“We shall have to go back to get our things,” said Frances quickly and solemnly.
“I’ll see to all that,” declared kind Mrs. Tregaskis briskly. “I’m going to pop over and see to one or two things, and I’ll bring back the nighties with me. I shall put on my seven-leagued boots, and be back before you know I’ve gone.”
“I’ll go back with you,” said Rosamund.
“No, my dear. It’s too far for you.” There was an underlying anxiety in Mrs. Tregaskis’ firm kindliness.
Frances looked at her sister with consternation.
“But — but “she half-whispered, turning her back on Mrs. Tregaskis, “it’s our very last night at home. We must go back, Rosamund.”
“Bon! ca y est,” ejaculated Bertie under her breath and casting a glance of humorous despair at Lady Argent and Ludovic. “Une scene de premiere classe!”
He noted with angry resentment her admirable French.
“Rosamund and Frances,” she said, in a tone of elaborate reasonableness, “I want you to listen to me, like good children. Lady Argent is very kindly letting you stay here so that we shouldn’t have to go back to the cottage, which is all upside down with packing and — and furniture and things, and I want you to be very good and give no trouble at all.”
“Oh no,” breathed Lady Argent, distressed. “But would they rather — do they want to go to the cottage again “She hesitated helplessly.
“Bless me,” cried Bertie cheerily, “the cottage isn’t going to run away in the night. There’ll be heaps of time tomorrow morning before we start for home.”
Rosamund flushed an angry red.
“The cottage is our home,” she said with emphasis.
“Well, darling, that’s very loyal of you,” laughed her guardian, “and I’m quite ready to hear you call it so until you’ve got used to our part of the world.
“Now what about washing paws, Sybil, before we adorn your dinner-table?”
It was perhaps this masterly conduct of a difficult situation that made Lady Argent say to her son that evening, when Mrs. Tregaskis had hurried upstairs “just to give those two a tucking-up and ‘God bless you’”: “Oh Ludovic! How splendid Bertie is, and how I hope it will turn out well.”
“Why should it not?” asked Ludovic, who held, indeed, his own certainties as to why it should not, but was perversely desirous of hearing and contradicting his mother’s point of view.
“It’s always rather a risk, isn’t it, to take other people’s children like that, even though they are relations. But they’re dear little girls, and so good and brave.”
“They seem to me singularly intelligent, and altogether rather remarkable.”
“Yes, indeed, one does feel that,” returned Lady Argent with the sort of gentle cordiality with which she almost always acclaimed any opportunity of praising others, and which consequently detracted considerably from the value of her approbation. “They are not at all ordinary, I feel sure, and that’s why it seems so very fortunate that Bertie, of all people, should take them. She will understand them so wonderfully. Her love of children is one of the most characteristic things about her, and she always says herself that she’s never quite stopped being a child in some ways, and so understands children. They come to her instinctively. Children and animals always know, they say.”
Ludovic had met this aphorism before, and disagreed with it profoundly, but he had no wish to deprive his mother of any of the gentle Victorian beliefs which ruled her life. At thirty years old, Ludovic Argent was still young enough to feel superior.
But at this moment his thoughts were altogether engaged with the little girls who yesterday had been all but unknown to him. Presently, to his own surprise, he said: “Mother, you wouldn’t consider the idea of having those two here, I suppose?”
“You don’t mean for good, Ludovic?”
He did, but a certain strain of moral cowardice, always latent in the imaginative, made him temporize.
“Well — for a long visit, perhaps. I — I think they’d be happier near their old home, and in their own part of the world.”
“But, my dear boy,” said his astonished mother, “you surely don’t mean to suggest that I should adopt two children of whom I know hardly anything, when they’ve already been offered an excellent and much more suitable home with a relation? It would be quite impossible. Do think of what you’re saying.”
Ludovic thought. From every point of view his suggestion was inadmissible. The instinct which had prompted it, he decided, was unpractical sentimentality.
He rose abruptly.
“You’re right, of course. It would be quite impossible.”
