“You are quite justified in saying that, though it’s ungenerous. But—what do you think made me come back?”
“What? Why, Soonhope, of course. You care more about this place than about any person living!” cried Lucy, frightened of the storm she had raised, but refusing to draw back. The swords were out now, and husband and wife stared at one another unflinchingly.
“Yes. I love Soonhope. I’m not happy away from the place for long,” Andrew admitted. “But I came back really because of the children, though you may not believe it.”
“Oh, I believe it. As long as you don’t try to make me believe that you came back for my sake!” said Lucy with a bitter laugh. “I suppose you’ll tell me next that I’ve lost your affection—”
“You don’t try very hard to keep it, do you? You never have,” said Andrew, bitter himself now.
“I? When did I ever fail you, Andrew? Haven’t I always tried to be a good wife to you?”
Andrew sighed. That was the difficulty with Lucy. She never could admit to having failed in any respect, and, indeed, according to her own lights, she never had. But it was a very great pity that virtue had to wear such a forbidding face. “Well,” he said wearily, “I dare say you’re right, Lucy. You generally are. And I know I have failed you, often.”
This admission, which should have cheered her with a knowledge of victory won, left Lucy instead with a desolate feeling of doubt. She had lost Andrew, the real Andrew, she knew that now, and was left with this courteous and patient shell of a husband. What if he were right, and the children, in whose loyal love she had always gone armed, should cease to care for her, too? The thought alarmed and distressed her so much that she sank on to the neatest chair, covered her quivering face with her hands, and burst into tears.
Andrew, half-afraid that she would repulse him, yet unable to see her suffering without trying to comfort her, crossed the room to her side and stood patting her shoulder awkwardly and calling himself a brute.
“Oh, Andrew, I can’t bear it if the children stop loving me!” she sobbed.
“I was a brute to frighten you with the idea,” he said remorsefully. “Don’t cry, Lucy. The children have always been more yours than mine, and they won’t turn against you unless you try them very high.”
“You—you think I ought to let Henry keep that horrible dog?” said Lucy, still sobbing, but beginning to fumble with her handkerchief. Unlike so many women, she could always find it even in moments of stress such as this. “It—it seems to me so weak, Andrew, and Henry will despise me for giving in to him.”
“Not at all. Give the boy credit for some decent feelings,” said Andrew. “He’ll think all the more of you if you do.”
“Will you tell him, then?”
“No,” said Andrew, though he would have liked to be the one to brighten Henry’s unhappy face. “You must tell him. That’s only fair.”
Henry, when his mother went out to the car and said, “I’ve decided that you may keep the dog, Henry,” took Virginia’s reprieve so quietly that Lucy was disappointed.
He said: “Thank you, Mother. It’s awfully decent of you,” but his eyes sought Andrew, standing a little apart with his shoulder against the sun-warmed stone of the doorway.
And it was to Andrew that he said, as if rewarding a service rendered: “Would you like to see Virginia having her tea, Father? She has a bowl of tea with one lump of sugar in it every day, because it’s good for her coat. You’d enjoy watching her. She’s an awfully neat lapper.”
CHAPTER SIX
1
“It isn’t fair,” Anne said, all the more hotly because secretly she sympathized, “to take Andrew’s part just because he’s more easy-going and pleasant than mother. After all she’s had the worst of it all round.”
“Well, she doesn’t let us forget it, does she?” drawled Adam, who happened to be in a bad temper.
“Oh, Adam! How can you be so mean?” cried Anne. “That’s a horrible thing to say.”
Adam looked a little ashamed of himself. “It’s true,” he growled. “All the same, I admit it was pretty foul of me to say it. And she did let Henry keep Virginia.”
“It was Andrew who did that,” said Henry from the floor, where he was engrossed in combing Virginia to her pretended anguish. “You know it was, Anne.”
