ToMABEL LLOYDWithout whose enduring friendshipmy books would not havecome to being
ToMABEL LLOYDWithout whose enduring friendshipmy books would not havecome to being
I
“AS a matter of fact—although one hates to say such a thing——” Lady Argent paused, in order to give the thing its full conversational value. “As a matter of absolute fact, those poor children are really to be congratulated.”
“Because they are left orphans at five years old?”
“How you exaggerate, Ludovic! Rosamund is quite fourteen, and the little one can’t be less than ten or eleven years old. And she wasn’t much of a mother to them, poor thing.”
“Well, what form did her modified motherhood take?”
“Ludovic, sheisdead, after all,” Lady Argent reminded her son. “But she was so much absorbed in her music, and they didn’t get any proper education, as far as one knows. And then, of course, during this last year she was quite obviously dying—she ought really to have been in a sanatorium.”
“She must have been quite young,” said Ludovic Argent reflectively.
“Only about seven- or eight-and-thirty. Don’t you remember when she first settled here, just after the husband died, and we were all so excited about this pretty young widow and that enormous grand piano that had to be forced in at the front-door with such difficulty?”
“I suppose I was at Oxford then, since I don’t remember the sensation which the grand piano must indeed have caused, if they got it through the front-door of that small place.”
Ludovic Argent and his mother both gazed across the valley below, because the front-door under discussion wasimmediately opposite their own, although separated from it by two slopes of hill and the River Wye. Only the window-panes twinkling in the afternoon sun were visible.
“And what will happen to her grand piano now? I suppose it will have to be got out again,” said Ludovic nonchalantly.
“That’s what I was just telling you,” Lady Argent mistakenly assured him. “In a way they really are to be congratulated, poor little things. I believe Bertie Tregaskis is going to look after them.”
“Is that the woman who pervades Cornwall with model dairies and good works generally, and if so, what is she doing in thisgalère?”
“She was a cousin of Mrs. Grantham’s, and the very day after Mrs. Grantham became so much worse Bertie was down here to see after those poor little girls. So exactly like her, because it wasn’t a particularly near relationship or anything—simply one of her magnificent, generous impulses. They really have nobody, poor waifs; the mother doesn’t seem to have had any belongings at all, or if she had, they are Hungarians of sorts, and much better not raked up, in all probability.”
“It is difficult to see who is available to do the raking, certainly,” Ludovic admitted.
“Oh, Bertie would do anything that wasright, of course, but she’s simply solved the whole problem by saying she’ll take them home with her. A woman who’s got more responsibilities already than anyone I know—and a child of her own besides—it really is rather magnificent of her, Ludovic.”
“But haven’t they got any guardian or anything?”
“Nothing at all. That’s one of the things that shows you what poor Mrs. Grantham was. Although she must have known for at least a year that she was dying, she never made any sort or kind of will. As a matter of fact I don’t suppose she had anything to leave, and the father’s money is safely secured for the two girls, Bertie says.”
“So Mrs. Tregaskis won’t have to take them for charity, so to speak?”
“Oh no! I don’t think even she could do that, wonderful manager though she is. She’s not at all well off. But of course it’s everything for girls of that age—or of any age, for that matter—to have a home. And she’ll be such a mother to them! She always says she was meant to be the mother of a large family and is wasted with just one little girl.”
“So the children are to be congratulated,” remarked Ludovic meditatively, as though summing up the situation.
“Well,” said his mother apologetically, “you know what I mean. Poor Mrs. Grantham was so ill, and she really was erratic—those long earrings, and all that music, and she seemed altogether more Hungarian than English, which was natural enough, I dare say, but not the best sort of thing for the daughters of an English father. One wouldn’t say anything unkind for the world—de mortuis—you know what I mean, dear, though I can never recollect the end of that proverb—or is it some sort of text?”
“I know what you mean,” Ludovic gravely assured her.
This untruth had been for many years his conversationalcheval-de-bataillein intercourse with his mother.
