“Eh, I could murrder yon Jessie Watson!” she hissed in Susan’s ear, her cook’s pride touched on a tender spot. “Luikin’ at her guid food as if it wad pushion her!”
“I very much hope you won’t, Donaldina,” said Susan anxiously. “For she plays exceedingly well, and we can’t do without her.”
“Ou, I’ll no’ meddle her,” she replied reassuringly. “I wadna touch her wi’ the tongs. Thae Watsons are a’ the same. There’s her younger sister that’s comin’ oot as a dancin’-teacher, fancies hersel’ a Paloovia, or ane o’ them. She’s aye flitterin’ aboot on her taes. An’ for Jessie, she’ll mebbe can play the piano, but whit ca’ has she tae be that proud? Her an’ her fee-ong-say!”
During a set of Quadrilles, Susan wandered out by herself. The merry strains of the music, the tap and shuffle of dancing feet, broke the utter stillness of the frost-bound countryside. Out of a deep blue sky a wonderful bright star shone in the East to remind the world of an Eve when shepherds watched their flocks in other fields near Bethlehem.
“I wonder what Peggy’s doing now?” thought Susan. “I wish she had come—”
Peggy, in her bedroom at the Manse, was wishing the same thing. Perhaps they would think that she was sulking, when her real reason for staying away was just that she couldn’t bear to meet Oliver’s cold and unfriendly eyes.
She sighed and turned restlessly in her small bed. It had been rather a disturbing evening, and not only because one half of her had wanted to go to Easter Hartrigg. While the Infantry had been going to bed, Bun had said suddenly, “Colin saw Jo-an to-night!”
“What do you mean, Bun?” Peggy was surprised. “Was she—was Jo-an here? I didn’t know. Perhaps she came to see Agnes.”
“No. She didn’t come in. Colin saw her looking in at the window when we were playing in the study after tea.”
“Do you think he really saw her, Bun dear? Colin isn’t always very sure of what he’s saying, he’s so little—”
“Oh, yes. He saw Jo-an.” Bun was calmly confident.
And Colin, bouncing up and down in his cot, primrose curls rampant above his rosy face, cried quite distinctly: “Jo! Jo! Wan’ Jo!”
“Peggy,” Bun said softly. “Why did Jo-an go away? Was she naughty? She cried so—”
Peggy’s heart had smitten her. She had not seen Jo-an for weeks, had not even thought about her. Soberly she answered her niece. “No, Bun. Jo-an wasn’t naughty. She went away of her own accord. I think perhaps she didn’t know herself what she wanted.”
“I know!” Cilly piped. “Like me when I’m bo’ed.”
Turning about and trying to cool her hot cheeks on the pillow, Peggy decided that she must go up to Reiverslaw the next day and see Jo-an. Probably she was being ridiculous; probably Jo-an was dancing gaily in the barn at Easter Hartrigg even now, her dark red hair flaming, her small secret face alight; but all the same, for her own satisfaction, Peggy knew that she would have to see her.
5
“You don’t know where she is?” Peggy faltered, her cheeks paling a little.
Mrs. Robertson shook her grey head. She was quite impassive, her lined brown face showed neither disquiet nor sorrow, but her hands plucked nervously at the apron of sacking which protected her black skirt.
“She went oot i’ the efternune, an’ never cam’ hame,” she said in a dull toneless voice. “Robertson’s been seekin’ her a’ day.”
“Do you know of anywhere she might go?” asked Peggy, who felt singularly helpless.
“Na, Miss Cunningham. There’s nae place she wad gang. Puir lassie. She’s licht like her mither was.”
“Her mother—?”
“Ay. Did ye no’ken? Ye’d be ower young, maybe.” Mrs. Robertson was mechanically smoothing her rough apron. “Jo-an’s ma grand-dochter, ma puir Jean’s lass. A love-bairn, as some wad say, though it’s a queer kin’ o’ love, I’m thinkin’, that . . . Aweel, dinna fash yersel’, Miss Peggy. Ye’ve a kind hert, I ken, but ye canna bear ither fowks’ troubles.”