All three young Lockharts were crammed into the summerhouse on the lawn, beside a collection of rotting deck-chairs, disused croquet-mallets and large wooden balls, their paint almost gone. As children they had found it a spacious, almost a palatial, playroom, but now they filled it to capacity. Henry and Virginia occupied the entire floor, and the other two were perched, Anne on the croquet-box, and Adam half-in, half-out of the open window, his long legs occasionally hitting Henry on the head, his fingers slowly disentangling a mass of ancient fishing-casts. In spite of the fact that Anne was grown up and Adam loftily conscious of the three-year gap between himself and ‘the kid Henry,’ they were in the habit of all conferring together as equals. They had assumed complete responsibility for their own actions, and were inclined to resent parental interference. Though they seldom put it into words, they felt that both parents had failed them and had no longer the right to try to order their lives. For a long time they had clung staunchly to Lucy, for they had been bewildered and distressed by her grief when Andrew had left them, but even before the return to Soonhope they had begun to realize that there might be something to be said for their father. Lucy, they discovered, as they grew out of childhood, was not easy to live with. She made too many rules, laid too much insistence on small, unimportant points, kept them in on every side, and if they rebelled, was a little too apt, as Adam had said, to remind them that she had had to be both father and mother to them during those years of change. So they had come to rely on their own judgment, and found, when they pooled their opinions, that these were sounder than Lucy could be made to believe; also that when they presented a united front, their mother could be made to yield, though grudgingly and with many laments over their ingratitude.
Now they were discovering that the father on whom they were prepared to look with suspicion, ready to pounce on the first officious assumption of paternal rights, had apparently no desire to exercise authority over them. He was interested in them, but treated them as rational beings entitled to their own views. It remained to be seen what be would do or say it they tried to get their own way in some outrageous demand. The meeting summoned in the summer-house had debated for a long time over the expediency of trying this on; but the difficulty appeared to be to find a suitable test case, and as Adam said: “It would only make them think that we really are senseless fools. I vote we just go on, and if anything crops up we’ll soon see where we stand.”
This having been approved, they passed on to a frank discussion of the merits and demerits of each parent, a proceeding which would have annoyed and distressed Lucy, and interested Andrew. On the whole, they were just, though not very merciful. The young are not given to a great display of mercy, considering it ‘soppy.’ At the same time, it is not easy to be absolutely impartial where one’s own mother and father are concerned, and it was a certain tendency to be lenient to Andrew which had made Anne break out in defence of Lucy.
After Henry had made his remark about Virginia, a silence fell, for they were all thinking it over. What Henry said was perfectly true. If it had not been for Andrew, Virginia would not have been lying on the floor of the summer-house with tightly shut eyes and forepaws prayerfully crossed while her master combed her bushy tail. Andrew had stepped in, and somehow had persuaded their mother to let Henry keep his dog. That was only fair: there never had been any real reason why they should not have a dog; but what interested them now that the crisis was over, was that Andrew had quietly asserted himself, behaving as the master of the house and head of the family without any fuss. His children began to think that if it came to a trial of strength, easy-going Andrew might win over all comers. . . .
“Of course,
mother never did let Andrew have much to do with us, even when we were kids, you remember,” said Adam, suddenly breaking the silence. “She always sort of disapproved and stopped him from playing with us, or anything. Didn’t she?”
“The real truth is,” said Anne, ignoring this unfortunate fact, which she remembered very well indeed, “that Andrew and mother should never have married each other. They just don’t fit.”
“Who would mother fit with?” asked Henry, sitting back on his heels, a very dirty comb, its teeth full of Virginia’s hair, in his equally dirty hand. “Or is that a rotten thing to say?” he added conscientiously, as his elders frowned.
“It may be rotten, but it’s dashed difficult to answer,” said Adam. “I don’t know. The misfit’s plain enough to see, but the other—! What do you think, Anne?”
“I think we’d better stop, because they are married, misfit or not,” said Anne, wishing she had not spoken her thought aloud.
“I know who Andrew would have fitted in with,” said Henry dreamily. “Someone like Kate.”
“That’s easy,” said Adam with a laugh. ‘Haven’t you noticed that Kate’s a bit like Mrs. Vardell in some ways?”
