“It’s no good,” she said at last. ““You see, I’ve learnt the proper thing to say about bullocks, and pigs, of course, are straightforward. You just prod them with a stick and look profound. But if you had shown me sheep, I should have been undone.”
“You shameless creature,” exclaimed Andrew admiringly. “Did you ever hear of such duplicity, Robin?”
Kate was indignant. “I think I’ve been very honest. Far too honest. And you know you only asked me what I thought in the hope that I’d make an ignorant remark for you to snigger at.”
“There speaks the true woman,” said Robin. “As usual, turning the tables to shift the blame on to the Mere Man. But I’ll give you this satisfaction, for you deserve it. You’re perfectly correct in saying these beasts are a nice level lot. They are.”
“I hope,” Kate said rather anxiously, “that you won’t give me away? I find it such a useful thing to say in farming circles.”
“Your guilty secret is safe with us,” Andrew assured in his best mock-heroic manner. “We are dumb. Aren’t we, Robin?”
“Silent as the grave,” Robin agreed. “Now, Drew, good look at ’em. They’re nice, you know. Not too long in the leg—”
The conversation became highly technical, and soared beyond Kate’s very slight grasp of the subject. She found herself, for the second time within an hour, a silent onlooker. The two men forgot her presence altogether, and she passed the time in contrasting them. Certainly Andrew was the better-looking of the two: beside his slim height Robin Anstruther appeared almost too broad of shoulder. Andrew’s fine, clean-cut features and long, rather melancholy grey eyes were set off by his red hair, and he had a manner to wile a bird off the tree. Robin was blunt, rather harsh, with the furrow scored across his forehead which gave him the look of a perpetual frown; Kate did not even know what colour his eyes were, for he crinkled them up when he did smile so that they were half-shut, and at other times his brows were drawn down close above them. She supposed they were dark, to match the thick, greying hair. And yet, comparing the two men, so utterly different, but such staunch friends, she could not think why Mrs. Fardell had chosen Andrew, not Robin. If what old Mrs. Milligan had said was true—and Kate was sure that it was—then Robin loved Elizabeth Fardell, too, and had lost her to Andrew. A curious mingling of feelings disturbed Kate: relief because that woman had preferred Andrew, rage at her blindness in not seeing that Robin was by far the better man. . . . And they were still friends. Truly men were odd creatures, and in many ways so much nicer than women. . . .
“Kate! You must be bored to death. I’m truly sorry!” It was Robin speaking, and she turned to him with a dazed smile. In an instant, like a clap of thunder, she understood both her relief and her anger. She had fallen in love with Robin Anstruther herself.
With an enormous effort she forced herself to say in an ordinary voice: “No, I’m not bored, really, thank you. It’s lovely just to be out on an afternoon like this.”
She would have said exactly the same thing if they had been standing in heavy rain in Haystoun’s worst slums. To be with him was enough for Kate just now, and she felt a spring of such pure happiness welling in her heart that she was afraid its effects must surely be noticeable. But Robin only said:
“That’s good. We’d better be going back for tea now,” and they turned and walked back up the sloping meadow.
For Kate the afternoon had suddenly become quite different from even the finest of September afternoons. Colours were all intensified, the grass was as green as the flames from a burning log of sea timber, everything about her swam in crystalline air that dazzled her eyes. The barberry bushes in the hedge, her favourite of all hedgerow trees, were hung with waxen tassels of fruit, rose-pink and orange-tawny on their black thorny stems, lovely beyond belief, and even the hawthorns were weighted down with haws which were brilliantly red, and not the usual rather dingy crimson. Robin picked a spray of barberry in passing and gave it to Kate, and she held it so tightly that the thorns ran into her hand, but she never felt them.
It was like falling over a cliff to come into the prosaic atmosphere of a chilly and formal dining-room, where a solid tea had been set out on the round table. Plates of massive girdle-scones, plates of rock-cakes which looked extraordinarily like their name, a heavy, dark gingerbread, a lump of shortbread, and on the sideboard a brown and a white loaf on a board. Evidently Robin’s cook-housekeeper was accustomed to catering for gargantuan appetites. There must at least half a pound of butter on each of the two glass dishes, there was an enormous jam-dish. Even the cups looked to Kate like soup bowls, as she sat down behind them, hidden from the others by the massive silver teapot and hot-water jug, which she could only lift with difficulty.
