“Only—only unofficially, Father. I mean, no one at home knows I can.”
“I hope you haven’t been fool enough to drive about without a licence? That’s a mug’s game,” said Andrew, but not at all in the fatherly manner which Anne would have resented at once.
“Oh, no. I went round plastered with ‘L’s’ for about a fortnight, with a providential licence in my pocket, and then I passed a test and got a proper licence.”
“And where did all this take place?” asked Andrew, hiding a smile at the ‘providential’ licence.
“When I was staying with a girl I was at school with,” Anne said ungrammatically. “Her father was giving her driving-lessons, and he very decently said I’d better learn, too, at the same time. So I did.”
“Without telling your mother?”
“Well, Father, Mother always drives her own car herself. She’d never let us, because I’ve heard her say often that a car is far better when only one person drives it.”
“I think you’re old enough to have a small car of your own,” said Andrew. “I’ll see you drive first, though—and I suppose,” he added, but to himself, “that Lucy would say I was bribing Anne! It can’t be helped. . . . “What’s that, Anne? I didn’t hear you. Sorry.”
“I only said, thank you, Father,” said Anne in a small voice. “And please could Adam share it with me? All his friends drive, and he’s been crazy about it for more than a year—”
‘We’ll see. Adam will have to be taught to drive without danger to himself or anyone else before I promise anything more.”
But Anne was content. “Father, you are a darling!” she said gratefully, and fell to blissful dreams of having a car of her very own.
Andrew, after a half-rueful glance at her rapt face, was silent also. She had called him a darling, she had enjoyed being with him, but how much was it all worth? It seemed very unlikely that Anne or the other two should feel particularly fond of him: and Lucy would be right, as she usually was, if she accused him of bribery, for it was the sudden longing to see Anne’s face brighten, to attach her to him by gifts if by nothing else, which had made him promise her a car so recklessly.
2
“What are you going to do this afternoon, Granny?” asked Kate, feeling, rather remorsefully, that she had seen very little of her grandmother since the house had been filled with people.
“I am taking Charlotte out to tea with Jean Anstruther,” said Mrs. Barlas. “If that doesn’t humble her a little, nothing will.”
“You’re a brave woman. I don’t know that I’d care to be present at a party where Mrs. Anstruther was hostess and Cousin Charlotte guest.”
“It will be very good for both of them,” said Mrs. Barlas placidly.
Kate was in her room, powdering her nose before going to Pennymuir with the boys, and her grandmother, seeing her door open, had come in for a talk. She now sat down in a small chintz-covered arm-chair beside the open window and said: “Wouldn’t you rather have gone to the tennis-party with Lucy and Anne?”
“Not I. The boys’ society is about on the same intellectual level as my own, and besides, I want to see what Pennymuir is like.”
“It used to be a lovely house when I was a girl,” said Mrs. Barlas. “There was a large family of young people, Hume was their name, and we had such picnics and dances and walking excursions. Of course, driving all that way in the wagonette was an amusement in itself, though I dare say the horses didn’t care for it much. Old James, my father’s coachman, used to make us walk up all the hills, I remember, out of revenge for having to go at all. We used to take our ball-dresses with us and stay the night. . . . But I don’t know what Pennymuir will be like now. A bachelor so often seems to live uncomfortably to our ideas, though I believe Robin Anstruther has an excellent cook-housekeeper. You must tell me all about it when you come home.”
“Of course I will, darling, but I dare say Mrs. Anstruther could tell you far more than I’ll be able to after one short visit.”
“Oh, Kate! Kate!” suddenly shrieked Mrs. Barlas as her grand-daughter moved towards the door.
“Granny darling, what a skelloch,” said Kate. “I’m not going away, you know. I’m still here.”
“I very nearly forgot what I came in on purpose to say,” explained the unrepentant Mrs. Barlas. “It’s this, Kate. I think Lucy is almost certain to ask you to stay on for a bit and I want you to say that you will.”
“But dear me, Granny, why this thusness? I mean, the party’s breaking up already, with Daddy and Grey gone back to business, and mother leaving to-morrow, to keep a watchful eye on them. I thought that by the end of this week I ought to be going—”
“Lucy will ask you to stay, and I wish you would, Kate. It is an uneasy household, and having someone like you would be a help.”
