Andrew looked at his wife and nodded. “It’s true. I did have an idea, Lucy, but whether you like it or not is a different matter.”
“It would have to be pretty frightful to be worse than Cousin Charlotte, don’t you think?” said Lucy dryly, “Yes, Andrew, tell it me. I’m sure I’ve racked my brains without result. The only thing I could think of was to burn the house down, and then she’d have to leave.”
“This isn’t quite as bad as that,” he promised her. “It was just this: you know how dearly Cousin Charlotte and your Great-Uncle Henry Halliday love each other? All you have to do is to invite the old man here for a few days, and I’m willing to bet you ten to one that she’ll go by the first available train.”
“Andrew! How wonderfully clever of you,” said Lucy, the first honest approval of him that he had seen for at least ten years in her eyes. Then her face clouded. “It wouldn’t be fair, Andrew. You would have to bear the brunt of Great-Uncle Henry, and he’s my relation. Perhaps we’d better stick to Cousin Charlotte.”
“No, no, my dear.” He was touched by her thought for him. “If it comes to that, Cousin Charlotte belongs to me, and you’ve borne with her gallantly. It’s my turn now. I’ll take on old Henry. If you’ll be content to leave it to me, I’ll say carelessly at luncheon that I’ve written and asked him to come, and you must back me up.”
“Oh, I will,” Lucy said fervently. “With all my heart.”
“That’s grand,” said Anne with immense satisfaction. “And no one will be exactly prostituted with grief over Cousin Charlotte’s departure!” She skipped away, leaving her parents to smile over her quite unconscious malapropisms.
In the meantime Kate had gone to her grandmother room, got the promised stamps, and given them to the gratified postman, and was returning to deliver his messages of thanks, when Nina came scurrying along the corridor from the direction of the back-stairs, an expression of horror blended with delight on her demure face.
“Could I get speaking to Mrs. Barlas, Miss Kate?” she asked breathlessly.
“I should think so. Granny, Nina wants to see you about something,” said Kate at her grandmother’s door.
“Come in!” screamed Mrs. Barlas. “Yes, Nina, what is it? Was Laidlaw pleased with his stamps, Kate?” she added at once in the same breath, before Nina could speak.
“Charmed. But go ahead, Nina. My news can wait,” said Kate.
“Oh, if ye please, mem,” gasped Nina, with a giggle hurriedly curtailed for propriety’s sake. “Florence has lost her teeth!”
“Lost her teeth?” This was Kate.
Mrs. Barlas showed no surprise. “I knew it,” she said heavily. “Very well, Nina. You can go and tell Florence to have a good look for them, and I’ll see her presently.” And when Nina had reluctantly left them, she went on: “As soon as Lucy told me about Florence saying nothing and standing with her hand to her mouth, I remembered. Kate, I didn’t dare to tell Lucy! You know how disgusted she would be. I had to leave the room in case I gave it away.”
“But, Granny, after all, what does it matter to Lucy? Of course, it is very awkward if Florence can’t or won’t speak, and I hope she’ll find them soon, but what is so disgusting about it?”
“Kate,” said Mrs. Barlas, with mournful solemnity, “you would be disgusted if I told you some of the places where Florence’s teeth have been found. The last time they were only in a plant-pot, among the leaves of a fern—and I never felt the same about that fern again, even after leaving it out in the rain for two nights. But the time before that she had baked them in a cake. A seed-cake, I believe—or was it one of those soda cakes she makes so well? Fortunately, it was a cake for the kitchen, and the teeth were in the middle of a slice, so they weren’t damaged. But both the other maids gave notice and left at once. It was no laughing matter,” she ended reproachfully. “The house was full of guests, and I had to get new maids at a moment’s notice, and the boot-boy was making beds and the gardener washing up.”
“Oh, Granny, I’m so sorry!” cried Kate, unrestrained tears of mirth streaming down her cheeks. “It was a picture of the kitchen tea, with Florence’s dentures grinning at them all from a slice of cake that did it! You shouldn’t be so funny.”
“It will be far from funny,” observed Mrs. Barlas with a bitterness almost up to Cousin Charlotte’s standard, “if she serves them as a savoury this evening. I know Florence. Until she finds those—those damned teeth of hers, she will only be fit for a mental home. I shall have to go and see her.”