“Strawberry jam, Henry?” asked his host, pushing jam-dish towards him. “I hope it is strawberry, by the way. I told Mrs. MacOstrich not to give us anything else.”
Henry, courtesy struggling with truthfulness and a love of strawberry jam, finally murmured: “I think this is plum jam, sir, but it doesn’t matter. I’m sure it’ll be awfully good.”
Robin seemed to Kate, who now found his every slightest gesture or change of expression important, to brace himself as he rose and rang the bell. “We’ll have strawberry jam,” he said.
A measured tread could presently be heard approaching, each heavy step by its slowness asserting its owner’s dignity and dislike of being summoned. The dining-room door opened and a figure, beside whom Mrs. Anstruther’s grenadier would have seemed like a simpering girl, stood gazing sternly at them. Mrs. MacOstrich, if this were she, was not tall; in fact, she was not larger than a twelve-year-old child, but every inch of her small, tautly held person, every line of the oblong, wooden face from which two china-blue eyes looked disapproval on the world in general, was awe-inspiring. Her sparse grey hair was combed off her face into a tiny knob on top of her head, her hands were folded on the small square of lace-edged apron which covered the front of her black dress.
“You rang, sir?” was all she said, but a sort of shudder passed over the petrified party seated round the table. Kate thought that it was actually Mrs. MacOstrich’s tininess which made her so terrifying; Henry said that he felt like a person with a cobra swaying to and fro in front of him; Adam said that he felt like a worm being put on a hook; and Andrew said with feeling: “Poor old Robin! He can’t get rid of her, you know. I believe she mesmerizes him.”
But all that was later, driving home. While Mrs. MacOstrich was present in person, no one spoke a word except Robin, and he only with an obvious effort.
“I asked for strawberry jam, Mrs. MacOstrich. This is plum. There must have been some mistake.”
“There was no mistake, sir. The plum was opened, so I put it out. There’s not a jar of strawberry open.”
“I see,” said Robin, and Kate’s heart was full of pity for him, bullied by this dwarfish creature, who ought to have been housekeeper to a troll. “But I think you’ll have to open a pot of strawberry jam, all the same.”
Silence. Then: “It’s the new strawberry, sir,” said Mrs. MacOstrich. “Maybe you didna know that last season’s was finished?”
“Never mind, never mind. Bring the new stuff,” said Robin hastily.
With a look which said eloquently that she washed her hands of all responsibility for such wanton extravagance, Mrs. MacOstrich left the room. When she returned, it was to place on the table a plate containing a section of honey, and in a silence that forbade remonstrance, she slowly ebbed away once more. The door closed soundlessly behind her malevolence, and the blight which had stricken Robin’s appalled guests began by degrees to vanish.
He looked miserably upset. “The old she-devil,” he muttered. “Wait a minute, boys, and I’ll fetch that jam myself.”
But a chorus of voices negatived this suggestion, which all felt to be a forlorn if valiant attempt, and the boys ate honey freely, making themselves and, Kate was rejoiced to see, the polished table exceedingly sticky in the p
rocess.
“Why doesn’t he dismiss her, Andrew?” she asked when they had started on their homeward way. “Did she save his life in infancy or something tiresome like that?”
“No. I can’t see the MacOstrich troubling to save anyone’s life, can you?” said Andrew thoughtfully. “She’s new since I was last there. It’s difficult to explain. She runs his house efficiently, and like a good many men he simply hasn’t the moral courage to say to her, ‘Mrs. MacOstrich, I find that I can dispense with your services. Here is a month’s wages in lieu of notice, and I should like you to leave to-night.’ No, she’s like the Old Man of the Sea who burdened poor Sinbad, and he can’t get rid of her.”
“Is she so very efficient?” murmured Kate. “I didn’t see many traces of it. The sitting-room was awfully doggy and untidy, and the dining-room about as gay and homelike as a dentist’s antechamber. I wouldn’t stand her—or the dogs!”
