“Oh, are you going?” asked Mrs. Anstruther, setting her empty glass on the tray and fumbling in the depths of a capacious black bag which permanently occupied her lap. “Well, you want the money for the potted head, eh? One-and-fourpence and the dish back, isn’t it? Now hurry home to your mother with the news. It ought to keep her in conversation for to-day at least. Good morning, Flora.”
Miss Milligan, empty basket over one arm, and a shilling, a threepenny-bit, and a penny clasped in the grey fabric palm of her other hand, closed the gate of The Anchorage, looking like a small ruffled bird. Really, poor Mrs. Anstruther!
But as she pattered quickly on her homeward way, indignation gave place to other feelings. Excitement over the thought of Mrs. Lockhart’s return and the family reunion which was to be staged at Soonhope was one. The other, as she saw the noble square tower of the Parish Church rising above a huddle of roofs on the low ground sloping to the river, was a gush of modest joy in her share of the restoration work towards which the Fancye Fayre laboured yearly to acquire funds. Certainly a part of it, however humble, would be built on a solid foundation of potted head.
When Miss Milligan reached the little house in Old Pettycraw Street where she had spent almost the whole of her life, she decided to give herself the pleasure of adding the last one-and-fourpence to the sum already in her cash-box before going up to Mamma with her news. The discovery that the grand total reached was twenty-three and eightpence, quite an advance on the previous year’s harvest, was doubly delightful, and she took the steep dark stairs almost without noticing them. Outside Mamma’s door she paused for a moment to regain her breath and compose herself to a more decorous frame of mind. Dear Mamma, being an invalid, disliked any suspicion of excitement, undue gaiety or acute distress. In her presence all emotions had to be muted to subdued half-tones, and her daughter surrounded her with an almost visible haze of tender solicitude. Before meeting Mrs. Milligan, strangers pictured her as a tiny, fragile creature, a delicate edition of her daughter, and were apt when they saw her to experience a rude shock. For Miss Milligan, hovering over her parent with unending care, was as improbable and ludicrous as a small, elderly linnet ministering to a barn-owl. Immense, billowing over a double bed which looked too small for her, her outlines made fluffier by a mass of soft shawls, old Mrs. Milligan’s resemblance to an owl was increased by a hooked nose projecting from a round white face, and a pair of eyes magnified by horn-rimmed spectacles. These eyes, as her daughter entered, were skimming the Births, Marriages and Deaths column of The Scotsman, nor did she look up, though she said in a faintly suffering tone: “You’ve been a long time, Flora.”
“I know, Mamma,” said Miss Milligan apologetically. “Jean Anstruther would have nothing new, I suppose?” asked Mrs. Milligan, her sharp eyes leaving the newspaper for long enough to dart to her daughter’s face.
“We—ell,” began Miss Milligan with caution, for she knew better than to rush things. “I wouldn’t say that, Mamma. I believe Mrs. Anstruther had a letter from Mrs. Lockhart.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Mrs. Milligan alertly, now laying the paper aside. “From Lucy Lockhart? What had she to say for herself? Did you see the letter?”
“Well, no. But I knew it was in that black bag of hers. She kept on touching it all the time she was talking—you know how she does, Mamma.”
“Then,” Mrs. Milligan deduced with calm authority, “the letter wouldn’t be from Lucy at all, but from Andrew Lockhart’s aunt, Robina Barlas. She and Jean Anstruther have always kept up. And so there’s news of the Lockharts, is there?”
The preliminary canter over safely, Miss Milligan began her recital with confidence, and was rewarded by her parent’s undivided attention. Finally Mrs. Milligan leant back against her pillows with a sigh of exhausted satisfaction. “I’ll take my Bovril now, Flora,” she said. “Hearing the news has quite tired me. You know what excitement does to my heart.”
The Bovril had been brought, tasted, and pronounced lacking in salt, and only when this defect had been remedied did Mrs. Milligan feel equal to further discussion of the engrossing topic.
2
“Oh, the whole town is bound to know about it by this time,” said Mrs. Anstruther composedly. “They had to hear some time or other, and by telling Flora Milligan I’ve saved everybody a lot of useless speculation. But I did not tell her that you were coming here this afternoon, Lucy.”
“You are being,” said Mrs. Lockhart, “incredibly kind as well as discreet. Aunt Robina assured me that you’d be pleased to see me, but I rather discounted that. You know her sweet nature. She always expects the world to share her own large-hearted charitable views, bless her.”