“I’m coming, too. I can’t miss this,” said Kate. “I promise I won’t laugh, Granny darling. You couldn’t be such a pig as not to let me come with you?”
But at sight of the scene of havoc in the kitchen, where drawers and cupboards had been torn open, and Florence, one hand still glued to her mouth, was scrabbling frantically among the contents of bins and boxes which stood empty on the table, Kate’s composure threatened to desert her. Only her grandmother’s ferocious look, her hissed, “Behave yourself!” made her gulp down her laughter and try to show a fitting severity.
“Now, Florence, what is this? Yes, I know you have lost them,” said Mrs. Barlas, as Florence, from behind her hand, made mumbling and unintelligible noises. “If you keep the things in their proper place, which is your mouth, you wouldn’t lose them. Have you looked in the coal scuttle?”
“Glug!” said Florence, nodding so madly that her cap fell over one eye and made her look wilder than ever.
“If ye please, mem,” broke in Nina glibly from the door leading to the scullery, where she, the open-mouthed Phemie, and Mrs. Pow’s May were all clustered, charmed spectators of this novel scene. “Me ’n’ Phemie’s looked under her pillow, an’ in amang the pitatoes, an’ a’ places, an’ we canna see them.”
Phemie and Mrs. Pow’s May gave vent to a burst of giggling, and Mrs. Barlas turned on all three of them.
“Why aren’t you girls doing your work?” she asked. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, standing giggling there. Off you go!”
“If ye please, mem, it’s eleeven o’clock,” ventured Nina.
“It may be midnight for all I care. You can’t have your cups of tea in this mess,” said Mrs. Barlas, such a martinet that Kate hardly recognized her gentle grandmother.
Without a word the three gathered dusters and brushes and faded away, and Mrs. Barlas resumed her one-sided examination of Florence.
“Not in the dust-bin? Thank goodness. You haven’t dropped them into the soup, I hope?”
“Glug!” said Florence, this time shaking her head as violently as she had previously nodded it. Her cap flew to the back of her head and hung there on a single hair-pin.
“Well, it seems quite hopeless,” Mrs. Barlas said at last, with a sigh of despair and exasperation. “You’ll have to do without them just now, Florence, and if you go to the dentist this afternoon—mercifully this is the day he is in Haystoun—he may be able to fit you with a temporary set. I’ll pay for them—” As Florence glugged and waggled her head in dissent: “If Mrs. Lockhart hears of this, I expect she will dismiss you, and I shall not blame her.”
Florence, with her free hand, flung her dirty apron over her head and sobbed behind it, and Kate, feeling that her grandmother was being really very severe indeed, was about to plead for the culprit, when, like a young horse galloping over a field, Phemie charged into the kitchen.
“Here they’re! See, I fund them for ye, Florence! Dinna greet, wumman! Here’s yer art teeth!” With a noble gesture she opened one red hand and flung a complete set of the most obviously artificial teeth Kate’s fascinated eyes had ever beheld on the floor at the cook’s feet.
Florence uttered a shrill cry, swooped on her recovered treasures, and all in one movement slapped them into her mouth, switched the apron from her face, and broke out volubly:
“The good God will reward ye for this, Phemie, that He will! And where were they at all, that I niver clapped me own two eyes on thim?”
“In the dust-pan!” cried Phemie triumphantly. “I heard a kin’ o’ a rattlin’ noise, and I luikit, an’ there they were. Eh, I’m that pleased, Florence. Ye were awfu’ hard up wantin’ them!”
“Well,” said Mrs. Barlas, “I hope this will be a lesson to you, Florence. See that this mess is cleared up before you and the girls have your eleven o’clock tea.” Her tone was once more mild. “How could they have got into Phemie’s dust-pan, I wonder?”
“Sure, it’s no wonder at all, ma’am,” said Florence happily, hurling tins back into cupboards at top speed and with deafening clatter. “Seeing I put thim there meself. Thinks I, it’s there they’ll be safe while I give me mouth a rest, for Phemie’s that thoughtful, if she sees thim she’ll niver cast thim out!”
4
“Well, you’ve been long enough in coming to see me,” said Mrs. Anstruther, as the grenadier showed Kate into the drawing-room at The Anchorage. “I began to think you had forgotten me altogether.”