“A buffer state? What a delightful prospect,” said Kate. “And when it’s between husband and wife, a little invidious, don’t you think?”
“Well,” said her grandmother defiantly. “I’m sorry for Andrew. I know he behaved badly, very badly, but he’s trying to make up for it now, and really poor Lucy is enough to try anyone’s temper. So insufferably good,” ended Mrs. Barlas angrily. “And about as much sense of humour as would lie on a threepenny bit!”
“So you would sacrifice your grandchild for your nephew?”
“Andrew has always been like a younger son to me,” Mrs. Barlas went on, unheeding. “He and your Uncle Gavin were brought up together, for his mother died not long after your grandfather, Kate, and I came back here with the children—your mother and Aunt Jane and Gavin—to keep house for my brother Adam, Andrew’s father. Ever since Gavin was killed in 1914, Andrew has tried to take his place, and I don’t like him to be so unhappy.”
“But, Granny, haven’t you ever thought—Lucy must be unhappy too!”
“Lucy has never understood Andrew or made allowances. She should have married an elderly minister or a desiccated professor, not a young man with hot blood and a high spirit. I don’t think I am a vindictive woman, Kate, indeed, I pray to God every night to make me less judging of Lucy, but I find it very hard to forgive her for what she drove Andrew to doing.”
Kate realized that it was quite useless to try to make her grandmother see things from Lucy’s point of view, so she only said: “Very well, Granny, if Lucy asks me, and if you really think I’ll be a help to any of them, I’ll stay.”
“You’ll be a help to me if to no one else,” said Mrs. Barlas, rising as a bellow came up from under the window.
“Hi, Kate! Kate, aren’t you nearly ready?” bawled Adam. “You must look like the Queen of Sheba by this time!”
“Have you been ‘’tiring your head?’” shouted the shriller voice of Henry. “And painting your face?”
“Silly ass, that was Jezebel,” Adam could be heard answering.
“Never mind,” said Henry with fine indifference. “She’s taking ages anyhow.”
Kate dropped a kiss on her grandmother’s soft cheek and hurried downstairs.
Lucy was talking to Andrew in the hall. “But I thought you were coming with us to Charteris, Andrew.”
“Sorry, my dear. I want to see some beasts of Robin’s that he thinks might suit me,” he said.
“Lady Charteris will think it so odd,” complained Lucy. “And I accepted for you.”
“No one will think it in the least odd if you explain. After all, a farmer’s time isn’t altogether his own, especially at this season of the year.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call yourself a farmer,” Lucy said fretfully. “It sounds so disgustingly rural.”
“Well, I am disgustingly rural,” said Andrew with unabated good-humour. “Hullo, Kate. You ready?”
Kate, conscious all up her spine that Lucy was looking frowningly after them, walked out to the old stable, now a garage, with Andrew by her side and the boys and Virginia rushing on ahead.
“Couldn’t you have gone to Pennymuir another day?” she asked. “
I’m afraid Lucy is disappointed.”
“Lucy’s always disappointed with me. She’d miss it if she weren’t,” he said cheerfully. “And she only wants to drag me to Charteris to prove to everyone what a reunited couple we are.”
“Oh, Andrew! You shouldn’t talk like that,” said Kate, painfully aware that she sounded both priggish and feeble.
“Now, Kate, don’t you begin worrying about me. Just make up your mind that I’m a hopeless case and you’ll feel much better about it,” he said.
Kate, angrily wishing that she could remember always to count ten before she spoke, said with an impatient sigh: “The tongue is an unruly member!”
“Cheer up. Yours isn’t half as unruly as some. Think of Cousin Charlotte.”
She had to laugh. “I’m glad, at least, that I’m not as bad as that!”
Then they were at the garage, where the boys had already occupied the back of the car, with Virginia leaping from one pair of bony knees to the other in a vain search for a comfortable seat.
“Longstreet’s forces being rushed to Chattanooga in the cars,” announced Henry as they started. “Drive as fast as you can, Father, or we’ll be too late to help old Bragg.”