“Kate wouldn’t run away with another person’s husband!” cried Henry, resenting this as a slur on Kate.
“Oh, do let’s stop!” said Anne uneasily. “Honestly, boys, we oughtn’t to discuss the parents like this—now. It was different when Andrew wasn’t here, and we felt he hadn’t anything to do with us.”
“The trouble is,” mumbled Adam through a mouthful of casts, “that we’ve been thinking for ourselves for so long we’ve got out of the habit of bothering about the parents.”
“It looks as if we’d have to start bothering about Andrew. He means to run the show,” said Anne. “And I believe it will be quite a pleasant change.”
“If he does run the show, I hope he’ll let me learn to drive the car,” said Adam thoughtfully.
“I think he will if you ask him,” Anne said thoughtfully. “He seems very reasonable.”
“Do you suppose we ought to stop these meetings of ours, Anne?” asked Adam.
Anne, relieved that she had not had to make the suggestion herself, agreed eagerly. “Yes, I do, unless anything frightfully crucible needs discussing,” she said, meaning, of course, crucial, but she and her two brothers were quite pleased with crucible. “. . . Oh, Henry, is Virginia finished? The darling! Doesn’t she look divine?”
The conclave broke up in a general hugging of the complaisant Virginia, during which the door, bumped into by Adam, flew open and a cascade of boy and dog fell out on to the lawn. Anne, following more carefully, sprang over the heap of struggling bodies, to find Kate gazing at them all in some surprise.
“A battle? A bear-fight?” she suggested.
“A dog-cuddle, that’s all,” said Anne. “At least, it started as one, inside the summer-house. I don’t know how it will finish. Were you looking for any of us, Kate?”
“Not exactly. I came out to escape Cousin Charlotte, who is making herself peculiarly obnoxious to your mother in the drawing-room.”
“Poor mother,” said Anne, her face clouding. “She does suffer from that old she-devil. I wish we could get rid of her.”
“It would take a bomb or an earthquake,” said Kate. “Boys! Wouldn’t you like to go up to Pennymuir this afternoon? Robin has asked us to tea.”
“A tea-party?” demanded Adam suspiciously, rising from the heap, but keeping one large foot planted on his writhing younger brother.
“Not a polite one,” Kate assured him. “Neither your mother nor mine seems keen to go. What about you, Anne?”
“I’m playing tennis at Charteris, I think,” said Anne. “They asked you, too, Kate.”
“I know, but my tennis is so frightful. Unless the party turns our to be a series of low-comic turns, I won’t be much asset to it,” said Kate. “Really, tea at Pennymuir with the boys is more in my line.”
“I’d better go and see if I have a respectable pair of shorts,” said Anne, and moved off across the lawn towards the house.
When she came out again, after giving her best white piqué shorts to Nina to have the pleats pressed, there was no sign of the boys or Kate. Only Andrew could be seen, talking to Geordie Pow near the garden door. Anne hesitated. She felt awkward with her father, partly because she had been discussing him so recently, partly because she was afraid of growing too fond of him, which would have seemed like a breach of loyalty to her mother. But Andrew waved a hand to her, and she walked slowly down the drive until she was close to him.
Dismissing Geordie with a nod, he turned to Anne. “You look if you were at a loose end,” he said. “Would you like to come in to Edinburgh with me? I have to sign some papers at Dickson’s office—the lawyer, you know—but it won’t take long. We’ll be back in plenty of time for luncheon.”
“Oh, Father, I’d love it!” cried Anne, suddenly realizing that she was a little bored. “Let me get a coat and a pair of gloves—”
“What about your mother?”
“Mother’s in the drawing-room writing letters. Cousin Eleanor is in her room writing letters. Aunt Robina is in her room writing letters, unless Cousin Charlotte has gone to interrupt her. Father, wouldn’t it be easy if you could just say those little spots that people write under a line when they’re repeating a thing?”
“You could always say ‘ditto, ditto,’” said Andrew gravely.
“So I could. I wish I’d thought of it sooner. I won’t be a minute, Father.”
