Читать книгу Pink Sugar - Anna Masterton Buchan - Страница 7

Table of Contents

‘She is an excellent sweet lady; ... and

out of all suspicion she is virtuous.’

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

If life had been pursuing its usual comfortable course with Miss Fanny Gilmour when her niece’s letter arrived asking her to make her home at Little Phantasy, it is doubtful whether she would ever have considered the proposal for a moment.

For thirty years—since the death of her parents—she had lived placidly in her own house, Harelaw Lodge, in Harelaw village, tended by a cook who had been in the Gilmour family for nearly fifty years, a housemaid who had been almost as long, a parlour-maid who was regarded as quite juvenile at forty-five, and a groom-gardener who was a teetotaller, a non-smoker, and an elder in the church. Thus buttressed and supported, Miss Fanny had listened calmly to the tales people brought to her about their domestic trials, thanking kind heaven for her own blessed state.

But a sudden and swift decay fell on the household at the Lodge. Janet, the cook, took influenza and died; Mary, the housemaid, was seized with neuritis, and retired on a pension; Agnes, the parlour-maid, went to keep house for an uncle who had money to leave; and James Smith, the groom-gardener, surprised and disgusted his mistress by marrying at the age of fifty-two a girl of one-and-twenty, and sailing for Canada.

‘If the foundations be destroyed, what shall the righteous do?’

Miss Fanny, terrified by the tales she read daily in the newspapers, dared not engage new servants, who would probably give faked references and decamp in the middle of the night with all her valuables. Confused and frightened as a lost lamb, she could only shut up her once so safe and comfortable house and fly for refuge to a fashionable hydropathic.

It was in this unhomely place, surrounded by strangers loud in voice and manner (they might almost have spoken a different language so alien did they seem to the gentle old lady), stranded and lonely, that Kirsty’s letter reached her. No wonder that the thought of Little Phantasy and a home with her own niece, Andrew’s girl, seemed safe and sweet—a haven, she called it to herself.

Miss Fanny had now been a week in her haven, and sitting this afternoon by a bright fire (the April wind was cold), knitting one fleecy white shawl and wrapped in several others, she smiled happily to herself. She was really a very contented woman. Given a comfortable chair well out of draughts, a bright fire, good regular meals, plenty of light but pure literature for week-days and the life of a missionary or philanthropist for the Sabbath, she asked little more of life. All these she had found at Little Phantasy.

For the rest, she thought her niece a bright creature, if somewhat given to rash speaking, her bedroom looked south and was the largest in the house, the cook seemed to be capable and amiable, and Miss Wotherspoon was a superior sort of woman with sound ideas about church attendance and the keeping of the Sabbath.

Miss Fanny was now sixty-five, and had, on the whole, enjoyed her life very much. She had a horror of clever books, so she had never had her feelings harrowed by reading of the ‘frustrated’ lives of spinsters, and had no idea that she ought to be miserable. She had never even heard of Freud. The only thing that troubled her about life was the thought of having to leave it. Death was a fact that she could not reconcile herself to: ‘a step in the Dark,’ she called it sadly. She knew well that this fear was very unbecoming in a professing Christian, and she strove hard to overcome it by reading many hymns and comforting booklets. She was reading one now, a little white and gold thing called Gleams from the City.

Kirsty had come in with her hands full of flowers, and was chattering gaily while she arranged them.

She was very pretty, Miss Fanny thought, this niece of hers, pleasant to look at and to listen to. Miss Fanny was not paying much attention to what she was saying, nor was she paying much attention to the good words in the little book; she was knitting mechanically, and thinking that tea would soon be coming in, and vaguely hoping that Easie had baked some of her delicious currant scones. If it had been Harelaw some one would probably have dropped in to tea; she missed her friends dropping in, but one can’t have everything.

‘Muirburn people are in no great hurry to call on new-comers,’ Kirsty said suddenly, as if she had read her aunt’s thoughts. ‘So far no one has called but one minister and his one wife. Perhaps this isn’t a sociable neighbourhood. I’m sure I shan’t mind. When the children come I shan’t have time to give a thought to neighbours.’

The children! Miss Fanny had forgotten about the menace which hung over the peace and comfort of Little Phantasy. To her the thought of three wild creatures let loose in the quiet household brought no rapture. Of course it was sad that they had lost their mother. The father, Kirsty had told her, was going to travel and get over his grief; surely it would have been better if he had stayed at home and looked after his children, rather than fling them in this haphazard way into the arms of a stranger, while he fled to far seas to seek consolation.