“You always do, darling,” she returned gratefully. “So much more like a daughter than a son.”
She sighed, and Ludovic wondered if the sigh were a tribute to the thought of her own non-existent daughter, or to the infirmity which had kept her only son at home, to limp his way through life in the Wye valley.
“Anyway,” his mother concluded as though presenting a final solution, “Bertie is bringing the poor children here this afternoon to say good-bye to me. It will be very good for them to come out, and Bertie is so wonderfully broad-minded—there’s no conventional nonsense about her. I do want you to meet her, Ludovic.”
“Very well, mother dear. I’m rather curious, I’ve heard so much about her.”
Towards five o’clock of that crisp October afternoon, Ludovic Argent’s curiosity was gratified.
He limped into the library and found his mother in earnest conversation with her friend.
Bertha Tregaskis was a woman of forty-five, and the dominant impression produced upon Ludovic was one of intense capability. Her strong black hair, untouched with grey, sprang crisp and wiry from a capacious forehead, and the broad contour of her strong face revealed innumerable lines, hinting at the many activities indicated by Lady Argent. Her white, rather prominent teeth were freely revealed as she greeted Ludovic with the sane, ample smile in which she seemed to envelop all her surroundings.
“This is a sad expedition of mine, but I’m very glad to meet Sybil’s son at last; I’ve heard of you so often.”
Her voice was very much what he had expected from her appearance—full, rather deep, and with a native decision of utterance.
“And I of you, from my mother and—in Cornwall.”
“Ah, Cornwall!” She laughed outright. “I be Carnish wumman, sure ’nuff.”
Her instant assumption of the Cornish burr, natural and almost instinctive though it appeared to be, irritated Ludovic.
With a quickness of perception which he was to learn was characteristic of her, Mrs. Tregaskis appeared to perceive it.
“I suspect you heard of me as ‘Miss Bertie,’ since I am never allowed to be anything else down there. I do believe that half Cornwall knew me as ‘Miss Bertie’ until I married, and the name has stuck. At home, when I’m in the village with Hazel, all the old women stand at their doors and tell each other ‘’tis Miss Bertie and her l’il maid.’”
“‘L’il maid’—how perfectly priceless,” murmured the sympathetic Lady Argent, as in duty bound. Ludovic, again conscious of unreasonable annoyance, found himselfwondering captiously whether anyone ever spoke of anyone else as a “l’il maid” outside the pages of a novel in dialect, his pet aversion. The phrase seemed too probable to be possible.
“Have you come from the Granthams’ place?” he demanded abruptly, impelled by a vicious desire to abandon the cloying topic of “Miss Bertie” and the atmosphere of local adulation of which she seemed to him redolent.
Where else should she have come from? He was aware that the question was ridiculous to the verge of politeness, but she replied, with all her armour of cheery friendliness unimpaired: “Yes, I’ve brought those two poor little girls, but your mother very kindly let them go out and play in the garden. So much better for them, after being shut up these last few days. I shall be very glad to get them home to-morrow; a change is the only thing.”
Her eyes, charged with kindly meanings, sought the sympathetic response of Lady Argent’s gaze.
“Of course it is. And they are too young to feel any wrench at leaving the place. It will probably be a relief to get right away from the atmosphere—and then, of course, they’ll love to be with your Hazel.”
“They’ve seen far too little of other children, and so, for the matter of that, has Hazel,” declared Bertha Tregaskis briskly. “I expect half a dozen rows royal to begin with, but the prospect doesn’t daunt me, on the whole.”
“I’m sure you’ll cope with all and any of it,” returned Lady Argent with a glance of fond admiration.
Ludovic felt sure of it too, but his sureness was untempered by either fondness or admiration.
He felt a strong desire to be matter-of-fact, almost disagreeable as far as possible, in this atmosphere of competent kindness.
“I shall go and fetch them in to tea,” he announced, reaching for his stick that was almost a crutch.
“Do, dear.”
As he went out at the French window Ludovic heard hismother murmuring wistfully: “He is so fond of children.”
