Читать книгу The Guarded Halo - Margaret Pedler - Страница 3

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Fen Wyatt had passed smoothly and automatically from father to son for a couple of centuries or more. A kindly, comfortable old house, mellowed by time and the care of generations who had lived in it and loved it. It had cradled their coming and periodically its darkened windows looked down regretfully upon their going, as first one and then another head of the family had been borne, shoulder-high, to his last resting-place. But Fen Wyatt remained—and hitherto there had always been a son to step into his inheritance.

And now it seemed as though the old house was waiting—gravely, rather surprisedly waiting for someone to come and take up the reins of government which Nicholas, the last member of the family upon whom the churchyard gate had closed finally and for ever, had unexpectedly let fall a month ago.

Outside, everything appeared just as usual. There was no perceptible change to mark the fact that Nick Wyatt—bluff, good-hearted, prejudiced Nick Wyatt—had stepped abruptly out of this world into the next. Commonplace, everyday little sounds filled the garden—the hum of a mowing machine as it was driven forward and back across meticulously shaven lawns; the slow, occasional footstep of a gardener followed by the metallic clip, clip of his shears as he trimmed a privet hedge; blithe singing of birds in the green-frocked trees, the piercingly sweet note of a blackbird fluting high above the twittering chorus. No, life was going on just the same outside the old house.

But inside, in an old-fashioned, low-ceiled room, with the May sunlight pouring into it through criss-crossed diamond window-panes, two people were facing the fact that, with the passing of Nick Wyatt, the whole of their world had come unstuck—suddenly and unbelievably.

“We’re right up against it.” Bob Wilson spoke with a definiteness which seemed to imply that he had mentally scoured every nook and corner wherein a grain of hope might lurk, and found them conspicuously empty.

He was sitting on the arm of a chair, his long legs stretched out dejectedly in front of him, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, and an expression of half-incredulous dismay on his face. It was rather a nice face. It possessed no pretensions to good looks, but there was a certain dogged strength about its square-jawed plainness, and a humorous frankness in the direct gaze of the pleasant gray eyes, set somewhat wide apart, that was not without attraction.

“Right up against it,” he repeated dispiritedly.

The girl to whom he vouchsafed this depressing piece of information was sufficiently like him, although darker in colouring, to justify the assumption that they were brother and sister. A slim, eager slip of a girl, she had the same wide-apart gray eyes, their rain-clear grayness in her case accentuated by a double rim of short black lashes, and the same determined mouth, only more delicately cut. But whereas Bob’s hair was of a nondescript brown and unequivocally straight, hers was black as a crow’s wing—satiny, shingled hair with a fugitive wave in it that denied it severity. Narrow, straight black brows gave a characteristic touch to her small, pointed face, and in the thin, sleeveless black frock she was wearing, sharply contrasting with the warm pallor of her skin, she conveyed rather the impression of a black-and-white etching.

She regarded her brother curiously.

“Do you mean,” she said slowly, “that we haven’t any money at all?”

He gave a short laugh.

“That’s about the size of it,” he admitted ruefully. “Actually, we’ve about enough to carry us on for a few weeks, with care and circumspection. But after that’s used up we shall have to fend for ourselves—unless there are any lineal descendants of Elijah’s ravens flying about!”

Shirley’s incredulous gaze passed bewilderedly from her brother’s face to the glimpse of garden visible through the windows. Just within sight, Tomkins, the ancient head gardener, was busily engaged in tying up some rose trees, while Mugs, the wire-haired terrier, occupying a strategic position behind him, was equally busy surreptitiously burying a bone in the rose-bed’s sacred precincts. It all looked so accustomed, so ordinary, that it seemed impossible to realize the cataclysm which had suddenly changed the whole of life as far as she and her brother were concerned.

A month ago they had been living what appeared to be a perfectly safe and secure existence, the favoured niece and nephew of a devoted bachelor uncle, surrounded by all those pleasant ways of living which plenty of money can procure, and with the ultimate prospect, when the time should eventually come for Nicholas Wyatt to be gathered to his fathers, of being left in possession of a sum which would at least maintain them both in independence for the rest of their lives.