She was musing thus when Kirsty, her eyes on the outside world, cried: ‘A man coming down the drive—a caller. Who can it be?’ and in a minute Miss Wotherspoon answered the question by announcing in the tone of one breaking news of the worst kind—‘Colonel Home.’

It may be said at once that Colonel Home was not there without great effort. He knew that he must call some time or other on his new tenant, but the disagreeable duty had been put off from day to day. To tell the truth, he had been something less than pleased when his factor had broken to him the fact that Little Phantasy was let to a single woman who, when seen in the flesh, turned out to be quite young and exceedingly pretty, and he had resolved to shun her like the plague. He would call once—courtesy demanded it; he would ask her if the house were to her liking, and tell her to see the factor about anything she wanted; he would send her some game occasionally. What more could be expected from a morose bachelor landlord?

Kirsty by this time knew that Colonel Home was not, as she had assured Blanche Cunningham, ‘seventy and crippled by gout.’ She had made friends with some of the village people, and had heard here and there a significant sentence which had given her a fairly accurate idea of her landlord. She thought it only too probable that as tenant of Little Phantasy he regarded her with deep distaste, and a demure smile turned up the corners of her mouth as she rose to greet him.

Miss Fanny sincerely admired her niece that afternoon. She herself belonged to a type that simpered before men when they were affable, and sat in frightened silence when they were difficult. Colonel Home, haggard and rather grim, barking out abrupt sentences, and disagreeing at every point where disagreement was possible, was certainly no lady’s man, and made Miss Fanny draw her shawls nervously round her for protection.

But Kirsty made the tea, talking and laughing in the easiest way. She was, her aunt noticed, a most adroit hostess. Many subjects were discussed in the way strangers casually discuss subjects over the teacups, epoch-making events were passed over with a word, and whenever the visitor appeared to be going to get fractious Kirsty glided serenely to something else.

‘Quite a woman of the world,’ said Miss Fanny to herself.

Only once did she feel uncomfortable. The talk had turned on the manners of modern youth, which Colonel Home considered deplorable.

‘Yes,’ said Kirsty musingly, the sunlight bright on her hair, both hands clasped round one knee. ‘Yes, I suppose they are deplorable, terribly off-hand and casual. And such meaningless slang! And yet,’ she turned grave green eyes on the visitor, ‘when the modern youth makes love in his meaningless slang, don’t you think it means as much to him and to the girl as the most florid declaration or the most delicate languishments? “Old bean” is perhaps what his lips say, but his heart is singing, “Thou art all fair, my beloved; thou art all fair; thou hast doves’ eyes.” ’

To quote the Song of Solomon to a gentleman! It seemed to Miss Fanny the height of indelicacy. She made up her mind to speak to Kirsty about it, and also about hugging her knee in that unladylike way. It all came, she was afraid, from roving about the world with a flighty stepmother.

She was glad when the conversation was interrupted by the entrance of Miss Wotherspoon with a telegram which she handed to Kirsty.

Telegrams were almost as alarming as bombs to Miss Fanny, she trembled like an aspen when she had to open one, and she noted with amazement the careless way Kirsty glanced at the contents of this one.

‘From Mr. Crawford,’ she said. ‘He suggests coming here to-morrow to talk over the plans about the children.’

She looked at her landlord; then she addressed her aunt.

‘Do you think, Aunt Fanny, that this is an auspicious moment to break it to Colonel Home about the children?’

Miss Fanny gave a scared look at the visitor and retreated without a word into her shawls.

Kirsty bent forward earnestly.

‘I’m not sure that I’ve played fair with you, Colonel Home. When I took the house I told the factor I was a spinster, and I’m afraid he let me have it because I sounded a quiet tenant. But things have changed.—No, don’t look so startled, I only mean that I’ve offered to take charge of three children for the summer. Would it bore you to hear about it? Their mother died some months ago—she was the sister of a great friend of mine—and the poor lambs are boarded in Clapham because there are no relations in this country to take them——’

‘What about their father?’ Colonel Home asked. ‘Isn’t he alive?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Miss Fanny, suddenly emerging from her shawls.

