VI
“THE sooner I pack up my young lady and take her off to Scotland, the better, I think,” said Bertha decisively.
“It’s all so silly,” sighed Nina vaguely. “But I really don’t know—I shouldn’t mind it, you know, Bertie, if he seriously wants it—only I think he’s too young. I’ve always hoped he’d marry a daughter of yours, and Rosamund’s as good as your daughter, though between ourselves, I’ve always been fonder of both the other two.”
“Well—it may do very well when he’s a little older. But don’t take it too seriously, Nina, my dear; it’s only a violent admiration for a pretty face.”
“He hasn’t been proposing to her, or anything ridiculous of that kind?” asked Nina nervously.
“Not that I know of, dear. He must know very well that, situated as he is, he can’t possibly think of marrying—unless, of course, you made it possible for him.”
“Of course, in a way, I want to see him married.”
“Not at that age, dearest. Why, the boy can’t know his own mind.”
“No. Poor Morris! And he is frightfully unbalanced.”
“So’s she,” said Bertha Tregaskis quickly. “Her be a right-down fulish li’l maid, I tells ’er.”
“Oh, you’ve spoken to her?”
“Only laughed at her in a wholesome way, my dear. Neither she nor Frances have a vestige of humour about them—everything is alwaysau grand serieux. That’s one reason why I don’t believe she and Morris would ever really suit one another.”
Nina deftly seized her opportunity.
“Morris certainly has inherited my sense of humour,” she observed pensively.
“Why, the other day he laughed so much at one of those stupid dialect imitations of mine, that I simply had to stop and chuckle myself. It was too infectious,” cried Bertie, with a laugh at the recollection.
“Poor boy!” smiled Nina tolerantly, and leaving it uncertain whether or not she was pitying Morris for his easy appreciation of Cornish rusticisms as rendered by Mrs. Tregaskis. “But, seriously, Bertie dear, it would be no bad thing if later on they are both in earnest—only just at present I think we’d better be hard-hearted, and not let it come to anything definite.”
“It’s unlucky that visit of ours having fallen through,” observed Bertha thoughtfully. “It keeps us here for another ten days before the Scotch visits, and I can’t very well forbid Morris to come to the house.”
“He’s there morning, noon, and night, I’m afraid,” sighed Nina.
“Oh, well, I flatter myself that I know how to manage a youngster of his age. I’ll see if I can’t get an opportunity to make Master Morris see reason.”
The opportunity was ahead of her.
At Porthlew Rosamund, coming downstairs, saw Morris wandering aimlessly round the hall.
At the sound of her footfall he looked up, and came towards her, impetuous and good-looking.
“Oh, Morris!” she cried.
He was halfway up the stairs and had caught both her hands in his.
“Rosamund, darling!” The grip of her strong, slender hands answered his, but there was a sort of questioning sound in her exclamation.
“Dearest,” said Morris with gentle surprise, “you know I adore you, don’t you? Don’t you love me?”
Mrs. Tregaskis, entering the hall briskly, in spite of herlong, hot walk, found them on the stairs, Morris holding Rosamund’s hands in his, and gazing up at her with adoration in his handsome, boyish face.
“Tut, tut, what have we here?” cried Bertha, with sufficient lightness in her tone to render a reply unnecessary. “Rosamund, you ought to be out of doors on a day like this. Waste of God’s own sunshine to coop yourself up with a book. I shall turn you and Francie out on the moor the minute lunch is over.”
“Francie has a headache,” said Rosamund, with the quick, defensive gleam in her eyes that her guardian’s cavalier treatment of Frances’ numerous minor ailments always roused.
“She won’t get rid of it by sitting indoors,” returned Bertha decisively.
“Morris, you’ll stay to lunch, will you?”
“Thank you,” he said, rather naïvely surprised. Mrs. Tregaskis had not been prodigal of invitations recently. A vista of the moorland sweep and Rosamund opened before him, only to be blotted out by the voice of Mrs. Tregaskis, its native ring of good-humoured decision somehow emphasized:
“You and I will have a little ploy of our own, Morris, when I’ve driven my lazybones out to take some exercise. I want a chat with you.”
She nodded, with her implacable kindliness, and asked where Frances was.
“In her room,” said Rosamund rather sullenly. “She is lying down.”
“Lying down at twelve o’clock in the morning!—and on a day like this,” added Bertha, with another reproachful glance at the cracked, baking ground and still sunlight outside. “Is her head very bad?”
“Yes.”
“I must go and investigate. I expect she needs one of my special compresses of eau de Cologne and cold water. Well, well!”
She began to mount the stairs slowly, making no attempt to disguise that her walk had slightly tired her.
“Stairs are no joke, at my age,” she panted laughingly over her shoulder to Morris; “andwith my figure. I be growin’ a bit broad-like across, ma dear!”
