by Guy McCrone
Contents
Title Page
Introductory Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
By the Same Author
Copyright
Introductory Note
THE following pages were written to stand by themselves, quite independent of what had gone before. But this being my fifth Moorhouse book—there were three in Wax Fruit, and Aunt Bel made a fourth—I feel it is time I set down the pattern of the Moorhouse clan for those who may want to refer to it. I feel, too, that a note is better than a formal family tree, for thus I need not go into useless ramifications.
Here they are, then. When I give a number after a name this is to indicate the character’s age in the year 1900, which is when The Hayburn Family opens.
The elder Mungo Moorhouse, farmer of the Laigh Farm, Ayrshire, was killed in an accident in 1870. He left six children. Mungo, Arthur, Sophia, Mary and David were by his first wife. Phœbe by his second.
Mungo, 65 (the Ayrshire Moorhouse), farmer and landed proprietor, married Margaret Ruanthorpe, 61, only surviving child of Sir Charles and Lady Ruanthorpe of the Duntrafford estates in Ayrshire. They have one son, Charles, 21.
Arthur, 63, wholesale provision merchant of Grosvenor Terrace, Glasgow, married Isabella Barrowfield (Bel), 54. Their children are: young Arthur, 29, Isabel, 27, and Tom, 25. The first two are married.
Sophia, 62, married William Butter, 63, commission agent of Rosebery Terrace, Glasgow. Their children are young Wil, 37 (who married his cousin Polly McNairn), and Margy, 35, also married.
Mary, 60, married George McNairn, soft-goods agent, formerly of Albany Place, Glasgow, who died in 1880. Their children are George (Georgie), 35, John (Jackie), 32, and the twin daughters Anne and Polly, 26. Anne is unmarried.
David, 53, of Aucheneame House, Dumbartonshire, married Grace Dermott, 51, daughter of Robert Dermott, chairman and founder of Dermott Ships Limited. Their children are Robert-David, 20, and Meg, 14.
Phœbe, 40, married Henry Hayburn, 45, of Hayburn and Company, shipbuilders and engineers, of Partickhill, Glasgow. There was a stillborn child in 1880. Henry has a natural son, Robin, 19, whom Phœbe has adopted.
I would again remind my readers that all the above people and those who move through the pages with them are friendly shadows in my own mind. They have no other reality of any kind.
And for this book. I have taken the word Creole in its first meaning; that is, one descended from the French or Spanish colonists to those lands washed by the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean Sea. His blood is unmixed European, and he may be a person of much distinction.
G. McC.
Chapter One
HENRY HAYBURN, shipbuilder and engineer of the city of Glasgow, stood at the corner of St. Vincent Street and Renfield Street waiting for a tram-car to take him to his home out west.
The year was 1900 and the month was November. It was a drab, nondescript night, foggy, a little, and cold, with a threat of snow.
Henry, who was the master of a prosperous shipyard on the River Clyde at Partick, had found himself forced to come into the centre of the city late this afternoon to settle some transport squabble in the goods-office of a railway company, and, having on the whole been worsted in the settlement, was in no very good temper.
He stood now under the lamp at the stopping-place, a spare figure in an Inverness cape and a tweed helmet—strange coverings, perhaps, for a man of affairs, but ones which Henry was not to be kept from wearing—nursing his annoyance and waiting for the tramway-car to come.
“Paper, sir?”
Henry dug into a trouser pocket for the necessary coin, and received an evening paper from the urchin’s hand. He was glad to see that the car coming just then was half-empty. He need neither stand hanging on a strap inside nor go upstairs to the bleak inhospitality of an outside seat.
He jumped in, sat down, paid his money and opened his paper with a lack of interest.
The same news as the morning. The dragging South African War. The clothing factory of Mann Byars in Virginia Street had been gutted by fire. Failure of a great firm of brokers in New York due to defalcation. The ageing Queen’s health seemed to be precarious, but she was still giving audiences, was still seeking to do her duty.
Nothing fresh. He raised his eyes, looking for a moment at the others in the lighted vehicle. Men and women sat huddled in their winter coats and wrappings, anxious like himself to be home. Having nothing better to do, he looked once more at his paper. Advertisement columns. Short paragraphs of comment. City entertainments.
A short poem of three verses. He looked through it idly. He knew nothing about poetry, but it seemed all right to him. Though why a commercial paper such as this should want to publish lines about the rattle of November leaves being the death-rattle of the dying year, he could not see.
Henry looked at the name printed beneath the lines, then folded his paper and stared once more about him. His mind was still given mainly to his altercation with the railway officials. The name of the writer of the verses was, indeed, so very familiar to him that he had quite failed to take it in. But now it began to penetrate.
Quickly he snapped the paper open again. Yes, there it was! Robin Hayburn! The name of his own son. With quick annoyance Henry folded it into a hard square and sat staring at the poem. One or two nearby passengers wondered for a moment at the flush of intense displeasure on the lean, clean-shaven face of this odd-looking, tweed-clad man.