“I’ll look for her, anyhow, Mrs. Robertson,” said Peggy, her eyes filling. This uncomplaining grief caught at her throat. “You don’t think we ought to tell the policeman?”
“I doot we’ll need tae, if we get nae word or nicht. But—”
“We must try to find her ourselves without having a fuss,” Peggy said quickly, understanding the gleam of fierce protective feeling which lighted a spark in the old woman’s eyes. “Does Mr. Armstrong know?”
“Ay, the Maister kens. He’s been seekin’ her himsel’. He minds Jean, ye ken—”
“Then I’ll go. We’ll find her yet, Mrs. Robertson.” Peggy spoke confidently, but she felt rather helpless and very much afraid. Unable to say more, she turned and walked quickly down the road which would take her to Muirfoot.
The afternoon was in time with her mood. Still, grey and cold, the country seemed so bound in frost that it could never quicken to life again. The fields were colourless, the woods bleakly dark. The woods . . . Peggy drew a sharp breath, her eyes looked for that tangled mass of firs, beeches and oaks which lay like a blot along the bottom of the valley, the haunted wood. Suddenly she knew where to look for Jo-an, and her pace quickened until she was almost running. She passed the road leading to Easter Hartrigg without a glance or even a thought, and plunged into the grassy cart-track which was her quickest way to Muirfoot and skirted the haunted wood. The sound of a car approaching hardly roused her, though cars seldom used the rough road over which she was stumbling. Only when it stopped and a voice called to her by name did she stop and look up.
“Oliver!” she cried, forgetting everything except her immediate need. “Will you come with me? Will you help me?”
She did not know that her eyes blazed dark and wild out of her white face, nor how urgent her cry had been. Oliver was out of the Squib and beside her in an instant.
“Help you? Of course,” he said simply. “I’ll turn the car first—”
Peggy gulped down a sob as he managed to get the Squib round, heedless of scratches the thorn bushes made on his precious paint-work. A second sob caught her unawares as she took her place in the battered little car.
“Where to?” demanded Oliver, putting his foot on the accelerator.
“Stop beside the wood.”
He shot her a quick glance, and then she noticed how haggard and care-worn he looked; but she could not say anything more. In silence they bumped down the steep hill, in silence Oliver stopped the car again when they reached the wood.
“Do—do you want me to come?” he muttered, as she sprang out. He had not moved from his seat, his hands were clenched on the wheel.
“Yes, of course—of course!” cried Peggy impatiently. Already she was half-way through a gap in the hedge, and by the time he had followed, was speeding over the narrow strip of open ground towards the trees.
Oliver asked no questions even of himself. Peggy was in trouble and needed him, that was enough. He set his teeth grimly as his lame leg resented the pace to which he forced it, and overtook her before she had gone more than fifty yards.
“We must look every inch,” said Peggy in the low voice which the darkness of the solemn fir-trees seemed to make necessary. “If you’ll go one way, I’ll—”
“What are we looking for?” Oliver’s own voice was sunk to a whisper.
“Jo-an, of course. . . .”
It was Peggy who found her beneath a twisted beech. The cold earth on which she lay seemed hardly colder than her hand or her pallid face. Oliver, hastening up in answer to Peggy’s cry, looked from the unconscious figure on the ground to the girl kneeling beside her. The navy-blue beret had fallen from Jo-an’s flaming hair, but she still wore a dark blue coat like Peggy’s; and a navy-blue beret covered Peggy’s head. Oliver knew now, and cursed himself for having been a fool. Of course it had been the nurse he had seen: and if Peggy had been there that one time, she had probably good cause for meeting Ronald Graham. Men’s gossip, always more direc
t than women’s, had mentioned him in connection with pretty Jo-an, and Oliver felt bitterly that he ought to have known. No wonder Peggy had turned from him to that damned Collier. . . . Her cry of distress brought him back to the present.
“Oliver! Is she—is she dead?”
He lifted one of the limp hands, felt a very faint fluttering pulse, and said, “No. But she’s pretty far gone. We’ll have to get her to the car somehow, and take her home as fast as we can.”
