Читать книгу The Rutherfurd Saga - Anna Buchan - Страница 17

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“This is the flower that smiles on every one.”

Love’s Labour Lost.

A few days later when Nicole was coming home from a tramp over the golf-course, she met Janet Symington at her own gate. They talked for a few minutes, then Janet on a sudden impulse asked Nicole to go in, and she went. Janet took her guest into the dining-room, remarking that she generally sat there.

The daily papers lay on a small table by the fire, along with a Bible and a pile of hymn-books and a work-basket. Janet motioned Nicole to the arm-chair at one side of the fireplace and seated herself in the other. She had wanted to see this girl again, but now that she had got her seated at her own fireside she found nothing to say.

“I suppose,” she began awkwardly, “things will seem strange to you. I mean to say Kirkmeikle. . . .”

“Strange? Well, I’ve never lived in a little town before, and it’s all very new and interesting. We enjoy it—mother, Babs, and I. Perhaps I enjoy it most, for I believe with Mr. Pope that the proper study of mankind is man! Mother and Babs are more—well, withdrawn. I mean to say they would be content to sit up in a tower, hardly troubling to look out of the window, whereas I would want to be down jigging with the crowd in the market-place.”

“Oh!” said Janet. Then, after a pause, “I suppose you will always have lived a very gay life?”

“Oh dear, no! far from it. You see, when I grew up the War was just finishing, and my two brothers had been killed, and my father was beginning to be ill, and there wasn’t much thought of gaiety in any of our heads. Of course, I have had some very good times; my aunts have me in London for months at a time, and I had a cold weather in India; but I’ve lived a great deal quietly at home in the country. . . . When my father died we found we couldn’t keep up our house—Rutherfurd; and we were very lucky to get the place sold almost at once; we heard of the Harbour House, liked it, took it, and here we are! Mine is a very simple life-story so far, I must really get it coloured up a bit. It’s ridiculous to be twenty-four and to have done so little.”

Miss Symington clasped her hands in her lap. “I’m forty-seven,” she said, “and I’m beginning to think I’ve done nothing at all.”

“Oh, but you,” cried Nicole, with her usual swift desire to make people pleased with themselves, “you are an important person, directing a household of your own, and with a nephew to bring up—that in itself is a big job. And you do a lot of good works, I hear.”

“I expect you’re an Episcopalian, Miss Rutherfurd?”

Nicole, rather surprised, said, “No. The Rutherfurds have always been Presbyterian, except perhaps before the Reformation, when I was an Irish rat, which I can scarcely remember.”

Miss Symington held on to the first part of the sentence, which had been sense, and replied to it. “I’m glad of that, for I always feel that a difference in the form of worship makes a barrier.”

“I never thought about it,” Nicole said truthfully. “Mother was brought up in the Church of England. Have you lived alone long?”

“Since my father died four years ago. My mother died two years earlier, and my only brother died in Canada about the same time as my father.”

“Oh.” Nicole clasped her hands. “I know what it means . . . but I always had my mother. Anyway, you have Alastair. I do envy you him. What we would give to have a little boy in the house! . . . And you’re rich, aren’t you? That must be rather jolly.”

Miss Symington shook her head. “My money has never given me any pleasure, and I’ve never found that people have liked me any the better because of it. Of course, I give systematically to deserving charities.”

Nicole stared at Janet, sitting holding the Scotsman between her face and a by no means too hot fire.

“But how dull!” she said. “I wouldn’t give systematically to anything—not though the Charity Organisation Society clapped me in jail for not doing it! All the fun of giving is giving where and when you like, and I don’t believe it does the harm they say, anyway.” Nicole lay back in her arm-chair and glowered defiantly.

“Money is a great responsibility,” Miss Symington said primly.

“So it is, but if I were you I wouldn’t let it weigh on me. Give half a crown to the next tramp—or five shillings if you want to make a ‘gesture’ as the papers say—and see if you don’t enjoy the look on his face.”

“Oh, I never give to beggars.”

Nicole made a face. “I give to every single one,” she said, and laughed. “You see what a thoroughly unsatisfactory person I am—selfish and sentimental and wayward, everything you’re not.”

“You’re willing to let me have all the virtues but you keep the graces.” Miss Symington smiled and flushed as she spoke, astonished at her own repartee, then went on, “I quite agree you have everything I haven’t—youth and . . . I suppose you would call it charm.”

