to the American guest. Bates, the butler, was elderly, and severely Church of England; his knowledge of widows was confined to the type ably represented by his mistress and he regarded young Mrs. Loring114as inclined to be “flighty.” The footman, who was entirely under the butler’s thumb in mundane matters, had fallen into the habit of sharing his opinions, and while agreeing in the general feeling of flightiness, declared boldly that the lady in question gave a certain “style” to the dinner-table that it had lacked before her advent.
For a helpless victim, however, a slave bound in fetters of steel, one would have to know Cummins, the under housemaid, who lighted Mrs. Loring’s fire night and morning. She was young, shy, country bred, and new to service. When Mrs. Benson sent her to the guest’s room at eight o’clock on the morning after her arrival she stopped outside the door in a panic of fear.
“Come in!” called a cheerful voice. “Come in!”
Cummins entered, bearing her box with brush and cloth and kindlings. To her further embarrassment Mrs. Loring was sitting up in bed with an ermine coat on, over which115her bright hair fell in picturesque disorder. She had brought the coat for theatre and opera, but as these attractions were lacking at Stoke Revel and as life there was, to her, one prolonged Polar expedition, with dashes farthest north morning and evening, she had diverted it to practical uses.
“Make me a quick fire please, a big fire, a hot fire,” she begged, “or I shall be late for breakfast; I never can step into that tin tub till the ice is melted.”
“There’s no ice in it, ma’am,” expostulated Cummins gently, with the voice of a wood dove.
“You can’t see it because you’re English,” said the strange lady, “but I can see it and feel it. Oh, you makesucha good fire! What is your name, please?”
“Cummins, ma’am.”
“There’s another Cummins downstairs, but she is tall and large. You shall be ‘Little Cummins.’”
Now every morning the shy maid palpitated116outside the bedroom door, having given her modest knock; palpitated for fear it should be all a dream. But no, it was not! there would be a clear-voiced “Come in!” and then, as she entered; “Good morning, Little Cummins. I’ve been longing for you since daybreak!” A trifle later on it was, “Good Little Cummins bearing coals of comfort! Kind Little Cummins,” and other strange and wonderful terms of praise, until Little Cummins felt herself consumed by a passion to which Mrs. de Tracy’s coals became as less than naught unless they could be heaped on the altar of the beloved.
So life went on at Stoke Revel, outwardly even and often dull, while in reality many subtle changes were taking place below the surface; changes slight in themselves but not without meaning.
Robinette ran up to her room directly after breakfast one morning and pinned on her hat as she came downstairs. Mark Lavendar had gone to London for a few days,117but even the dullness of breakfast-table conversation had not robbed her of her joy in the early sunshine, made more cheery by the prospect of a walk with Carnaby, with whom she was now fast friends.
Carnaby looked at her beamingly as they stood together on the steps. “You’re the best turned-out woman of my acquaintance,” he said approvingly, with a laughable struggle for the tone of a middle-aged man of the world.
“How many ladies of fashion do you know, my child?” enquired Robinetta, pulling on her gloves.
“I see a lot of ’em off and on,” Carnaby answered somewhat huffily, “and they don’t call me a child either!”
“Don’t they? Then that’s because they’re timid and don’t dare address a future Admiral as Infant-in-Arms! Come on, Middy dear, let’s walk.”
Robinette wore a white serge dress and jacket, and her hat was a rough straw turned118up saucily in two places with black owls’ heads. Mrs. Benson and Little Cummins had looked at it curiously while Robinette was at breakfast.
“’Tis black underneath and white on top, Mrs. Benson. ’Ow can that be? It looks as if one ’at ’ad been clapped on another!”
“That’s what it is, Cummins. It’s a double hat; but they’ll do anything in America. It’s a double hat with two black owls’ heads, and I’ll wager they charged double price for it!”
“She’s a lovely beauty in anythink and everythink she wears,” said Little Cummins loyally.
“May I call you ‘Cousin Robin’?” Carnaby asked as they walked along. “Robinette is such a long name.”
“Cousin Robin is very nice, I think,” she answered. “As a matter of fact I ought to be your Aunt Robin; it would be much more appropriate.”
“Aunt be blowed!” ejaculated Carnaby.
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“You’re very fond of making yourself out old, but it’s no go! When I first heard you were a widow I thought you would be grandmother’s age,––I say––do you think you will marry another time, Cousin Robin?”
“That’s a very leading question for a gentleman to put to a lady! Were you intending to ask me to wait for you, Middy dear?” asked Robinette, putting her arm in the boy’s laughingly, quite unconscious of his mood.
“I’d wait quick enough if you’d let me! I’d wait a lifetime! There never was anybody like you in the world!”
