Читать книгу The Proper Place - Anna Masterton Buchan - Страница 3

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“This young gentlewoman had a father

—O, that ‘had’ how sad a passage ’tis.”

All’s Well that Ends Well.

“How many bedrooms does that make?”

Mrs. Jackson asked the question in a somewhat weary tone. Since her husband had decided, two months ago, that what they wanted was a country-house, she had inspected nine, and was frankly sick of her task.

The girl she addressed, Nicole Rutherfurd, was standing looking out of the window. She turned at the question and “I beg your pardon,” she said, “how many bedrooms? There are twelve quite large ones, and eight smaller ones.”

They were standing in one of the bedrooms, and Nicole felt that never had she realised how shabby it was until she saw Mrs. Jackson glance round it. That lady said nothing, but Nicole believed that in her mind’s eye she was seeing it richly furnished in rose-pink. Gone the faded carpet and washed-out chintzes; instead there would be a thick velvet carpet, pink silk curtains, the newest and best of bedroom suites, a rose-pink satin quilt on the bed. In one of Hans Andersen’s tales he tells how, at a dinner-party, one of the guests blew on a flute made from a willow in the ditch, and behold, every one was immediately wafted to his or her proper place. “Everything in its proper place,” sang the flute, and the bumptious host flew into the herdsman’s cottage—you know the story? Nicole thought of it now as she looked at the lady, who might reign in her mother’s stead at Rutherfurd.

She was a stout woman, with a broad kind face under an expensive hat, and she stood solidly beside the old wash-stand and looked consideringly before her.

“We have the twelve rooms where we are,” she told Nicole. “Deneholm’s the name of our house in Pollokshields—but, of course, that’s including maids’ rooms. Four public rooms, a conservatory off the library, and central heating. Oh, Deneholm’s a good house and easy worked for its size: I’ll be sorry to leave it.”

“And must you?” Nicole asked.

Mrs. Jackson laid a fat hand on the towel rail, shaking it slightly, as if to test its soundness, and said:

“Well, you see, it’s Mr. Jackson. He’s making money fast—you know how it is, once you get started, money makes money, you can’t help yourself—and he thinks we’ve been long enough in a villa, he wants a country-house. It’s not me, mind you, I’d rather stay on at Deneholm.... D’you know Glasgow at all?”

“Hardly at all,” Nicole said, and added, smiling, “but I’ve often wanted to see more of it.”

Mrs. Jackson beamed at her. “You’d like it. Sauchiehall Street on a spring morning with all the windows full of light pretty things! or Buchanan Street on a winter afternoon before Christmas! I’ve had many a happy hour, I can tell you, going in and out of the shops. It’ll be an awful change for me if Mr. Jackson carries out his plan of living always in the country. Shop windows are what I like, and this”—she waved her hand towards the window with its view of lawn and running water, and golden bracken on the hillside—“this gives me no pleasure to speak of. I haven’t the kind of figure for the country, nor the kind of feet either. Fancy me in a short tweed skirt and those kind of shoes—brogues, d’you call them? A nice fright I’d be. I need dressing.”

She looked complacently down at her tight form in its heavily embroidered coat-frock—her fur coat had been left in the hall—and said solemnly, “What I’d be like if I didn’t corset myself I know not.”

Nicole had a momentary vision of the figure of Mrs. Jackson unfettered, and said hurriedly, “It’s—it’s comfortable to be plump.”

Mrs. Jackson chuckled. “I doubt I’m more than ‘plump’—that’s just your polite way of putting it—but what I say is I repay dressing. I’m not the kind that looks their best in deshabille. See me in the morning with a jumper and a skirt and easy slippers—I’m a fright. But when I get on a dress like this over a good pair of corsets, and a hat with ospreys, and my pearls, I’m not bad, am I?”

Nicole assured her that the result left nothing to be desired, and then, anxious to break away from such a personal subject, she said, “I do hope you will begin to like the country if you have to live in it. I think you’ll find there are points about it.”

Mrs. Jackson moved towards the door shaking her head dubiously.

“Not me. I like to have neighbours and to hear the sound of the electric cars, and the telephone always ringing, and the men folk going out to business and coming back at night with all the news. You need to be born in the country to put up with it. I fair shiver when I think of the dullness. Getting up in the morning and not a sound except, mebbe, hens and cows. One post a day and no evening papers unless you send for them. Nothing to do except to take a walk in the forenoon and go out in the car in the afternoon.”

“There’s always gardening,” Nicole reminded her.

