Jane was annoyed. The coffee stung where it had splashed her, and this man was a pest and a bore. “Do I look so bucolic?” she asked coldly.
“Is it necessarily bucolic to have an intelligent interest in your surroundings?”
From his tone she could tell that she had hurt his feelings, and this made her feel more kindly towards him. If he could be hurt, then he was not the man of brass she had imagined him to be, and it was inhospitable of her anyhow, to snub him in her own home. Slightly remorseful, she said the first thing she could think of, and only realized when the words were spoken that she had made an unfortunate choice.
“Why are you wearing your glasses when you can see perfectly well without them?”
“Miss Cranstoun, I wore them the whole time in the train,” he said, but courteously and without a smile.
Jane bit her lip, frowned, then laughed rather helplessly. “You win,” she said. “But if I admit to our—our squabble this morning, will you tell me why you’ve got them on now? Is it a disguise?”
“I’ll tell you, of course, without any admission from you. It appals me to have to meet batches of strangers, and they are a sort of protection to me.”
“You hide behind them? What a good idea. I think I’ll buy a pair myself,” said Jane.
“I’d like to apologize for this morning,” he said unexpectedly, for she had just been wondering if she should not, and had decided against it on the useful principle of never apologize, never explain.
“Oh, no, don’t. I was really very rude to you,” said Jane hastily.
“All right. I won’t if you don’t,” he said. “But to make amends I’ll tell you what I was watching. The blackcock were parading and fighting, spreading their fine tails, and the grey-hens looking on. It’s a sight I have often wanted to see and never managed until this morning.”
“Oh! And I disturbed them! What a shame. No wonder you were angry!” cried Jane, really distressed.
He gave her a curious glance. “And yet you’re not ‘particularly interested’ in such things, are you? The country to you means a place for golf and tennis, with bridge on wet afternoons?”
“Nothing of the kind,” said Jane indignantly. “That’s just plain suburban, and you know it! You are being really rude now, and I don’t like it at all.”
“I just wanted to find out whether you were speaking the truth or not,” he said coolly.
“And you think I wasn’t?”
“I know you weren’t. And that’s ruder than ever, isn’t it? Will you forgive me?”
“No. I don’t think I will. I hate being tricked and played with,” said Jane. “But I’m much more hopeful of your chances in this by-election now than before I met you. Even Danny Buchanan, who’s been trained by that foxy old Harrison, hasn’t your cunning in twisting words round to the speaker’s utter discomfiture.”
“What a left-handed compliment. Look here, I must be off now. To show that you have forgiven me, will you come out one morning soon and watch the blackcock with me?”
“Certainly not,” said Jane with dignity as she shook hands.
“I’ll ring you up about it.”
“Do. But I won’t come.”
“We’ll see. Good-bye for the present.”
“Good-bye,” said Jane with finality.
Chapter Four
ENFANT TERRIBLE
“Here they are!” called Love, flying across the hall and flinging the door wide open to the clear chill evening as the big claret-coloured car drove up with a scatter of gravel.
Jane, just a second behind her, could see her mother’s face, framed in fur, laughing as she stepped from the car. The amazing youthfulness of that pretty face, the almost childish contour of the softly-rounded rosy cheeks, was only emphasized by the snowy curls which looked as if they had just been powdered; the brilliant brown eyes had the depth and velvety softness of pansy petals. At first glance Helen Cranstoun looked a yielding, rather shy woman; but her chin had a firmness at odds with those pink rose-leaf curves, and there was a certain watchful alertness in the pansy eyes which they never lost entirely.
“Well, Love, my baby! Well, Janey darling, how nice to come home and find you both here!” said Lady Cranstoun in her deep but gentle voice, kissing them warmly. “We’ve had a wonderfully interesting time, haven’t we, Magnus?”
Sir Magnus had put his arm round Jane, who, in spite of her shortcomings, was secretly the best-loved of his children. She hugged him, liking the familiar tickling brush of his heavy moustache against her cheek, thinking with a pang, ‘He’s got greyer since I saw him!’
“Are you going out this evening, Jane?” he said, disappointedly looking at her navy-blue uniform and solid black shoes.
“Guides,” said Jane with a loud groan, “unless,” she added, brightening, “I could ring up Cathie and tell her I won’t be down to-night?”
“You can hardly do that, can you?” said her father doubtfully, and Lady Cranstoun chimed in. “No, Janey. It’s a very great pity that you didn’t think of changing the night of your meeting for once, but of course you must go. Cathie may be quite a good lieutenant, but it is hardly fair to ask her to take the Company meeting alone at such short notice.”
Always such decision, such sound sense! But Jane could not help thinking that if her mother, once in a while, had said: “Never mind the Guides—the Rural—the Nursing Association—this evening, dear,” she herself would be a great deal more enthusiastic about them.
She sighed, straightening her belt, twitched her hat forward, and said: “I must be off, then. I’ll be late for dinner.”
As she started she heard Love’s “Rather you than me, Janey!” and her mother’s gently reproving: “Love, dear—” and she could imagine that an argument on the pros and cons of Social Service might shortly be in full swing. However, for once she was out of it, she, the virtuous apprentice in spite of herself, swinging down the long drive on foot, heartily cursing all voluntary organizations and longing for the car. Love, if she had allowed herself to be mixed up in good works, would certainly have insisted on having the car; but, of course, the Guides and Cathie had to walk to the Church Hall where the meetings were held, and though they had only half the distance to go, in a place like Milton Riggend, so strongly Labour, some kind person would be sure to point out the difference between driving to a meeting comfortable, and trudging there, and would sneer at the Tory efforts to do good.
