This Merry Bond

by Sara Seale

  With a quick, unexpected movement he bent and kissed her and for an instant she yielded to an unexpected attraction she only half-understood and had never met until now. Then, with an instinct that was too quick to control, she slapped him hard across the face.

  He didn’t seem in the least disconcerted, but stood looking down at her, amusement only too plainly written in his eyes.

  “After all,” she said with a sort of frightened anger, “you’re just the same as any of the others and have to make love to the girl you see home.”

  He shook his head at her, his grave mouth relaxing in a smile.

  “I thought it was considered provincial to slap a man’s face these days,” he said very gently.

  The quick tears stung her eyes.

  “Chalk that one up, Simon Shand, and I hope you’re satisfied!” she cried.

  “Quite,” he replied. “I learned something I very much wanted to know. Good night.”

  He lifted his hat and went back to his car without a word of apology.

  It seemed to Nicky, on looking back, that these small incidents were cumulative, the insignificant pointers to the final relationship between the Shands and the Bredons. On the face of it, it seemed impossible to arrive at any workable understanding between them. The very existence of the Shands had rankled from the day when Nicky and her father had come home to find the Shand mansion overlooking the Nye acres in all its blatant ugliness. She could not at that time understand old John’s honesty, his dislike of humbug and hypocrisy. She thought with her father that the old man was an impossible boor, a moneyed tradesman trying to assert his own importance. It was pardonable to be rude to John Shand, for he had no manners himself.

  But Simon couldn’t be dismissed in the same category. Had he not been his father’s son, Nicky knew she would never have dared to be so insolent. Simon Shand was a thorn in the flesh, for he had a simplicity that was always to puzzle her. She had too little experience as yet with standards that were other than Bredon to recognize a quality in him that was greater than her own or Charles’s. She only knew that he had a knack of making her feel small and that he didn’t conform to what she deemed to be the Shand pattern.

  She sat on the floor one evening by her father’s chair and tried to argue it out.

  “What is it about us that riles old Shand so much, Charles? It’s obvious why he riles us, but I can’t see—”

  Charles laughed.

  “You’re a perfect example of the ruling classes, my sweet,” he said lightly. “Implicit faith in your own powers of rightness with never a thought to the masses!”

  “Oh, Charles, that makes us sound horribly self-righteous,” she protested, half-laughing.

  “Well, so we are. And so in his lower middle-class fashion is old Shand. That’s what makes him so impossible. Now the son’s a different kettle of fish altogether. Hilary’s right, you know; there must be some good blood somewhere. Probably the mother’s side.” “He’s just as self-righteous,” Nicky said sharply, then amended with reluctant honesty, “At least he’s so often right. Perhaps it isn’t the same.”

  “See much of him?”

  “No. I don’t think he likes me.”

  “Curious!” said Charles with mock irony.

  “Oh, he’s no different from the others really,” she was stung to retort. “You always said there’s very little difference between men where women are concerned, and you’re right.”

  “I see,” said Charles and shot her a quick look. “Do you like him, Nick?”

  “Not much. I don’t like any of the Shands. But the neighborhood seems quite ready to put up with the boots and shoes for the sake of an eligible bachelor. Liza told me that he’s made thousands out of the business since the old man gave up.”

  Charles sighed.

  “Yes. Between the two of them they’re worth a fortune. I could do with a quarter of it to set Nye to rights.”

  She hugged her knees to her chin in the firelight.

  “Are things bad just now darling?”

  “Pretty tight. Some more land will have to go if things don’t get better.”

  “Oh, Charles! Nye isn’t building property to be sold off in plots,” she said angrily.

  Impatiently, he shrugged still farther into the deep chair.

  “Don’t be a fool, Nicky! I don’t like selling land any more than you do, but bills have to be settled some time. Shand doesn’t want to build on his land, anyway.”

  “Shand again!”

  “Well, darling, he’s camped on our boundaries with the sole idea of acquiring most of our land, so he’s decidedly our best buyer.”

  She was silent, staring into the fire, but it struck her, not for the first time, that Charles didn’t greatly care what became of Nye. She knew he couldn’t sell the house, which was entailed, and that at least was one safeguard for the future, but he was so much a wanderer at heart that he could never love any one piece of earth sufficiently to make sacrifices for it.

  Almost as if he voiced her thoughts, he said: “You don’t really want to spend the winter here, do you, Nick?”

  “But Charles, we’ve only just come back!”

  “All right, all right. I just thought things were a bit depressing and we might go off somewhere until they get better.”

  She had a quick unfamiliar stab of fear.

  “Things aren’t really bad—not worse than usual, are they?” she asked and turned to look at him. But his face was in shadow and only his hands—long, narrow hands like her own—twisted and fidgeted in the firelight.

  “Oh, something will turn up,” he said in his old casual manner. “And after all, one’s got to take a chance. What have you been up to lately?”

  “Nothing much,” she answered, relieved at the change of subject. “Oh, I’ve been run in again, darling. I forgot.”

  “My good child, this must be about the tenth time,” said Charles impatiently. “How do you think it looks for a magistrate’s daughter to continually come up before the courts?”