He knew that she fostered this idea because she wished him to marry. He told himself that, in point of fact, he was not fond of children at all, and supposed that she based her assertion on an isolated liking for the intelligent small boy of an under-gardener.
Presently he saw the two children, in very modified mourning, under a great ilex-tree at the bottom of the garden. They were sitting on a bench side by side, very quietly, but they both rose at the sound of his crutch on the gravel.
“How do you do?” said Ludovic gravely, and shook hands with them both.
His first thought was that it was not fair to speak of Rosamund Grantham, at all events, as a child, to bring her out to tea, as though she were in need of childish diversion to make her forget a childish sorrow, to send her to play in the garden. He thought that perhaps she also had felt it so. Resentment smouldered in her dark-ringed eyes, and in the sulkily-cut lines of her very beautiful mouth.
There was much to recall the Slavonic type in her, in the high moulding of the cheek-bones, the straight, rather blunt nose, opaque ivory complexion, and straight black brows. Her eyes, sombre and heavy-lidded, were of a colour seldom seen in England—the true tint of clear deep grey. Her build, however, showed no trace of a squat, square-standing, Hungarian ancestry. She was very tall for her thirteen years, but gave the impression of having already almost attained to her full growth. Straight and square-shouldered, she was far too thin for beauty, from the defiant curve of neck and upheld chin to the long slim fingers, betraying sensitiveness in every outstanding blue vein and narrowed finger-tip.
Ludovic Argent, then and thereafter, thought that he had never seen a creature more at odds with her world and her passionate unbalanced self, than was Rosamund Grantham.
Frances, her face at eleven years old already bearing the impress of the dreamer in the steadfast gaze of eyes as grey as those of her sister, gave a sense of reliance and purposefulness that seemed to Ludovic amazing. Her small face had a classical delicacy of outline, her mouth was pathetically childish. Both had the same very soft brown hair growing in a curious little point on the low square forehead, and seeming too light in colour and texture for the dark brows and lashes beneath.
Both greeted Ludovic with serious self-possession, but Frances smiled at him a little, timidly, revealing teeth that sloped inwards.
“My mother sent me to tell you that tea is ready. She is in the library with Mrs. Tregaskis,” he said.
“Shall we come, then?” murmured Rosamund conventionally. Her manner was that of a princess, and he surmised that whatever the Hungarian past of Mrs. Grantham might have concealed, a very secure assurance in her own ineradicable birthright and breeding had descended to her daughter.
“You have been here before, I know,” he said, as they walked towards the house. “I expect I was at Oxford, or abroad,” he added hastily, cursing himself for the allusion which might recall expeditions with the dead mother.
But Rosamund adjusted the trend of the conversation as easily as she adjusted her pace to his halting steps.
“How nice to go abroad,” she said wistfully. “You must know a lot of places. Have you been to Russia?”
“No,” said Ludovic, and almost found himself asking, “Have you?” as though to a contemporary.
“Neither have I, of course,” Rosamund assured him rather apologetically, “but I am very much interested in it just at present; I’ve been reading about Siberia.”
“What was the book?”
“Oh, it’s only a children’s book—and I think it’s rather old-fashioned—one about Siberian exiles.”
A sudden memory of his boyhood, book-encompassed, stirred eagerly in Ludovic.
“Is it called ‘The Young Exiles’?” he cried.
“Oh! have you read it too?”
Their eyes met, and a delighted sense of recognition seemed to dance in both.
“I like the beginning part of it best, when the father is first arrested, and they go to the Czar. Do you remember?”
“Yes. And have you come to the part....”
They were as much excited as old friends meeting unexpectedly in a foreign country.
Ludovic remembered the book, which had absorbed him twenty years earlier, a good deal more clearly than he remembered the reviews which were now the objects of his monthly perusal.
They talked about “The Young Exiles” until the house was reached.