Lady Argent’s sigh was compounded of mingled relief and regret that any scheme suggested by her son would prove to be impracticable.
“Perhaps,” she said, by way of compromise, “we could have them to stay, later on. I quite see what you mean about their liking the Wye valley, poor little things. And of course I know how fond you are of children, darling.”
Ludovic rightly conjectured that the last few hours had for ever placed this parental illusion beyond the reach of doubt. It would be part of the penalty of an unconventional, and therefore unpractical, suggestion.
“The infants are asleep!” cried Bertha Tregaskis at the door, merrily, triumphantly, and also, as it happened, altogether untruly. “At least if they’re not they ought to be.
I left them very much en route for the Land of Nod, though Rosamund wouldn’t own to it, and of course the little one always holds fast by her. I tell you what, Sybil, it will be the making of them both to be with another child. As it is, I can see that Rosamund is domineering, and Frances simply has no individuality of her own. It always is so when there are only two. The elder or cleverer or stronger simply has things all her own way — and Rosamund is all three. She has any amount of character, but I foresee a handful. Well, it’s all in the day’s work, I suppose.”
“As though your day wasn’t full enough already, Bertie dear!”
Ludovic left the room.
Next morning the visitors were driven early to the station. There was, after all, Mrs. Tregaskis had declared at breakfast, no time to return to the cottage on the other side of the valley — Rosamund and Frances must wave to it from the train window. Couldn’t they see the garden and a little bit of the house from the train? Very well, then it would be quite exciting to watch for it. They could have a race to see who caught sight of it first.
Into this bracing atmosphere of cheery optimism Ludovic’s voice cut coldly and decisively: “I can drive round that way, if you wish it.” He addressed himself directly to Rosamund. His mother looked surprised, but it was left to Bertha to exclaim: “Only at the risk of missing the train, and I don’t want to do that — my old man is counting on my being back by the early train, and he’ll drive down to meet it, I expect.
That’s no joke, when one lives three miles from the station at the top of one of our Cornish hills!”
Mrs. Tregaskis was always possessive when speaking of Cornwall.
“I’m afraid you might find it rather out of your way, Ludovic, and we haven’t left much time,” began Lady Argent apologetically.
“I don’t mind,” said Rosamund miserably, answering Ludovic’s gaze.
“Good girl!” said Mrs. Tregaskis approvingly. “Why, Francie!”
Frances had suddenly begun to cry, quietly and hopelessly.
Rosamund said “Francie!” in a tone of exasperated misery that spoke of nerves rasped to breaking point.
“Hush! Leave her to me,” commanded her guardian.
“Frances, darling, what is it? Come here to me. What is the matter?”
She held out both her capable hands.
Frances looked at her quite silently with streaming eyes.
“Oh,” cried Lady Argent pitifully, and Frances turned to her at once and hid her face against the outstretched arm.
“Poor little thing,” said Lady Argent almost tearfull
y.
But Ludovic noted that his mother seemed to comfort Frances in an instinctive sort of way, with gentle hand stroking her hair, and without attempting to make her speak.
Bertha Tregaskis, “wonderful with children,” Ludovic ironically reflected, was capable of nothing more startling than an imperative: “Hush, now, Rosamund. She’ll stop in a minute. Go on with your breakfast, and remember that you have a long journey in front of you. However, you’ll have a real Cornish tea when you arrive — splits and cream, and pasties, and all sorts of things. Us has a real proper ole set-tii, at tay-time.” She laughed, and for the rest of the meal was very jovial and talkative, drawing attention from Frances, who presently stopped crying and wiped her eyes in a shamefaced way. She looked timidly once or twice at Rosamund, which glances were intercepted by Mrs. Tregaskis with significantly raised eyebrows which said plainly to Lady Argent, “What did I tell you?”
But it was Ludovic who saw the elder sister’s answering look and read into it her intense agony of protective love and impotent apprehension. The dead mother might have made Frances’ world, but Frances made Rosamund’s.
III
“HERE we are!” declared Mrs. Tregaskis thankfully, as the train slowed down at Porthlew. “I declare it’s good to be alive, in such weather and a country like this one.”