More than that it had been out of Uncle Nick’s power to assure them. Fen Wyatt itself, together with the monies which provided the big annual income he enjoyed, was entailed, and at his death must go to Alan Wyatt, son of his younger brother James. As long as that brother had lived, so long had Nick quarrelled with him. As is not infrequently the case with blood relations, the two men had nothing in common, and they had split finally and completely on the subject of their sister’s marriage, Nick approving whilst his brother fiercely disapproved the man of her choice—James’s disapprobation being based upon the fact that the man in question was painfully lacking in this world’s goods. And when at the last the death of the younger put an end to the ceaseless warfare between the brothers, the hostile sentiment had been carried on into the next generation, and Nicholas and his nephew and heir, Alan Wyatt, had had nothing to do with each other beyond the interchange of occasional acrimonious letters relating to family and estate matters.

Meanwhile, Nicholas had concentrated his whole affections upon Bob and Shirley, the children of his much-loved sister. The latter had been suddenly and very tragically left a widow, and practically penniless, a few weeks after the birth of her daughter, and thenceforward he had charged himself with her entire welfare. His first proposal had been that she and her children should come and live with him at Fen Wyatt, but when she rejected this, with all a woman’s innate craving to have a home of her own, he had established her in a house a few miles distant. Never very strong, however, and brokenhearted by her husband’s death, her grip on life had gradually and almost imperceptibly weakened, until at last, at the end of two years, she quietly faded out of existence.

It was then that Nicholas showed that, just as in the case of his brother death could not soften his ingrained hostility, so death had no power to stem his devotion. Equally with his dislike, his affection also carried itself into the next generation, and when his sister’s death left her children entirely bereft, he had put into practice his original idea and brought them to Fen Wyatt, together with the nurse who had seen them both come into the world and had stood devotedly by their mother throughout the tragedy which had broken her.

That had been eighteen years ago, when Bob was a sturdy youngster of nine and Shirley seven years younger, and since then the brother and sister had learned to look upon Fen Wyatt as so completely “home”—their own home—that, now, the realization that it was no longer theirs but their cousin’s, Alan Wyatt’s, that with the death of Nicholas they had become merely interlopers, had descended upon them as a stunning blow.

Shirley had never associated the thought of death with Uncle Nick—big, striding Uncle Nick, with his jolly, weather-beaten face and cheery smile, riding hard and straight to hounds three times a week, driving his fast sports car with unhesitating steadiness of nerve and judgment, vital and gay and optimistic as many a far younger man. Twenty years hence, perhaps, when fifty-five had translated itself into seventy-five. But not yet—not yet.... And already it had happened. Uncle Nick was dead, had been dead three weeks, and here she was sitting listening to Bob while he enlightened her as to the precise circumstances in which his death involved them. Added to the shock of his sudden passing and the sick, aching misery which had succeeded it, the illimitable sense of loss of which they were both so desperately conscious, there was to be this new and acute consideration—a sordid counting up of pounds and shillings, the necessity for facing the question of ways and means.

A rather wistful smile curved Shirley’s lips for a moment. How stricken and self-reproachful Uncle Nick would be could he have known the circumstances! Fortunately he didn’t know. It had always been his chief desire to make secure the future of his sister’s children. He had a certain small patrimony of his own, quite apart from the Fen Wyatt monies, and his aim and object had been so to increase this during his lifetime that it should be sufficient for their needs after he was gone.

“You’ll never be rich,” he used to say discontentedly. “There’ll not be a twentieth of what that damned young rotter, Alan, will come in for. But you’ll have enough to carry on in a little place that’s your own. Bob knows enough about the management of land to run a small farm off his own bat.”

Practically it had amounted to an obsession with him, this determination to make them independent, and latterly he had speculated pretty heavily with his small personal fortune in his endeavours to accomplish it. At first he had been amazingly successful, and his capital had augmented itself by leaps and bounds. Then the tide suddenly turned, and in a few weeks he had lost it all. But he was still undaunted and optimistic. Only the day before he died he had been full of fresh plans.