The words were said half under the boy’s breath and the emotion in his tone was a complete and disagreeable surprise. Here was something that must be nipped in the bud, instantly and courageously. Robinette dropped Carnaby’s arm and said: “We’ll talk that over at once, Middy dear, but first you shall race me to the top of the twisting path, down past the tulip beds, to the seat under the big ash tree.––Come on!”
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The two reached the tree in a moment, Carnaby sufficiently in advance to preserve his self-respect and with a colour heightened by something other than the exercise of running.
“Sit down, first cousin once removed!” said Robinette. “Do you know the story of Sydney Smith, who wrote apologizing to somebody for not being able to come to dinner? ‘The house is full of cousins,’ he said; ‘would they were “once removed”!’”
“It’s no good telling me literary anecdotes!––You’re not treating me fairly,” said Carnaby sulkily.
“I’m treating you exactly as you should be treated, Infant-in-Arms,” Robinette answered firmly. “Give me your two paws, and look me straight in the eye.”
Carnaby was no coward. His steel-grey eyes blazed as he met his cousin’s look. “Carnaby dear, do you know what you are to me? You are my kinsman; my only male relation. I’m so fond of you already, don’t121spoil it! Think what you can be to me if you will. I am all alone in the world and when you grow a little older how I should like to depend upon you! I need affection; so do you, dear boy; can’t I see how you are just starving for it? There is no reason in the world why we shouldn’t be fond of each other! Oh! how grateful I should be to think of a strong young middy growing up to advise me and take me about! It was that kind of care and thought of me that was in your mind just now!”
“You’ll be marrying somebody one of these days,” blurted Carnaby, wholly moved, but only half convinced. “Then you’ll forget all about your ‘kinsman.’”
“I have no intention in that direction,” said Robinette, “but if I change my mind I’ll consult you first; how will that do?”
“It wouldn’t do any good,” sighed the boy, “so I’d rather you wouldn’t! You’d have your own way spite of everything a fellow could say against it!”
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There was a moment of embarrassment; then the silence was promptly broken by Robinette.
“Well, Middy dear, are we the best of friends?” she asked, rising from the bench and putting out her hand.
The lad took it and said all in a glow of chivalry, “You’re the dearest, the best, and the prettiest cousin in the world! You don’t mind my thinking you’re the prettiest?”
“Mind it? I delight in it! I shall come to your ship and pour out tea for you in my most fetching frock. Your friends will say: ‘Who is that particularly agreeable lady, Carnaby?’ And you, with swelling chest, will respond, ‘That’s my American cousin, Mrs. Loring. She’s a nice creature; I’m glad you like her!’”
Robinette’s imitation of Carnaby’s possible pomposity was so amusing and so clever that it drew a laugh from the boy in spite of himself.
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“Just let anyone try to call you a ‘creature’!” he exclaimed. “He’d have me to reckon with! Oh! I am so tired of being a boy! The inside of me is all grown up and everybody keeps on looking at the outside and thinking I’m just the same as I always was!”
“Dear old Middy, you’re quite old enough to be my protector and that is what you shall be! Now shall we go in? I want you to stand near by while I ask your grandmother a favor.”
“She won’t do it if she can help it,” was Carnaby’s succinct reply.
“Oh, I am not sure! Where shall we find her,––in the library?”
“Yes; come along! Get up your circulation; you’ll need it!”
“Aunt de Tracy, there is something at Stoke Revel I am very anxious to have if you will give it to me,” said Robinette, as she came into the library a few minutes later.
Mrs. de Tracy looked up from her knitting124solemnly. “If it belongs to me, I shall no doubt be willing, as I know you would not ask for anything out of the common; but I own little here; nearly all is Carnaby’s.”
“This was my mother’s,” said Robinette. “It is a picture hanging in the smoking room; one that was a great favorite of hers, called ‘Robinetta.’ Her drawing-master found an Italian artist in London who went to the National Gallery and made a copy of the Sir Joshua picture, and I was named after it.”
“I wish your mother could have been a little less romantic,” sighed Mrs. de Tracy. “There were such fine old family names she might have used: Marcia and Elspeth, and Rosamond and Winifred!”
“I am sorry, Aunt de Tracy. If I had been consulted I believe I should have agreed with you. Perhaps when my mother was in America the family ties were not drawn as tightly as in the former years?”
“If it was so, it was only natural,” said the125old lady. “However, if you ask Carnaby, and if the picture has no great value, I am sure he will wish you to have it, especially if you know it to have been your mother’s property.” Here Carnaby sauntered into the room. “That’s all right, grandmother,” he said, “I heard what you were saying; only I wish it was a real Sir Joshua we were giving Cousin Robin instead of a copy!”
