Читать книгу The Proper Place - Anna Masterton Buchan - Страница 8

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“Of many good I think him best.”

Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Mr. Jackson bought Rutherfurd practically as it stood. He grumbled loudly at the sum it cost him, but in his heart he was as well pleased as the buyer in Proverbs: ”It is naught, it is naught,” saith the buyer, but when he goeth away he boasteth.

The house was what he had always vaguely dreamed of, always desired to attain to, for he had a real love and appreciation of beautiful things. He did not try to deceive himself about his own or his wife’s fitness for their position; he knew they might be rather absurd in their new setting; his hopes were built on his son. Andrew, he determined, would play the part of the young laird and play it well. There was no need for him to trouble the Glasgow office much; he must shoot, and fish, and take to all country sports. His father had a picture of him in his mind’s eye, going about in knickerbockers, with dogs, a member of the County Council, on friendly terms with the neighbouring landowners. And of course he would marry, some nice girl of good family, and carry on the name of Jackson. There was nothing to be ashamed of in the name; it stood for straightness and integrity. Jackson of Rutherfurd—it sounded well, he thought.

Mrs. Jackson, though very much excited at the thought of the change, was beset with fears. She called on all her friends and broke to them with a sort of fearful joy the news that the Jacksons were about to become “county.” They were all very nice and sympathetic, except Mrs. McArthur, who was frankly pessimistic and inclined to be rude.

Mrs. Jackson would not have cared so much had it been one of her more recent friends who had taken up this attitude, but she had known Mrs. McArthur all her life and had always admired and respected her greatly.

“You’re leaving Glasgow, I hear,” she said coldly, the first time Mrs. Jackson went to see her after the great step had been taken.

“Have you heard?” that lady asked blankly. “I came to-day to tell you.”

“Bad news travels fast,” said Mrs. McArthur, sitting solidly in a high chair and surveying her friend as if she were seeing her in an entirely new light.

Mrs. McArthur was a powerful-looking woman with a large, white, wrinkled face. She belonged to an old Glasgow family and loved her city with something like passion. Holding fast to the past, she had an immense contempt for modern ways and all innovations.

“Ucha,” Mrs. Jackson began nervously. “Mr. Jackson’s bought a place and we’re leaving Glasgow for good. It’s a wrench to leave a town where you were born and brought up and married and lived near sixty years in—— And I’m fond of Glasgow. It’s a fine hearty place, and I’d like to know where you’d find a prettier, greener suburb than Pollokshields.”

Her hostess said nothing, so she went on talking rapidly. “And the shops and all, and concerts and theatres; we’ll miss a lot, but still—— Rutherfurd’s a fine place and not that awful far away. I really don’t know how I’ll get on at all, entertaining and all that, and a butler, and taking my place as a county lady, but I’ll just have to do my best. If only I’d had a daughter! What a help she’d be now. But it’s no good blaming Providence, and Andy’s a good boy to me.”

She smoothed down her lap and sighed, while Mrs. McArthur gave a sniff and said:

“Well, I think you’re making a mistake. Some people are fitted for a country life and some aren’t. I’d hate it myself. We go to Millport every summer for July and August, and the coast’s bright compared to the country, steamers and what not, but two months is more than enough for me. Indeed, I wouldn’t go away at all, if it weren’t that I value town all the more when I get back.” She watched a maid put a large plump tea-pot on the tray before her and covered it with a tea-cosy embroidered with wild roses, and then continued: “A coast house is bad enough, but how anybody can buy ‘a place’ as they call it, a house away at the end of an avenue, removed from all mankind, dreary beyond words....” She lifted her eyes to the ceiling in mute wonder, while Mrs. Jackson cleared her throat uncomfortably.

“Well, but, Mrs. McArthur,” she began, “some people like the country, you know, and——”

“Some people have queer tastes, Mrs. Jackson. Look at the people that are always going away about the North Pole!”

Mrs. Jackson failed to see the connection, but she murmured, “That’s so,” in a depressed tone; then, more brightly, added: “You couldn’t call Rutherfurd cold. Rather sheltered it is, with flowers blooming away like anything still, and we’re putting in central heating—— Can you believe it, they had done all these years without it? Luckily, there’s electric light.”

“There is? Well, I prefer gas myself.” Mrs. McArthur looked complacently round at her incandescent mantles in pink globes, then began to pour out the tea.... “Will the house need much?”

Her guest, glad of this slight show of interest, responded volubly.

“All the bedrooms need new paper and paint. The Rutherfurds were never very well-off for their position, and money’s been getting scarcer with them every year. The hall and the public rooms will be left with all the furniture, just as they are; they’re panelled, you know....” She leant forward impressively. “Mrs. McArthur, would you believe it, there’s no carpet on the stairs.”