Morris laughed, and watched her disappear up the first short flight of stairs. He turned to Rosamund rather shyly. Shyness was not at all inherent in Morris Severing, but the advent of Mrs. Tregaskis and her few crisp, kindly sentences, had somehow cut across the atmosphere of joyous security in which he had met Rosamund that morning.
As he turned to her, Bertha’s broad face, reddened by heat and exertion, appeared over the balusters.
“Rosamund, my dear, come up here a minute, will you?”
Rosamund gave Morris a look in which appeal and defiance seemed oddly to mingle, and in her turn disappeared.
Morris Severing was left disconsolate in the hall. It was of no amusement to him, although he gave the purely perfunctory laugh of civility, when Miss Blandflower, hovering on the threshold of the porch, said to him with a nervous laugh:
“Monarch of all you survey, I see.”
“Have you been gardening?” he inquired with polite superfluity, at the same time relieving her of an earth-encrusted trowel and a basket overflowing with plantain and dandelion roots.
“Oh yes,” she giggled. “Thosenorribleweeds! There’s no rest for the wicked.”
“But you’re not wicked at all, Miss Blandflower,” he assured her gravely. “Only too good, to tire yourself like this. Come and rest in the hall.”
Minnie looked doubtful.
She compromised by hovering restlessly between the hall-door and the window, thereby keeping Morris on his feet, while she gazed longingly at the sofa, set under the cool of a huge stand of white daisies and geraniums.
“Very hot,” she sighed, passing an earthy hand over herheated face. “Well, if you won’t think me too fearfully lazy——”
Miss Blandflower was always protesting feebly against accusations that no sane mind could ever have entertained against her.
“Of course not. I should be much happier if you’d only sit down till lunch,” said Morris with truth. The exhausted Minnie sank down thankfully, murmuring “Aso-fia is always a luxury, isn’t it,” and the next moment bounding agitatedly to her feet as the gong reverberated through the hall, and Frederick Tregaskis was heard emerging from the study.
Minnie looked at her large earthy hands with an expression of horror, muttered something about would these little hands never be clean, and fled.
It was with a sense almost of fatality, as though such a thing must inevitably happen where Miss Blandflower was concerned, that Morris watched, without having time to prevent it, a collision between her and her host at the foot of the stairs.
“Oh, Mr. Tregaskis,” shrieked Minnie, “I beg your pardon—I’d no idea—sostupid of me.”
“Do not apologize,” said Frederick, in tones of ice and casting a look of concentrated venom at the overwhelmed Miss Blandflower. “And pray do not be late for luncheon.”
“I’ve been gardening,” she gasped, displaying the trophies of toil in unattractively blackened finger-nails and hardened palms.
“So I perceive. I believe the gong has sounded?”
“Yes, oh yes. I feel I’ve earned my lunch,” cried Minnie, disappearing as fast as she could.
“My wife’s protégé,” remarked Frederick, as usual carefully disassociating himself from his spouse, “has, to my certain knowledge, made that remark before every meal for the past fourteen years.”
“I’m sure it’s a very true one, sir,” said Morris withwhat he supposed to be a ready courtesy, and only the expression of rather sardonic amusement which his host disconcertingly turned upon him at intervals throughout the meal, betrayed to Morris that his ready adaptability had led him to make an almost too apropos rejoinder to Frederick Tregaskis’ peculiar form of pleasantry.
Morris sat between Hazel and her mother, and was able to look at Rosamund on the opposite side of the table. She hardly once raised her eyes to his, but when she did so, he saw a light in them that brought an answering ardour to his own gaze.
He had hardly a glance to spare for Hazel Tregaskis, whose tawny hair seemed to radiate sparkles, even as her charming personality radiated vitality. Frances, beside her, looked pale and languid, with dark circles round her eyes, and as soon as luncheon was over Morris heard Mrs. Tregaskis say to her affectionately:
“You’d better go upstairs to the boudoir, Francie, and curl up on the sofa. I’ll come up in a minute and see if we can’t find something for the poor head.”
“Thank you, Cousin Bertie.”
Mrs. Tregaskis looked round, almost like a general arranging for the dispersal of a superfluous staff.
“Hazel, on with the hat again! I’m not going to have you dashing out in this sun with nothing on your head. I suppose you and Minnie want to go up to the moors? and you must take this lazy child with you.”
She laid a possessive hand upon Rosamund’s shoulder.
“Dear Mrs. Tregaskis, there’s that tinyweelittle patch down by the pond that I meant to finish this afternoon,” breathed Miss Blandflower, evidently uncertain whether she was supposed to be pining for moorland air, or eager to finish her weeding.
“No, no, Minnie.” Mrs. Tregaskis’ tone left no further room for doubt upon the point. “You did far too much this morning. You know I’m always telling you not to choose the very hottest time of day for weeding. I dare sayMorris and I will turn our energies to that patch by the pond, and surprise you when you get in. Now then, off with you!”