What the devil was Robin up to? Writing penny-a-line trash for an evening rag like this! Or, indeed, writing for anything at all! What was his own son doing writing poetry? And putting his name to it! Robin was nineteen now, and a man. He was quite a good student and, if he would learn to give his mind to things a bit more, he had the makings of quite a good engineer. Henry crammed the paper indignantly into his pocket. He would see his son about this. It was beneath the boy’s dignity, if it was nothing else. Beneath the dignity of the name of Hayburn!
The tram ran on. Between the bright lights of Sauchiehall Street. Through Charing Cross. Past the handsome terraces known as “The Doctors’ Row”, since Glasgow’s medical specialists were, as now, gathered together into this quarter. Then on, farther westward, clanging its bell and running faster as the traffic became less.
Henry Hayburn sat staring before him. Robin. He wished that Robin were stronger. He didn’t want a delicate son. A boy should have a good, hard body at nearly twenty, so that he could get on with his training and stand correction. Delicate young people, especially if they were a bit smart, could use their disabilities to slip through the fingers of discipline.
He remembered that Robin had not come down to breakfast this morning. He had been forced to hurry off before he had discovered why.
A quick stab of apprehension drove itself into the bowels of Henry Hayburn, for he loved his son. Could something really be wrong with Robin? Was this persistent coughing more than the remains of a drawn-out, common cold? Should he take the boy to see a doctor?
But as Henry trudged the last part of his way home under the dark, leafless trees to his villa in Partickhill, his
mind came back to Robin’s verses. Ill or not ill, he was going to tell Robin what he thought of this poetry-writing.
Robin was the son of one Glasgow engineer and the grandson of another, the heir to a great tradition. It was in the direction of engineering that his star lay, and he would not be allowed to forget it.
II
The carpeted entrance hall was warm and quiet as he shut the front door. It was dimly lit by a shaded oil lamp. There was no light from the landing upstairs. No light on the staircase itself. No sounds came from the kitchen quarters.
The grandfather clock beside him began to strike. Henry stood in the middle of the hall until it had finished striking six strokes.
Again there was silence. Where was everybody? On another evening he would have made nothing of this. He would have hung up his outdoor things and shouted to discover his wife’s or his son’s whereabouts. But now his mood would not let him.
He crossed to the door of his study and threw it open. A great, heaped fire was blazing, filling the room with a bright red glow, lighting up his shelves of books, outlining his work-desk and gleaming on the worn leather chairs. For a moment he did not see his son standing there to one side of the fireplace, an arm on the mantelpiece, his brow resting upon it, his gaze turned to the dancing flames.
As Henry shut the door behind him, Robin raised his head, turned round and said: “Hullo, Father.” His shape was outlined by the firelight now. It was the shape of a tall, too-slender young man in a box jacket.
The fragility of his look had some effect, perhaps, upon his father’s first words. Instead of exploding, as he might have done, all Henry said was: “Hullo. Have you been at the University today?”
To Robin, his father’s voice sounded sharp and threw him on his guard. He shook his head and merely said, “No.”
“Not feel well enough?”
Robin put back a strand of dark hair, that had fallen on his brow, and once more said, “No.”
Still in his rough cape, Henry stood looking at his son. The boy’s handsome features seemed white and, somehow, weary. But he couldn’t quite tell in the firelight. “What are you doing in here?” he asked, rather to make Robin talk, than because he wanted to know.
“Warming myself.”
Robin was in one of his defensive moods—moods that made Henry angry. Now he drew the hard square of folded newspaper from his pocket. “Look here, did you write that?”
Robin took it from him, read it, smiled with pleasure at seeing words written by himself standing there for the first time in print and said: “It’s got my name underneath it, hasn’t it?”
Henry hated the boy’s smile. He hated the look of pleasure. He had expected somehow that Robin would look embarrassed and caught. And here he was, pleased with himself!
He turned to fling off his heavy cloak, then faced his son. “Well, once and for all. We don’t want cheap scribblers in this house! Penny-a-liners!”
“But I’ve got to begin somewhere.”
“Begin? You’ve got to stop! Now!”
Robin stood crestfallen, his hair down on his brow again, staring ruefully at the little poem of three verses in his hand. He thought of the enthusiasm, the dear trouble that had gone to the making of them. And the paper had liked them and published them! He had worked hard at these twelve lines. Moved words back and forth. Tried others. Laboured to get them smooth; to express exactly what he felt.
“It’s the University that’s your affair! You’ve a career to study for! Not this nonsense!”
Without raising his head, Robin said: “I would like to show this to Mother.”
“Rubbish!” With an impatient gesture, Henry Hayburn snapped the paper from his son’s hand and thrust it into the fire. For Henry the action was nothing more than a gesture of extreme but temporary irritation.
To Robin Hayburn it was something quite other.
They were standing facing each other, the boy’s face hot with something very near to hatred, the man still angry but self-conscious, and now, perhaps, anxious to defend what he had done; when once again the study door was opened, and Phœbe Hayburn, his wife, stood there, a slim figure with furs drawn about her shoulders. Her face, too, seemed white in the red glow of the firelight. Her strange, slanting eyes, big with anxiety, reflected its flames.
“Hullo, I thought I heard someone in here. What is it? Is anything wrong?”