“Thank you, Carnaby dear, and thank you, too, Aunt de Tracy. You can’t think how much it is to me to have this; it is a precious link between mother’s girlhood, and mother, and me.” So saying, she dropped a timid kiss upon Mrs. de Tracy’s iron-grey hair, and left the room.
“If she could live in England long enough to get over that excessive freedom of manner, your cousin would be quite a pleasing person, but I am afraid it goes too deep to be cured,” Mrs. de Tracy remarked as she smoothed the hairs that might have been ruffled by Robinette’s kiss.
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Carnaby made no reply. He was looking out into the garden and feeling half a boy, half a man, but wholly, though not very contentedly, a kinsman.
127XITHE SANDS AT WESTON
“Thursday morning? Is it possible that this is Thursday morning? And I must run up to London on Saturday,” said Lavendar to himself as he finished dressing by the open window. He looked up the day of the week in his calendar first, in order to make quite sure of the fact. Yes, there was no doubt at all that it was Thursday. His sense of time must have suffered some strange confusion; in one way it seemed only an hour ago that he had arrived from the clangour and darkness of London to the silence of the country, the cuckoos calling across the river between the wooded hills, and the April sunshine on the orchard trees; in another, years might have passed since the moment when he first saw Robinette Loring sitting under Mrs. Prettyman’s plum tree.
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“Eight days have we spent together in this house, and yet since that time when we first crossed in the boat, I’ve never been more than half an hour alone with her,” he thought. “There are only three other people in the house after all, but they seem to have the power of multiplying themselves like the loaves and fishes (only when they’re not wanted) so that we’re eternally in a crowd. That boy particularly! I like Carnaby, if he could get it into his thick head that his presence isn’t always necessary; it must bother Mrs. Loring too; he’s quite off his head about her if she only knew it. However, it’s my last day very likely, and if I have to outwit Machiavelli I’ll manage it somehow! Surely one lame old woman, and a torpid machine for knitting and writing notes like Miss Smeardon, can’t want to be out of doors all day. Hang that boy, though! He’ll come anywhere.” Here he stopped and sat down suddenly at the dressing-table, covering his face with his hands in comic129despair. “Mrs. Loring can’t like it! She must be doing it on purpose, avoiding being alone with me because she sees I admire her,” he sighed. “After all why should I ever suppose that I interest her as much as she does me?”
No one could have told from Lavendar’s face, when he appeared fresh and smiling at the breakfast table half an hour later, that he was hatching any deep-laid schemes.
Robinette entered the dining room five minutes late, as usual, pretty as a pink, breathless with hurrying. She wore a white dress again, with one rose stuck at her waistband, “A little tribute from the gardener,” she said, as she noticed Lavendar glance at it. She went rapidly around the table shaking hands, and gave Carnaby’s red cheeks a pinch in passing that made Lavendar long to tweak the boy’s ear.
“Good morning, all!” she said cheerily, “and how is my first cousin once removed? Is he going to Weston with me this morning to buy hairpins?”
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“He is!” Carnaby answered joyfully, between mouthfuls of bacon and eggs. “He has been out of hairpins for a week.”
“Does he need tapes and buttons also?” asked Robinette, taking the piece of muffin from his hand and buttering it for herself; an act highly disapproved of by Mrs. de Tracy, who hurriedly requested Bates to pass the bread.
“He needs everything you need,” Carnaby said with heightened colour.
“My hair is giving me a good deal of trouble, lately,” remarked Lavendar, passing his hand over a thickly thatched head.
“I have an excellent American tonic that I will give you after breakfast,” said Robinette roguishly. “You need to apply it with a brush at ten, eleven, and twelve o’clock, sitting in the sun continuously between those hours so that the scalp may be well invigorated. Carnaby, will you buy me butter scotch and lemonade and oranges in Weston?”
“I will, if Grandmother’ll increase my allowance,”131said Carnaby malevolently, “for I need every penny I’ve got in hand for the hairpins.”
“I hope you are not hungry, Robinetta,” said Mrs. de Tracy, “that you have to buy food in Weston.”
“No, indeed,” said Robinette, “I was only longing to test Carnaby’s generosity and educate him in buying trifles for pretty ladies.”
“He can probably be relied on to educate himself in that line when the time comes,” Mrs. de Tracy remarked; “and now if you have all finished talking about hair, I will take up my breakfast again.”
“Oh, Aunt de Tracy, I am so sorry if it wasn’t a nice subject, but I never thought. Anyway I only talked about hairpins; it was Mr. Lavendar who introduced hair into the conversation; wasn’t it, Middy dear?”
Lavendar thought he could have annihilated them both for their open comradeship, their obvious delight in each other’s society. Was he to be put on the shelf like a dry old132bachelor? Not he! He would circumvent them in some way or another, although the rôle of gooseberry was new to him.