“But am I not to go to the moors too?” demanded Morris, half amused and half vexed, and wholly desirous of an afternoon in Rosamund’s company.
Bertha appeared to consider.
“How would it be if we took up tea to them, later?” she said, with an air of suggestion. “That’s what we’ll do, and you can help me to carry the tea-basket. I dare say Francie will be able to come with us by that time, poor child. It will be cooler for her.
“Good-bye, you dear people. We shall meet again later—under the wych-elm, Minnie, you know. Four o’clock.”
Morris dashed out and opened the gate for them.
“You’ll walk back with me,” he said hurriedly to Rosamund, and read her answer in her eyes, before turning back with discontent in his own, to where Bertha Tregaskis awaited him.
She surveyed him with unabashed gaze.
“Well, you think I’m an interfering, tiresome old spoilsport, don’t you, Morris? But I really must have a talk with you, and I don’t feel you’re going to be very angry with me, somehow. After all, we’reveryold friends.”
She laughed at him with a sort of friendly pleading in her look, and Morris laughed a little too. He had always liked his mother’s friend.
“Let’s sit down in the shade, and leave the weeding till it’s cooler. And now, my dear boy, I’m going straight to the point. I always face up to my fences boldly—at least I used to, in the good old days when Frederick could afford to keep a couple of gees in the stables. You mustn’t make love to my little girl.”
Morris, to his fury, felt himself colouring hotly. He could not think what to say.
“You see,” said Bertie, carefully looking away from him, “it isn’t as though you were both of you a few years older.You’ve neither of you seen anything of the world, and Rosamund is in some ways very undeveloped and young for her age. I don’t want either of you to take this attraction seriously—at any rate for the present.”
“Has my mother been talking to you?” demanded Morris rather sullenly.
Bertha hesitated for a moment.
“She’s only said what I felt quite sure of already—that she thinks you too young to entertain any idea of—marriage, for instance.”
She looked at him narrowly as she spoke, and Morris coloured again.
“Of course, I couldn’t think of that, exactly,” he stammered naïvely. “You know quite well that, owing to my father’s preposterous will, I haven’t anything but what she gives me.”
“Exactly, my dear boy, though you and I both know very well that she only holds the whole thing in trust for you, as it were.”
“Rotten arrangement, I call it,” muttered Morris. “Of course, I practically do all the business that old Bartlett used to do for the estate, but it’s a bore being tied here and never my own master. I should have been in Germany studying music for the last four years if mother hadn’t made such a frightful fuss at the idea.”
“I wish you and she understood one another better,” sighed Bertha. “My sympathies are always on the young people’s side, you know, Morris, though your motherismy greatest friend.”
“Really?” he said eagerly. “Then I wish you’d talk to her a bit.”
“But, Morris, what could I say? I can’t let Rosamund drift into a sort of half-and-half engagement, you know. It isn’t fair to her, and I am responsible for her just as though she were my daughter.”
“Why should it be ‘half-and-half’?” he asked rather defiantly.
“Because she’s too young, and has seen too little of the world, for me to sanction anything else at present,” said Bertha decisively.
Morris was slightly soothed by the fact that she laid all the emphasis on Rosamund’s youth, and not on his own, as he felt his mother would have done.
“Look here, Morris,” said Bertha earnestly. “I’m asking you for Rosamund’s sake to have a little patience. If this is the real thing, it won’t do you any harm to wait for a year or two, or her either. It’ll help you to know one another better, too. Why, you’ve not seen her since you were both children, except for this last week.”
“Iknewthe first minute I saw her again,” cried Morris eagerly and boyishly.
“I know she’s very attractive,” said Bertha, smiling rather proudly, “though I says it as shouldn’t, since she’s just like my own daughter. You know I’ve had them since their mother died, Morris.”
“I know,” he said.
“Well, then, don’t you think I’ve got just a little right to be consulted?” She looked at him so humorously that Morris laughed a little.
“Yes, of course. I expect I’d want to consult you, anyway, on my own account, you know. You do so understand about things, Mrs. Tregaskis.”
“You dear boy! That’s just the very nicest thing you could have said to me. I love young people, and it’s always been a disappointment to me that I didn’t have ten children. You see. I had to adopt two as it was! Rosamund is a dear child, Morris, and I’ve loved her as much as though she were my own.”
She suddenly sighed, and some unexplained instinct made Morris exclaim rather defensively:
“And of course she adores you. I’m sure of that.”
“Ah well, my dear boy, one doesn’t expect very much. The thing I care most about is that they should be good and happy and keep well. Which reminds me that I must goand see after my poor little invalid. But, Morris, I do want to ask you one thing, if you’ll remember that I’m an old woman and not get angry with me.”
