Читать книгу Pink Sugar - Anna Masterton Buchan - Страница 6

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‘A pickle plats an’ paths an’ posies,

A wheen auld gillyflowers an’ roses:

A ring o’ wa’s the hale encloses

Frae sheep or men:

An’ there the auld housie beeks an’ dozes

A’ by her lane.’

R. L. S.

The Rev. Robert Brand and his sister Rebecca sat at breakfast in the singularly ugly dining-room of Muirburn Manse.

Looking round it, Robert Brand told himself that the only pretty things in it were the April sunshine and the big blue bowl of kingcups that stood in the middle of the table.

There was certainly no beauty in the worn carpet, the horse-hair furniture, the solid Victorian sideboard with its burden of salver and fluted biscuit-box grown yellow with constant cleaning, or in the black marble clock on the shabby black mantelpiece. Except for a Shakespeare calendar hung on the bell, the room was almost exactly as it had been six-and-thirty years ago when the Rev. Ebenezer Brand had been inducted to Muirburn and had taken to himself as wife Lizzie Telfer—and very fine they had thought it.

The stipend of Muirburn was small, and Ebenezer Brand, having been entirely without worldly wisdom, had married a girl as penniless as himself; but they had struggled along light-heartedly, pinching and scraping to educate their two children, making jokes about their poverty, finding amusement in the fact that the carpets had lost all pattern and were ‘like the road.’ They had been abundantly happy, and when, after a long illness, his wife left him alone, Mr. Brand for six months tried to live without her, ‘liked it not, and died,’ and his son Robert reigned in his stead.

Rebecca sat opposite her brother, facing the windows, with the April sun lighting her round red face and mouse-coloured hair. She wore a serviceable but unbecoming brown woollen jumper, and a most uncompromising expression. Lizzie Brand had often looked at her daughter with a ruefully affectionate smile. Where had she come from, this solid, dumpy little person with her practical ways, her sledge-hammer common-sense, her gift for peeling the gilt from the gingerbread? She was certainly utterly unlike either of her parents, who had been dowered with good looks, wit, and a pretty fancy, but in whom practical talents had been somewhat conspicuously lacking.

Robert was like his father, tall and thin, with a gentle, rather long face and a shy manner. This morning he wore an old tweed coat and a pair of ancient flannel trousers. It was evident from his extremely clean and well-brushed look that he did not belong to the type of clergyman who forgoes the morning tub, contenting himself with ‘a nice wash,’ and who spends the greater part of the day frowsting in dressing-gown and slippers.

Rebecca was supping porridge with evident enjoyment.

‘These porridge are very good,’ she said, ‘though I made them myself. Jeanie has never turned up this morning. I suppose she will say that her mother is ill again, but it’s more likely to be the thought of the washing that has kept her away.’

Her brother nodded absently as he carried his porridge plate to the sideboard. He took the cup of tea Rebecca had poured out for him, and stood meditatively holding it in his hand.

‘Bec,’ he said, ‘I’ve been thinking we might make some changes in the papers we get for the Magazine Club. What’s the good of always getting the same ones? Couldn’t we take for a change The Times Literary Supplement, and The Spectator or The Outlook?’

Rebecca put down her cup with a cluck of impatience. ‘Rob, what’s the good of talking like that?—Do go and sit down in your place, and not stand about in that lost way.—Of course, I know you would prefer literary papers, but for one who could read the sort of papers you like, thirty get pleasure from the present ones. Can you see old Robert Stark, who pores for hours over Chambers’s Journal, finding anything to read in The Times Literary Supplement? What does he care what new books are being published, or how brilliantly the first article is written? And would you deprive Mrs. Stark of the Sunday at Home, which she has read every Sunday for goodness knows how many years, and offer her The Spectator instead? You’re simply selfish, Rob; that’s what you are.’

Rob sighed.

Rebecca continued: ‘And it isn’t as if we were at all ill-off for good reading. There’s the library at Priorsford; you can bicycle down any day; and you know how good the librarian is about saving you Blackwood’s and the Cornhill. And Merren Strang is always lending you new books——’

‘Oh, I know.’ Rob took a scone and buttered it slowly. Then he said rather shamefacedly, ‘A paper like the Literary Supplement coming always at the end of the week is something to look forward to.’

‘Rob, you baby!’ Rebecca cried, but her voice softened as she said, ‘Well, I daresay we need something to look forward to now as much as when we were children. You and I haven’t been exactly smothered with the good things of this world. I wonder often what it must feel like to have money to buy things that aren’t necessary, only pretty; to be able to renew a house when everything seems to be going done on your hands. And just fancy being able to go into a steamboat office and take a ticket to India and China! Except for the three years that I went to school in Edinburgh I’ve hardly ever been away from Muirburn. I’ve just made beds, and swept rooms, and polished floors, and washed dishes, and cooked, and attended church services, and taught in the Sunday School, and collected, and given out magazines—and now I’m thirty-five.’