The two young people set off in high spirits, and Mrs. de Tracy and Miss Smeardon watched them as they walked down the avenue on their way to the station, their clasped hands swinging in a merry rhythm as they hummed a bit of the last popular song.
“I hope Robinetta will not Americanize Carnaby,” said Mrs. de Tracy. “He seems so foolishly elated, so feverishly gay all at once. Her manner is too informal; Carnaby requires constant repression.”
“Perhaps his temperature has not returned to normal since his attack of quinsy,” Miss Smeardon observed, reassuringly.
Meanwhile Lavendar sat in Admiral de Tracy’s old smoking room for half an hour writing letters. Every time that he glanced up from his work, and he did so pretty often, his eyes fell on a picture that hung upon the opposite wall. It was the copy of133Sir Joshua’s “Robinetta” made long ago and just presented to its namesake.
In the portrait the girl’s hair was a still brighter gold; yet certainly there was a likeness somewhere about it, he thought; partly in the expression, partly in the broad low forehead, and the eyes that looked as if they were seeing fairies.
Of course to his mind Mrs. Loring was a hundred times more lovely than Sir Joshua’s famous girl with a robin. He felt very ill-used because Robinette and Carnaby had deliberately gone for an excursion without him and had left him toiling over business papers when they had gone off to enjoy themselves.
How bright it was out there in the sunshine, to be sure! And why should it be Carnaby, not he, who was by this time walking along the sea front of Weston, and watching the breeze flutter Robinette’s scarf and bring a brighter colour to her lips?
There! the last words were written, and134taking up his bunch of letters, watch in hand, he sought Mrs. de Tracy, and explained that he would bicycle to Weston and catch the London post himself.
“I’ll send William”––she began; but Lavendar hastily assured her that he should enjoy the ride, and hurried off in triumph. Miss Smeardon smiled an acid smile as she watched him go. “He has forgotten all about poor Miss Meredith, I suppose,” she murmured. “Yet it was not so long ago that they were supposed to be all in all to each other!”
“It was a foolish engagement, Miss Smeardon,” said Mrs. de Tracy in a cold voice. “I never thought the girl was suited to Mark, and I understand that old Mr. Lavendar was relieved when the whole thing came to an end.”
“Quite so; certainly; no doubt Miss Meredith would never have made him happy,” said Miss Smeardon at once, “though it is always more agreeable when the lady discovers135the fact first. In this case she confessed openly that Mr. Lavendar broke her heart with his indifference.”
“She was an ill-bred young woman,” said Mrs. de Tracy, as if the subject were now closed. “However, I hope that the son of my family solicitor would think it only proper to pay a certain amount of attention to the Admiral’s niece, were she ever so obnoxious to him.”
Miss Smeardon made no audible reply, but her thoughts were to the effect that never was an obnoxious duty performed by any man with a better grace.
The sea front at Weston was the most prosaic scene in the world, a long esplanade with an asphalt path running its full length, and ugly jerrybuilt houses glaring out upon it, a gimcrack pier with a gingerbread sort of band-stand and glass house at the end;––all that could have been done to ruin nature had been determinedly done there. But you cannot ruin a spring day,136nor youth, nor the colour of the sea. Along the level shore, the placid waves swept and broke, and then gathered up their white skirts, and retreated to return with the same musical laugh. Children and dogs played about on the wet sands. The wind blew freshly and the sea stretched all one pure blue, till it met on the horizon with the bluer skies.
Weston seemed to Lavendar a very fresh and delightful spot at that moment, although had he been in a different mood its sordidness only would have struck him. Yes, there they were in the distance; he knew Robinette’s white dress and the figure of the boy beside her. Hang that boy! Were they really going to buy hairpins? If so, then a hair-dresser’s he must find. Lavendar turned up the little street that led from the sea-front, scanning all the signs––Boots––Dairies––Vegetable shops––Heavens! were there nothing but vegetable and boot shops in Weston? Boots again. At last a Hairdresser;137Lavendar stood in the doorway until he made sure that Robinette and the middy had turned in that direction, and then he boldly entered the shop.
To his horror he found himself confronted by a smiling young woman, whose own very marvellous erection of hair made him think she must be used as an advertisement for the goods she supplied.
In another moment Robinette and the boy would be upon him, and he must be found deep in fictitious business. He cast one agonized glance at the mysteries of the toilet that surrounded him on every side, then clearing his throat, he said modestly but firmly, that he wanted to buy a pair of curling tongs for a lady.
“These are the thing if you wish a Marcel wave,” was the reply, “but just for an ordinary crimp we sell a good many of the plain ones.”
“Yes, thank you. They will do; the lady––my sister, also wished––”