“‘What on earth is the boy talking about?” Andrew asked Kate.
“American Civil War, I should think. He lives in it the whole time,” said Kate. “I’ve learnt quite a lot about it since Henry took me in hand, though I can’t master tactics.”
“You’ve learnt quite a lot about Henry,” he said. “You know him a great deal better, in this short time even, than I do.”
“Oh, parents often don’t hear very much about their children’s private affairs. You probably have a better chance than most fathers if you start now,” Kate said.
“Why so, my clever cousin?”
“Because you can see them in a more detached way, as if they were just other people,” explained Kate, her words vague, but the idea behind them, as Andrew realized, not only clear-cut but extremely sound. “Parents and children hardly ever think of each other as persons. I suppose that’s the fault of so close a relationship. But you, after not seeing them for a bit, ought to be able to judge them pretty fairly.”
“That is very acute of you, Kate. I didn’t know you studied human nature so deeply.”
“I don’t. It’s more instinct than anything. A woman’s instinct!” said Kate in a deep, mysterious voice, and laughed. “Dear me, I’m talking clichés now. Do you ever do that? It’s rather amusing, played as a game.”
“You mean ‘I always say there’s nothing like a good cup of tea,’ that sort of thing?”
“Yes, that’s it exactly. And ‘how small the world is’ and ‘a fire brightens up a room so.’”
“But hang it all, it does!”
“Of course. Clichés are nearly always true,” said Kate. “That’s partly why they’re so irritating, I expect. Oh, Andrew, isn’t this lovely?”
While they talked, the car had been climbing steadily up out of the valley, and now they were almost on top of the long ridge of the Lammermuirs. All about them rolled the hills, purpled with fading heather, which deepened in the hollow places to an exquisite soft dark brown. Far ahead the narrow unfenced road ran winding down into Berwickshire, the Cheviots filled the southern horizon, and away to their left could be seen a dim line of sand, white fringed, which was the shore at Berwick-upon-Tweed.
“There are the Eildons,” said Kate, gazing at the three-headed hill standing up so abruptly in the plain near Melrose.
“Where? That’s Look-out Mountain,” Henry said dreamily. “The dam’ Yanks are massed behind it.”
“Shut up about that war of yours,” ordered Adam, cuffing his younger brother’s head. “We’re all sick of it. Father, are there trout in those burns we crossed?”
“Any number, or used to be,” said Andrew, who had stopped the car and was looking through half-closed eyes at the wide scene. “We’ll go and see one of these days, Adam.”
“Are we far from Pennymuir?” asked Kate.
“No, but you can’t see it, from here. There’s a green valley running to the south, just below that dip in the road,” said Andrew, pointing. “It’s quite near the hills, but so sheltered that the crops are earlier than on any of the neighbouring farms. The ground drops sharply here, and it doesn’t lie nearly so high as you’d think.”
He started the car again, and they ran slowly down the winding road. Quite suddenly it turned to the left, and instead of heather on either side there was a great stretch of purple-tawny grass in seed, the burnished stems shining bronze in the sun. Below her, Kate saw the green valley, threaded by links of a burn, and half-way down its length a cluster of tall trees stood about a house, which was built on a level piece of ground above the water. A drift of blue smoke from the high chimneys rose straight up into the windless air, there was a hoarse cooing of wood-pigeons. Beyond it, where the valley opened out, were fields of darkening wheat, fields of vivid green turnips, meadows where black cattle lay dreaming.
They crossed the burn by a solid wooden bridge, which Henry looked at hopefully, murmuring to Virginia, his sympathetic listener: “They’d have to burn that bridge behind them if they retreated.”
Unfortunately, Adam overheard. “At it again?” he said sternly. “And anyhow, what would be the good of burning the bridge? They could walk over the burn easily.”
The burn certainly was disappointingly shallow and narrow.
“Never mind, Henry, I expect it runs red in winter, when the snow melts in the hills, and almost up to the bridge,” said Kate, turning to smile at the Confederate behind her.