Lady Argent greeted them with smiles and kind, outstretched hand, but Ludovic felt convinced by the rather nervous cheeriness of her “Well, children dear, how do you like the garden?” that Mrs. Tregaskis had been impressing upon his mother the necessity for carrying off the situation with a high-handed brightness.
The brightness of Mrs. Tregaskis herself was beyond question.
“We heard you having a great pow-wow as you came along,” she said gaily. “What was it all about?”
She looked at Rosamund, but it was Frances who, after an instant’s pause, replied gently and gravely:
“It was about a book, mostly.”
“Ah! story-books, story-books, story-books!” Mrs. Tregaskis shook her head good-humouredly. “I suspect both these little people of being book-worms.”
The laugh in her kindly gaze was inflexible, and Lady Argent responded to it by a faint tinkle of mirth that Ludovic savagely told himself was sycophantic.
“Well, I was a bit of a book-worm myself, once upon a time. No, no, don’t ask me how long ago.” No one showed any signs of doing so. “It must have been quite a hundred years ago, since I wasn’t much bigger than Frances is now, if you can imagine such a thing.”
She gave her ready, jolly laugh with both hands on her wide hips.
“I used to sit up in an old pear-tree in the orchard (down tü Tintagel ’twas, ma dear), and read everything I could find—not the sort of story-books you children of to-day get hold of, I can assure you, but books that you’d think very stiff and dry, I expect.”
She was now addressing herself, almost in narrative form, to Rosamund and Frances, but Ludovic noted with venomous satisfaction that the politely unresponsive expression on both faces seemed to discourage her slightly.
She turned to Lady Argent again, with another slight laugh, as it were of proud apology for her own literary infancy.
“I really believe I’d worked my way through the whole of Motley’s ‘Dutch Republic’ before I was ten years old, and as for Don Quixote, he was my hero. In fact my lightest literature was Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queen,’ most of which I knew by heart.”
“My dear! At ten years old! Just think of it!” This from Lady Argent. Ludovic contented himself with the bitter ejaculation:
“Liar!”
Which civil and ingratiating apostrophe was naturally confined to his own breast.
“Don’t you find that this generation has a positively vitiated taste as regards fiction?” Bertha Tregaskis demanded of her hostess, who, having all her life been innocently devoid of any taste for fiction at all, replied in an unsure voice:
“Do you mean sort of penny dreadfuls, Bertie, dear? which they always say the housemaids like, though I’m suremine have the most superior taste, for they read books like ‘St. Elmo’ or ‘Donovan’ for choice, I believe. I know my maid told me she was reading a novel called ‘Infelice,’ whatever that may mean. So educated of her, I thought, to choose a book with a foreign name like that.”
“‘Infeleese’?” repeated Mrs. Tregaskis uncomprehendingly. “Oh,Infelice! I know what you mean. My dear Sybil!”
More laughter.
“Have I said something absurd?” Lady Argent helplessly inquired; “I never do know anything about books, you know—so unlike Ludovic.”
She looked proudly at her son.
“You know he writes, Bertie?”
Ludovic had writhed under this simple announcement ever since his tenth year.
“But how splendid!” cried Mrs. Tregaskis with enthusiasm. “Who publishes for you?”
Ludovic felt convinced that she expected him to disclaim ever having got as far as publication, and took a vicious satisfaction in replying:
“‘Cameron’s Review’ has taken one or two small things, but they really are so very few and far between that only a fond parentcouldlook upon me as a writer, in any sense of the word.”
“Nonsense,” murmured his mother. “Don’t listen to him, Bertie. He had a most beautiful thing, pages and pages long, all about Early English Poetry in the ‘Age of Literature,’ only a few weeks ago.”
Mrs. Tregaskis appeared to be as much impressed as the fondest of parents could desire.
“You don’t say so! Splendid! Scrumptious!” She almost shouted in her enthusiasm.
“I envy you dilettantes, who have time for all that sort of thing. A poverty-stricken Cornish woman like myself has to write what and when she can, just to turn an honest penny now and then.”
“Bertie! you don’t mean to say you write, aswellas everything else?”