“No, but you’re a woman, and have the dauntless courage of your sex where female servants are concerned. Robin would turn off a ploughman or a gardener as fast as some people, but he is wax in the hands of his housekeeper. As for the dogs—don’t tell him I told you, or he’d be livid, but everyone who wants to get rid of some dog they don’t want goes to him with a sad tale and a pack of excuses and reasons for having to ‘part’ with them, and poor Robin takes ’em all in. I don’t believe there’s one of his own there bar old Wat.”
“Poor fellow!” said Kate in accents of profoundest pity.
And then the mere fact that she had been speaking of Robin sent her soaring away again in a silent ecstasy, helped by the swoop of the car as it topped the hill and flew down into the valley of the Alewater. It was amazing, this feeling. Kate had been in love before, but she had never known this boundless happiness, this sense of increased beauty and richness in all about her which made it a joyous adventure even to breathe. In the first exaltation following on her discovery that she loved Robin Anstruther, Kate was not troubled with his feeling towards her. Disappointment and disillusion would come later, perhaps, but for the present she only hugged her delicious secret joy closer. She was still in this dreamy mood, at peace with the whole world, wanting everyone to be as happy as herself, when they arrived at Soonhope to find that the tennis-playing contingent was back from Charteris.
Lucy, indeed, was crossing the hall when they entered, the boys once more clamouring for food in spite of their large tea. “Did you have a nice time?” she asked, in a tone which lacked its usual undercurrent of faint disapproval.
“Lovely,” said Kate; and then, seeing from Lucy’s surprised face that possibly ‘lovely’ was an overstatement except to her own ear, added rather confusedly: “It was so beautiful up on the Lammermuirs. Such a—a grand view.”
“Well, I’m very glad,” said Lucy. “And if you are enjoying it at all, Kate, I do hope you will stay here for a bit, and not cut your visit short? Eleanor said she could spare you, and we should all be glad. Wouldn’t we, Andrew?”
“Of course. Delighted,” he said with his ready smile, pleased at Lucy’s hospitable impulse. “Do stay, Kate.”
Stay here, within reach of Robin? Stay here, where even if she did not see him, she was in the place where he lived? How could she do anything else? “Yes, I’d love to. Thank you so much, Lucy—Andrew.” And Kate, with a faint, dazzled smile at both, went upstairs to dress for dinner.
Andrew looked after her with a puzzled frown. “Funny thing,” he said confidentially to Lucy, “I never noticed it before, but Kate’s uncommonly good to look at, isn’t she?”
Nor did he notice his wife’s quick, suspicious glance at him, and she only said: “Yes, Kate is really very handsome this evening. I think the air here must suit her.” ‘Which was as well for his peace of mind.
3
“Really, there are times when I think that Florence is half-witted,” said Lucy, coming into the parlour, as everyone but herself still persisted in calling it, a few mornings later. “To-day, for example, I couldn’t get a word out of her. She just stood staring at me with her hand over her mouth, all the time I was in the kitchen. And yet on other mornings I haven’t had a chance to speak because of her flow of conversation. Aunt Robina, are you quite sure she is all there?”
“Oh, I think so,” said Mrs. Barlas placidly, looking up from the fine crochet which never seemed to tire her amazingly youthful blue eyes. “I know she is a little odd in some of her ways, Lucy, but she is such a good cook.”
“Oh, yes, she is an excellent cook,” Lucy conceded, “I’ve never had a better one, and I think it was wonderful of you to get her back for me. But really, Aunt Robina, it is a little nerve-shaking to be goggled at when you are giving orders for the meals—and no suggestions about puddings or a savoury for to-night! Not a word. Just blank silence, clutching her face. I found it most upsetting. Was she in the habit of behaving like that when she was your cook?”
“N—no. I don’t think she was,” said Mrs. Barlas slowly.
“Never mind, Lucy dear. She’ll send in a triumphant pudding and a quite new, exotic savoury, and all will be well,” added Kate, who thought her grandmother suddenly looked a trifle upset, and supposed it was because Florence did not altogether meet with Lucy’s approval.
“I dare say she will,” said Lucy more cheerfully. “She has never failed me so far. Only this evening I do particularly want things to be quite perfect, with the Charterises coming to dinner.”
“Florence loves a dinner-party and will do her very best,” said Mrs. Barlas over her shoulder. She had risen and was moving to the door.