“Not for me,” said Mrs. Jackson firmly. “I like to see a place well kept, but touch it I wouldn’t. For one thing I couldn’t stoop. Now, I suppose you garden by the hour and like it? Ucha? And tramp about the hills and take an interest in all the cottages? Well, as I say, it’s all in the way you’re brought up, but it’s not my idea of pleasure.”

Nicole laughed as they left the room together. She began to feel more kindly towards this talkative and outspoken lady.

“Now I wonder if there is anything more you ought to see. You took the servants’ quarters on trust, you’ve seen all the living-rooms and most of the bedrooms. There is another room, my mother’s own room, which you haven’t seen. Would you care——?”

“Oh, I’ll not bother, thanks, just now. I’ve enough to keep in my head as it is, and the time’s getting on.”

“Tea will be in the drawing-room now,” Nicole told her. “We ordered it early that you might have some before you start on your long drive home.”

“Oh, well—thanks. A cup of tea would be nice. And I’d like to see the drawing-room again to be able to tell Mr. Jackson right about it. I must say I like the hall. It’s mebbe a wee thing dreary with all that dark oak, but there’s something noble-looking about it too. I’ve seen pictures——”

She stopped on the staircase for a minute, studying the hall with her head on one side, then went on. “Of course, if we bought it we would need to have central heating put in at once. Mr. Jackson’s great for all his comforts. I see you’ve got the electric light. Yes—That’s the library to the left, isn’t it? Then the dining-room, and the billiard-room. I’m quite getting the hang of the house now, and I must say I like it. For all it’s so big there’s a feeling of comfort about it—grand but homely, if you know what I mean? ... Deneholm, now, is comfortable right enough, always a nice smell about it of good cooking, and hot-water pipes, and furniture kept well rubbed with polish, but when all’s said and done it’s only a villa like all the other villas in the road. In our road nobody would ever think to have a stair like this without a carpet. This’ll take some living up to.”

Nicole was standing a few steps lower down, looking back at Mrs. Jackson, and she surprised on the face of that lady an expression half-proud, half-deprecating. Her bearing, too, had subtly altered; her head was held almost arrogantly, it was as if she saw herself cut from her moorings in Pollokshields, sailing as mistress of Rutherfurd in stately fashion over the calm waters of county society.

Opening the door of the drawing-room, Nicole said, “Is tea ready, Mother? Mrs. Jackson, my mother. My cousin, Miss Burt.”

Lady Jane Rutherfurd rose from her chair by the fire and smiled at the newcomer, as she held out her hand in greeting.

Nicole knew what it meant to her mother to receive Mrs. Jackson smiling. It was necessary that Rutherfurd should be sold, and Lady Jane was brave about it and uncomplaining, but she found the preliminaries trying. She disliked exceedingly—how could she help it?—the thought of unknown people going through the house, appraising the furniture, raising eyebrows at the shabbiness, casting calculating glances round rooms that were to her sacred. Ronnie’s room with the book-shelves made by himself—they always stood a little crooked—and the cricket-bats and fishing-rods and tennis-racquets stacked in one corner, the school and college groups on the walls, everything just as he had left it. And next door Archie’s room—waiting too. And her own room, the big, airy, sunny room with its windows opening on the view she loved best; and next it the oddly-shaped Corner Room that had been a sort of sanctuary to the whole family. When the house was full of people she and her husband had, with a sort of guilty joy, escaped at times from their guests and crept to the Corner Room to play with the children and refresh their souls. In that room had been kept all the precious picture-books that were looked at only when hands were clean and records unblemished, and the toys, too good for the nursery—the lovely Manchu doll which had been sent to Nicole from China; the brass animals from India, the gaily painted wooden figures from Russia, kings and queens with robes and crowns, priests with long white beards. The pictures on the walls were all family portraits, faded water-colours of children long since grown up and gone away, many of them now finished with their pilgrimage. Four little pictures hung in a line over the fire-place, the three Rutherfurd children, each painted at the age of five—Ronnie with his serious eyes and beautiful mouth, Archie, blue-eyed and obstinate, Nicole, bright-tinted, a fire-fly of a creature. The fourth was the cousin, Barbara Burt, who now sat beside Lady Jane and poured out tea.

Barbara’s mother had been a Rutherfurd and had married foolishly. Norman Burt had been tutor to the Rutherfurd boys, a handsome young man with brains and ambition, but unstable as water. His wife after two years of misery and anxiety had died, leaving a baby daughter which the father had been only too thankful to get rid of, so Lady Jane had taken the child and had never let her feel that she was not as much to her as her own.

