Читать книгу The Counterplot - Hope Mirrlees - Страница 5

Table of Contents

Teresa dressed and went down to the drawing-room, to find her father and Jollypot already there and chatting amicably.

“The place was full of salmon at four and sixpence a pound, and he said, ‘You’ll never get rid of that!’ and the fishmonger said, ‘Won’t I? It’ll go like winking,’ and the other chap said, ‘Who’ll buy it these hard times?’ and he said, ‘The miners, of course.’”

Dick Lane was a stockily-built man of middle height, with a round, rubicund face. A Frenchman had once described him as, Le type accompli du farmer-gentleman.

He was, however, a Londoner, born and bred, as his fathers had been before him for many a generation; but, as they had always had enough and to spare for beef and mutton and bacon, the heather of Wales and the pannage of the New Forest had helped to build their bones; besides, it was not so very long ago that cits could go a-maying without being late for ’Change; and then, there is the Cockney’s dream of catching, one day before he dies, the piscis rarus—a Thames trout—a dream which, though it never be realised, maketh him to lie down in green pastures and leadeth him beside the still waters.

As to Dick, he liked cricket, and the smell of manure and of freshly-cut hay, he liked pigs, and he liked wide, quiet vistas; but he liked them as a background to his prosaic and quietly regulated activities—much as a golfer, though mainly occupied with the progress of the game, subconsciously is not indifferent to the springy turf aromatic with thyme and scabious, nor to the pungent breezes from the sea, nor to the sweep of the downs.

He and Teresa exchanged friendly nods, and she, sinking into a chair, began to contemplate him—much as Blake may have contemplated the tiger, when he wondered:

What mysterious hand and eye

Framed its awful symmetry.

There he sat, pink from his bath, pleasantly tired after his two rounds of golf, expounding to Jollypot his views on the threatened strike—the heir to all the ages.

For his body and soul were knit from strange old fragments: sack; fear of the plague; terror of the stars; a vision of the Virgin Queen borne, like a relic in a casket, on the shoulders of fantastically-dressed gentlemen; Walsingham; sailor’s tales of Spanish ladies; a very English association between the august word of Liberty and the homely monosyllable Wilkes; dynasties tottering to the tune of “Lillybolero”; Faith, Hope, and Charity, stimulated by cries of, “No Popery,” “Lavender, Sweet Lavender,” “Pity the poor prisoners of the Fleet”; Dr. Donne thundering Redemption at Paul’s Cross, the lawn at his wrist curiously edged with a bracelet of burnished hair; Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great, Pride, Lechery, Robin Hood, throbbing in ballads, or else, alive and kicking and bravely dressed beyond one’s dreams, floating in barges down the Thames; Death—grinning in stone from crevices of the churches, dancing in churchyards with bishops and kings and courtesans, forming the burden of a hundred songs, and at last, one day, catching one oneself; Death—but every death cancelled by a birth.

Without all this he would not have been sitting there, saying, “The English working man is at bottom a sensible chap, and if they would only appeal to his common sense it would be all right.”

Then the gong sounded. Dick looked at his watch and remarked, quite good-humouredly, “I wonder how many times your mother has been in time for dinner during the thirty years we have been married.”

At last the door opened, and the Doña came in with Concha.

“I have just been saying I wonder how many times you have been in time for dinner since we were married.”

The Doña ignored this remark, and busied herself in straightening Teresa’s fichu.

Then they went in to dinner.

“By the way, Anna,” said Dick, looking across at the Doña and sucking the soup off his moustache, “I was playing golf with Crofts, and he says there’s going to be a wonderful new rose at the show this year—terra cotta coloured. It’s a Lyons one; he says it’s been got by a new way of hybridising. We must ask Harry about it.”

“Harry wouldn’t know—he knows nothing about gardening,” said the Doña scornfully.

“Not know? Why, he’ll know all about it. That fellow Worthington—you know who I mean, the chap that went on that commission to India—well, he’s a knowledgeable sort of chap, and he asked me the other day at the Club if Dr. Sinclair of Cambridge wasn’t a son-in-law of mine, and he said that he’d been making the most wonderful discoveries lately.”

“What’s the use of discoveries—of Harry’s, at any rate? They do no one any good,” said the Doña sullenly.

“Oh, I don’t know; there’s no knowing what these things mayn’t lead to—they may teach us to improve the human stock and all sorts of things”; and then Dick applied himself to the more interesting subject of his fried sole, oblivious, in spite of years of experience, that his remark had horrified his wife by its impious heresy.

However, her only comment was an ironical smile.

“To learn to know people through flowers—what a lovely idea,” mused Jollypot, who was too absent-minded to be tactful. “I think it is his work among flowers that makes Dr. Sinclair so—so——”

“So like a flower himself, eh?” grinned Dick, with a sudden vision of his large, massive, overbearing son-in-law.

“I’m sure flowers really irritate Harry horribly,” said Concha. “They’ve probably got the Oxford manner, or are not Old Liberals, or something.”

“You are quite right, Concha. Both flowers and children irritate him,” said the Doña bitterly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Dick, with indifferent good humour. “By the way,” he added, “I’ve asked a young fellow called Munroe down for the week-end. He’s representing a South African sugar firm we have to do with ... it’ll be all right, won’t it?”

“Well, Arnold’s written to say he’s coming, and he doesn’t like strangers, you know,” said the Doña.

“Well, I’m blessed ... has it come to this ...” he spluttered, roused completely out of his habitual good humour.

“No, it hasn’t,” said Concha soothingly, and laid a hand on his.