Rob nodded.

‘I know. You’ve had the worst of it, Bec. All the time I was at the War you were having the really hard job at home—watching Mother die. And then Father ... I wish you had an easier life.’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Rebecca gave her head an odd little self-conscious jerk, a habit with her when she found herself the topic of conversation. ‘I’ve a lot to be thankful for. I might have had to live in a mining village or a dismal big town. If I have to stay always in one place I couldn’t find a prettier place than Muirburn, and it was nice of the people to elect you in Father’s place. Oh, I know you think you ought to have a harder job, but say as you like, Rob, you aren’t fit for hard work yet. I doubt if you ever will be. It will take years anyway before you get over the wounds and the gassing. If you insist on trying to get a slum church you’ll crock up, that’s all you’ll do.’

‘But I feel such a slacker,’ Rob complained.

‘Father was happy here for nearly thirty-five years,’ his sister reminded him.

‘Ah, but Father was different.’

‘How “different”?’

‘Well,’ said Rob, ‘for one thing he was the very man for a country charge. He loved the changes of the seasons: the garden was the delight of his heart; the hills were his friends; what is it Wordsworth says?—“The sounding cataract haunted him like a passion.” And then he could occupy his spare time with writing—it wasn’t remunerative work, but it gave him pleasure. And you must remember that he and my mother were bound up in each other, and the purpose of both their lives was fulfilled in the mere fact of being together. That was wonderful and beautiful.’

‘And very uncommon,’ Rebecca said, pouring herself out a second cup of tea with a brisk air.

Her brother cast an amused glance at her, but only said, ‘Well, as you say, there are worse places than Muirburn, and after all we never know what a day may bring forth. Any morning the postman may hand to us a letter that will change the whole course of our existence.’

‘He passed yesterday without calling,’ said Rebecca.

Even as she spoke the latch of the garden gate clicked, and the postman was seen wheeling his red bicycle along the winding narrow drive, brushed by the tassels of the flowering currant, and shaded by the laburnums, green still, and waiting for their golden days.

Rebecca sped to the door, and came back with a letter.

‘For me,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Rob, it’s from London, and it’s good paper.’

Rob sat with a piece of bread and butter half-way to his mouth while his sister opened it, but in a second she let it fall on the table with a ‘Tuts’ of disgust.

‘ “Special offer of Worcester Corsets!” They oughtn’t to be allowed to send such alluring-looking letters as advertisements. I’m positively shaking with excitement.’

Robert laughed, and ate his bread and butter.

‘Poor old Bec! Never mind, some day it will come.’

Rebecca returned to her seat behind the breakfast-tray, shaking her head dejectedly.

‘Not in Muirburn. Nothing ever happens in Muirburn. The primroses and daffodils come up and flower; then the lupins and the Canterbury bells and the columbine and the roses; then the autumn flowers; then whirling winds and winter again. That’s all. The people are always the same—more or less. Children grow up, and the middle-aged ones get old and deaf and blind, and now and again one is carried round the corner to the churchyard, and there is generally a new baby somewhere....’

‘Dear me, Rebecca, when you babble of flowers things are pretty bad. But something has happened at Muirburn now. Colonel Home has come back to live at Phantasy, and Little Phantasy is let for the first time in the memory of man.... D’you remember, Bec, what a hero we made of Colonel Home when we were little?’

Rebecca nodded, and her brother went on:

‘To us he was no ordinary mortal, he was a knight straight out of a fairy tale—the young laird of Phantasy. I suppose he would be about sixteen when I was six. I know he seemed to be larger than human—tall and straight and blue-eyed. I was convinced that he wore shining suits of mail in his more exalted moments. We used to haunt the gates of Phantasy on the chance of seeing him. There was romance in the very way the heavy gates creaked, and the stone bears seemed to me to guard some fairy pleasance. Sometimes—you remember?—he gave us sweeties and a pat on the head, and we almost expired under such a weight of honour. I hate to think of him as middle-aged and maimed and rather poor, such a shining figure as he was to us.’

Rebecca sat looking at the bread she was crumbling on her plate.

‘Yes,’ she said, after a minute, ‘and I hate most to think of him having to let Little Phantasy. The Homes always kept themselves apart, and to have to admit strangers within their very gates must be galling. And if it had been taken by a sensible couple who would have been company for him—this Miss Gilmour is just a girl, I don’t believe she is more than five-and-twenty, and——’

‘Have you seen her?’ Robert asked with interest.