Barbara had only a dim recollection of her father, when he came to Rutherfurd for yet another loan. He died when she was ten. Her uncle Walter took her into the Corner Room and told her. He called her “poor child,” and she wondered why. She felt no grief, and was too young to realise that in that lay the tragedy.

At that time nothing had seemed less likely than that the Rutherfurds should ever have to leave their home, but the years passed, and the War came and took Ronnie and Archie and the light from the eyes of their mother. Lean years came, bringing the need for retrenchment to people who did not know how to retrench, and now Sir Walter Rutherfurd had been in his grave three months, and Rutherfurd was in the market.

The most casual visitor, entering the Rutherfurd drawing-room, was certain to break off any conversation in which he might be engaged, and let his eyes wander round the place in silence. It was an involuntary tribute to the spell of the old chamber, a spell compounded of homeliness and strangeness. Once it may have been part of the great hall of the fortalice, which was encased in the modern structure like a stone quern built into a dyke. But about the time when Mary of Scots came to her uneasy throne, a Rutherfurd clothed the walls with little square Tudor panels, now dark as ebony with age, and his grandson had imported some English craftsman—perhaps a pupil of Inigo Jones—who, in place of the oak rafters, had designed a plaster ceiling, with deep medallions and a heavy enrichment of flowers and foliage. That was nearly three hundred years ago, and the plaster to-day had mellowed to a fine ivory. Later, the Adam brothers had contributed an ornate classical mantelpiece, whose marble nymphs and cornucopias had, like the ceiling, a dull ivory sheen. By some queer trick of perspective, the room seemed to slope down towards each end as if the roof were a shallow arch, so that the fire-place became the centre and shrine of it.

But it was not the room itself, or even the faded Mortlake brocades of the old chairs and settees, which most enthralled the stranger. There was a window on each side the hearth of a more modern pattern, which served the purposes of light, but the window at the west end was of the small sunken type of Scottish architecture, and it was in itself a picture, for in its deep embrasure it framed a landscape. Not the shorn lawns and the clipped yews of a Tudor garden, which might have consorted with the panelling, but a long vista of rushy parks and wild thorn trees, with, at the end, the top of the Lammerlaw, which in August, when the heather flowered, hung like an amethyst in the pale heavens. That window was the choicest of the Rutherfurd pictures, but others hung on the dim panels. All but one were portraits of men. There was a Rutherfurd by Jameson, in black armour and a gorgeous scarlet sash; another by Allan Ramsay, in a purple coat, a sprigged waistcoat and a steenkirk cravat, pointing with an accusing forefinger to a paper, while a violent thunderstorm seemed to be gathering in the background. A lean warrior in shako and coatee held a red Kathiawar stallion by the bridle, oblivious of the battle that was raging round him. There was a Raeburn, too, of a Lord of Session, in which plump hands were folded over scarlet robes, and rosy cheeks were puckered as if at the memory of some professional jest.

All the pictures but one were of men. That one was framed in the panelling above the fire-place and gave the room its peculiar character, as a famous altar-piece makes the atmosphere of the chapel where it hangs. It was a woman, no longer in her first youth, with a mouth narrowed a little by pain and disappointment, but with great brown eyes still full of the hunger of life. It was a replica of the Miereveldt of the “Queen of Hearts,” Elizabeth of Bohemia, and, as sometimes happens in copies, there was a smoothing away of the cruder idiosyncrasies of the original, so that what it may have lost as a portrait it gained as a picture. One saw a woman who had known the whole range of mortal joys and sorrows. Her eyes did not command, but beguiled, for her kingdom was not of this world. Her beauty had in it something so rare and secret, so far from common loveliness, that the thing seemed in very truth an altar-piece, belonging not to this epoch or to that land, but to the eternity of the human soul. Looking down with her wistful small face above the ivory of the mantelpiece, she seemed to make the marble nymphs fussy and ill at ease. She herself, was profoundly at ease among the grim Rutherfurd soldiers and sailors. She had always been at ease among men, for they must needs follow where she beckoned.

Into the dim beauty of this room came Mrs. Jackson, stepping delicately over the polished floor on her high heels. She seated herself in the chair that her hostess suggested as comfortable, and said:

“Well, I’m sure this is very nice, but they’ll be wondering at home where I am! Yes, thanks, I take both sugar and cream and I like it strong. Servants’ tea, they tell me I take, when I laugh at the weak washy stuff people drink nowadays! But I’ll be home before it’s dark, anyway. The extra hour’s a blessing when the days begin to draw in.”