“It wouldn’t be easy to get guns and wagons over,” muttered Henry, this time so low that only Virginia heard. He tickled her ear when he whispered, but she only twitched it once or twice, and lavishly licked his hand. ‘Dear Virginia!’ thought her besotted owner. ‘She’s interested, if no one else has the sense to be!’
Several dogs rushed from the house and galloped, barking furiously, round and round the car. Virginia promptly sat up and barked back, and the clamour was becoming deafening when Robin Anstruther, in breeches and gaiters, appeared on his doorstep and roared, “That will do!” whereupon the dogs, all except old Wat, the Aberdeen, whom Kate recognized immediately, hurriedly departed, with an occasional last bark, to some point of vantage among the trees.
‘Pretty bachelor-ish,’ thought Kate, as they went into a hall furnished with an oak settle along one wall and a narrow oak table along the other. Both were strewn with an engaging variety of odds and ends: dog-collars, muzzles, a shoe-horn, several ancient tweed caps, a pipe or two, and a tin of tobacco. Among these, on the table, a small lustre mug crammed too tightly with antirrhinums looked pathetically lost.
‘Not as uncomfortable as Granny seemed to fear,’ she added to herself, for the sitting-room which they entered was sunny, the worn leather chairs large and inviting. ‘But, oh heavens, what a smell of dog!’
It was obvious that dogs were accustomed to sit where they pleased, for one by one the pack stole quietly in, and with growls and sidelong looks at each other, proceeded to their favourite chairs. Virginia, her nose in the air, sat bolt upright on Henry’s knee, loftily ignoring the blandishments of Wat and a peculiarly dirty wire-haired fox-terrier.
‘A woman’s touch is what’s needed here,’ thought Kate, wishing that she could repeat her cliché aloud to Andrew. As he and Robin were already deep in talk, and the boys seemed inclined to be silent, she had time to look about her. A large writing-desk, open, was littered with papers, which had overflowed on to the mantelpiece, where they stacked on either side of a clock and behind one or two bits of old china. The clock, Kate noticed, was not going. There were two bookcases full of books, with yet more papers on top of them; there was a large wireless in a corner, and, rather surprisingly, several good etchings and dry-points on the walls, and a small landscape in oils, of a red East Lothian field caught by the sun on some day of early spring.
But the cushions, and the cretonne loose covers of the sofa and some smaller chairs, had a draggled look, and the leather of the arm-chairs was scratched, and even in places torn, by dogs’ paws or teeth.
‘I suppose he prefers it to look like this, or he wouldn’t let it get in such a mess,’ thought Kate, but she had received a severe shock, for her idea of sailors was that they were always neat, and liked to have things ‘shipshape.’ Though not naturally very tidy herself, her fingers itched to set this room to rights, to straighten one of the dry-points that hung crooked, remove the collection of spent matches from the coal-scuttle, and sweep the dusty papers out of sight.
The boys showed signs of becoming restive, and Robin rose. “You’ll find some of the plums ripe on the garden wall,” he said to Adam. “Would you and Henry like to have a look at them before tea?”
“Yes, please,” answered both, and instantly disappeared, followed by Virginia and a trail of other dogs.
“I don’t know how to entertain you, Kate,” went on the host with a worried frown. “Drew and I are going to walk down to the low meadow to see some bullocks—”
“I’d like to come, too, it you don’t mind. But if you want to be all boys together, I can explore by myself,” said Kate.
“Nonsense. You’ll come with us, of course,” said Andrew.
When they reached the meadow, Robin turned to her. “What do you think of them?” he asked, waving a stick at the placid bullocks, who gazed at them from large, soft, stupid eyes and blew out their moist black nostrils questioningly. Their long ears flapped at flies, their tails switched peacefully, their black coats shone like satin over their sleek flanks. Kate wanted to cry: ‘I hate to look at them, poor beasts, when I know that they’ll all end in the slaughter-house!’ But she realized that this was hardly likely to meet with approval, so she narrowed her eyes judicially, pursed her lips, and finally said in a carelessly knowledgeable tone: “They seem a nice level lot.”
The surprise and suspicion that struggled with respect in the men’s faces was too much for her gravity, however, and she began to laugh.
Yoked with a Lamb Page 18
