Читать книгу The Rutherfurd Saga - Anna Buchan - Страница 16

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“It is a gallant child, one that makes old hearts fresh.”

The Winter’s Tale.

On the morning of the Thursday that he had been invited to tea with the Rutherfurds, Alastair and his friend and attendant, Annie, disported themselves among the boats at the Harbour. It was not usual for them to be down on the shore in the morning. Generally, Annie “did” the nursery, and Alastair played in the garden, and then they went for a walk; but to-day Miss Symington had gone after breakfast to Langtoun, the sun was shining, and Alastair had begged so hard for the Harbour that Annie had skirmished rapidly through her work, cast care to the winds, and raced with him down the brae.

It was exceedingly fortunate, Alastair felt, that his aunt had gone away that day, for his friend Mr. Beckett had given him a repeater pistol complete with ammunition (caps), and, also, there was a Norwegian boat in the Harbour manned by strange-speaking but wonderfully friendly sailors. He and Annie had been invited on board and had sat in a fascinating cabin and drunk strong black tea out of gaily-painted bowls. It was a good thing Miss Symington had been spared the sight, but it had all been so novel and exciting that neither had ever thought for a moment they were doing wrong.

Now they were pirates. Alastair was a quaint figure in an overcoat made for his growth, inclined to be humpy at the back, and a dark grey felt hat; but if his appearance suggested a lay preacher rather than a law breaker, his spirit left nothing to be desired. As he stamped about shouting hoarsely what he fondly believed to be curses, Annie said he made her blood run cold. That damsel’s idea of the behaviour of a pirate was an odd one. She leant languidly over the side of the boat and sang a song which she was much addicted to, beginning, “When the spring-time comes, gentle Annie.”

Alastair was firing his new pistol so recklessly after what he called a “retreating craft,” that he did not notice Nicole Rutherfurd until she leant over and shouted to him:

“I know who you are. You’re Paul Jones. He was a tremendous pirate and he came from these parts.”

“Oh?” said Alastair politely. “Would you care to see my pistol? It goes on firing as long as there are any caps.”

“And then what happens?”

“It stops. I’m coming to your house this afternoon.”

“You are,” said Nicole.

“Yes. I was going to ask you, only Annie wouldn’t let me ring your bell, would you mind if Mr. Beckett came with me rather than Aunt Janet?”

“But—does Mr. Beckett want to come?”

“No,” said Alastair truthfully, looking very straight into Nicole’s eyes, “he hates tea-parties, but he might come if he was asked. He says you can’t very well not accept, when ladies ask you. That’s why he went to Mrs. Heggie’s.”

“I see. And what about your Aunt Janet? Would she rather stay at home too?”

“She’d stay at home if you asked her to,” Alastair said, and received a prod in the back from Annie, who was struggling with suppressed giggles. “Give over this meenit,” she whispered hoarsely, “or I’ll tell yer aunt.” Then, to Nicole, “Please be so good as not to heed him, Miss”; and again to her charge, “Come awa’ hame, ye ill laddie.”

But Alastair heeded her not, for, walking along the shore, he spied his friend Mr. Beckett and flew to him like an arrow from a bow.

Nicole and Annie followed, the latter apologising incoherently as they went.

“Naebody pits the things he says into his heid: he juist oots wi’ them afore ye ken whaur ye are. He’s daft aboot Maister Beckett—— Ye see, he’s fair seeck o’ weemen, for he sees nothing else. He didna mean to be impident to you, for he’s an awfu’ polite laddie. I dinna ken whaur he gets his manners, they’re no’ Kirkmeikle anes onyway.”

Nicole shook hands with Simon Beckett, and remarked on the freshness of the morning.

“Yes, too good to work in. The mornings have been so good lately and the afternoons so bad, that I’m trying the plan of walking in the morning and writing the rest of the day.”

“Oh, you write?” said Nicole with lively interest.

“Not to say write. . . . I’m doing a job—trying to write an account . . . an unholy mess I’m making of it.” He looked so embarrassed and ashamed of himself that Nicole changed the subject by asking him if he would give them the pleasure of his company at tea that afternoon.

The tall young man looked suspiciously at Alastair, while Alastair looked out to sea, and Nicole said, “I know it’s too bad to ask you, for like all men I expect you loathe tea-parties, but if you would come and support Alastair in a household of women you would be doing a kindness. . . . Then we may expect you? Why, Alastair, we’ll have quite a party, shan’t we? You and your aunt and Mr. Beckett and three of ourselves—enough to play musical chairs!”

Before four o’clock another man had been added to the party.