  “Lucky for the magistrate’s daughter,” Nicky said unabashed. “They let me off lightly in consequence.”

  “Well, I’ll be surprised if you’re so lucky this time, my pretty. They’ve put old Shand on the bench since we came back.”

  “These Shands!” cried Nicky with exasperation. “I fall over them wherever I go! Anyway, he won’t dare make himself unpleasant.”

  But John Shand dared to make himself very unpleasant indeed. He made it quite clear from the start that his sympathies didn’t lie with the Bredons. They had got away with too much in the past, riding roughshod over the law and all the canons of society because everyone was too class-conscious to treat them like ordinary people.

  Perhaps the sight of Nicky defending her cause with a charm she would never have wasted on him otherwise went a long way to hardening the old man’s heart. Perhaps he saw the grin and barely perceptible wink that passed between father and daughter as Nicky finished speaking, and his choleric temper was roused, but the words which passed audibly enough between himself, old Colonel Evershot and Sir James Mosspaul were heated and violent.

  He argued, his accent becoming stronger than ever as he made his points, that there was too much speeding through the village, the children were coming out of school at the time—any one of them might have been injured, perhaps killed—and that if they thought because the defendant’s father was a magistrate she should be treated any differently from anyone else, he for one would, show them where they were wrong. He demanded the maximum penalty and delivered a blunt and lengthy reprimand to the defendant.

  Standing there before the bench, Nicky watched them all with amusement at first. Old Colonel Evershot, red and uncomfortable and avoiding her eye; Sir James, his pompous bluster pricked by the unexpected onslaught. She watched old Shand, and saw that Simon was like him in one thing—that direct, disconcerting gaze of shrewd blue eyes. But there the resemblance ended. John Shand looked what he was, a hard-headed north-
country tradesman who had built up his present position by that very directness and lack of compromise that carried his demands forward now.

  In spite of herself, she felt a fleeting admiration for his courage; then his blunt, contemptuous words began to sting her. Before she could stop herself, she was answering him back, and it wasn’t until she caught Charles’s disapproving eye that she realized she was contributing to a disgraceful public scene.

  Shand carried the day, as indeed in the face of what he had just said, no different outcome could have been expected. Nicky turned her back on the magistrates and immediately left the courtroom with her father. The smiles of her friends were not all sympathetic, and right at the back of the court she saw Simon, leaning against the wall looking at her curiously.

  The coffee room of the Nye Arms was empty when she arrived. It was late afternoon. The bar would be opening in less than an hour, and Nicky ordered herself some tea and buttered toast while she waited. Some of the gang would be sure to come along.

  She looked around the dark little room with its low, raftered ceiling and thought of the many parties it had witnessed. Twenty-first birthdays, and smoky sessions in the small hours on the way back from a dance. With a slight feeling of shame she remembered, the many times they had awakened the proprietor after he had gone to bed. Charles was his landlord, and because she was Charles’s daughter she supposed he hadn’t liked to refuse.

  She wondered, almost for the first time, how many people didn’t like to refuse her things because she was Charles’s daughter. It wasn’t a comfortable thought. Nicky suddenly realized that she wanted to be liked for herself.

  “Myself alone!” she declaimed aloud with memories of some comic song lighting an unsuspected streak of sentimentality in her.

  Someone came into the coffee room and she looked up quickly.

  “Oh,” she said disgustedly as she saw Simon standing in the doorway.

  “I saw your car outside,” he said.

  “Come to gloat?” she asked with her mouth full of buttered toast.

  “No. Simply to tell you one of your front tires is flat.”

  She began to laugh.

  “It’s perfect! You get a rise every time,” she said, and when he asked her what she meant she replied, “Nothing. Have some tea.”

  He hesitated. “Well—”

  “Oh, don’t if you don’t want to,” she said hastily.

  He smiled and sat down opposite her.

  “You are a silly child,” he said.

  “Child?”

  “Yes, child. You’re a frightful child at times. Why do you suppose you should have got off with a smaller fine than anyone else this afternoon?”

  “I always have before.”

  “But why? Think it out for yourself. The law isn’t constituted differently for one person more than another.”

  “Oh, don’t let’s discuss it. I’ve been enraged enough for one day as it is.”

  He looked at her thoughtfully and under his grave gaze she became suddenly restive.

  “Why do you look at me like that?” she demanded childishly. “Is my nose shiny or something?”

  “I wonder if at the bottom of your heart you really do think the world revolves entirely around the Bredons?” he said softly.

  She stared at him, blinking a little, and presently she said in a tone of voice: “That doesn’t sound very pretty. Is that you really think of me?”

  “That’s how you generally behave,” he countered.

  She pushed away her plate and let her tea grow cold. “I don't know what it is about you, Simon Shand,” she said, “that always gets me on the raw. And yet I believe—I believe I’d like you to like me.”

  She looked at his grave, still face and thought of him for once entirely divorced from, his family and his family associations. She wanted to say in spite of herself: “You are a real person—you’ve got something that I haven’t. What is it?” Instead she said: “I talk a lot of rubbish at times. You’re really rather an overbearing person, don’t you think?”

