Читать книгу The Guarded Halo - Margaret Pedler - Страница 4

Table of Contents

Looking out of her bedroom window, Shirley was conscious of a sudden pang. A fortnight had elapsed since the day she and Bob had taken their decision regarding their cousin’s offer of an allowance, and from that time onward arrangements for their departure from Fen Wyatt had proceeded apace. There had been a great many things to see to—rooms to be secured in London, a selection made of what to take with them of their own personal possessions and what to discard—since they both recognized that henceforth they must “travel light”—farewell visits to be paid to friends and neighbours, and, finally, the packing up of trunks and boxes. The time had simply flown by in the accomplishing of these things.

And now the actual morning of departure had come, and Shirley felt a poignant tug at her heart as she stood at her open window for a moment before going downstairs to breakfast. Mid-May sunshine flooded the garden below, where an early rose or two had already pushed crumpled petals up between green calyx leaves; Mugs, the terrier, was light-heartedly chasing a cat off the lawn, and in the meadows beyond cattle were lazily cropping the young, sweet grass. It was all typical of the life she had known, the life that with to-day was coming to an end, giving place to one that would be new and strange and untried. Never again would she stand at this same window looking out on the familiar landscape, background against which almost the whole of her days had been lived, and the dull insistence of the word “Never” clanged against her consciousness, as it has clanged for each of us at some time or another, with a horrible finality that was almost unbearable.

Stifling a sigh, she turned from the window and took her way downstairs. In the hall, trunks and suitcases stood strapped and ready, emphasizing afresh the imminence of departure, and, as she hurried by them, two of the servants passed her with the quiet tread and half-averted gaze of their class when trouble is in the air.

It had been arranged that the household staff should remain on in the service of the new owner, all except old Nanny who had been the Wilsons’ nurse when they had first come to Fen Wyatt. Alan Wyatt had offered her a post there as linen-room maid—he could be relied upon always to do the conventionally correct thing—but, when Shirley had conveyed the offer to her, she had indignantly refused it.

“Not for me, miss, thank you,” she had asserted with some asperity, her eyes suddenly dimmed with loyal, indignant tears. “Fen Wyatt’s no place for me with old master gone and not even my own bairns to look after. I’ll take a temp’r’y job, and perhaps when you and Master Bob’s settled down somewhere you’ll have me back. I can cook as good as anyone, as well you know, miss.”

“I know you can, Nanny,” Shirley had answered unhappily. “But I’m afraid Mr. Bob and I will never be anywhere where we can afford to keep even a ‘staff’ of one. You see, we’re really poor people now.”

“There’d be no question of wages, miss,” rejoined Nanny simply. “I’d work my fingers to the bone for you and Master Bob without a penny piece, and that’s the truth. And if so be”—she twiddled the corner of her apron awkwardly between her fingers—“and if so be you—you haven’t got quite enough to start a little home of your own, for furnishings and what not, why, miss, I haven’t been here all these years on good wages and not saved a bit. I’ve two hundred pounds put by in War Savings ’Stificates, and that’s yours—yours and Master Bob’s—to-morrow, if it ’ud help.”

Shirley, touched to the quick, had thrown her arms round the old woman’s neck and hugged her. Then, quietly and soberly, she had explained to her exactly the circumstances in which Uncle Nick’s death had left them, and how even two hundred pounds couldn’t help them to start a home of their own. To poor old Nanny it was all very terrible and difficult of belief—that her “bairns,” as she had always called them, should have to “turn to and work.” It was a subversal of the whole order of the universe, and the worst of it was there didn’t seem anybody in particular upon whom the blame for such a state of things could be laid. Nor would she relinquish the idea that somehow and at some time a home would materialize in which she could once more serve and care for her adored young master and mistress.

“So I’ll just take a temp’r’y job, as I said, Miss Shirley,” she repeated doggedly. “And then you can send for me when you want me.”

Many a time, during the heart-breaking days that followed, days devoted to the preparations for departure, the recollection of Nanny’s unshakable belief in that future home had served in some queer indefinable way to comfort Shirley, even though she could not share it.

But this morning, on this last day of all, she could find no comfort anywhere, and she entered the sunny breakfast-room weighed down with an overwhelming sense of sadness. Bob had been standing leaning against the framework of the open French window, his face grave and a trifle drawn looking. The wrench of leaving Fen Wyatt was trying him hard, while the thought of the future filled him with anxiety.

At the sound of Shirley’s entrance he turned swiftly, and, seeing the sadness in her face, forced a smile to his own.

“ ’Morning, old thing. Come along and partake of your last breakfast as one of the idle rich. It’s a jolly good one, anyway”—lifting off the dish covers as he spoke—“fish kedgeree and the succulent kidney and bacon. Which will you have?”

Shirley shook her head. The idea of food was repulsive to her.

“Neither, thanks. I’m not hungry. I’ll just have a cup of coffee.”