“Well, all the same, it’s ...” he growled; and then subsided, slightly appeased.

The Doña, quite unmoved, continued placidly eating her sole. Then she remarked, “And where is your friend to sleep, may I ask? Arnold is bringing down Guy and a cousin of his. When the children are here you know how little room we have.”

“I suppose one of them—Arnold, as far as that goes—can sleep at Rudge’s,” said Dick sulkily.

“Oh, I can sleep in Dad’s dressing-room, if it comes to that,” said Teresa.

“Or I can,” said Concha.

“Oh, no, you’re so much more dependent on your own dressing-table and your own things,” said Teresa; and Concha blushed. Innocent remarks of Teresa’s had a way of making her blush; but she was a fighter.

“What’s the good Colonial like?” she asked, her voice not quite natural—and thinking the while, “I will ask if I choose! It’s absolutely unbearable how self-conscious they’re making me—it’s like servants.”

“The Colonial—what Colonial? Oh, Monroe! He’s a Scot really, but he’s been out there some years; done jolly well, too. He’s a gallant fellow, too—V.C. in the war.”

“Oh, no-o-o!” drawled Concha, “how amusing! V.C.’s are so exotic—it’s like seeing a fox suddenly in a wood——” and then she blushed again, for she realised that this remark was not original, but Guy Cust’s, and that Teresa was looking at her.

“What’s he like?” she went on hurriedly.

“Oh, I don’t know ... he’s a great big chap,” and then he added cryptically, “pretty Scotch, I should say.”

When dinner was over, the Doña went up to the nursery to apologise, in case the children were still awake, for not having been up before to say good-night. She found they were asleep, however, but Nanny was sitting in the day-nursery darning a jersey of Jasper’s; so, partly to avoid having had the trouble of climbing the stairs for nothing, partly because she had been seeking for some time the occasion for a private chat, she sank into the rocking-chair—looking extremely distinguished in her black lace mantilla and velvet gown.

Her brown eyes, with the quizzical droop of the lids that Teresa had inherited, fixed Nanny in a disconcerting Spanish stare.

How thankful she was that she did not have to wear a gown of black serge fastening down her chest with buttons, and a starched white cap.

“I think the children have had a happy summer,” she said.

“Oh, yes, madam. There’s nowhere like Plasencia—and no one like Granny and Auntie!”

There was a definite matter upon which the Doña wanted information; but it required delicate handling. She was on the point of approaching it by asking if the children were not very lonely at Cambridge, but realising that this would be a reflection upon Nanny she immediately abandoned it—no one could deal more cavalierly, when she chose, with the feelings of others than the Doña; but she never inadvertently hurt a fly.

So what she said was, “I suppose Dr. Sinclair is always very busy?”

“Oh, yes—always working away at his stocks and his chickens,” said Nanny placidly, holding a small hole up to the light. “He’s managed to get that bit of ground behind the garden, and he’s planted it with nothing but stocks. He lets Anna help him with the chickens. She’s becoming quite a little companion to her Daddy.”

“That is delightful,” purred the Doña; then, after a pause, “He must be terribly lonely, poor man.”

“Oh, yes, he frets a lot, I’m sure; but, of course, gentlemen don’t show it so much.”

“Ah?” and there was a note of suppressed eagerness in the interjection.

Nanny began to feel uncomfortable.

As dogs who live much with human beings develop an agonising sensitiveness, so servants are apt to develop from an intimacy with their masters a delicacy and refinement of feeling often much greater than that of the masters.

At the bottom of her heart, she resented Dr. Sinclair’s indifference to his children—at any rate, his indifference to Jasper—for Anna, who was a remarkably intelligent little girl, he rather liked. But with regard to Jasper, he had once remarked to a crony at dinner that, with the exception of the late Lord —— (naming a famous man of science), his son was the greatest bore he had ever met; which remark had been repeated by the parlour-maid in a garbled version to the indignant Nanny.

Then, in decent mourning, a broken heart as well as a crape band must be worn on the sleeve; Dr. Sinclair’s sleeve was innocent of either, and it could not be denied that within eight months of his wife’s death his voice was as loud and cheerful, his eyes as bright, as ever before.

Yes; but it was quite another matter to be pumped, even by “Granny,” or to admit to any one but her own most secret heart that “Daddy” could, under any circumstances, behave otherwise than as the model of all the nursery virtues.

There was a short silence; then the Doña said, “Yes, poor man! It must be very dull for him. But I suppose he is beginning to see his friends?”

“Oh, yes, madam, the College gentlemen sometimes come to talk over his work with him,” and Nanny pursed up her lips, and accelerated the speed with which she was threading her needle through her warp. “It’s a blessing, I’m sure,” she added, “that he has his work to take off his thoughts sometimes.”

“Yes, indeed!”; then, after a slight pause, “What about that Miss—what was her name—the lady professor—Miss Fyles-Smith? Is she still working with Dr. Sinclair?”

“I couldn’t say, madam, I’m sure. She was very kind, taking the children on the river, and that—when Dr. Sinclair was away.”

The slight emphasis on the temporal clause did more credit to Nanny’s heart than her head—considering that the rapier she was parrying was wielded by the Doña; for it caused the Doña to say to herself, “Aha! she knows what I mean, does she? There must be something in it then.”

However, this was loyal, faithful service, and the Doña had an innate respect for the first-rate; but, though honouring Nanny, she did not feel in the least ashamed of herself.

She changed the subject, and sat on, for a while, chatting on safe, innocent topics.