“I’m glad I haven’t fallen below standard,” Mrs. Anstruther said rather dryly. “Though I have not a reputation for kindness in Haystoun, I don’t think I am quite a gorgon, and I was always fond of Andrew.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you, but I am rather—on edge just now,” said Lucy Lockhart with a nervous laugh. “And of course everyone here will be busy raking up the old scandal, picking it to rags to see if they could possibly have missed anything. Do you think we are complete fools to come back to Soonhope? It was Andrew’s doing, not mine.”
“I always expected it,” said Mrs. Anstruther. “The call of his own country rings very loud in the ears of a man like Andrew. ‘The sun rises fair in France, and fair sets he, But he hath tint the blithe blink he had in my ain countrie.’”
Lucy Lockhart stirred restlessly, as if the cushion at her back was not comfortable, and a faint spasm of distress momentarily distorted her still pretty, skilfully made-up face. “Of course. The place,” she murmured. “Andrew was always crazy about Soonhope.” Then she leaned forward. “Mrs. Anstruther,” she said, her eyes searching the older woman’s, “what do you suppose is going to happen when we’ve settled down here again? Will everyone cold-shoulder us? It’s going to be—awkward—especially for the children, if they do.”
“You needn’t be afraid of that, my dear Lucy,” said Mrs. Anstruther with her grim laugh. “Everybody will flock to call on you, at least once.”
“I—see.” They looked at each other with complete comprehension for an instant, then, shrugging her shoulders, Lucy Lockhart sank back into her chair. “Well, we’re asking for it, of course,” she said resignedly. “And I suppose it doesn’t much matter, after all.”
“That’s the proper spirit,” Mrs. Anstruther approved. “Tell ’em all to go to the devil, my dear. Your friends will see that you aren’t lonely, and as you say, the others don’t count.”
“I suppose it was stupid of me to sneak out here by bus to-day, but I did want to have one look at the house and garden all by myself, without people staring at me and asking silly questions. You know what Haystoun is.”
“I certainly ought to,” answered Mrs. Anstruther. “But you’re safe enough to-day, Lucy. You couldn’t have chosen a better afternoon for a stealthy visit. It’s the ‘Fancy Fayre’—with a lot of extra Y’s and E’s—for the parish Church restoration fund, and everyone is down at the Manse, where I’ve no doubt poor Flora is telling them all about your romantic return. You can go out at the back here and along the Loaning to the garden gate at Soonhope, and not a soul will be a penny the wiser except Hannah and me, and we don’t chatter.”
“I know you don’t,” said Lucy, with a grateful smile for the grenadier, who had just carried in the tea-tray. “That’s why Aunt Robina told me to come to you.”
She accepted a cup of tea, and by silent consent the talk drifted to impersonal matters, until Mrs. Anstruther said: “I don’t want to hurry you, but remember that everyone will go home from the Fancye Fayre—ridiculous name for a decent sale of work!—by way of Soonhope. In fact, I’ll probably have a good many unexpected visitors myself this evening. It you want to go over the place in peace, you ought to be starting now.”
“I will.” Mrs. Lockhart stood up, very trim in her neat brown tweeds, but, her hostess thought, fa
r too thin, for she could remember when Lucy had been pleasantly plump as a partridge.
“Don’t worry too much over what people say,” she said on a sudden impulse.
“Oh—worry—!” Lucy smiled the suggestion away. “Good-bye, Mrs. Anstruther, and thank you. I won’t say more, for I know you hate gush, but I am very glad indeed that Aunt Robina insisted on my coming to see you. It’s done me good.”
She walked quickly along the green Loaning between high hedges of thorn and wild roses. Ahead of her she could see the familiar gateway, the two stone pillars each surmounted by a moss-grown stone ball, the old walnut tree hanging its dark green leaves over the wall. So little was changed; so little—except herself and Andrew, and her world which had tumbled about her ears with a crash which still rang in them after four years. . . . The gate—it was a double door, really, its supporting pillars a part of the high garden wall—still creaked when she pushed it open after unlocking it with one of a bunch of keys which she carried, and the general appearance of the garden was unchanged. Overgrown though it was, she could still pick out well-known rose-bushes, clumps of ripening lavender. Her hand felt mechanically for the southernwood which grew in the left border just inside the door, and at once her fingers tightened on the soft, feathery leaves; she smelt their sharp, spicy fragrance as she bruised them. . . . There was the weather-stained teak seat under the big pear tree, and the arbour where earwigs lurked, to fall with a horrid plop! on to the book of anyone who sat reading in its green shade. The grass walks had been cut not long before, and the daisies which had escaped were wide open, very close to the turf, their golden eyes staring up at the sun.