“Fancy! As poor as all that, are they? It’s a good thing you’ve got a handsome one to lay down. It’s just about two years since you got it....”

Mrs. Jackson nodded. “Two years past in September. It is rich, isn’t it? I’m awful fond of crimson, and it’s a really good carpet, made for us. But——” she hesitated and glanced deprecatingly at her friend, “all the same, I don’t think we’ll put it down at Rutherfurd. It’s not the thing if you’ve got a fine old staircase—antique, you know—to cover it.”

Mrs. McArthur laid down her tea-cup, and after a moment’s pause addressed her old friend, gazing at her the while as if she had suddenly observed in her some new and most unpleasing trait.

“I must say I’m surprised at you, Bella Jackson, giving in to that sort of thing. At your time of life! It’s all very well for artists, it’s part of their trade to be daft-like, but I never thought to see you with a stair like a perpetual spring-cleaning.”

“Oh, not as bad as that. You don’t miss a carpet, somehow the bare steps are all of a piece with the rest of the house. You must come and see for yourself.”

“I’ll not do that,” Mrs. McArthur said with great decision.

“Oh, mebbe you will.... The house is empty now. Lady Jane Rutherfurd and her daughter and niece have taken a small house in Fife. I’m sorry for them, I am indeed. It’s not very easy to rise in the world, but it must be worse to come down. I’m going to ask the daughter to visit me. She’s an awful nice girl with no airs at all. I think Andy’ll like her, and she’ll be a great help to me, for goodness knows what I’ll do when all the people come to call!”

She sighed as she rose to go, and Mrs. McArthur, remaining seated, said: “Well, I’m glad I’m not in your place. You’ll only regret once leaving Pollokshields and that’ll be all the time. But wha will to Cupar maun to Cupar. I always knew your husband was a climber. Many a time I’ve said to myself: ‘Look at that wee Jackson worming himself in here and there, doing public work for his own ends, thinking he’ll get a knighthood out of it....’ But you were always an honest soul, Bella, and to hear you talking about ‘the county’ and ‘Lady Jane’ and not putting on a stair-carpet makes me fair sick. You can tell your husband from me that a queer sight he’ll be as a laird.”

She laughed unpleasantly, and rose to her feet, while Mrs. Jackson, flushed and distressed, meekly held out her hand.

“Well, good-bye. You’ll be far too grand to remember me when you’re the lady of Rutherfurd. I’ll miss you, and I’ll miss Andy. What does he say about all this?”

But Mrs. Jackson murmured something and fled from the place where so often she had found rest and refreshment, feeling that she had, in very truth, been wounded in the house of her friend.

What Andrew Jackson thought of the change no one ever heard. That young man was not given to confiding his feelings to the world at large. He was respectful to his parents—oddly so in this disrespectful age—and if he sometimes did permit himself to smile at them both, no one knew.

He was an ordinary-looking young man, neither tall nor short, with frank eyes, and a pleasant smile. His mother thought him wonderfully handsome. In the War he had won a well-deserved Military Cross, and since coming home to his father’s business much of his spare time had been spent helping with various schemes for the boys and young men of his own city.

Sitting with his mother in her very own parlour one evening before they left Deneholm for good, he looked round the room, which with all its ugliness had an air of homely comfort about it, and said, “You’ve been happy here, Mother?”

Mrs. Jackson, who was tidying out a large work-basket, looked up at the question.

Andrew was lying back in one of the shabby red velvet chairs smoking a pipe, and watching his mother. She loved to sit so with her son. Her husband was always busy, out at a meeting or a public dinner, or looking over papers in his own room, but Andrew spent many evenings in “the parlour.”

“Happy, Andy? Yes, of course I’ve been happy.”

She spoke in an abstracted way, her attention obviously still on the work-basket. Presently she held out a photograph, saying: “It’s queer to come across something you haven’t seen for years. It’s a school group.... That’s me, that fat one in the front with the curls! Eh, my my, I couldn’t sleep wondering what I’d be like, and I got such a disappointment....”

Her son studied the faded picture gravely.

“Where was this taken, Mother?” he asked.

“At the first school I was ever at, a private school in Myrtle Park. My home was in Crosshill, of course. We sat on benches in an upper room and learned out of wee paper books. There were pictures to help us on, and I remember getting a rap over the fingers for spelling t u b—bucket.... I wore a white pinafore. Children never wear pinafores now. I daresay they’re neater, but I don’t know—there was something awful fresh about a clean pinny.”

She was disentangling some silks and rolling them neatly on cards as she talked.

