CHAPTER XXII.
‘Tell me how to bear so blandly the assuming ways of wild young people!
‘Truly they would be unbearable if I had not also been unbearable myself as well.’—Goethe.
When Mr. Crosby had told the Barrys that he would come down next day for a game of tennis, they had not altogether believed in his coming, so that when they see him from afar off, through the many holes in the hedge, walking towards them down the village street, surprise is their greatest sentiment.
‘Susan,’ says Dominick solemnly, pausing racket in hand, ‘it must be you. I always told you your face was your fortune, and a very small one at that. You’ll have tomarry him, and then we’ll all go and live with you for ever. That’ll be a treat for you, and will doubtless make up for the fact that he is emulating the Great Methuselah. If I can say a good word for you, I—Oh, how d’ye do, Mr. Crosby? Brought your racket, too, I see. Carew, now we’ll make up a set: Mr. Crosby and—’
‘Miss Susan, if I may,’ says Crosby, looking into Susan’s charming face whilst holding her hand in greeting. There are any amount of greetings to be got through when you go to see the Barrys. They are all alwaysen évidence, and all full of life and friendliness. Even little Bonnie hurries up on his stick, and gives him a loving greeting. The child’s face is so sweet and so happily friendly that Crosby stoops and kisses him.
‘Certainly you may,’ says Susan genially; ‘but I’m not so good a player as Betty. She can play like anything. But to-day she has got a bad cold in her head. Well’—laughing—‘come on; we can try, and, after all, we can only be beaten.’
They are, as it happens, and very badly, too, Mr. Crosby, though no doubt good at big game, being rather a tyro at tennis.
‘I apologize,’ says he, when the game is at an end, and they have all seated themselves upon the ground to rest and gather breath; ‘I’m afraid Su—Miss Susan—you will hardly care to play with me again.’
‘I told you you could call me Susan,’ says she calmly. ‘Somehow, I dislike the Miss before it. Betty told you Miss Barry sounded like Aunt Jemima, but I think Miss Susan sounds like Jane.’
‘Poor old Jane! And she’s got such an awful nose!’ says Betty. ‘I think I’d rather be like Aunt Jemima than her.’
‘Susan hasn’t got an awful nose,’ says Bonnie, stroking Susan’s dainty little Grecian appendage fondly. ‘It’s a nice one.’
‘Susan is a beauty,’ says Betty; ‘we all know that. Even James went down before her. Poor James! I wonder what he is doing now.’
‘Stewing in the Soudan,’ says Carew.
‘He was always in one sort of stew or another,’ says Dominick, ‘so it will come kindly to him. And after Susan’s heartless behaviour—’
‘Dom!’ says Susan, in an awful tone. But Mr. Fitzgerald is beyond the reach of tones.
‘Oh, it’s all very well your taking it like that now,’ says he; ‘but when poor old James was here it was a different thing.’
‘It was not,’ says Susan indignantly.
‘Are you going to deny that he was your abject slave—that he sat in your pocket from morning till night—well, very nearly night? That he followed you from place to place like a baa-lamb? That you did not encourage him in the basest fashion?’
‘I never encouraged him. Encourage him! That boy!’
‘Don’t call him names, Susan, behind his back,’ says Betty, whose mischievous nature is now all afire, and who is as keen about the baiting of Susan as either Carew or Dom. ‘Besides, what a boy he is! Hemust be twenty-two, at all events.’ This seems quite old to Betty.
‘What did you do with the keepsake he gave you when he was going away?’ asks Carew. He is lying flat upon the warm grass, his chin upon his palms, and looks up at Susan with judicial eyes. ‘What was it? I forget now. A lock of his lovely hair?’
‘No,’ says Betty; ‘a little silver brooch—an anchor.’
‘That means hope,’ says Dominick solemnly. ‘Susan, he is coming back next year. What are you going to say to him?’
‘Just exactly what everybody else is going to say to him,’ says Susan, who is now crimson. ‘And I didn’t want that horrid brooch at all.’
‘Still, you took it,’ says Betty. ‘I call that rather mean, to take it, and then say you didn’t want it.’
‘Well, what was I to do?’
‘Refuse it, mildly but firmly,’ says Mr. Fitzgerald. ‘The acceptance of it was, in my opinion, as good as the acceptance ofJames. When he does come back, Susan, I don’t see how you are to get out of being Mrs. James. That brooch is a regular binder. How does it seem to you, Mr. Crosby?’