Small and slight though Jo-an was, her dead weight was no light burden, and Oliver sometimes wondered afterwards how, hampered by his leg, he had ever managed to struggle across from the wood to the road. Only stark necessity and Peggy’s utter trust in his ability made him equal to it, and even so, he was hardly able to get the unconscious girl into the car.
“We ought to have rugs,” he muttered, but Peggy was dragging off her heavy coat and wrapping it round Jo-an. When he would have protested: “Oh, never mind about me!” she cried. “It is Jo-an who matters now!”
“But I do mind about you,” he retorted, and his tone, even at that moment, made Peggy’s heart jump. “You’ll put on my Burberry. Don’t waste time in arguing, but put it on, and get in beside her. It’ll be a tight fit, but you’ll have to hold her steady.”
The short winter day was over, the sun had sunk out of sight and a few stars were beginning to glimmer in the darkening sky as they drove up the hill to Reiverslaw. To Peggy, tired and overwrought, everything after that seemed to be happening in some sort of long-drawn out dream. She helped Mrs. Robertson to put Jo-an to bed while Oliver went to ring up the doctor. Ages passed, during which she sat beside the unconscious Jo-an, holding Mrs. Robertson’s trembling hand in a warm clasp. Then the doctor—old Dr. Scott, not his nephew, arrived, and Oliver insisted that she must go home, she could do no more now, and he was waiting to drive her in the Squib.
Once out in the cold night things were better. Peggy was young enough to be confident that now Jo-an had been found and was safely at home with the doctor there, she was bound to be all right. Oliver, who had seen death often enough to recognize it, had no intention of disillusioning her. Poor child, she had gone through a good deal, and had held up bravely. No need to trouble her, she would hear soon enough about Jo-an if his fears were realized.
It was Christmas Eve, too, the season of peace and goodwill. . . .
Peggy, her eyes on the brilliant star now glowing in the east, wondering if in the well-filled cattle sheds the patient bullocks would speak with human tongues at midnight, as legend said they did, was startled by hearing him say:
“I—I’ve never congratulated you yet, Peggy. You must be thinking me a mannerless brute.”
“Congratulated me? What about?”
“Well,” Oliver floundered on. “I believe the proper thing to do is to wish you joy, and congratulate Hugh Collier. I do, with all my heart—”
They were almost at the Manse gate. “Do you mean,” said Peggy rather breathlessly, “that because you saw Hugh kiss me, you think we’re engaged?”
“Yes.”
The Squib was slowing up. Peggy seized the door handle, ready to jump as soon as she had said what she wanted to.
“Does it always follow, Oliver, that if a man k-kisses a girl they’re bound to be engaged?”
“It needn’t,” said Oliver hoarsely.
“Well, then—” Peggy sprang from the car and dashed for the gate. There she paused. “You—you kissed me yourself, once, Oliver. . . . Well, then—silly Oliver!”
She was gone. He could hear her running up the frosty drive and he knew it was useless to think of overtaking her. “Peggy! Peggy!” he called.
A faint laugh answered him, and for a second he could see her standing against the lighted oblong of the open door.
“Good night, Oliver! I’ll see you to-morrow at church!”
The door banged. Oliver sat quite still for a little, then he solemnly took off his hat. “Here’s a happy Christmas to us both!” he said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1
On Christmas morning the one bell above the little parish kirk of Muirfoot summoned the people to church, where they sang the old, well-known hymns with a heartiness which prevented them, for once, from seeming hackneyed; and Mr. Cunningham’s short sermon on “Goodwill,” spoken from his kindly heart in homely rugged accents, sent the congregation out into the clean cold air full of brotherly love. Greetings were exchanged in softened voices at the kirk-gate, with the green mounds and staggering headstones as a reminder of those others who in past years had spoken the same “Merry Christmas” to their friends now resting beside them. Even the noses of the three Misses Pringle seemed less inquisitive than usual, their eyes not quite so sharp. And Peggy, coming up to the Easter Hartrigg party, her rosy face smiling above the fur collar of her new winter coat, her cornflower blue eyes full of a new gravity, put her hand into Oliver’s, silently, but with a look which said everything. There on the path, surrounded by the homeward-bound churchgoers, Peggy and Oliver plighted their troth without a spoken word, and Susan, with a pang which she could not suppress, guessed it. Rather soberly she and Charles walked towards the Squib. . . .