She descended lightly on to the astonishingly bleak little platform, empty and swept by a north wind.
“Now for bags and baggage! Frances — umbrellas, dressing-bag, papers — that’s all right. Rosamund? Come along, darlings, you must get out everything while I see to the luggage. Porter! Ah, Trewin, good-afternoon. Is the trap outside? Just show these young ladies the way, and then come back for the trunks. How’s the wife?”
“Better, thank you, Mrs. Tregaskis,” said the man, touching his cap with a grin.
“That’s right. Tell her I’ll be round to see her in a day or two.”
Kind, competent Mrs. Tregaskis hurried along, beaming and exchanging greetings with one or two porters and a newspaper-boy.
“How pleased they all are to see her,” said Frances wistfully. “Isn’t it cold, Rosamund?”
“It’s much colder than at home. Turn up your collar, Francie. Do you think we shall go to the house in a cab?”
“No — she said the old man would drive down in a trap.
I suppose it’s the coachman.”
“I think she meant Cousin Frederick. She said ‘my old man.
“Oh! Is he very old?” asked Frances in rather awestruck tones.
“I suppose he must be.”
But when they presently went outside the station and climbed into the tall dog-cart, driven by Cousin Frederick, they did not think him very old after all.
He was small and brown and clean-shaven, with a thin, deeply lined face and a curious twist at the corner of his mouth that gave him the appearance of always wearing a rather sardonic smile. But his little grey eyes were inscrutable, and never smiled. No one had ever called him Freddy, or even Fred.
He lifted his cap to Rosamund and Frances and said: “I’m afraid I can’t get down. The mare won’t stand.
Do you mind sitting at the back?”
They climbed up obediently, and from an elevation which both secretly felt to be perilous, watched the arrival of Mrs. Tregaskis and sundry minor articles of luggage.
“Here we are,” she announced gaily to her husband, after the universal but obvious fashion of the newly arrived. “How are you, dear? and how’s Hazel? All well at home? That’s right, thank you, Trewin. You’ll see to the boxes, won’t you. I suppose the luggage cart is here?”
Frederick pointed silently with the whip.
“Oh yes, that’s all right. Well, I’ll pop in, and we can be off.”
She patted the mare vehemently.
“Jenny needs clipping,” she observed in parenthesis.
“Well” — she got in beside her husband.
As they drove through the steep town of Porthlew Mrs. Tregaskis exchanged cheery salutations in her hearty, ringing voice with a number of people. Frederick slanted the whip slightly in the direction of his cap, straightened it again, and said nothing.
Neither did he say anything throughout the three-mile drive, nor when they stopped before the square stone house, and Mrs. Tregaskis kissed first Rosamund and then Frances, on the steps of the porch, and said: “Welcome home, darlings.”
Then she shouted aloud: “Hazel, my poppet! Hazel! Come and say how d’ye do to the cousins.”
Hazel Tregaskis, aged fourteen, came into the hall. She was small and brown like her father, with something of the same twist at the corner of her mouth, but rendered charming by rippling tawny hair, and beautiful eyes where an elfin spirit of mockery seemed eternally to dance. She held herself very erect, and moved with remarkable grace and lightness.
They had tea in the hall, and Hazel sat beside her father and chattered freely to the new arrivals.
“Where is Minnie?” suddenly demanded Mrs. Tregaskis. “Frederick, we’ve forgotten Minnie. Where is Minnie? Hazel, where is Minnie — where is Miss Blandflower, darling?”
“I don’t know,” said Hazel calmly.
“Go and find her at once, my pet. Poor Miss Blandflower! You know this isn’t quite like her own home, and we never want to let her feel herself forgotten, or unwanted. Now run, Hazel.”
Hazel rose from her place with no appearance of haste, and went slowly in search of the missing one.
Mrs. Tregaskis remarked rather elaborately: “Miss Blandflower is a very old friend of ours, though she is a great deal younger than I am. She will give you your lessons, I hope, with Hazel.”