“We’ll economize a bit,” he declared, “and invest whatever I can save out of the Fen Wyatt income. After all, the income’s mine to do what I like with as long as I live, provided I keep the place up adequately.” He beamed cheerily at niece and nephew. “There’s nothing to make a song about. The luck was out and my castle’s tumbled down. But there’s plenty of time to make a fresh start and build it up again. I’m not much more than half-way through life, after all.”

But sometimes Fate doesn’t give a fresh start. Nick Wyatt didn’t get one. Instead, he died that night, passing quietly in his sleep from this world to the next, and Bob and Shirley were left alone to face the music.

“I’m glad—glad he never knew,” said Shirley, speaking her thoughts abruptly. “He would have hated it so for us.”

“We shall hate it pretty badly ourselves before long, I expect,” rejoined her brother grimly. “You’ve not realized it yet. Neither have I. That we’re practically penniless.... We shall begin to realize it when we turn out of here.”

She glanced round the room and her eyes misted suddenly. The dearness of it all! Dearness of books, their covers faded with much fingering, of the little low stool on which she used to sit in front of the big fire, yawning about the day’s sport with Uncle Nick when they had come home together from a day with hounds; above all, dearness of the big, old-fashioned arm-chair where he himself had always sat. Instinctively she and Bob had avoided its use since he was no longer there to fill it.

“Yes, I suppose we shall have to go,” she said unevenly. “It doesn’t seem real, does it? When—when do we go, Bob?”

“Well, Alan Wyatt’s been quite sporting over that. He wrote at once, you remember, saying that there was no hurry. And now I’ve had another letter from him.”

“Another? What about?”

Bob foraged in his pockets, finally producing the letter in question and unfolding it.

“He says that of course he knows Uncle Nick’s death will make a great difference to us and—and all that. And he suggests making us an allowance—thinks it would be only fair in the circumstances.”

A swift flush dyed Shirley’s face scarlet.

“Oh, Bob——!” She broke off, then added quietly: “May I see the letter?”

He handed it across to her in silence. There was a curious expression in his eyes as he did so, half deprecating, half interrogative, as though he wondered how she would regard its contents.

“... Naturally,” ran the small, somewhat pedantic script, “I am quite aware that my father and my Uncle Nicholas hated each other cordially, and perhaps there was good reason for it. Nor do I imagine that there is the least likelihood of anything in the nature of friendship between ourselves. We have been too long reared in an atmosphere of mutual hostility. But the fact remains that we are branches of the same family, and for the credit of that family I should prefer that you and your sister were not dependent upon others for your livelihood. For this reason, therefore, I propose to make you each an annual allowance which would provide you with at least a livable income.”

Here the letter branched off into details of amount and mode of payment, concluding rather pompously:

“And I trust that you will see your way to accepting this in the spirit in which it is offered.”

Shirley read the letter in silence. Then she looked across at her brother, and in her eyes there was the same interrogative, uncertain expression that had been in his.

“It’s very unexpected, isn’t it?” she said at last. “And rather nice of him—in the circumstances.”

“And it provides a way out,” he answered briefly.

“No.” She shook her head with decision. “It doesn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

A look of sudden anxiety, of apprehension, sprang into her face.

“Why, you couldn’t—we couldn’t possibly accept this,” she said swiftly. “You think that, too, Bob? Oh, you must think that!”

“Must I? What’s your reason for saying we can’t accept it?”

“Uncle Nick is the reason. You know, and I know, that there is nothing he would have hated more than for us to accept anything whatever from the James Wyatt family. He would never have allowed it while he was alive, and it wouldn’t seem straight or—or honourable to do the very thing he would have loathed now he’s dead.”

Bob slipped off the arm of the chair on which he had been perched, and stood up.

“Well said, old thing. Them’s exactly my sentiments—only I didn’t want to express them till I knew how you felt about it.”

A little sigh of relief escaped between her lips.

“Then that’s all right,” she replied. “Do you know, for a moment you quite frightened me, Bob. I thought”—slowly—“that you wanted to take this wretched money.”

Bob’s eyes twinkled.

“I do,” he said. “I want it no end. I feel exactly like a donkey who sees a bunch of carrots dangled in front of his nose—just out of reach.”