‘He’s alive,’ said Kirsty, ‘but very broken, you know. So he is going away to travel or take a voyage or something——’

As her landlord made no comment she went on:

‘Perhaps I ought to have asked your permission, but I was so fearfully keen to get them. It isn’t quite fixed yet, but this is a wire from Mr. Crawford (that’s the father) saying he will come here to-morrow and talk it over. I think he leaves England next week.’

‘Does he?’ said Colonel Home drily.

‘So—you don’t really object to children being here, do you?’

‘As to that, I don’t suppose they’ll bother me, but keep them out of the woods, please, or there will be rows with the keepers.’

‘Oh yes,’ Kirsty promised blithely. ‘Out of the woods in case of traps, and out of the Hope Water in case of drowning—you and I will be kept busy, Aunt Fanny.’

Miss Fanny sighed resignedly, and Colonel Home said:

‘As a matter of fact I don’t think there has ever been a lot of children at Phantasy. I was an only child, my father was an only child, and so on—away back. But I should think it would be quite a good place for children. I know I was very happy, only child as I was.’

‘Oh, I’m not afraid of them not being able to amuse themselves,’ Kirsty assured him. ‘They are country children, and I should think the joy of being in Scotland and away from London would be almost enough for them. And then there is this jolly garden, and the water, and the donkey. Are there any children round about they could play with?’

Colonel Home thought for a moment. ‘I don’t believe there are,’ he said at last; ‘it’s a very middle-aged neighbourhood. I’m afraid, Miss Gilmour, you’ve let yourself in for an uncommonly dull time here.’

‘That’s what I want,’ said Kirsty, and, seeing his incredulous look, she added: ‘No, I’m not posing. I’ve always lived among a great many people in so-called gay places, and I want to see what a really quiet country life is like. So far I haven’t seen any of the inhabitants of Muirburn except the Rev. Norman M’Candlish.’

‘You’ve seen him, have you?’ said Colonel Home.

Kirsty waited for further comment, and when none seemed to be forthcoming, continued: ‘Who else is there to see?’

Colonel Home stared at the fire and appeared to be thinking deeply.

‘There’s young Brand,’ he said, ‘the other minister, and his sister. They’ve been here all their lives, for their father was minister of Muirburn. And the Anthony Hays at Cherrytrees. What? Yes, it’s a nice name for a place.... And some people bought Edmonston Hall some time ago—Carruthers is the name, the man was knighted in the War; they roll in money. I’ve never seen them.... And that’s about all the people around Muirburn that are ever at home, except of course Mrs. Strang at Hopewaterfoot. She’s a connection of mine through my mother. Her boy was in my battalion. He was killed. Her husband was killed in the Boer War. She writes books.’

‘Oh!’ cried Kirsty, ‘this is interesting! Do you hear, Aunt Fanny? Someone who writes books living quite near. What kind of books does she write? Novels?’

‘I believe so.’ Colonel Home rose to his feet in a determined manner as if to indicate that nothing more was to be got out of him. As a matter of fact, he felt very satisfied with his visit. He had stayed nearly an hour, and it had not been as bad as he had expected. His tenant seemed quite an intelligent young woman, and, as far as he could judge, would not be likely to obtrude herself on his time or attention. He liked the frightened lady in the fleecy shawls, and altogether it might have been much worse. So he limped through the garden, basking in the peace that the doing of a disagreeable duty brings.

Kirsty looked after him rather sadly.

‘So that’s your landlord, Kirsty,’ said Miss Fanny.

‘Poor soul,’ said Kirsty.

Miss Fanny looked rather shocked. ‘Of course he’s lame,’ she said, ‘but still——’

‘That’s the least of it,’ Kirsty said.

When Miss Fanny failed to understand she asked no questions but turned her thoughts to something else. She now mused on the coming of Mr. Crawford, and asked suddenly:

‘Will he stay the night?’

‘Who? Colonel Home?’

‘Oh no, Mr. Crawford. Didn’t you say he was coming to-morrow?’

‘Yes, I expect he will stay the night. I must remember to tell Miss Wotherspoon to get a room ready. We must put our best foot forward, and send him away with a good impression of Little Phantasy. It’s lucky you are here to give the place an air of respectability. Colonel Home looked quite reassured when he saw you.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Miss Fanny, as she took up her knitting, ‘but I would have enjoyed Easie’s scones better without him. He’s not what I call a pleasant man.’