Lucy Lockhart walked all round the garden slowly, remembering. Andrew had asked her to marry him, standing near the great bush of Malmaison roses, and she had been wearing a cluster of them tucked into the belt of her white piqué skirt. His Aunt Robina, Mrs. Barlas, a widow even then, had kept house for him, until he married. Lucy wondered a little if he would not have been better to remain a bachelor, looked after by Aunt Robina, but she did not really believe it. She had always been a good wife to him. Anyhow, it was too late to worry over that sort of thing now! And he had always had a good deal of freedom in spite of marriage, she thought bitterly; his eye for a pretty woman might often have led him into mischief if it had not been for her intervention. And this last affair, with Elizabeth Fardell, her own friend, as she had supposed, had been more than mischief unfortunately. Again Lucy’s face contracted with that little spasm of distress. Elizabeth had been often to Soonhope, had walked here in the garden. To-day it seemed as if the place rang again with the ghost of her charming voice raised in some old song, or in careless laughter, as if no one else had ever known the garden. Would Andrew find the same thing? Or would he remember, as she usually did, all the children who had played and quarrelled, filched strawberries and been stung by wasps, within these mellow walls? Their own children, and Aunt Robina’s grandchildren Kate and Grey Heron, and farther back, Andrew himself and his brothers, three of them, killed in the greedy years between 1914 and 1918, as his cousin and playmate Gavin Barlas had been.
The house itself, Lucy thought, could hardly remind her of more, and yet, when she had left the garden by the other door and stood on the lawn looking at the prim white rough-cast front, the door set back between the curves of two half-round towers roofed with purple slate, she knew that she could not go inside, could not brave that echoing hall, the untenanted rooms. She began to wonder whether she could live in it again, even after it had been restored to its former state of cheerful occupancy. It was four years since she and Andrew had met. Their reconciliation—if reconciliation was the name for an arrangement made to benefit the children and save Soonhope from neglect—had been carried out by letter. Perhaps Andrew had changed; perhaps she had, too.
It was while she was being jolted back to Edinburgh in the bus that the idea came to Lucy. Instead of meeting Andrew alone, with only the staring, interested eyes of the children to embarrass them both further, she would have a house-party at Soonhope, gathered before he came back. It would probably annoy him intensely, but he deserved that. “Yes,” thought Lucy, “I’ll do it. Aunt Robina, and the Herons if they’ll come. I know Greystiel Heron doesn’t approve of us now, but, after all, his wife is Aunt Robina’s daughter and Andrew’s first cousin, and Kate and young Grey came to Soonhope often enough in the past. Kate would be a tower of strength. . . . Oh!” A further idea had come to her, of such brilliance that she almost shouted aloud. “Oh! I wonder if Kate would come and look after the opening of the house, and painters and things? I believe she’d love it, and if I can only make her look on it as a job then I could give her something for her work and time I’d give almost anything in reason not to have to see Soonhope again until it’s ready for us to move in. Yes, that’s an idea of such beauty that I can hardly believe it came to me. If Kate will do it, she’ll be the very person for the job!”
3
Old Mrs. Milligan, wreathed in Shetland shawls, lay among her pillows and luxuriated in gloomy thoughts. She was being grossly neglected by her only child. Ever since the day of the Fancye Fayre Flora had been, to use her own phrase, ‘neither to hold nor to bind,’ so inflated with the idea of her importance that the sharpest rebuke failed to puncture her conceit. Little did it matter to her nowadays if her poor, helpless mother’s Bovril was too hot or too cold, too salt or not sufficiently seasoned. Off she jaunted to tea-parties here and bridge there, leaving the parent who should have been her first charge to the mercies of a heavy-footed peroxide blonde whose fingers were all thumbs.