‘You see, I haven’t heard all the evidence yet,’ says Crosby, who is looking at Susan’s flushed, half-angry, wholly-delightful face. James, whoever he is, seems to have been a good deal in her society at one time.
‘There’s no evidence,’ says she wrathfully, ‘and I wish you boys wouldn’t be so stupid! As for the brooch, I hate it; I never wear it.’
‘Well, if ever anyone gives me a present I shall wear it every day and all day long,’ says Betty. ‘What’s the good of having a lover if people don’t know about it?’
‘Is that so?’ says Mr. Fitzgerald, regarding her with all the air of one to whom now the road seems clear. ‘Then the moment I become a millionaire—and there seems quite an immediate prospect of it just now—I shall buy you the Koh-i-Noor, and you shallwear it on your beauteous brow, and proclaim me as your unworthy lover to all the world.’
‘I will when I get it,’ says Betty, with tremendous sarcasm.
‘The reason you won’t wear it,’ says Carew, alluding to Susan’s despised brooch, ‘is plain to even the poor innocents around you. Girls, in spite of all Betty has said, seldom wear their keepsakes. They get cotton wool and wrap them up in it, and peep at them rapturously on Christmas Day or Easter Sunday, or on the beloved one’s birthday, or some other sacred occasion. What’s James’s birthday, Susan?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Susan; ‘and I don’t know, either, why you tease me so much about him. He is quite as little to me as I am to him.’ Her voice is trembling now. They have gone a little too far perhaps, or is the memory of James ‘stewing in the Soudan’ too much for her? Whichever it is, Mr. Crosby is growing anxious for her; but all the youngsters are now in full cry, and the proverbial cruelty of brothers andsisters is well known to many a long-suffering girl and boy.
‘Oh, Susan,’ says Betty, ‘where does one go to when one tells naughty-naughties? Dom; do you remember the evening just before James went abroad, when he went into floods of tears because she wouldn’t give him a rosebud she had in her dress? It took Dom, and me, and Carew, and a pint of water to restore him.’
At this they all laugh, even Susan, though very faintly and very shamefacedly. Her pretty eyes are shy and angry.
‘He wanted a specimen to take out with him to astonish the natives,’ says Carew. ‘You were the real specimen he wanted to take out with him, Susan, but as that was impracticable just then (it will probably be arranged next time), he decided on taking the rosebud instead.’
‘He wanted nothing,’ says Susan, whose face is now bent over Bonnie’s as if to hide it. ‘He didn’t care a bit about me.’
‘Indeed he did, Susan.’
A fresh element has fallen into the situation. Everyone looks round. The voice is the voice of Jacky—Jacky, who, up to this, has been as usual buried in a book. This time the burial has been deeper than ever, as the day before yesterday someone had lent him Mr. Stevenson’s enthralling ‘Treasure Island,’ from which no one can ever extract themselves until the very last page is turned. Jacky, since he first began it, has been practically useless, but just now a few fragments of the conversation going on around him have filtered to his brain.
Now, in his own peculiarly disagreeable way he adores Susan, and something has led him to believe that those around her are now depreciating her powers of attraction, and that she is giving in to them for want of support. Well, he will support her. Poor old Jacky! he comes nobly forward to her rescue, and as usual puts his foot in it.
‘He liked you better than anyone,’ says he, in his slow, ponderous fashion, glaring angrily at Betty, with whom he carries onan undying feud. ‘Why, don’t you remember how he used to hunt you all over the garden to kiss you!’
Tableau!
Betty leads the way after about a moment’s awful pause, and then they all go off into shrieks of laughter. Jacky, alone, sullen, silent, not understanding, stands as if petrified. Susan has pushed Bonnie from her, and has risen to her feet. Her face is crimson now; her eyes are full of tears. Involuntarily Crosby rises too.
‘He used not,’ says poor Susan. Alas! this assertion is not quite true. ‘And even if he did, you’—to the horrified Jacky—‘should not have told it. You, Jacky’—trembling with shame—‘I wouldn’t have believed it of you! It was hateful of you! You’—with a withering glance around—‘are all hateful, and—and—’
She chokes, breaks down, and runs with swift-flying feet into the small shrubbery beyond, where lies a little summer-house in which she can hide herself.