“Do you think I’ve offended Aunt Robina by saying that about the paragon, Kate?” asked Lucy as the door closed. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Don’t worry,” said Kate consolingly. “It’ll be all right. You know Granny doesn’t really mind in the least.”
“Well, I only hope that Florence’s manner will be a little more normal to-morrow morning,” said Lucy. “Or I shall be really frightened to speak to her at all, and you will have to do it.”
She had never seemed so human before, and Kate thought: ‘If she were only like this always, what a nice person she would be!’
A sharp voice could be heard raised indignantly in the hall. “Boy, call off This Animal. It’s biting my boots.”
“Cousin Charlotte!” breathed Lucy with a hunted look in her eyes. “Heaven send she doesn’t come in here!”
There was a delighted growling, a scampering of toenails on the tiled floor, a scuffling, and Henry’s voice, admonishing Virginia. “Naughty girl. Wicked girl. Mustn’t bite ladies’ boots!”
“As if that cooing sort of talk is likely to stop the little monster,” said Lucy, who had grown almost reconciled to Virginia’s presence about the house. She and Kate looked at each other and had to smile, so tender was Henry’s scolding.
“There, Cousin Charlotte. She won’t do it again,” he said confidently.
“I don’t trust the Creature within a yard of me. I shall go to the garden, where I understand dogs are not allowed.” And Miss Napier’s footsteps died away. Presently Kate, peeping cautiously round one of the long curtains which hung at the parlour window, saw her black hat bobbing determinedly down the drive.
“Gone to heckle Geordie Pow. We’re safe,” she announced to Lucy.
“For the moment,” retorted Cousin Charlotte’s unwilling hostess gloomily. “But I shall not feel really safe until she leaves. And then I’ll go to the station and see her off, just to make certain that the train doesn’t go without her.”
Kate laughed, but she was sorry for Lucy, knowing that Cousin Charlotte reserved her most unpleasant home-truths for her. “Does she bother you so much, Lucy? It’s a shame.”
“Bother me? I can’t tell you, Kate, how grateful I’d be to the person who could send her away—without being outrageously rude to her, of course.”
“Mother!” shrieked Anne, suddenly springing up from the sofa where she had been curled unnoti
ced with a book. “Mother! Do you mean that?”
“Anne, what a fright you gave me! Of course I meant it,” said Lucy. “Why?”
“Then wait here a minute. Don’t go. Stay here till I come back.” And Anne tore from the room.
“Do you suppose that half-wittedness is catching and that Anne has taken leave of her senses, too?” asked Lucy plaintively.
“I hope not. A half-witted cook could be got rid of at pinch, but a daughter in that state would be a much more serious problem,” laughed Kate. “Lucy, I must rush to Granny and tell her that I see the postman coming. She has some foreign stamps for him, and you know what a passionate philatelist he is. Wouldn’t that make a nice title for a book or a play? The Passionate Philatelist?”
“With Laidlaw as the hero,” suggested Lucy, raising her eyebrows as she glanced out of the window at the rather unromantic tubby figure coming up the drive pushing a bicycle.
“Well, no. Perhaps not. But I must tell Granny—” And Kate in her turn went tempestuously out, leaving Lucy, obedient and curious, but puzzled, to wait for her daughter.
Because she never liked to be idle, she went to the handsome bow-fronted bureau of inlaid wood, its surfaces polished to a mellow sheen, and began, with a frown—it was one of Lucy’s more human traits that she had to count on her fingers—to add up the monthly books. But half-way up the second horrid column of pennies, “. . . and one makes fourteen, that’s one-and-fourpence. No, it isn’t, it’s one-and-two, oh, dear!”—there was a scud of hurrying feet, the door burst open, and Anne, dragging her bewildered father by the coat-sleeve, dashed in.
“Now. Father, tell mother!” she cried, breathless but triumphant. “Mother, father has a plan!”
“Tell your mother what?” and:
“A plan to do what?” said her parents in a duet.
“Dear me, how stupid you both are!” said Anne, stamping with impatience. “Mother, didn’t you say you’d be internally grateful if someone could tell you how to get rid of Cousin Charlotte? Father, you know you said you had a wizard idea about it. Well, then!”
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