Читать книгу White Turrets - Mrs. Molesworth - Страница 7

Eric Balderson was awaiting his mother—not impatiently, he was never impatient about anything—in the drawing-room, as she had foreseen when they went in. And so was tea, thanks to Eric. He was one of those people in whose case it is not difficult to take the bad with the good, for the latter so decidedly predominated. If slow, tiresomely slow sometimes, he was so considerate; if in a certain sense heavy, he was so entirely to be relied upon, and in unselfish thoughtfulness for others, above all in small matters—for in important ones I cannot endorse the popular axiom that “the best of men are selfish”—he was almost like a woman.

“Now, isn’t that nice?” said his mother, appreciatively. “Tea just ready. You are clever, Eric. Isn’t he a good boy, Winifred? Of course it’s all due to my splendid bringing up, but still he does me credit, doesn’t he?”

Winifred smiled, but did not speak. She knew he was excellent, but she did not care much for Eric Balderson. Celia liked him better.

“I suppose you have learned to be daughter as well as son to your mother,” she said quietly, as she stood by the table, while this very “tame-cat” young man, as Winifred contemptuously called him, poured out the tea for his mother and her young friends.

“Yes, that’s to say she has had to put up with my feeble efforts in that direction, failing better,” he said. “Now then, I think I have got hers—my mother’s—tea just as she likes it; will you be so good as to tell me of any peculiarities of taste of yours, or your sister’s—cream, sugar, both or neither, or which?”

“Winifred takes no cream—I take both. Yes, I will hand Mrs Balderson hers, and you can look after Winifred. This is mine? Thank you,” and Celia seated herself near the tea-table.

“Did you enjoy the concert this afternoon?” young Mr Balderson inquired. “It was a concert you were at, wasn’t it?”

“Oh yes, very much, very much indeed,” said Celia. “It was a very nice concert. But the thing that we cared for most was Miss Norreys’ singing.”

“Miss Norreys—Hertha Norreys, do you mean?”

“Yes,” said Mrs Balderson, “these girls have both fallen in love with her, Eric.”

“With her as well as with her singing,” said Winifred.

Eric looked up with a comical expression.

“She is very charming, I am told,” he said. “I cannot testify to the fact from personal experience, for you can’t exactly call a person charming who deliberately snubs you.”

“How do you mean?” said his mother. “I didn’t know you had ever met Miss Norreys, and if you have, why should you think she snubbed you?”

“Because she did,” Eric replied simply.

Winifred’s eyes sparkled. Her admiration for Hertha rose still higher.

“Just what I should have expected of her,” she thought to herself.

“My dear Eric,” said his mother, with a very slight touch of annoyance in her tone, “I think you talk nonsense sometimes.”

He smiled.

“Sometimes, perhaps, but not always,” he said.

But he rose from his seat as he spoke, for he was more than quick at reading his mother’s feelings, and went towards the piano.

“I’ll look out the songs, mother, that I want to try over,” he remarked. “That’s to say, if you are still good for a little practising before dinner.”

“Certainly I am. Indeed, we hurried home partly on that account,” Mrs Balderson replied. “I will run up-stairs and take off my things in a moment. And you, dears, will have a little quiet time for your letters, and for resting, if you are tired.”

“I shall be glad to write my letters, but I am not the least tired, thank you,” said Winifred, in her clear, slightly incisive tone, almost as if resenting the kindly imputation.

“I am, rather,” said Celia gently.

“I scarcely see how you could help it, after such a busy day,” agreed Mrs Balderson. “You have been on the go since early this morning. Such a contrast from your regular restful life at home. Not that we Londoners can stand so much fatigue as country people often imagine we can, fancying that a rush is our usual existence.” She was leaving the room as she spoke, but stopped to add, “Remember I want you to be fresh this evening, though it is only a small party. Your cousin is coming, for one.”

“Oh dear,” said Winifred, in a half-complaining voice, when her hostess had gone, “I forgot about Lennox being in London just now. Mrs Balderson really need not have troubled to ask him. We have quite enough of him at home.”

Eric glanced at her.

“I fear we can scarcely put him off now, except with grave discourtesy,” he said. And Winifred could not tell if he was laughing at her or not. “Besides,” he went on, “though I cannot hope the fact would carry any weight with it, I am very fond of Lennox. I do my best to see something of him whenever I get a chance.”