“Well, as long as you know they’re out of reach——”

“I’m afraid they are,” he admitted with a short sigh. “It’s a pretty stiff temptation, though, Shirley. A livable income—just what Uncle Nick always intended us to have—and we’ve only got to say ‘Yes, please’ for it. I suppose”—thoughtfully—“we are right in refusing it?”

“Right? Of course we’re right,” she answered impetuously. “Uncle Nick’s been a perfect brick to us all our lives, and we can’t be so utterly low-down as to have taken everything he’s always given us—and then respond by taking the very thing of all others he would hate us to do. Can you imagine what his feelings would be if he knew that we were living on the charity—for that’s what it would amount to—of the James Wyatt family... choosing to live on it?”

Bob nodded.

“Yes, I can pretty well imagine,” he said gruffly.

“We couldn’t do it. It would be—disloyal, somehow. We owe everything in the world to Uncle Nick, everything we’ve ever had.” Her voice shook a little at the remembrance of how much of love and thought and kindness had been comprehended in that “everything.”

“We can’t let him down over this,” she went on quietly. “You can’t let down anyone who’s been so unutterably good to you. I should feel ashamed all my life if we took this money.”

Bob lit a cigarette and stood smoking in silence for a while, staring down into the fire. Inwardly he agreed heartily with every word his sister had spoken. Scrupulously honourable himself, Nick Wyatt had inculcated the same fineness of perception in these two for whose lives he had made himself responsible—a fineness that carried loyalty and honour to its uttermost limit. Nevertheless, Bob had all a man’s practical sense of the value of money, added to which, as considerably the elder of the two, he had a heavy feeling of responsibility regarding his sister. And although her impulsive refusal to consider Alan Wyatt’s proposal met with an instant response in his own heart, he could not but realize that to turn down an offer of a livable income, in the circumstances in which they found themselves, would be regarded by most people as an act of quixotic folly.

Rapidly he envisaged the future. To refuse this offer meant that both he and Shirley must find work of some kind. Later on he might be able to earn enough to support them both, but he recognized that unless he had phenomenal luck it was unlikely he would be able to do much more at the outset than keep himself. And phenomenal luck rarely comes your way at the moment when you particularly need it. At length, tossing his cigarette half smoked into the fire, he turned back to his sister and put the matter squarely before her, pointing out the advantages of Alan Wyatt’s offer and painting the alternative future, should they decide to refuse it, in no uncertain colours.

“After all,” he wound up, “we live in a material world and we’ve got to look at the thing from a practical point of view. Most people would say we were utter fools to refuse an offer which means sure and certain bread-and-butter.”

But Shirley remained unmoved.

“I’d rather be a fool than a knave,” she returned composedly. “And that particular bread-and-butter—bought with Alan Wyatt’s money—would choke me. Every mouthful would be a sort of insult to Uncle Nick.”

He nodded assent.

“I know what you mean. Then the alternative is a job for each of us.”

“Well, you won’t find any difficulty in getting one,” she answered, with sisterly pride in this big brother of hers. “And even I must be of some sort of use in the world. I know a bit about poultry-keeping and dairy-work, and I can drive a car and speak French. There must be lots of people who want that kind of thing.”

“Oh, lots,” agreed Bob.

Both were speaking in happy ignorance of the efficiency demands of the present day, their viewpoint based on life as it had come to them with every sharp edge and corner rounded off by the smoothing action of money.

“Then write to-day and refuse the offer, Bob,” said Shirley. “I shall feel much happier when we’ve put it right behind us.”

So that same evening a coolly courteous refusal was dispatched to Alan Wyatt, and Shirley went to bed with a little warm glow of thankfulness at her heart. She felt as though, had they accepted, they would have been letting Uncle Nick down, and that was unthinkable. As she said to Bob, when she kissed him good night:

“One must play the game by someone who has played it so splendidly by us. I’m glad you refused, Bob.”

But there were days to come when they were to count to the last farthing the unreckoned cost of “playing the game,” when Bob was to ask himself bitterly if the price had not been too heavy a one to pay.