On reaching Easter Hartrigg, they found that the post had made a belated arrival, and took up their letters. Among the pile of Christmas cards from people to whom she had forgotten to send similar tokens of friendship, Susan discovered a note from Lady Evelyn Heriot and ripped it open.
“This is to remind us that we are to dine at the Dower House, and to ask us if the day after to-morrow will do,” she said. “Will you find the telegraph forms, Oliver? I’ll send a wire—”
Oliver, rummaging in the bureau pigeon-holes, was heard to mutter indistinctly that he might walk down to Muirfoot after luncheon and send it off. Susan opened her mouth to tell him that this would be unnecessary, since Jems could go on his bicycle, but fortunately remembered in time that Muirfoot held an attraction for her brother more potent than the ginger beer and kola with which Jems slaked his thirst whenever an errand took him to the post office.
“Thank you, Oliver,” she said. “That will be kind of you. Oh, and by the way, while you’re down there, you might call at the Manse and remind the Cunninghams to have the Infantry here at three o’clock to-morrow—for the Christmas tree, you know.”
“I could do that, yes,” said Oliver, quite as though he would not otherwise set foot within the Manse gate. Susan did not so much as smile, but Charles was not so considerate, and his peals of mirth rang through the sitting-room.
“Is there a joke?” asked Oliver in an austere and stately manner, at which the graceless Charles, incoherently mumbling something about ostriches and sand, once more gave himself up to noisy merriment.
The heavy midday meal of turkey and plum-pudding sacred to the day having been eaten, Oliver departed for Muirfoot, while Susan, determined to walk off the effects, took a stout stick, and with Tara beside her, left the house also. Charles, announcing that he felt like a boa-constrictor after its monthly feed, laid himself down full-length on a sofa, and all her blandishments did not avail to move him.
“Leave me,” he said faintly. “I would be alone. Perchance slumber may restore me, but to walk would be fatal to one in my present delicate condition.”
“A walk would do you all the good in the world,” said Susan, and poked at him with her stick.
Tara, full of goodwill and turkey scraps, and seeing in the recumbent figure a fit object for affectionate demonstration, placed his large fore-paws firmly on Charles’s defenceless body, and fell to licking his face lavishly.
“Ugh! Ugh!” gasped Charles, vainly trying to ward off these caresses. “Are you aware, Susan darling, that your mammoth is grinding my stomach to pulp? Call him off, or I won’t be answerable for the consequences. Yes, Tara, old man, I know you mean well, and it’s frightfully generous of you to give me a whiff of your turkey, but don’t let me deprive you of it. I mean, I had turkey myself. You’re stand
ing on it now—”
Weak with laughter, Susan succeeded in hauling Tara off, and they went out together, leaving Charles to rearrange himself in a nest of cushions.
The air was sharp, but the sun shone with defiant splendour, as though to blazon the fact that the shortest day was past, and the season approaching when he would rule the heaven for about seventeen hours out of each twenty-four. The country was bathed in clear pale light, the hills under their cover of snow gleamed whitely, almost hurting the eyes by their chill purity; every distant cottage, every haystack, could be seen as distinctly as through a telescope. Trees, their exquisite outlines no longer hidden by disguising leaves, held out bare branches, each smallest twig etched in lovely perfection against the far cold blue; and rooks, cawing gravely, flapped their way, a sober frieze, across the open spaces of the sky, their black wings shimmering where they caught the light. A hardy starling, that nefarious but diverting mimic, perched high in an old ash-tree beside the road and amused himself by piping selections from an apparently inexhaustible repertoire. Curlew, plover, blackbird, he copied faultlessly, while Susan stood listening below. Then he gave an admirable imitation of a self-satisfied rooster hailing the dawn, and even a few bars of “Braw, braw lads,” an air which he must often have heard some ploughman whistle as he turned up the rich red soil. At the end of the performance Susan could not resist clapping, whereupon, with a sudden affectation of startled modesty the small comedian flew away, leaving her laughing.
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