“Oh yes,” said Winifred, coolly, “I know you and he are chums. Well, as long as he does not sit beside me at dinner and entertain me with questions about the cows and the pigs and the old women at home, whom I am more than thankful to forget for a week or two—”

“He shall not sit beside you at dinner; so much I can guarantee,” said Eric. And though Winifred thanked him laughingly, as if all that had been said was a joke, she did not entirely disagree with Celia’s first observation when they found themselves alone in their own room.

“Winifred,” said Celia, “I think Mr Eric Balderson was really rather angry at your tone about Lennox. I heard it in his voice, though he has that dry way of speaking that makes it difficult to know whether he is in fun or earnest.”

She was standing in front of the fire—a brightly glowing one—in the large room, which, with a dressing-room out of it, the two girls shared together. And as she spoke she turned round slowly, and looked at her sister half timidly.

“Well, and what if he were?” said Winifred. “After all, Lennox is our cousin, not his. He does not need to take up the cudgels in the poor dear’s defence. It would be very impertinent.”

“He would not mean it that way,” said Celia, “and though you are so much cleverer and wiser than I, you know, Winifred, onlookers sometimes see the most. Don’t you think, considering how things are with Lennox, it would be better always to speak very nicely of him? After all, his caring for you is no crime—you need not despise him for it.”

“Oh, bother!” said Winifred, throwing herself back into a comfortable chintz-covered arm-chair, “perhaps it would be better. But I hate beating about the bush and always thinking such a lot about what to say and not to say. I do like to be natural. However, I’ll be more careful. But I am so tired of Lennox and all that dull, humdrum country life that Mrs Balderson calls restful and delightful. And so are you, Celia; we are at one on these subjects.”

“Of course we are,” said the younger girl, “though my feeling is not that I want to leave home, but simply to have—you know what—my chance, my test, which I cannot have at home. But you are very good, dear Winifred, not to think me impertinent for warning you.”

For a moment or two there was silence.

Then said Winifred, raising herself, “I must write to mamma.”

A shadow of disappointment flitted across Celia’s face, but there was no trace of it in her voice.

“To mamma?” she said. “Oh, then, I will write to Louise.”

“Of course,” said Winifred, majestically. “It would never do for me not to write first to mamma. Indeed, I don’t see that there is any hurry for your writing at all.”

She got out her paper and pens as she spoke. Then with the queer mixture of candid self-deprecation which existed in her, side by side with unusual self-assertion, she startled Celia by an unexpected speech.

“About what you were saying of Lennox just now, Celia,” she began, her fingers toying idly with the pen she had already dipped into the ink, “do you know, at the bottom of my heart, I don’t think I believe that he does care for me?”

Celia gasped.

“Winifred,” she exclaimed, “that is going too far. Whatever he is not, he is certainly not a mean hypocrite. You can’t think that for—for any selfish or interested motives, he would pretend to care for you? He couldn’t.”

“No, no, I don’t think him the least of a hypocrite,” said Winifred, eagerly. “You don’t understand, Celia. He thinks he does, quite honestly. He’s always been put in the position—not told he must care for me, for, of course, with a man of any spirit or principle that would only drive him the other way. And Lennox has plenty of principle and spirit too, of a kind. But he has been tacitly told he does, and so he has come to believe it.”

Celia looked extremely perplexed. This was a new light indeed upon the subject, but a light which seemed, at first at any rate, only to increase the already existing perplexity.

“If—if you think that,” she said at last, “I don’t wonder at what you always say about him. I mean about it all. Not that I don’t sympathise with you—I do, as you know. I couldn’t imagine being in love with Lennox;” and she smiled to herself, as it were, at the very thought. “But I always thought it must make a great difference if a girl knows a man is very devoted to her, you know.”

“Oh,” said Winifred, in her very off-hand way, “as far as that goes, I think I could stand Lennox better if I knew he did not care much for me,” which paradoxical speech gave her younger sister considerable food for reflection. And before Celia spoke again, Winifred dismissed the subject in her high-handed fashion, quite ignoring the fact that it was she herself, and she alone, who had started the conversation.

“You really must not chatter or let me chatter any more, Celia,” she said. “I must get my letter written.”

And for the best part of an hour there was no sound to be heard but the scratching of their pens—of Winifred’s pen alone after a while, for Celia’s correspondence was confined to her sister Louise, while Miss Maryon, once she had got her hand in, so to say, went on writing long after her rather short and not very graphic letter to her mother was finished. For she was a young woman of great energy and almost perfect physical condition. It was quite true, as she had declared to Mrs Balderson, that she was not “the very least tired.”

She looked up suddenly, when she had closed and addressed her fourth envelope.

“It must be getting rather late,” she said.