“Oh my dear Sybil, the greatest rubbish, you know—just a story here and there, to bring in a much-needed guinea.”
She laughed the gallant laugh of one who would scorn to deny the need of guineas.
“Howtoowonderful she is,” said Lady Argent in an undertone to the universe at large. “Bertie, you must let us read your stories.”
“Oh no, my dear. They’re only just scribbled off between a Mothers’ Meeting and a dairy class—just anyhow. What would the writer say to that?”
She looked roguishly at Ludovic.
“How I envy you! If I had nothing else to do but sit in this magnificent study, I should try and write a book, perhaps; but as it is ... I envy you.”
There was an instant’s silence.
An unpardonable instinct to see whether it were possible thoroughly to disconcert his mother’s friend seized upon Ludovic.
“I wish to goodness,” he said slowly, and with an entirely assumed bitterness of tone, “that Ihadsomething to do besides sit in a study and scribble—it’s not fit for a man.”
It was almost the first time that his mother had ever heard him allude to his infirmity, and she flushed from brow to chin.
But Mrs. Tregaskis was more than equal to the situation, as its creator had surmised that she would be.
The jovial lines of her face softened into kindly compassion, and the slow noddings of her head were portentous with understanding:
“Aha!” she murmured eloquently, and the depths of comprehension in her brooding gaze left Ludovic utterly defeated. Then, after a moment’s silence, obviously consecrated by Mrs. Tregaskis to her complete and all-embracingunderstanding of Ludovic Argent, she gravitated skilfully towards a brighter outlook.
“What a joy that little gift of writing is, though! I always say it’s like the quality of mercy, twice blessed—it blesses him that givesandhim that takes——”
“My dear Bertie!” said Lady Argent with her soft laugh, and under a vague impression that Bertie was being epigrammatic and slightly daring with a passage from the Scriptures.
“Well, it’s very true,” laughed Mrs. Tregaskis. “I’m sure the readers of ‘Cameron’s’ and the ‘Age of Literature’ often bless your son’s contributions, and as to ‘him that gives,’ I know it really is the greatest joy to me sometimes, when the real work of the day is done, to feel I can let myself sit down for a few minutes and turn out half a dozen little French couplets or some fanciful piece of nonsense about children and fairies—you know the sort of thing. It does seem to rest one so.”
“To rest one!” echoed Lady Argent, with at least three notes of admiration in her voice.
“Children, do you realize what a wonderful person your—your guardian is? She’ll tell you all sorts of stories about fairies and things. I know you’re perfectly marvellous with children, Bertie,” she added in a most audible aside.
“Little people generally like my long yarns about the Cornish pixies,” admitted Mrs. Tregaskis. “Have you ever seen a pixie, Frances?”
“No,” said Frances coldly.
“Ah, they don’t grow in this part of the world. But there are wonderful things in Cornwall, as you’ll find out when you live there.”
“When do you go?” asked Ludovic of Rosamund.
Her sensitive face flushed.
“To-morrow, I think,” she half-whispered, with a glance in the direction of Mrs. Tregaskis, that seemed to Ludovic to convey hostility and a half defiant fear.
“Well, Sybil,” Bertha observed, “am I to see the garden, too?”
“Oh yes, of course. I’m longing for your advice—you know so much about a garden, and those things you made me get for the rockery last year aren’t doing quite as well as I hoped. Do come and tell me what you think of them.”
Mrs. Tregaskis rose. Her eye rested for a moment on the children. Then she said briskly:
“The children must show us the way. I expect they’ve ferreted out every corner in the place, during that grand exploration before tea, if they haven’t actually danced upon your most cherished rock-plants. I know what country kids are like.”
Ludovic thought of the two little forlorn figures that he had found under the great ilex-tree, and Mrs. Tregaskis’ joviality seemed to him singularly out of place.
He rose and opened the door.
“Form fours—quick march—left, right, left, right,” cried Bertie playfully, giving Rosamund a gentle push by the shoulders.
Rosamund and Frances went out.