Mrs. Jackson beamed at her hostess as she accepted a cup of strong, sugary tea, and Lady Jane said, “I do hope you won’t be too tired after your long afternoon. It is such hard work looking at houses. Other people’s belongings are so fatiguing, don’t you think?”

“Not to me,” said Mrs. Jackson firmly. She was sitting forward on the very edge of her chair, her tight figure very erect, a piece of bread and butter held elegantly. “I’m getting a wee bit tired of it now, but as a rule there’s nothing I like better than a chance to get into somebody’s house and take a good look. Mind, you learn a lot, for everybody has a different way of arranging furniture and ornaments, and all that. Just look at this room.” She put the last bite of bread and butter into her mouth and twisted herself round to look. “That cabinet there ... and the screen and that mirror.” Her eyes wandered to the fire-place. “That’s a new idea, isn’t it, to have a picture put in like that? Who’s the lady?”

“That,” said Nicole, “is my Lovely Lady, the ‘Queen of Hearts.’ ”

Mrs. Jackson looked utterly at sea, and Barbara said, “That is a portrait of Elizabeth of Bohemia.”

“Is that so?” said Mrs. Jackson.

Nicole said, “Don’t you know the poem about her?” and kneeling on the fender-stool, looking up into the pictured face, she repeated:

“You meaner beauties of the night,

That poorly satisfy our eyes,

More by your number than your light,

You common people of the skies;

What are you when the moon shall rise?”

Mrs. Jackson stared at the girl. The light from the dancing flames caught the ruddy tints in her hair, and her upturned face in the rosy glow was like a flower of fire.

The two cousins, Barbara and Nicole, were like each other, yet oddly unlike. Nicole once said, “Babs is consistently handsome. I’ve only got moments of ‘looks.’ ” Barbara had very good features, but there was something buttoned-up about her face, something prim and cold. Her cousin had no features worth the mentioning, but her eyes laughed and sparkled and darkened with every passing mood, and she would suddenly flush into a loveliness which was far beyond the neat good looks of Barbara.

Barbara was inclined to be heavy, Nicole was light and supple, a “fairy’s child.” Nicole was four-and-twenty, Barbara was four years older. Nicole was all Rutherfurd, Barbara was half a Burt.

If Barbara had knelt on the fender-stool and addressed a picture in verse, she would have looked affected and felt a fool. Nicole made it seem a most natural thing to do.

Mrs. Jackson, as I have said, stared, her cup half-way to her mouth. “Elizabeth of Bohemia,” she murmured. “Wasn’t she assassinated?” The way she said “assassinated,” with a lilt in the middle of the word, was delicious, and Barbara, who saw that Nicole, whose sense of the ridiculous could “afflict her like an illness,” was giving way to laughter, rushed in with:

“That was the Empress of Austria, wasn’t it? An Elizabeth too.”

“Uch, yes, so it was... Well, I must say I admire your room. Not that we haven’t old furniture, too, we have; Mr. Jackson’s great on it, but I sometimes think our room’s more like a museum than a room to be comfortable in. For one thing, Father doesn’t like photos in it. I used to try and make it more homely, you know, with a photo here and an ornament there, but he said I spoiled the effect. It’s what the man who arranged it for us called a ‘period’ room, but what period I never can mind. I’m never in it except to see that it’s kept well dusted, and when we have people to dinner. I’ve got a wee room of my own”—she nodded happily to Nicole—“the morning-room it should be called, but I like to call it ‘the parlour.’ ”

“I expect,” said Nicole, “it’s a delightful room. Do have one of these hot scones.”

“Thanks. I don’t know if you’d call it a delightful room, but it seems delightful to me for I’ve all my things round me, my wee ornaments that I buy for souvenirs when I visit new places, and photos of old friends—I’ve got Andy (that’s my boy) at every year of his life—and the plush suite that we began life with in the drawing-room. Andy says I like the room because I can come off my perch in it! In a way he’s right. It’s not natural for me to be stiff and starched in my manner. I like a laugh, and I’m inclined to be jokesome, but, of course, I’ve got to be on my dignity when we’re entertaining people. Such swells as we get sometimes! That’s because Father’s connected with all sorts of public things, and I can tell you I’ve to be careful what I say.”

Mrs. Jackson laughed aloud, and Lady Jane said in her gentle voice:

“You must lead a very interesting life. So varied. I always think Glasgow seems such an alive place. Babs and Nicole and I once helped at a bazaar there and we loved it.” She turned to her niece. “You remember, dear, that big bazaar for a woman’s hospital? Mary Carstairs had a stall.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Jackson, “that bazaar. I was there! I had the Pottery stall—along with others, of course.... So you know Lady Carstairs? I’ve met her here and there, of course, but I’m not awfully fond of her. A frozen kind of woman she seemed to me, but I daresay she’s all right when you know her.”