“Shall I ring for our letters to be taken down, do you think, Celia? They are not in time for to-night’s mail, but still, if posted now, they will get to Barleyfield for the afternoon delivery to-morrow.”

But to her question there came no reply, and looking up, the silence was quickly explained to her. Celia was fast asleep! Her pretty head supported by her arm, which had found a resting-place on the end of a sofa standing by, she was far away in some happy dreamland probably, to judge by the half-smile upon her face, and the calm, childlike softness of her breathing.

“Poor little Celia,” said Winifred to herself. “How sweet she looks!” and with deft and gentle hand she moved the couch, so that the fair head itself could lean on the cushion. “Let me see,” she went on, glancing at the clock on the mantel-piece, “a quarter—no, five minutes to seven. I will run down with the letters so as not to wake her by ringing, and then I will let her sleep till a quarter past. She will be all the brighter for it afterwards.”

Bright, and better than bright—each charming in her own way—looked the two girls an hour later when they entered the drawing-room again, where their hostess and her husband, a thin, elderly man, with pleasant, luminous blue eyes, and grey hair rapidly turning to white, were having a consultation after the orthodox conjugal fashion as to “who takes whom” down to dinner.

“At my left, you say, my dear? Young Mrs Fancourt at my left?—oh yes, Lennox Maryon takes her. Why, I thought—” Mr Balderson was saying, when the opening of the door made him stop abruptly, looking after the manner of men decidedly guilty, as an admonitory “sh” from his wife warned him that the new-comers were his young guests.

“That’s right,” said Mrs Balderson, heartily. “Good girls. I like to have my home party about me on these little occasions. What can that lazy Eric be doing? He is not generally so late.”

The delinquent entered as she spoke—before, indeed, the door had closed behind the two sisters. He came quietly into the room with some little laughing rejoinder to his mother, and walked over to where Mr Balderson was standing, without seeming to notice either Winifred or Celia in any special way. Yet Celia was perfectly aware that even as he passed them he took in every detail of their appearance and attire.

“I hope he thinks we are nicely dressed,” she thought, though she would not have liked Winifred to read her unspoken reflection. “I suspect he is rather critical, though in a nice way. Well, Winifred looks very pretty, I am sure, but I wish she were not quite so fond of black.”

Yes, Winifred looked very well indeed, for, though her black dress was almost severely simple, it was of rich material and fitted well. This was in accordance with Miss Maryon’s principles. She would have scorned to spend much time or thought upon her clothes, still shabbiness or dowdiness or eccentricity she did not consider a fitting accompaniment of woman as she should be. The worst that could be said of her way of dressing was that it was far too old, and on the whole monotonous. But to strangers this latter defect was naturally absent, and perhaps the very heaviness and stiffness of style she affected had practically the opposite result of making the girl herself look all the younger.

However that may have been, she was genuinely indifferent about herself; to-night her thoughts were more on dress than usual, nevertheless, for she was exceedingly interested in Celia’s appearance, and, considering her theories, almost inconsistently eager that she should be admired.

“Does she not look lovely?” she could not help whispering to Mrs Balderson, and her whole face sparkled with pleasure when there came the hearty reply.

“Most lovely; that pale pink suits her to perfection, and—” But the rest of the kind woman’s admiration remained unexpressed, for at that moment some of her guests were announced, and she had to hasten forward to meet them. Others followed quickly, causing a little bustle in the room, under cover of which a young man made his way in quietly; not sorry to do so, if the truth were told, for Mr Lennox Maryon, very much at home in the hunting-field or at a steeplechase, was decidedly shy in a London drawing-room. Nor was the consciousness of his cousin Winifred’s observant, albeit short-sighted, brown eyes, likely to put him more at his ease.

He was in luck, however, on the present occasion. Both Winifred, and Celia were for the moment somewhat apart from the Baldersons and their other guests, feeling, perhaps, as perfect strangers to the latter, just a little “out of it.” Lennox hurried up to them with great satisfaction, though not without a touch of the nervousness which somehow always hovered about him when near Winifred.

“How are you?” he said with somewhat unnecessary emphasis, considering there was not the slightest need for anxiety as to the state of health of either of the girls. “So delighted to find you here. When did you come up? left all well at home, eh?”

“One question at a time, please, Lennox, if you have no objection,” said Winifred, coldly. “Not that any of yours strike me as very important; we came up yesterday, and we are both perfectly well, and as you saw everybody at home the day before, there is no reason for special anxiety about their health that I can see.”