Nicole flung out her hands. “Not that, not charm; don’t accuse me of that—I’m so sick of it. ‘Charrum—a kind of a bloom on a woman,’ doesn’t Barrie call it?”

“Does he? That will be in a play. I never go to the theatre.”

Nicole was aghast. “But—oh, but what you are missing!”

“I daresay, but I couldn’t sit comfortably in a play-house. I’d be like the two old ladies in Edinburgh who were persuaded to go, and were hardly seated when a cry got up of ‘Fire’, and the one turned to the other and said, ‘And we’ll go straight to the Pit because we’re on the Devil’s territory—and to think, too, that it’s Prayer-Meeting night!’ ”

Janet’s eyes had a slight twinkle as she told the story, and Nicole cried, “The lambs! But you don’t really believe that, do you? That it’s wrong to go to a play?”

“It would be wrong for me. . . . But to go back to charm. D’you know what Alastair said of you and your mother and cousin when he got back from the Harbour House? ‘They’re pretty and kind and they smell nice.’ . . . I was brought up to think it wrong to spend much time or money on my appearance. My mother had a passion for fine underwear and silk stockings, and we thought it just part of her illness. My father despised all that sort of nonsense. He gave his time to higher things, and I’ve tried to follow out his wishes—about the Mission Hall he started in Langtoun, and all his other schemes.”

“I know you do a tremendous lot,” Nicole assured her; “and don’t you have a parson of sorts staying with you every Sunday?”

“Yes. I arrange for a speaker every week for the Hall, and of course I give hospitality. It’s nothing,—only supper on Saturday night, and there’s a fire in the library and they sit there; then Sabbath’s a busy day with services and classes, and they go off on Monday morning. We often have very good speakers. If you would care to come some Sabbath? . . .”

“Yes, thank you, I would. . . . D’you never go away, Miss Symington? never take a holiday?”

“Oh yes. I go for a month to Crieff Hydro, every summer. A lot of ministers go, and it’s very nice.”

“I see.” Hearing steps on the gravel Nicole turned her head. “You’re going to have visitors, I’d better go.”

“No, please. It’s only Mr. and Mrs. Lambert. I go to their church. Do stay and see them.”

Mr. Lambert was a man of about five-and-thirty, small and thin, with a whimsical, puckered face. He was afflicted with a slight stammer and had a funny way when he came to a difficult word of helping it out by giving little slaps to his trouser-leg. His wife was a slim, dark girl, with a gentle manner and a frank smile. They both shook hands cordially with Nicole, and regretted that they had been out when she called with her mother.

“But I saw your small daughter—and I know something of you, Mr. Lambert, from Alastair. He told me the story you told him about the mermaid’s comb and the cod-liver-oil soup.”

Mr. Lambert looked shy, and stammered when he spoke.

“I sometimes t-t-ell him stories when I meet him on his walks. . . . I hope you like Kirkmeikle, Miss Rutherfurd?”

“I do. It’s a likeable little town.”

“And the inhabitants?”

Nicole appealed to Mrs. Lambert. “What am I to say? Criticism is never welcome.”

“We don’t mind it in Kirkmeikle,” the minister told her. “We’re used to it. Fife folk are hard critics, so say away?”

Nicole shook her head. “But I’ve nothing to say. I haven’t seen anybody more than once, and that once they were very pleasant. It’s very difficult, don’t you think, to find horrid people except in books? The worst you can say of most people is that they are dull, and I expect that is a wise arrangement, for dull people are much easier to live with than scintillatingly brilliant people.”

“Talking of books,” said Mr. Lambert, “unless you’re a great reader you’ll find it very dull here in the winter. We’ve a small book-club among ourselves that’s a great help. But you may belong to a library?”

“We get our books from The Times. Whenever you want a new book, let me know and I can order it for you.”

“That would be kind,” the minister’s wife said eagerly, “for sometimes we wait months before we get a book we’re keen about. Indeed, we’ve only now got Page’s Letters—but they were worth waiting for.”

“Really, Mrs. Lambert,” Janet said, as she knelt down to pick up a coal that had fallen on the hearth, “I don’t know how you find time to read, with two infants and so much housework.”