Altogether, it was a pleasant morning. Edinburgh was looking clean and sunny, and the tourists had thinned to an occasional two or three untidily dressed persons armed with cameras, who ate chocolate in the streets and loudly discussed the idiosyncrasies of the Scottish as though the people near them could not understand what they were saying.
“It’s a pity that a nation is so often judged by its tourists,” said Andrew mildly as he and his daughter walked along Princes Street. “Tourists are really a race apart, and a very odd one.”
Anne laughed gaily, the clear, carefree sound causing several heads to turn and smile in sympathy at this good-looking father and daughter. She was thoroughly enjoying herself. Andrew had bought her some beautifully fine silk stockings, a blue suède bag and a pair of gloves to match’, and, which Anne liked almost better, a spray of ‘Royalty’ carnations, looking like shot blue-and-pink silk, to wear in her coat.
“We’ve time for a drink,” he said, crowning the whole morning by this careless suggestion, and led the way into the American bar of a famous hotel. “What would you like, Anne?”
“Well, truly, I’d rather have tomato-juice than anything,” said Anne. “But if it would look better, you choose me something not too strong.”
“Tomato-juice looks as well as any other drink, and tastes a great deal nicer than most. I suppose I’m old-fashioned, Anne, but I am really rather glad you don’t like cocktails.”
“They make me sneeze,” explained Anne, sipping her tomato-juice. “Father, this is simply too divine.”
“What? The tomato-juice?”
“No, though it is marvellous. No, I mean the whole thing, coming in to Edinburgh, and everything.”
“Surely, now that you’re grown up, you must have been taken out by other people a lot more amusing than a mere father?” said Andrew, wondering just how tight a rein Lucy had kept on this young creature.
“Oh, yes, I have been taken about by boys, but not awfully often. Mother was never very keen on it, unless she knew them and their fathers and mothers and things. But you know so much better how to do it than any of them,” said Anne, and then blushed at her own tactlessness, for of course her father must have had a lot of practice taking Mrs. Fardell to places like this divine little bar with the high, red stools and the clinking cocktail-shakers and the amusing frescoes on the walls.
Andrew, however, appeared to notice nothing, and answered with complete composure: “At my
age, my dear, one ought to know a little about the business. Have a potato chip? Or a cheese straw? It would go very well with tomato-juice.”
Shortly after this they left. “It would be a pity to spoil it by being late for lunch,” Andrew said, and Anne heartily agreed. She did not want any unpleasantness to dim this delightful outing.
They were driving very slowly eastwards along George Street when an old man, rather shaky on his feet, but attired with the utmost elegance and neatness, tottered out in front of the car, heard the warning horn, stepped back and shook his fist as they passed. “Damned road-hogs!” they could hear him cry in a shrill voice of fury, and Andrew chuckled.
“Know who that was?”
“No. Ought I to?”
“Well, he’s your mother’s Great-Uncle Henry, a Victorian survival of the naughty nineties, and a kind of male Cousin Charlotte.”
“How dreadful!” said Anne, twisting her head to catch a last glimpse of the doddering but jaunty figure. “One Cousin Charlotte in the family is more than enough. And oh, Father! Couldn’t you possibly think of some way to get Cousin Charlotte out of the house? She is driving mother mad, and I really don’t wonder.”
“It might be done. I’ve got an idea. Great-Uncle Henry and Cousin Charlotte hate each other like poison. Suppose I suggested that old Henry—by the way, he’s Henry’s godfather, so it is all the more appropriate—ought to be asked to Soonhope. There’s no hope or fear of his refusing an invitation to live free for a week or two, and unless I’m very much mistaken, Cousin Charlotte will he packing her boxes within the next hour.”
“Father, how marvellous of you!”
“It all depends on your mother, of course,” said Andrew dryly. “She may refuse to have anything to do with it.”
“I don’t think so, not if it means good-bye Cousin Charlotte.”
“I’ll try it, then, at the first favourable moment,” Andrew promised, and changed the subject by saying: “I suppose you can drive, Anne?”
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