She paused a minute and he cried eagerly:
“Of course, you can ask anything you like. You know that.”
“I really believe I can, you’re so reasonable. Well, Morris, I don’t want to know what’s passed between you and Rosamund, though I rather fancy that littletableau vivantthat I came across in the hall this morning wasn’t strictly within the rules, but I do ask you not to let things go any further for the present. Rosamund is going up to Scotland with me in ten days’ time, which will make things easier, but I want you to show a man’s self-control and see less of her than you have been doing lately.”
Morris looked his consternation.
“Why don’t you go away altogether, if that is the only way, and come back again after we’re safe out of the way?”
She did not give him time to reply, but rose, and began walking back to the house.
“Think it over, while I’m seeing after Frances, and we can finish our talk when I come back.”
“But look here”—Morris, colouring deeply, had caught up with her in one or two long strides—“it sounds a most rotten thing to ask—but—but what will Rosamund think? She—she must know perfectly well that—that——” He began to stammer helplessly, and Bertha’s level tones came with cheery common sense to his rescue.
“My dear boy, Rosamund is a very pretty girl who has been out a year and a half, and has met with quite a reasonable amount of admiration. She is much too sensible to take things seriously until they really become so.” She hastily dismissed from her recollection certain of the strictures recently passed upon Rosamund in conversation with Nina Severing.
“Don’t you think I’m in earnest, then?” demanded Morris.
Bertha looked at his flushed, youthful face, ardent with indignation.
“I’m quite sure that you are,” she said quietly, “and it depends on you not to let Rosamund become so, or at any rate think herself so. I am going to trust her to your honour, Morris.”
On this lofty note she left him, going into the house with a certain rapidity of step that might have suggested some anxiety not to spoil a good exit.
But Morris was a great deal too much absorbed in his own reflections to draw any such conclusions.
He paced up and down the front of the house, his hands in his pockets.
He did not analyze his sensations, and so escaped the humiliating knowledge that his principal emotion was one of satisfaction at Bertha’s admirable understanding. He wished that his mother could have heard her.
The wish, however, was a subconscious one—his main preoccupation was with the approaching interview. That there would be an interview between himself and Rosamund he took for granted. They would walk back from the moor together that very afternoon, and he would have to tell her that he was going away.
Morris thought of her brilliant, ardent gaze and clinging hands, and kicked the gravel about fiercely.
“Why can’t I be my own master,” he thought angrily.
Unwittingly the thought intruded itself that were he his own master, he should not make use of that independence to curtail it by the decisive step of marriage at the age of twenty-three.
“Damn,” muttered Morris. “Why aren’t things different all round?”
The desirability of a society where love-making should be smiled upon by parents and guardians with no ulterior thoughts of an announcement in theMorning Postto the effect that a marriage had been arranged, had had time to impress itself forcibly upon Morris before Mrs. Tregaskisrejoined him. She looked troubled, and Morris, attributing her expression to anxiety on his behalf, remarked with more than a touch of magnanimity:
“Look here, it seems to me that things work out this way, more or less. I’d better say good-bye to her this evening, and go off yachting somewhere. And then by the time I get back I suppose she’ll be in Scotland.”
Bertha’s brow cleared a little as she looked at him.
“Shake hands, Morris,” she said quietly. “You’re a white man.”
“You know, I shan’t leave off caring about her,” he said wistfully. “I shall never love anyone else.”
“My dear boy, in two or three years’ time there’ll be absolutely no objection to you telling her so. And there’s nobody I should be gladder to give her to. But I do think that for the present this is the only way.”
Her words woke in Morris a fleeting recollection of Sidney Carton, and the realization of his own self-abnegation almost overcame him.
“Let me take that tea-basket,” he muttered hastily. “Isn’t Frances coming?”
“I’m afraid not. I’ve sent her to bed altogether. To tell you the truth, Morris, I’m a good deal worried about her, and if she’s no better this evening I shall ask you to call at Dr. Lee’s on your way to Pensevern, and send him up here. She’s got a temperature—though, of course, that doesn’t mean much with her.”
“Is she so delicate?”
“She’s much stronger than she was when I first had her,” said Bertha decidedly. “But if she’s not better next week I certainly shan’t leave her. The other two will have to pay their visits alone. Poor Francie! She’ll be miserable at my not having the change, but I couldn’t leave her.”
“You’re awfully good,” murmured the boy.
She laughed heartily.
“I’m only an old hen fussing over her brood. It’s all in the day’s work, Morris, and if it does mean giving up timehere, and some little pleasure or comfort there, one doesn’t think twice about it. But don’t let’s talk about me. Fat old bodies of my age,” said Bertha, striding vigorously across the garden, “aren’t at all interesting. I consider myself as dull as ditchwater, and of no earthly use except to give you young things a helping hand now and again.”
“I think you’re the most understanding person in the whole world,” said Morris with conviction.