“Oh, she is,” Nicole assured her. “She’s a cousin of ours, so we’ve had opportunities of judging. But I know what you mean about the frozenness. It’s a sort of protective barrier she has raised between herself and the host of casual acquaintances that she is compelled to have. She says they would overrun her otherwise. The wife of a public man—and such a very public man as Ted Carstairs—has a sorry time. You must feel that yourself sometimes.”

Mrs. Jackson gave Nicole an understanding push with her disengaged hand. “Be quiet!” she said feelingly. “Do I not know what it means at big receptions and things to have people come up and say, ‘How d’you do, Mrs. Jackson?’ shaking me by the hand as friendly as you like, and me with no earthly notion who they are. Of course I just smile away and never let on, but, as you say, it’s wearing, and then there’s the pushing kind that you’ve got to keep in their places—uch yes.... You’ll not have been troubled much with that sort of thing, Lady Ruth—Lady Jane, I mean.”

That gentle lady shook her head. “Indeed no. I’ve often been so thankful for my quiet life. With my wretched memory for faces I would be worse than useless.”

Mrs. Jackson leant forward and said earnestly, “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. You’d be a great success, I’m sure, in any sphere of life.” She paused, and added, “If Mr. Jackson buys this place—of course, I don’t know whether he will or not—but if he does, I’m just wondering how I’m to come after you. It’ll be an awful drop, you know, from Lady Jane Rutherfurd to Mrs. Jackson.”

She laughed happily, evidently in no way depressed at the prospect, while Lady Jane, flushing pink at such unusual frankness, hastily suggested that she might have more tea.

Mrs. Jackson waved away the suggestion, too much interested in what she wanted to say to trouble about tea. Looking confidentially into the face of her hostess, she said, “How many servants d’you run this house with, if it’s a fair question?”

“How many? Let me see. There’s Johnson, the butler, he has always been with us, and ...” She turned to her niece. “Barbara is our housekeeper. Barbara will tell you.”

“Johnson,” began Barbara, counting on her fingers, “and Alexander, the footman, that’s two. And the cook and kitchen-maid, and an under kitchen-maid, five: three housemaids, eight. Then there’s our maid, Aunt Jane, and Harris. That makes ten in the house, doesn’t it?”

“My!” ejaculated Mrs. Jackson. “Ten’s a lot. At Deneholm we’ve just the three—cook, housemaid, and tablemaid. I don’t know if I could bear to launch out into menservants. For all the time we’ve had a gardener I’ve never so much as given him an order, and I’m not a bit at home with the chauffeur.... I must say I liked the look of the butler when he let me in—a fatherly sort of man he looked. D’you think he would stay on with us and keep us right—you know what I mean?—and the footman, too, of course.”

She looked at Barbara, who said, “Well—I hardly know. As my aunt says, he has been at Rutherfurd a long time and he may feel himself too old to begin with new people. Alexander might——”

“Alexander,” said Nicole, “is like his namesake, ‘hopelessly volatile.’ ”

“I see,” Mrs. Jackson murmured, looking puzzled. “Have you a large family, Lady Jane?”

Before her mother could reply Nicole broke in, “There are only we three now.”

“Is that so? Well, well. I’ve only the one son, Andy.... I can’t tell you what I came through when he was away at the War. Father had his business to keep him occupied, and I couldn’t stay in the house. I made bandages and picked sphagnum moss like a fury, and did every mortal thing I could to keep myself from thinking.... But he came back none the worse. It would have killed Mr. Jackson and me to lose Andy.”

Mrs. Jackson laid down her cup, arranged her veil, and prepared to depart.

“Well,” she said, standing solidly on the rug before Lady Jane, “I don’t know, of course—Mr. Jackson’ll have to see the place himself—but I’ve a kind of feeling that it’s here we’ll settle.” She looked round the room again. “I mebbe shouldn’t ask, but will you be taking all the furniture away with you? That picture above the fire-place, now? You see, I could never get the room to look the same, and I know Mr. Jackson would like it like this.”

She held out her hand, saying rather wistfully, “He has such high ideals, you know what I mean.... Well, thank you for that nice tea. It’s been a treat to me seeing you. D’you know what it all reminds me of? One of Stephen McKenna’s novels. He’s an awful high-class writer, isn’t he? There’s hardly one of his characters but what has a title and a butler.”