“I know. It has been rather a long time, but it isn’t always easy to get away when one is a mere visitor,” Kate said, coming forward and kissing Mrs. Anstruther’s withered cheek. “Now I have been asked to stay for several weeks, at least until the boys go back to school, so Lucy feels that I can be left to amuse myself, I suppose. . . . Oh, how do you do, Miss Milligan? I’m sorry I didn’t see you before, but it’s so sunny outside that my eyes are dazzled.”
She shook hands with Miss Milligan, who had crept mouse-like out of a very large chair.
“Sit down,” said Mrs. Anstruther, “and tell me what you’ve been doing at Soonhope. Flora is dying to hear, too,” she added with a malicious side-glance at her other guest.
“One thing we did was to go to Pennymuir for tea the other day,” said Kate.
“Yes, Robin told me you had been up, with Andrew and the boys. How is the place looking? Like a pigsty and full of other people’s unwanted dogs, I suppose. You know I refuse to go there at all, while he persists in keeping that woman.”
Miss Milligan’s nose grew pink at the tip and quivered with excitement, scenting scandal.
“Oh, I don’t mean what you think, Flora,” said Mrs. Anstruther, and gave her sudden hoot of laughter. “The woman is his cook-housekeeper and it is all quite as respectable as you could wish.”
Then, as Miss Milligan, overcome with confused indignation, subsided, Mrs. Anstruther continued blandly, as if she and Kate were alone in the room. “A truly dreadful woman, my dear. The last time I went to Pennymuir she was intolerably impertinent to me, and I vowed that I would never go to the house again until Robin paid her off. But the creature is a termagant, and Robin appears afraid to tell her to leave. I’d do it with pleasure, but she wouldn’t take it from me.”
“Men hate changes, don’t they?” Kate suggested. “They always seem to prefer the evils that they know, even to possible unknown blessings.”
“Well, there’s one change I should like to recommend to my nephew,” said Mrs. Anstruther. “And that is marriage. It’s about time he took a wife. In another year or so he will be so encrusted in bachelordom that he will be a hopeless case. Even as it is, I pity any woman who marries him. What with getting rid of that MacOstrich and most of his dogs, she would have her work cut out for her.”
Kate said nothing, for this mention of marriage had brought to her mind the remembrance of Robin’s unhappy love-affair. Of course, it Mrs. Fardell’s husband were to grant het the divorce he had refused up to the present, she could be free to marry Robin. But how awkward a situation would arise if he brought her as his wife to Pennymuir! And Kate’s heart cried “‘No!” more loudly than any thought of the difficulties attending this possibility. Her silence was not noticed, and she blessed Miss Milligan for having piped up as soon as Mrs. Anstruther had ceased to air her views.
“Oh, surely, dear Mrs. Anstruther, you are being a little hard on your nephew. Such a charming man, I am sure anyone would be pleased to marry him.” And she darted a look at the unconscious Kate.
“Now, Flora, don’t talk nonsense. What do you know about Robin? Or about any man, if it comes to that?” said Mrs. Anstruther. She knew that she was being unkind, but she had endured a long session with Miss Milligan, and was thoroughly weary of her. Besides, her arthritic pains had been more troublesome than usual lately, and her patience and temper were equally short.
“Perhaps I had better be going,” said Miss Milligan with maddening meekness and long-suffering. “Mamma will miss me if I am not home soon.”
“Don’t forget to tell her that Kate will be at Soonhope for longer than she expected,” said Mrs. Anstruther.
“I won’t. And I hope, Kate, that you will be able to spare the time to come and see Mamma and me?” said Miss Milligan, eyeing Kate so intently that she made the object of her scrutiny feel acutely uncomfortable.
“Why has Miss Milligan taken to staring at me like that?” she asked impatiently as soon as the door had shut on the small, spare figure with the inevitable basket in one hand. “It is most embarrassing.”
“Oh, poor Flora, she has to have something to stare at,” said Mrs. Anstruther, a great deal more charitably than ‘poor Flora’ would have believed. “And it might as well be a pleasant-looking creature like yourself. But I did think that it was a peculiarly piercing look. Have you a guilty secret on your conscience? If you have, Flora will ferret it out for a certainty.”