“Nonsense. You must have something.” He became persuasive. “See, I’ll choose for you—the S. K. and bacon, as being more sustaining than kedgeree.” He came round to her side with a plate on which reposed a kidney cooked to a turn, flanked by crisp, golden-brown curls of bacon. “Now be a good girl and eat it up. Remember, to-morrow you may have to breakfast off a fried sardine”—smiling—“so make the most of present opportunities.”

She yielded at last to his kindly coaxing and made a valiant effort to eat. But she felt as though each morsel would choke her, and Mugs, leaning an eager, palpitating little body against her knee, came in for more than his usual share of titbits.

“I wonder how Mugs will like being a poor man’s dog,” continued Bob, talking at random in an endeavour to distract her thoughts a little. They had decided to take Mugs with them, feeling that to part with him would be the last straw on their already overburdened young backs. “Reared on the fat of the land and the very best bones, he will have to get used to his daily dog-biscuit—with a rabbit-neck sometimes by way of a treat.”

Shirley smiled wanly, and tried to repay Bob’s manful efforts by making a pretence of cheering up. But it was a poor pretence and petered out altogether later on when, breakfast over, she made a last pilgrimage round the house and garden, bidding a voiceless good-bye to the place which had been home so long but never would be again. Mugs followed close at her heels, his eyes wistfully puzzled, his short tail at half-mast, sensing, in the way dogs will, that all was not well with his beloved mistress.

Last of all, she bent her steps in the direction of the stables, and here the sight of Uncle Nick’s favourite hunter, with its sleek brown head thrust over the door of the box next that which housed her own thoroughbred mare, was almost more than she could bear. Several other brown and chestnut heads were quickly pushed over the wooden doors of different stalls, and little whinnies of pleasure mingled with an impatient stamping of hoofs. The half-dozen hunters in the stables knew very well that Shirley’s morning visit usually coincided, when the head groom wasn’t looking, with surreptitious gifts of apple or sugar or an illicit handful of corn.

She went down the line as usual, stroking velvety noses that nuzzled affectionately against her palm, and the tears were running unchecked down her face when at length she made her way back to the house. Bob met her on the threshold.

“The servants are all waiting to say good-bye,” he announced, his voice a trifle uneven. These final moments were straining even his self-control far more than he had anticipated.

Shirley made a shrinking little gesture of protest.

“Oh, Bob—I—I can’t!” she said shakily.

Instantly his self-control returned. These two were such close friends, meant so much to one another, that either was always ready to help the other at no matter what personal cost.

“Yes, you can,” he declared sturdily. “It ’ud break their hearts if you didn’t say good-bye to them, and they’ve always been such a decent crowd. So pull up your socks, old thing, and come along.”

She sighed heavily. The whole of her being, at the moment, seemed merged into a single agonizing essence of farewell—farewell to the old home, to all the dear, familiar ways of life, above all, farewell to that beloved personality whose spirit, in some intangible way, still seemed to pervade the place he had known and loved. And she would have been illimitably thankful if she could have avoided this final ordeal, have crept silently away, wrapped in her own grief, without any further last words or elaboration of good-byes.

But she realized the truth of Bob’s prompting in regard to the servants—the claim they had on her. And a recognition of what was due to other people, the necessity of playing the game by them, was an inherent characteristic of her make-up. Noblesse oblige, or, at least, its modern equivalent, had been a basic axiom of Uncle Nick’s whole life, and she could not fail his teaching now. So she rallied pluckily to Bob’s urgent demand and accompanied him into the old, high-raftered hall where a little crowd of subdued-looking maids and men had assembled.

But at length it was all over—the leave-takings in the hall, the parting glimpses, through half-opened doors, of rooms which had held so much of happiness and laughter, even the final poignant moment when, for the very last time, Shirley and Bob crossed the threshold of Fen Wyatt and stepped into the car that was waiting to bear them to the station.

As it rounded the curve of the drive they had a brief vision of the flock of servants still clustered about the doorway, of the fluttering handkerchiefs of the maids, and in the forefront of the group old Nanny, her wrinkled face twisted and wrung as her eyes strained after her heart’s children. Then the car turned the corner and swept out of sight.

Shirley’s hand suddenly clutched Mugs’s small body very tightly as he sat beside her, so tightly that he uttered a little yelp of protest.

“Bob,” she said a trifle breathlessly, “I think I feel rather like Ishmael when he was driven out to live in the wilderness.”

He glanced down at her whimsically.

“Don’t think of it like that. Let’s think this is only another bit of the Big Adventure, as Uncle Nick used to say.”

Her pulses, which had been jerking unevenly, steadied down. The memory of Uncle Nick’s cheery philosophy was like the reassuring touch of a friendly hand.

“Never get the wind up about life, kiddy,” he had said to her on one occasion. “Always think of it as a Big Adventure, with lots of queer turns and surprises—and take good luck or bad just as it comes, without funking. There’s only one thing bigger—the Biggest Adventure of all—and that’s death.”

And now Nick himself had gone on that Biggest Adventure, leaving her to fare forth alone, without his kindly guidance, on the next stage of her journey. Her mouth set itself determinedly in a straight line of courage. Whatever the future held in store, she would try to remember that it was all part of the adventure of life, and meet it “without funking.”