Lennox gave a half-awkward little laugh. What he was laughing at he could not have told, but he took it for granted that Winifred’s speeches had something clever in them, and the laugh helped to hide his shyness. And he did not overhear Celia’s reproachful tone as she whispered in her sister’s ear:

“Winifred, how can you? Poor old Lennox.”

“We are enjoying ourselves very much indeed, Lennox, you will be glad to hear,” the younger girl said brightly. “I can scarcely believe we only left them all yesterday. It is delightful to see a home face again.”

The young man turned to her gratefully, his handsome, rather sunburnt features lighting up with a very pleasant smile.

“Good little Celia,” he said approvingly. “I don’t believe there’s much fear of your falling in love with London.”

There was a little bitterness underlying the accent he put on the pronoun. Winifred heard it, and was ready for battle on the spot.

“Celia is absurd,” she exclaimed. “She is only talking that kind of way to please you, Lennox. Why, the very first thing she said this morning was: ‘Oh, Winifred, if only we were to be here three months instead of three weeks!’ You know it was, Celia.”

“And no harm in it, that I can see, if she did say so,” said Lennox, flushing a little. “I think London’s very good fun, myself, once in a way.”

He could pluck up a spirit now and then with Winifred, but I scarcely think it profited him much.

“Very good fun!” she repeated. “You do express yourself so oddly, Lennox. I am afraid our ideas on the subject of London are not more likely to agree than on—”

But a touch on her arm stopped her. Celia was drawing her attention to the fact that Mr Balderson was on the point of introducing a man to her. An elderly, or at least middle-aged, man, whose name was known to her as that of a distinguished-in-his-own-line writer.

“Mr Sunningdale—Miss Maryon.”

The middle-aged man bowed somewhat absently. He dined out most nights of his life; he saw only a young woman in black, whom he did not remember ever having seen before, and he had been interrupted in a conversation, at the other side of the room, with a woman he knew well, whose conversation always amused him. These little contretemps will happen in the best-regulated houses. He was not an ill-tempered man, and resigned himself to fate. But Winifred’s face, on the contrary, changed from steely coldness to sunshine. You would scarcely have recognised her for the same girl, as she replied to some little commonplace observation of the great man’s with her most winning manner.

“Good eyes,” thought he to himself, “I hope I shall not need to talk to her much;” while Winifred, in a flutter of gratification, was saying to herself how very kind it was of Mrs Balderson to have given her to Mr Sunningdale, of all people, to take her in to dinner.

Lennox moved away with a little sigh, which Celia heard, though it was all but inaudible. The girl’s tender heart quivered for him, for she was far from endorsing her elder sister’s startling suggestion that Lennox did not really “care for her.”

“He is just devoted to her—quite devoted,” thought Celia. “How unlucky it seems! These things generally go that way, I suppose; at least, if what one reads in novels is true. I hope that I shall never care for any one, and that no one will care for me, for it would be sure to be only on one side or the other.”

She had no time to say anything consoling or sympathising to her cousin—indeed, what could she have said?—for he was already told off to his lady, the young Mrs Fancourt, whom Mr Balderson had alluded to; and Celia herself was soon appropriated by the husband of the pretty little woman in question, on whose arm she made her way down-stairs.

She had scarcely looked at him; she was thinking so much of Winifred and Lennox, that she was quite indifferent about her own fate, and Mr Fancourt, a good-natured man, whose rather limited ideas were entirely absorbed by admiration for his wife, soon gave her up as decidedly dull and heavy. Celia did not care—she had plenty to think of and plenty to amuse herself with; she was rather glad when her monosyllables resulted in Mr Fancourt’s directing his attentions to the woman on his other side. And one or two courses had been removed before a voice on her right hand startled her into realising that she had a neighbour in that quarter too.

“Miss Maryon, what are you thinking about so intently?” were the words she heard. “I have been watching you for quite five minutes—you are in a regular brown study.”

Celia started, then smiled, and, finally, as she became satisfied that Eric—for it was he—was not really shocked at her, could not repress a little laugh.

“I am so sorry,” she said. “Why didn’t you speak to me before? I didn’t even know you were there.”

“So I saw—at least, I hoped it was so—that there was no special motive in the resolute way in which you turned a cold shoulder upon me, and—”

“No,” said Celia, laughing again, “my shoulders are not at all cold, thank you. This part of the room is delightfully out of any draught.”

“And,” continued Eric, “fixed your eyes upon the flowers in front of you, and let your thoughts wander to— No! that I can’t guess. I wonder where they were wandering to.”