Kate, on whom the effect of the leek-stealing and its consequences had worn off long since, denied possession of a guilty secret, and their talk presently turned to other topics. But when, after having had tea with Mrs. Anstruther, she started to walk down the road to Soonhope, she still could not shake off the unpleasant sensation which Miss Milligan’s gimlet-like, boring look had caused.
‘Even if she knew that I’d fallen in love with Robin—and she couldn’t possibly unless she was a clairvoyante,’ thought the puzzled and irritated Kate, ‘she’d have no business to glare at me as if I’d done something disgraceful.’ Then she told herself that she was bothering herself to a morbid degree about the opinion of a local busybody, and began to think of the approaching dinner-party. The principal guests, Sir Hugh and Lady Charteris, with their elder daughter Sybil and their son John, she dismissed with a careless ‘nice people!’ For her the guest of the evening was Robin Anstruther, and she wondered anxiously if he would like her in the leaf brown velvet dinner-gown, the new one which Granny had given her, which she thought so becoming. Then she remembered that he probably would never notice what she wore, for with his mind’s eye he must always see his love, Elizabeth. Kate’s first careless rapture was over now, and the pangs which follow that exaltation were upon her. She was very sober when she met Andrew in the hall, and he could not imagine what had made him think his cousin Kate good-looking. This evening she was really very plain indeed.
Kate, had she known what he was thinking about her, would have seconded it, unflattering though it was. She looked at her reflection in the mirror on her dressing-table, and made a disgusted face at it. Indeed, to be truthful, she so far forgot her age and sense as to put out her tongue, and then drew her brows right down to her eyes, shooting out her lower lip at the same time. The result was appallingly ugly, and she was startled and annoyed to hear a yell of laughter which told her that she had an audience. Whirling round, she saw Henry rolling on her bed in agonies of mirth.
“What a really horrible little boy you are, Cousin Henry,” she said. “And who gave you permission to creep into my room without knocking?”
“Now, Cousin Katy, be decent,” he implored her. “Do be decent. I did knock, but you were so busy making faces that you never heard me. So I thought I’d have a squint, and if you’d been in your under-fugs or your corset-cover, or whatever women wear under their dresses, I was going to steal modestly away, though I’ve seen Anne tons of times in next to nothing. I say! Could you make that marvellous face again? It was like a sick bulldog.”
“I could, bu
t I’m not going to, Henny Penny, And could you stop carousing on my bed?”
“Och, Kate, you might do it again, just once, to cheer me up. I need cheering up,” he added darkly.
“I’m sorry, but even for your sweet sake I won’t repeat the performance. Even in its hey-day that face was never made more than once a week.”
“When was its hey-day?”
“Oh, a long time ago, before you existed, if imagine such dim ages, when I was Leader of the Fifth at Saint Cymbeline’s,” said Kate, who was feeling better, improvising rapidly as she made up her face. “I used to be bribed to do it at mistresses who had incurred our displeasure. Ah, Cousin Henry, those were the days! I remember at the height of the great Boot-hole Riot, when the whole of the Lower Fifth was singing the Red Flag among the hockey-sticks in that subterranean retreat, and Miss Chipping Norton, the geography mistress, was sent to quell the disorder and fine each rioter ten Order Marks, I made The Face, and she swooned into a boot-hole. And when she did come round, she was a raving maniac. What do you think of that?” said Kate impressively, and waved her lipstick.
“There ought to be a girl who sneaked on the rioters to Miss Weston-super-Mare,” said Henry thoughtfully. “There always was in all the girls’ stories that Anne used to read.”
“Oh, you mean Matilda Ramsbottom? Yes, to be sure, she sneaked—(and the name was Chipping Norton, Henry. Miss Weston-super-Mare was the games mistress, and everyone adored her and used to hang about the passages for the exquisite pleasure of seeing her emerge with her hockey stride from the Staff Room after eleven o’clock milk and biscuits) but Matilda’s subsequent fate was so awful that I wasn’t going to sully your innocent ears with it. She was forced to eat the whole form’s share of Spotted Dog on the following Thursday, just before she played in the great match against Saint Perkin’s, and she burst in mid-field and the bits had to be sent back to her sorrowing parents in a hamper. They were immensely rich, and she was, of course, an only child.”
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