Here it was, three minutes past twelve by wireless time, and no one had brought up her glass of Wincarnis, though Flora knew very well how much she depended on it to bridge the gulf between her Bovril at eleven and one o’clock lunch. Downstairs she could hear Mima, the peroxide blonde, engaged in shrill converse with some tradesman: the butcher’s boy, probably, a worthless young scoundrel whose chubby red cheeks, and black hair sleek from constant smoothing by its owner’s suety hands, made him an object of admiration to every domestic in Old Pettycraw Street. Yells of laughter followed by a prolonged coquettish screech and the slamming of a door seemed to indicate that at last Mima had dismissed her swain. Mrs. Milligan prepared to stage a heart attack the moment that her bedroom door opened to admit her handmaiden with the delayed restorative. But two more minutes ticked by, and still there was no sign of Mima or the Wincarnis. Mrs. Milligan gave up the idea of the heart attack, and decided merely to turn faint if anyone should be good enough to remember her existence. After that, it was the last straw that she should be taken unawares munching a Rich Tea biscuit, book in hand, spectacles on nose, when Flora, without warning, charged—yes, charged was the only word for it—into the room like a mad bull.
“Mamma!” she cried excitedly, quite forgetting her usual sick-room manner, and speaking in a high voice and with what her parent considered a sickening assumption of girlishness. “What do you think? Old Mrs. Barlas was out at Soonhope yesterday afternoon. And the painters are going in next week!”
“I’ll thank you to remember, Flora, that I am not deaf,” responded Mrs. Milligan. “Though I soon will be if you persist in screaming at me. Perhaps that’s your object? And look at the time. Six minutes past twelve, and I’ve never had my Wincarnis yet.”
“Six minutes past—!” Miss Milligan shrank under her mother’s accusing look, then tried bravely to rally. “Oh, no, Mamma, not six minutes past. This clock is a little fast. I heard the Town Hall strike as I came upstairs.”
“Six minutes past by Big Ben. I can’t help it if the Town Hall is slow. The wireless is good enough for me, and I prefer to take my nourishment by it. Perhaps, if you can spare the time, Flora”—bitterly—“you will bring me my Wincarnis at once.”
This severity, Mrs. Milligan was glad to see, had its desired effect. Flora crept away, reduced to her normal mouse-like quiet. On her reappearance with the wineglass of tonic, ju
stice was tempered with mercy, for Mrs. Milligan expressed a wish to hear the morning’s news. Not out of the daily paper, she could read that for herself, but the richer, more intimate news of Haystoun, told with a wealth of minute detail and delicious conjecture, which was so much more enjoyable than anything happening in the world beyond its bounds. Finally, when she had plucked every smallest shred of interest from her daughter’s account, Mrs. Milligan royally extended forgiveness in the shape of a suggestion that Flora should call on Mrs. Anstruther after lunch.
“You’ll see, Flora, that Jean Anstruther will know more about Soonhope and the Lockharts than anyone in the town.”
Miss Milligan demurred. She was afraid of Mrs. Anstruther’s sharp tongue, and was also apt to forget, in her new character of expert on all the Soonhope affairs, that she owed her knowledge in the first place to the rheumatic owner of The Anchorage.
So: “Oh, I don’t believe she does, Mamma,” she protested feebly. “After all, she can’t get about—”
“Jean Anstruther will know,” repeated her mother inexorably. “She and Robina Barlas were great friends when they were girls, and Robina is sure to have told her all the Lockharts’ plans. I wish I could go myself. It would take more than Jean Anstruther to frighten me. If you can get her to talk, she’ll tell you plenty. But you’re a poor creature, Flora, and easily daunted. No more spirit than a mouse!”
As it was easier to cope with Mrs. Anstruther, from whom at least she could escape, than to thwart Mamma, Miss Milligan put on her second-best straw hat—it had been her best the summer before, and next year would see it relegated to the humble position of shopping headgear—and set out through the length of the town towards The Anchorage.
Haystoun lay sleeping in the sun, lost in a dream of the glorious past. It had cradled kings, it had boasted a palace, besides a proud abbey outside the walls on the banks of the slow-running Alewater, it had been a bulwark against the invading English, a poet had sung of it as ‘Scotland’s wall.’ Before the river silted up it had been a port, with the small ships sailing to the very gates of the town. The Napoleonic Wars had seen its last days of importance, when soldiers from the new barracks beyond the West Port had thronged the streets, and there had been sounds of ‘revelry by night’ from the Assembly Rooms in the Town House. Very little had changed since that martial bustle died away. The barracks, fallen into ruin, had disappeared as completely as the ancient palace, though a remnant of the great abbey still stood, forming the Parish Church, and never even half-filled now of a Sunday morning.
Yoked with a Lamb Page 2