Neither answered this question. But the tension relaxed as they dropped their eyes and turned towards her, shamefacedly, as it seemed to her now. She came into the room, taking off her furs.
“I’ve arranged for you to see a specialist tomorrow, Robin,” she said. Then, turning in deep concern to her husband: “Has Robin been telling you what happened last night, Henry?”
Chapter Two
IT was the following afternoon. Robin dumped the pile of obsolete Punches together, set them straight on the shining table and got up.
The black marble clock on the black marble mantelpiece of the sombre waiting-room chimed the three-quarters. They had come at three. Since then he had undressed, had been examined, sounded, and Heaven knew what else, had put on his clothes again and forthwith been banished in here. Now his father and the consultant doctor were discussing his condition.
Robin began pacing the thick Turkey carpet. No. Three-quarters of an hour wasn’t much for all that. Nerves were making him impatient. He wasn’t well, of course, but he would be all right. Anyway, he had better await the verdict before he allowed himself to think anything silly.
At a window he stopped to look out. Already a thin curtain of Glasgow fog was threatening to shorten still more the short November day. No. He mustn’t think anything silly.
But now, intensely conscious of himself, he drew a hand from a trouser pocket and fell to examining it. Did it seem transparent? Did the veins show blue through the skin? Didn’t other young men of twenty have stronger, browner hands? He spread out his fingers, noting, not for the first time, that they were long and thin, with odd, spatulate ends. Last year an arty lady, reading hands at a church bazaar, had told him he had the hands of an artist, that he felt things more intensely than most. This had been meat and drink to Robin’s self-awareness, his secret hopes, his vanity. Remembering her words, he smiled a little, put his hand back into his pocket and began once more to pace the room.
But now he could hear a door-handle turn and the doctor’s voice say: “Well, you’ll tell the laddie’s mother just what the trouble is, Mr. Hayburn. And what I’ve advised you to do.”
The doctor was professionally cordial as he helped this important Glasgow engineer into his Inverness cape, and his son into his overcoat, while the attendant maid, whose duty it was to do these things for lesser patients, was allowed merely to stand by and presently to throw open the front door.
“Dear me, Mr. Hayburn! Do you mean to tell me you’ve got one of these things? Well, don’t go and blow yourself up!”
Just across the pavement, at the doctor’s carriage-stone, a French automobile was standing, a strange horseless vehicle like a large open chair on wheels with a seat of buttoned upholstery, gig-lamps and a steering-bar.
The doctor put a friendly hand on Robin’s shoulder.
“You’re a brave boy, Robin, to let your father drive you about in a thing like that.” Then, answering a look in the young man’s face: “I’ve been telling your father what I think. He’ll let you and your mother know. Mind now, it’ll be all right.” He turned to shake a quizzical finger in the direction of Robin’s father, who had, by this time, mounted his motor-car and sat resting his hands on the steering-bar. “Now, Mr. Hayburn! Just you remember that ten-mile limit!”
And presently, on this second grey afternoon, Henry and Robin Hayburn were to be seen making their progress out of Woodside Terrace, along the farther end of Sauchiehall Street, past the West End Park—its grounds already desecrated by scaffolding and other preparations for the great exhibition that was to be held in the coming summer—past the ne
w Art Galleries, not yet open, and on, up into Partickhill, the strange petrol carriage spluttering as it ascended.
Immediate curiosity about his condition had left Robin. He did not know why. His father seemed tense, somehow. Thus Robin was content to sit beside him saying nothing; content to wait until a joint explanation should be given to his mother and himself. It would be better to receive the doctor’s verdict at the same time as she did.
II
“Hullo, Phœbe! I’ve just run up to ask for Robin. How is he today?” Mrs. Arthur Moorhouse closed the door behind her and crossed the Hayburns’ Partickhill drawing-room.
Bel Moorhouse was a woman of fifty-four, handsome, carefully corseted and smart. Following the dictates of the infant century, Bel, always careful of fashion, wore a very wide cinnamon-coloured coat, its collars and cuffs of lavish sable. Her hat was a small affair of brown ostrich feathers, and she carried a small round muff. These things suited her. They underlined the fact that Mrs. Arthur Moorhouse was a person of some importance. Her figure, as she bent to kiss this sister-in-law she had come to see, might be none too flexible, but at least it was regal. Yet, if tight lacing and an instinct for right deportment had made Bel’s movements formal, there had been nothing of formality in her voice, nothing, indeed, but affectionate concern, as she asked Phœbe Hayburn her question.
Phœbe did not reply. With a quick “Hello, Bel” and a motion that almost seemed like a drawing-away, she turned and moved across to a window.
Unperturbed by this, Bel sat down in a fireside chair, opened her coat, laid aside her muff and pulled off her gloves, all the while contemplating Phœbe’s back as she stood staring out. Phœbe seemed upset by her question. It must be serious with Robin. Queer creature, Phœbe. She always behaved oddly when she was in trouble. And she was so hard to get at. So hard to comfort. Bel had known this half-sister of her husband’s since she was a child of ten; had brought her up from then, indeed. But even now she could not claim quite to understand her. Yes, a strange girl.