“The master was a queer man. I forget how it came up in the class one day, but he was talking about servants of God, and he said to me, ‘Bella, have you ever seen a servant of God?’ I said I had not, and he told me to come out into the middle of the floor, and he solemnly shook hands with me and said, ‘Now you can say you’ve shaken hands with a servant of God.’ ... But, of course, I was thinking of prophets with long white beards. Jeremiah, you know....”

“Of course,” said Andrew.

“It was a queer Glasgow in those days. Crosshill was like a village, and there was a long stretch of vacant ground from it to Eglinton Toll. You’ll hardly mind of it like that? And at the foot of Myrtle Park there were big pools or bogs or something that we could skate on in winter. And there were only horse-cars going in and out to town, and they didn’t go further than the Park Gate.... I stayed at the Myrtle Park school till I was ten and then I went to another private school in Kelvinside till I was seventeen, but I don’t think I ever learned much.... I got engaged to your father when I was twenty. He was a deacon in the church we went to, and read papers at the Literary Society.... He took to walking home with me from meetings and dropping in to supper, but it was long before I could believe he meant anything, for, you see, I wasn’t clever, and he was a promising young man. We weren’t married for some years because, of course, we had to save, but I was awful happy making my things, and going out with your father to concerts and socials.”

She stopped to deal patiently with a very tangled skein, and her son asked where their first house had been.

“D’you not remember it, Andy? Uch, you must. We left it when you were six. It was called Abbotsford, a house in Maxwell Road, a semi-detached villa, just the six rooms and kitchen. We had been married five years when you came, so I can tell you we were glad to see you. And your father was getting on well, and in time he bought Deneholm. It seemed an awful lift in the world to me! We had just the one girl at Abbotsford, and we started here with three experienced women. My! I was miserable with them for a while: I always thought they were laughing to each other when I went into the kitchen, and so they were, mebbe, but I got used to it; and you’ve to live a long time after you’re laughed at! The Rutherfurds’ butler’s staying on with us, that’s a comfort, for he’ll keep the other servants in order. He wanted to go with Lady Jane—quite the old family servant in a book—but they said they couldn’t do with him in a small house. Miss Nicole said to me that it would never do for them to have a butler in Kirkmeikle, it would be ‘trailing clouds of glory,’ though what she meant by that I don’t know. It’s a hymn, isn’t it? That’s the worst of people like the Rutherfurds, you don’t know half they mean; they so seldom talk sense. I can discuss a subject quite well if people’ll stick to it, but when they suddenly fly off and quote things.... I want to ask you, Andy, d’you think I’ll ever be able to take my place at Rutherfurd?” She did not wait for an answer, but went on:

“I was seeing Mrs. McArthur the other day and she fairly depressed me. I’ve known her so long and she’s been such a good friend, and now she seems to have turned against me. I could see she thought I’d be a figure of fun at Rutherfurd, and she was quite bitter about your father, said he was a climber.... I think myself men are quicker at picking up things than women. I’m sure when your father married me he didn’t know anything about pictures, and old furniture, and the things he cares so much about now. He was quite pleased with our little house, and worked in the garden on Saturday afternoons. I sometimes wish that we’d never got on in the world and that we still lived at Abbotsford.”

Andrew knocked his pipe against the fender and put it on the edge of the mantelpiece.

“I wouldn’t worry, Mother,” he said, in his quiet voice. “You never pretend to be anything you’re not, so you’ll get on splendidly. Nobody’s going to laugh in an unkindly way at you so long as you’re sincere. And it doesn’t matter greatly if we do amuse our neighbours. What would Punch do without jokes about the New Rich? It’s better to amuse people than bore them, any day. You laugh too, Mother—then the laughter won’t hurt you.”

“I see what you mean, Andy.... But surely nobody would ever think of laughing at your father?”

“I suppose not. But the best-liked people are those that you can laugh at in a kindly way. And no one has more friends than you, my dear.”

“In Glasgow—but I doubt there’ll be none of my kind near Rutherfurd. Mrs. McArthur says ...”

“Never mind Mrs. McArthur. She’s a thrawn old body sometimes.”

She still looked at her son with troubled eyes.

“And you’re a beautiful speaker, Andy, from being at an English school, though I whiles wonder how you’ve kept it, for my Glasgow accent would corrupt a nation. I doubt Mrs. McArthur’s right—but, anyway, I’ll always have you. You’ve been my great comfort all your life.”

“That’s nonsense,” said Andrew, beginning to smash up the fire.

His mother took the poker from him, for it vexed her economical soul to see a good fire spoiled.

“No, it’s the truth.... Well, well, everything has an end. Somehow, I never thought we’d leave Deneholm. I wonder who’ll buy it, and sit in this room? Mebbe children’ll play here.” She looked wistfully at her son. “I wish you’d marry, Andy. Mind, you’re getting on. Thirty-two—and I never saw you so much as look at a girl.”