Lady Jane, who had taken a liking for Mrs. Brodie, the woman with the nine children, had gone along with something for the baby and had found the household in trouble. The eldest boy had been brought in with a bad cut on his forehead and a broken arm. The doctor was with him, a clean-shaven elderly man with a weather-beaten face.

Mrs. Brodie was standing near, holding her youngest, the “wee horse,” under one arm. “Eh my!” she said, wiping her face with her apron, “folk gets awfu’ frichts in this warld. Ye’re niver lang wi’oot something—a family’s a sair trauchle. I was juist thinkin’ we were a’ quat o’ the measles an’ here we are again!”

“Wull I dee? Wull I dee?” wailed the patient, a freckled fair boy of fourteen.

“Not you,” said the doctor, “but you deserve to, hanging on carts as I’ve seen you do fifty times. If you had dropped off before a motor instead of a gig where would you have been, I’d like to know? . . . Now, then, Mrs. Brodie, he’ll do all right if you keep him quiet. Don’t let him sit up on any account. I’ll look in again before bedtime. Be thankful he’s got off so easy.” He pinched the cheek of the baby. “That’s a fine child. He’s the best you’ve got, and they’re not a bad-looking lot taking them as a whole. Good day to you.”

Lady Jane and the doctor went out into the street together. “Which is your way?” he asked.

“Down here—to the Harbour House.”

“Ho! so you are one of the new-comers? My sister called on you—Kilgour’s the name—but she found you out. I think you must be Lady Jane Rutherfurd?”

“I am, and I’m hoping to meet your sister soon—— What a nice place Kirkmeikle is!”

“I’m glad you like it. I’ve lived here all my life and I think there’s no place to compare with it. Are you interested in old things? No one is about here; like the ancient Athenians they follow after new things, and they don’t know their own old town. I haven’t much time, being an Insurance slave, but there’s a spare hour or two nearly every night when I can shut myself into my den. My sister has an ill will at my craze: she says I waste both coal and light, but bless me! a man can’t live by bread alone and it’s an innocent pastime delving in the past.”

“And are you going to give to the world the result of your delving?”

Dr. Kilgour laughed. “Ah, that’s another matter. I doubt if any publisher living would take the risk of bringing out a book that would only interest a few. . . . But we’ll see. I go off here.”

He stopped and held out his hand.

“But we are almost at the Harbour House,” Lady Jane said, “Won’t you come in and have some tea before you go on with your rounds? I’m sure you need it.”

Dr. Kilgour hesitated. “I’m afraid my sister would say I wasn’t dressed for company. I’ve on a terrible old coat, but the thought of tea is tempting. And I’m very fond of your old house. I knew it well in Mrs. Swinton’s time, for I was her doctor for nearly thirty years.”

“Oh, so you knew Mrs. Swinton? She seems to have been something of a veiled prophet in Kirkmeikle. No one seems actually to have known her.”

“Ah well, you see, she didn’t visit in Kirkmeikle—she wasn’t a woman who made friends—and she always drove to Aberlour to the Episcopal Church there. A fine woman in her way, but the most reactionary old Tory I ever met. She would have turned an ordinary moderate man into a howling red Bolshevist in ten minutes. And yet you couldn’t help admiring her somehow—— Many a time she ordered me out of the house and got Barr from Aberlour or Dawson from Langtoun, but she always came back to me again. And never was a bit abashed to send for me either, that was the funny thing. Like an old woman here, Betsy Curle, who says: ‘I’ve tried Barr, an’ I’ve tried Dawson, but I’ve juist had to fa’ back on Kilgour!’ There’s a great deal in being used to a doctor; it’s natural to like a change, but when people are really ill they want back their old one.”

Lady Jane laughed as she ran up the steps and opened the door.

“There’s more in it than that,” she said. . . . “I think we’ll find the girls in the drawing-room, and tea will be ready shortly. We’re having it early to-day, for Miss Symington is bringing her nephew to see us.”

“A party!” said Dr. Kilgour. “I’m being punished for coming out so shabby. But I might wash my hands at least. . . . Yes, I know the cloak-room, thank you.”

Tea had to be in the dining-room that afternoon, and the striped curtains were drawn at the windows, and candles in red shades gave a festive look to the table. There were crackers too, red crackers, for this was Alastair’s party, and a great iced cake, stuffed not only with raisins and peel, but with threepenny bits and rings and thimbles.

Alastair had never seen such a table in his life and looked at it with grave concerned eyes, saying nothing.

“It’s either a belated Hallowe’en party or a premature Christmas party,” Nicole explained, as they took their places. “Hallowe’en we’d better call it, for we’re going to ‘dook’ for apples. Alastair, are you good at ‘dooking’?”

The child swallowed a bit of bread and butter and said, “I don’t know. I’ve never tried.”