“Is she Hazel’s governess?” inquired Frances gently.
Frederick Tregaskis nodded, but his wife said with an air of slight repression: “She lives with us, Frances dear, as I told you, and we do our very best to make her feel that this is her home. You see, Miss Blandflower is extremely poor, and has nowhere else to live.”
“Like us,” returned Frances with mournful matter-of-factness.
“Not at all like you,” said her cousin Frederick, suddenly looking at her. “Neither you nor Rosamund need think that you have nowhere to go. You will have money of your father’s some day, in fact it belongs to you now, and will be used for your education and any other expenses. You can go to school, if you would like that, or live with anybody.”
“Come, come, Frederick, we needn’t go into these sordid details,” said Bertha, with an extremely annoyed laugh.
Frances looked bewildered, as though she felt herself to have received a rebuke, but Rosamund’s grey eyes met those of Frederick Tregaskis with a sudden lightening of their sombre gloom.
“I disagree with you, Bertha,” he observed, with a look of dislike at his wife. “These things are much better clearly defined. It is quite conceivable that Rosamund and Frances may dislike the position of refugees under our hospitable roof, and in that case they may as well know that I shall further any reasonable scheme they may entertain for existence elsewhere.”
“Frederick, how impossible you are, dear. The children will think you don’t want them. Cousin Frederick is only joking, darling,” she added, laying her hand on Frances’ reassuringly.
“I never joke,” said Cousin Frederick with an acid expression that did much to confirm his statement. “Another cup of tea, if you please.”
“Here is Minnie,” cried Mrs. Tregaskis in tones of relief not wholly attributable to the appearance of Miss Blandflower.
“Here I am, last but not least,” agitatedly murmured the late-comer, while her hostess cordially embraced her, and presented Rosamund and Frances.
Miss Blandflower belonged to that numerous and mistaken class of person which supposes the art of witty conversation to lie in the frequent quotation of well-known tags and the humorously-intended mispronunciation of the more ordinary words in the English language.
She said, “Not lost, but gone before,” with a slightly nervous
laugh, when Bertha deplored her lateness for tea, and explained that this was due to a mistaken impression that tea was to be at five o’clock. However, live and learn.
And it was almost mechanically that she murmured, on being invited to eat saffron cake: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, well, perhaps I will.”
“Minnie,” said Mrs. Tregaskis, shaking a playfully admonishing finger at her, “how, now how, is the dairy? Have you been in once since I’ve been away?”
“Dear Mrs. Tregaskis, how can you? Of course I have.
I’ve tried to see to everything, though of course no one could take your place. I needn’t tell you that.”
“Rubbish, my dear, rubbish. How’s the new dairymaid? I was very vexed at having to leave without settling her, I must confess. Will she do?”
“‘I doubt it, said the carpenter,’” returned Minnie, shaking her head.
Her voice never gave any hint of inverted commas, and Frances looked at her with large, surprised eyes.
Miss Blandflower was thin and sandy, with eyeglasses, and might have been of any age between thirty-four and forty. She several times glanced affectionately at Mrs. Tregaskis, and said, “A sight for sore eyes, as they say,” and then flung a nervous look at Frederick, who remained silent.
After tea Rosamund and Frances were shown the garden, where Cousin Bertha had turned a piece of rough ground into a tennis court, and made a herbaceous border and two rockeries, and the stables, where Cousin Bertha proposed personally to conduct the clipping of the mare Jenny, on the morrow, and where she slapped Jenny’s hind-quarters with a heartiness that violently disconcerted both children, unused to animals of any description.
They were also taken over the little dairy, where Cousin Bertha superintended the making of cheese and butter and cream which, she assured them, to their utter bewilderment, “paid,” and where she also weekly instructed a class of girls from the neighbouring farms. They were shown the chickens, bred and kept and fed, and, Frances supposed in her utter ignorance of the expert language employed by her cousin, doubtless hatched by Cousin Bertha, and the little orchard where Cousin Bertha had planted a variety of small apple-trees, most of which she indicated by name.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 59