‘Yes, she was in Mrs. Dickson’s shop on Saturday when I went in. I forgot to tell you. Pretty? Oh yes, I suppose you would call her very pretty, and beautifully dressed. Such suitable clothes. A knitted green dress and hat, and hand-knitted grey silk stockings, and grey suede brogues, and long grey gloves. She had a big basket on her arm as if she were playing at housekeeping, and she has that silly way of going on in a shop. You know—“Now, suppose I take this and this——” Mrs. Dickson, under the impression that her advice was being asked, got quite coy and kept saying, “Oh, I’m sure I don’t know. It’s for you to say——” But she seems a friendly sort of girl. She looked at me as though she would like to speak, but I kept well back among the onions and the paraffin barrels. When she went out Mrs. Dickson was full of her; I could hardly get out of the shop. She asked if we had called yet (knowing full well we hadn’t!) and added, rather rebukatively, that Mr. M’Candlish had called at once. Poor Mrs. Dickson! She is very anxious that we should lure this wealthy new-comer to the church. As if we had any chance against Netherton with its organ and its genteel society!’

‘I don’t see why you should say that,’ Rob complained. ‘Ours is a pretty little church, and I don’t see anything wrong with the harmonium. I don’t say I’m much of a preacher, but I’m no worse than M’Candlish.’

Rebecca smiled pityingly at her brother.

‘My dear,’ she said, ‘you are a much better preacher than Mr. M’Candlish (though Mrs. Stark complains that you stop much too suddenly, “like a cairt cowpin’ ”) but you can never hope to compete with him, he has such affable teeth. I expect his smile and his jovial manner have already made a deep impression on Miss Gilmour, and she will obediently stumble into his fold—unless, as is most likely, she is an Episcopalian.’

‘Oh well,’ Robert Brand shrugged his shoulders, and having finished his breakfast got up to go to his study. He stopped at the door.

‘By the way, I forgot to tell you that I met Lady Carruthers yesterday, and she told me a long story about some scheme she is involved in, something Russian, I gathered, but not the Famine. Anyway, she ended by asking me to subscribe. I suppose we must?’

Rebecca, who had begun to collect the breakfast-dishes, stopped with a porridge plate in her hand, and said in tones of concentrated fury, ‘That woman! What imbecile scheme has she got into her head now? Probably to send gramophones to soothe the savage breasts of the Bolshevists!—We can’t give less than one pound. Oh, it’s too bad, Rob. It will have to come off what I had saved up for your new suit. That’s the worst of being poor, you can’t refuse. Rich people would refuse without a thought, or give her five shillings and tell her to go away, but we can’t.’

‘Never mind, Bec. My suit isn’t so very green, and, anyway, who cares?’

‘And we need coals,’ Rebecca went on. ‘I thought I could make them last till May, but they won’t, and coals are such a ransom here. But I don’t grudge the coals as I grudge one pound to Lady Carruthers.... The last time she came I had been spring-cleaning and starching curtains till my hands were stiff, and she sat there wasting my time, and then had the impertinence to tell me that what I needed was to get on to the Higher Plane.’

Robert sat down on the arm of the sofa and laughed aloud, while Rebecca with a circular swoop collected the butter, the marmalade, and a plate of scones.

‘Stop laughing, Rob. There’s little to laugh at. This week’s begun badly with that woman and coals, and a big washing and Jeanie not turning up. I’d better just set on the boiler fire and start myself. Rob, I do try to be as saving as I can, but what’s the good of saving? If I could only make some money! To think of Merren Strang being able to make money by writing! I’m sure you might try, Rob. You’re almost sure to have inherited it from Father, and——’

Rob laughed again and said, ‘ “Treason is not inherited, my lord,” nor I fear is the art of writing. Besides, I don’t remember that Father ever made any money to speak of.’

‘Oh no,’ Rebecca said hopelessly, ‘we’re not the kind of people that ever could make money.’

She went over to the fireplace to pull the daily leaf off the calendar.

‘This is Holy Week,’ she, announced. ‘St. Mark’s people will be busy. There won’t be an arum-lily left in the district when they’ve done decorating that little church of theirs. I wonder who makes up these calendars.’ She tweaked off the leaf impatiently. ‘They have the most inappropriate quotations. For weeks I’ve had nothing but remarks about kings—“Comets usher forth the death of kings,” and such like, things that can interest no one but the Royal Family.’

‘What’s the one for to-day?’ Robert asked.

His sister held it out to him with a twinkle in her small grey eyes.

‘ “Sweet are the uses of adversity,” ’ she repeated, and the brother and sister laughed together before separating to their several duties.