“Alastair has hardly ever been to a party,” his aunt explained. “There are so few children of his age within reach that he rarely has any one to play with.”

But Alastair, not liking to be pitied, broke in:

“I’ve got Annie: she plays, and Mr. Beckett knows heaps of games.”

“I don’t believe, however,” Nicole said, “that Mr. Beckett has ever ‘dooked’ for apples.”

“I haven’t,” that gentleman confessed. “What exactly is the rite?”

Nicole nodded at him. “Wait and see,” she advised.

Dr. Kilgour had already drunk two large cups of tea, and was enormously enjoying the hot scones and the feather-light “dropped” scones.

“Curious eerie time, Hallowe’en,” he remarked; “cold winds, cabbage runts, red apples, and looking-glasses! You know the superstition that if a girl looks into the glass at midnight on Hallowe’en, she’ll see the man she’s to wed? A farmer’s wife near here, I’ve been told, advised the pretty kitchen-maid to go and look. The girl came back—‘Sic blethers,’ she said, ‘I only saw the maister an’ his black dowg.’ ‘Be kind to ma bairns,’ said her mistress, and before Hallowe’en came round again she was dead, and the kitchen-lass reigned in her stead. . . . What d’you think of that, Miss Symington?”

“It’s not very likely to be true,” Miss Symington said prosaically.

Lady Jane laughed. “It’s a good tale, anyway,” she said. “Pass Alastair the chocolate biscuits, Nikky. Babs dear, will you cut the cake. . . .”

Immediately after tea a small wooden tub half full of water was set on a bath-mat by the careful Christina in the middle of the drawing-room floor, the apples were poured in, and Barbara stirred them about with a porridge stick, while Nicole knelt on the seat of a chair, with a fork in her hand.

She was as serious and absorbed as a child as she hung over the back of the chair waiting an opportunity to drop the fork among the rosy bobbing apples. She chose her time badly and the fork slid harmless to the bottom of the tub.

“No good! Now, Alastair, you see how it should be done—or, rather, how it shouldn’t be done.” She knelt beside him on the chair, one arm round him. “Now—very careful. Wait until they slow down a bit and drop the fork into the thick of them. . . . Oh, well done, you almost got one there: the fork knocked off a bit of skin.”

Immensely encouraged, Alastair descended to the floor, and asked whose turn it was next. “Mr. Beckett’s, perhaps?” he suggested.

“Miss Symington first, I think,” Nicole told him, “and then comes my mother and Barbara.”

Miss Symington found herself meekly accepting the fork and mounting the chair. It was a thing she had never expected to do again in this life, but she dropped it with precision, and it was fished out sticking in a large apple.

Barbara wiped the apple and presented it to the victor.

“We’ll put Mr. Beckett next,” Lady Jane said, and Alastair nearly tumbled into the tub in his anxiety that his friend should succeed: but he failed.

“It was too difficult,” Alastair said loyally, “they were going round so fast.”

“If Barbara wouldn’t stir so lustily,” Lady Jane complained. “Let them settle. Now, you see, I’ve got one.”

Alastair secured half-a-dozen apples before he could bear to see the tub removed, and endeavoured to stow them all about his person for future consumption.

“Fireworks now,” Nicole told him.

“I must go,” said Dr. Kilgour. “I’ve stayed far too long already, but it’s been fun. Thank you for my good tea, Lady Jane. . . . I’ll send you that book, Beckett, I think it’ll interest you.”

The fireworks were produced and set off, to the almost solemn joy of Alastair. Everything was warranted harmless, but the place stank of brimstone, and when Miss Symington saw confetti bombs explode, and sparklets shed flying sparks of light in all directions, and fire balloons ascend to the ceiling, she felt that this was no amusement for the drawing-room.

She stared in sheer amazement at the almost girlish abandon of Lady Jane, who was the most reckless conductor of fireworks. “Apply a light,” she said, without troubling to read the directions, and immediately applied a light to anything she saw which had an end sticking out. And these girls, too! working so hard to make a child happy, throwing themselves heart and soul into his entertainment, not playing down to him but playing with him, and obviously enjoying it. All this trouble about a little boy! Miss Symington could not understand it. She had been brought up to believe that children should be seen, not heard. Alastair would be past bearing if he were made to feel so important. Mr. Beckett spoiled him, too; Annie said he played with him for hours, just like Lady Jane and these girls. They were all quite different from the people she was accustomed to meet—much simpler and at the same time very puzzling, full of fervour about things of no moment, and quite off-hand and careless about really serious matters. Very good to look at, she admitted, glancing across the room to where Nicole sat cooling herself in one of the windows. She wore a straight tight black satin dress, with a soft white pleated ruffle starting from the shoulder and continued all down one side. The wicked extravagance of a white ruffle! Why, it wouldn’t go on more than once or twice. . . . And to sit there with the window open and the night air blowing in on her bare neck!