“Ah, but there’s always time to read, odd half-hours, and even ten minutes aren’t to be despised that give you a refreshing page or two to go on with.”

“In that case,” said Nicole, “you must only read the best. It would be too bad to waste those precious snatched minutes on rubbish. . . . If I come across anything specially good, may I bring it to you? Just now old books suit my mood best, and I’m utterly behind with new books.”

“Oh, do you read according to your mood?”

Nicole had risen to go, but at Mrs. Lambert’s question she sat down on the arm of her chair and said:

“Yes; don’t you? I like contrasts. If I’m having a tremendously gay time in London I read dull memoirs to recall to myself my latter end! In India I used to like to sit at the end of the long Indian day and listen to the monkey-people, and watch the kites swoop down, and hear the conches from the temple, and read Barrie—all about Jess and Leeby and the intimate details of the Thrums kitchen. It was like seeing a minutely painted Dutch interior against the background of the Matterhorn!”

“And tell me,” said Mrs. Lambert, “what d’you read when life is terribly ordinary, and everything seems to smell of boiled cabbage?”

Miss Symington looked in a surprised way at her minister’s wife, but Nicole laughed and said, “I know—‘when nothing is left remarkable.’ Why then, I read of glowing places like the Taj Mahal, and of people like Shah Jehan. Shah Jehan with his elephants and his peacocks, his queens and his palaces . . .”

She stopped. The minister’s wife was enthralled, but Miss Symington wore a doubtful expression as if she feared that this young woman was not going to prove a very uplifting influence in Kirkmeikle.

“I must go,” said Nicole, “for I’m talking far too much. Good-bye, Miss Symington.” She smiled at the Lamberts. “I shan’t forget the books,” she promised, and was gone.

Mrs. Lambert gave a sigh as the door shut behind her, and said. “I never met any one like her. Her voice . . . and her eyes. She’s like warmth and light. I seem to feel chilly now she’s gone.”

Her husband shook his head at her. “You’re a born worshipper, Jeanie. I suppose now you’ll go home and dote on this Miss Rutherfurd. And she hasn’t wanted for worship, that young woman.”

Nicole went home so silent and thoughtful that her mother, in some alarm, asked her if she felt quite well.

“Oh yes, thanks. . . . I’ve been to see Miss Symington.”

“What,” cried Barbara, “again? You seem to have a morbid desire for that woman’s society.”

“No. I met her at her own gate and she asked me to come in, and she’s one of those sincere people who would never think of asking you unless they really wanted you. We talked—— Do you know”—very solemnly—“I don’t believe any man has ever said anything more intimate to Miss Symington than, ‘A bright day, but rather chilly.’ ”

“And do you propose to introduce passion into her life?” Barbara asked drily.

Nicole laughed. “You do make me sound a fool, Babs. You’re the best bubble-pricker that I know—— But don’t you think it is very sad for Miss Symington to have all that money—didn’t Mrs. Heggie say she was very rich?—and get no good out of it?”

“But she does good with it,” Lady Jane reminded her.

“Oh, but in such a dull way, just giving large impersonal sums. She doesn’t know how to give, and she doesn’t know how to live, and she doesn’t know how to love—— Rather neat that, what? No, but really, I can’t bear to see waste. I looked at that woman to-day and I just longed to spend some money on her. The house is awful—I shouldn’t think there is one single beautiful thing in it. She sits in the dining-room, Mums, with a green plush cloth on the table and an aspidistra in a pot—and if there is a soul-destroying thing on earth it’s an aspidistra! She entertains preachers for the week-ends. I can see her sitting talking so painstakingly to them, telling them what she has read in the Scotsman. . . . D’you know, she doesn’t even realise what a treasure she has got in Alastair: he’s just another thing for her to be conscientious about. I tell you she doesn’t know how to enjoy.”

Barbara yawned. “Oh, do let’s talk about something else. I’m frankly bored with the whole population of Kirkmeikle. . . . I’m tired of solid worth. Is there anything really wicked in the house that I could read?”

Her aunt laughed. “Poor Babs! But you’ve found a way of escape to-day.” She turned to Nicole. “Aunt Constance’s friends the Erskines called to-day when you were out. Very friendly people they seem. We are all invited to Queensbarns next Wednesday.”

“Oh, are we?” said Nicole.