  He watched her flushed little face propped between her slender hands, her bright, tilted eyes appraising him with faint perplexity, and he smiled suddenly and rose to his feet.

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said pleasantly. “Not nearly so overbearing as you are. I’ll tell them about your tire on the way out. Good night.”

  “You haven’t ordered any tea after all,” Nicky said a little blankly.

  “I don’t want any, thanks. I think I hear your friends outside. Good night again.”

  He picked up his hat and went out, meeting Liza and Freddie Whiteman in the hall.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was Mouse who opened Nicky’s eyes.

  She was lying on her stomach in the old nursery one wet November afternoon, sticking scraps into an old half-finished book of her childhood.

  Mouse, knitting vigorously beside the fire, said suddenly:

  “Your father’s riding for a fall, Nicky.”

  “Do you mean that Mrs. Beamish he’s always around with?” Nicky said without looking up. “Oh, I think he can handle her.”

  “No, I didn’t mean Mrs. Beamish,” said Mouse with something like a snort. “I was referring to finance,” she continued with that occasional pomposity that always made Nicky laugh. “Nye’s in a bad way, Nicky, and your father’s more concerned than I’ve ever seen him.”

  “Nye’s been in a bad way so many times, darling Mouse. I don’t suppose it’s any worse than usual,” said Nicky carelessly.

  Mouse looked at the slim young body stretched at her feet and sighed. It seemed such a little time ago that another Nicky had lain there, a thin excitable child, her red hair falling over her face in wild elf-locks just as it did now. To Mouse, Nicky was still a precocious child, wilful, a little stubborn, her strange little heart as yet untouched.

  “This isn’t like other times,” she said, and her voice sounded tired and unlike herself.

  Nicky carefully pasted a highly colored kitten at a rakish angle in a corner of the book, then rolled over on to her back.

  “I believe you’re really worried, Mouse,” she said.

  “If things get any worse, your father will be selling Nye,” Mouse said bluntly.

  “We can’t sell Nye,” Nicky said automatically. “It’s entailed. Mouse—you don’t really think—”

  “I don’t think, my dear. I know, and so does the whole neighborhood. Bills will have to be settled some time, even if it means bankruptcy.”

  The room was suddenly very quiet and Nicky looked with frightened eyes upon the familiar surroundings. The worn linoleum, the dearly loved prints and the tiles in the old-fashioned fireplace painted with fairy-book characters. Outside the rain drove against the windows, and the firelight shone on Mouse’s needles clicking and twinkling in the dusk.

  “Is there really any danger?” she said in a whisper. “Mouse, you don’t think—”

  “I should talk to your father if I were you, Nicky. You may be able to think of something.”

  But when Charles looked into his daughter’s set, strained, little face, he said with affectionate impatience: “Who the devil’s been talking to you, Nick? We’re not down the drain yet, so take that starved-ghost look off your silly little mug.”

  Nicky relaxed and some of the strain went out of her face.

  “I thought Mouse must have been frightening me,” she said.

  “Blast her!” said Charles, but his brilliant eyes slid away from Nicky’s and wouldn’t hold her gaze.

  “Charles—” She snatched at his restless fingers and imprisoned them in her own. “You wouldn’t lie to me? I—I’d much rather know the worst!”

  “Darling, don’t look so gloomy! No one’s going to foreclose on the mortgage, if that’s what you mean.” He tried to laugh it off, but his eyes betrayed him. “Though I may as well tell you that I’ve got to raise five thousand immediately.”

  “Five thousand...” For a moment she was uni
mpressed. The sum didn’t sound so very large in comparison to Charles’s earlier gambles on the market. “Well, you can raise that, can’t you?”

  “And where from, my pretty? Out of my hat together with a few rabbits?”

  “Well, anybody would lend it to you. You’ve borrowed often enough before.”

  “I’ve borrowed too often,” he said with unwonted bitterness. He didn’t add that many of the loans hadn’t been repaid and he had at long last reached the limit of his friends’ endurance. “I’ve tried every soul I know, and can’t raise even a couple of hundred.”

  “You’ll have to sell the horses,” said Nicky in a queer taut little voice, but Charles withdrew his hands impatiently from hers.

  “Don’t talk such nonsense, Nicky,” he said. “What would be the good of that? Sell the best blood I’ve had in the stable for years. You’ll be suggesting I lease the shooting to old man Shand next.”

  “Well, we’ve got to do something.”

  He jumped up with a quick nervous gesture and began pacing. “I know we’ve got to do something. Don’t keep on telling me so. I’m not a half-wit!” he cried. “I’m nearly off my head as it is. This is the first time in my life I haven’t been able to raise the money somehow.”

  Nicky watched him anxiously. She had never before seen him so wrought up. She went to him and caught his shoulders between firm insistent young hands.

  “I’ll find a way,” she said with feverish intensity. “I’ll raise it for you. Don’t worry, darling. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “You? How can you raise five thousand when I can’t?” he said incredulously.

  “Never mind. I think I can. You’re not to worry. Everything’s going to be all right,” she said again.