Simon Beckett crossed the room and stood by Nicole, who smiled up at him, inviting him to admire the outlook.

“I sit here always after tea,” she told him, “and look out at the sea and the lights. . . . We do enjoy these quiet evenings. Mother plays Patience or writes letters, Barbara sews, and I watch the lights when I’m not reading.” She twisted the blind-cord and asked, “D’you write in the evenings?”

Simon nodded. “At least I try to, but I get so stuffy and restless that I’m generally glad about nine o’clock to dash out for an hour and tramp about.”

“Is it a novel you’re writing?”

“Oh, Lord, no.” He looked aghast at the idea. “I’m only putting into as decent English as I know how, the record of our expedition in the Himalayas.”

“Yes,” Nicole said, “I thought you must be that Simon Beckett.”

“You see,” Simon said apologetically, “there’s no one else to do it, or you may be sure I wouldn’t have attempted it.”

“It must be fine, though, to have a job like that to do; something you’ve got to begin every morning, something that no one else could do. I envy you.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t suppose it matters much to any one, but I’d feel a slacker if I didn’t do it. . . . But the worst of it is I’m no manner of use at writing, I sit for hours over one sentence. I never had much of a head . . .”

He stopped and pulled at his tie, then said bashfully:

“I wonder—would it be an awful bore to you—if any time I’m in a worse hole than usual I came and asked your advice? I’d be awfully obliged if you’d sometimes give me a hand.”

“I’m afraid,” said Nicole, with unusual diffidence, “that I don’t know much about style.”

Simon laughed aloud. “Style! If I can make it sense I shan’t worry about style.”

“In that case we shall feel honoured—I speak for mother, Babs, and myself—if you will come down some night and dine and talk over any difficulty. Mother can spell really wonderfully, and Babs is clever. . . . To write a book must be far worse than attempting a high peak.”

Simon Beckett groaned. “The next time I go out I’ll settle there. Nothing again will ever induce me to attempt to lecture or write on the subject.”

“Oh, you lecture too?”

“I have lectured twice. But never again. It was an awful exhibition . . .”

He turned to Alastair who had come up to him, saying:

“What is it, Bat?”

“Aunt Janet says I’ve got to go home?”

Simon looked at his watch. “By Jove, it’s going on for seven o’clock. Past your bedtime, old man.”

“Why d’you call him ‘Bat’?” Nicole asked.

“Because,” Alastair explained, “my name’s too long and he thinks I’m like a bat. He calls Annie ‘Gentle Annie.’ ”

“Your aunt’s waiting for you,” Simon interrupted. “Yes, I’m coming too.”

Alastair departed reluctantly, comforted, however, by the fact that his pockets were full of nuts and apples; and Nicole had put into his hands a box of chocolates and an electric-torch as parting gifts. “So that you may light them home,” she told him, as he trotted away his hand in Simon’s.

He chattered all the way home to his friend, but Miss Symington walked deep in thought. When she opened her own front door and went into the hall she stared round her as if she were seeing it for the first time. After the Harbour House how bare it looked, how bleak. The unshaded incandescent gas made an ugly light. Before her she saw the hall she had just left, the soft-shaded lamps, the coloured prints on the walls, the polished table reflecting the big bowl of bright berries, the chests with their brass trays and candlesticks and snuffers, the blue and yellow of the old Chinese rugs, the warm pleasant smell of good fires and good cooking and well-kept furniture. She sniffed. Her own house did not smell so pleasantly. There was a mixed odour of hot iron and something burning in the kitchen range, for the cook had an economical but unpleasing habit of putting potato-peelings and such things in the fire.

Miss Symington went into the dining-room. The fire was low, and one gas burned dully. A green chenille cloth covered the table, and there was an arm-chair on either side of the fire, and eight smaller chairs were ranged along the wall under the oil-paintings. Presently a tea-cloth would be laid corner-wise on the green cloth and her supper set. How dull it all seemed! She was not a woman who greatly cared for comfort and good food and pretty things about her, but to-night she felt that something was lacking.

“You’d better go to bed, Alastair,” she said. “Annie will be waiting for you. D’you like Lady Jane and the two young ladies?”

“Yes, they’re kind and pretty and they smell nice!”

Miss Symington was rather scandalised—fancy a child noticing that! but she merely said:

“Run away to bed.”

“Yes.” He was collecting all his treasure to show Annie. “Good night, Aunt Janet.”

But Miss Symington did not reply. She was looking at herself in the mirror above the mantelpiece.