Passing the largest of the local public-houses, Jane saw to her amazement that two men who stood in front of its frosted glass door were Peregrine Gilbert and Danny Buchanan, the rival candidates. She bowed to both impartially without stopping to speak, then thought how idiotic she must look, bowing like that when she was dressed in her hideous though business-like uniform. That made her smile, and she hurried on to the hall in a better temper.
“So you won’t come in and have a pint with me and talk over old times?” Peregrine Gilbert asked again, after Jane had passed from sight. It seemed to him that the years had not dealt too kindly with his former batman. Buchanan must be younger than himself, but his thin clever face was deeply lined, there was a lot of grey in his dark hair. He was greatly changed from the stocky young private who had fought with him in the War that was to end war for ever.
“It’ll do me no good to be seen wi’ you,” Danny answered, biting back the ‘sir,’ which had sprung unconsciously to his lips. “You an’ me’s on different sides now.”
“Well, I don’t suppose it will do me much good to be seen with you,” Gilbert retorted.
“That’s no’ the same. Folk would think all the more o’ you for it, but they’d say I was betraying the Party.”
“Does it matter what people say?”
“No’ to the likes of you. But it does to me,” Danny said with a truth that Gilbert had to acknowledge.
“Well, I’m sorry, Buchanan,” he said. “By the way, do you still keep white mice? Remember the one you had in France?”
A smile creased the other’s lean cheeks. “Eh, ma wee mice!” he said, his accent broadening from the careful Board School English which he had so painfully acquired. “I never had anither like yon! I was awful’ te’en up wi’ ma wee mice!”
“Surely you haven’t still got it? A regular mascot, that mouse was—”
Danny Buchanan shook his head. “Na. She got oot ma pooch ae day when we were resting behind the lines an’ I never saw her mair.” His voice was mournful.
“Cheer up, man! It’s probably populated the whole of that French village with piebald Franco-Scottish mice by this time,” said Peregrine Gilbert.
“Nae doot. Aweel, there’s things o’ greater importance to worry over than mice in thae days.”
“We thought the mouse pretty important when we were stuck in those bloody trenches,” said Gilbert. “We were a bit like the prisoners in the Bastille, the mouse kept us sane.”
Danny looked at him gravely, almost pityingly. “Do ye no’ think, sir”—it slipped out this time and he never even noticed it—“that we were free then, whatever we thocht? That we’re prisoners now, and the world we’ve to live in’s the Bastille?”
Strange, uncomfortable words that rang in Gilbert’s ears long after he had parted from his fellow-soldier and political opponent, and was driving up the Craigrois to see the newly-returned Sir Magnus about one of his tenants, a farmer who was not giving satisfaction, and with whom Sir Magnus’s advice might help him to deal. There was something of the visionary about Danny Buchanan, doubly inherited, for his mother, Gilbert remembered hearing, had been Welsh to his father’s Scots. So greatly was he impressed by the words with which Buchanan had left him, that he repeated them to his host, when, having been pressed to stay and dine informally without going home to dress, the two men were sitting in Sir Magnus’s library beside a log fire, in that pleasant hour before dinner.
“Queer fellow, Buchanan,” said Sir Magnus. “A bee in his bonnet, of course, like all these honest Socialists, but he’s one of the few with no axe of his own to grind. I should be very sorry to see him in, and not only for your sake, Gilbert, but he’s infinitely preferable to old Harrison. It’s a thousand pities they can’t be made to see that the Conservatives are far more progressive than their own party, and that at bottom the aims of both aren’t so entirely different after all.”
It seemed to Gilbert that they were poles apart in outlook if not in actual policy, for the Conservatives still had the good old-fashioned idea of all for the people and nothing by the people; but his own ideas on the subject were too nebulous to permit of his arguing with Sir Magnus even if he had wanted to. He would be better employed in working up his own party’s policy and learning it properly, in order to confound questioners with a wealth of statistics when he was heckled at a meeting. So he sat quiet, watching his host’s big-nosed profile outlined against the window, and wondering how a man of Sir Magnus’s inconsiderable height should be so oddly impressive. It was the carriage of the head, he thought, or possibly the keen straight glance from piercing grey eyes, or the firm set of the lips beneath the sweeping moustache, grey like hair and eyes. Whatever the reason, there was a power in him that made him a man to be reckoned with no matter where he was. It seemed odd that he had never stood for the constituency himself. Strange that he and Lady Cranstoun should be the parents of such very mediocre children, thought Peregrine Gilbert, who had by this time met all four of them. The sons, ‘Maggie,’ as the elder was called, and Stair, were extremely ordinary young men, engrossed, the one in farming, which he was supposed to be learning in practical form on some Berwickshire farm; the other in his Regiment. As for the daughters—Jane, it seemed to him, had remarkably little to commend her except her love of the out-of-doors which she had denied so stupidly, and Love . . . He paused in his thoughts, realizing that Love, child and minx though she was, had a driving force about her not unlike that of her mother. It would drive her, quite possibly, in a totally different direction, but it was there. He decided that Love, at least, could not be dismissed as mediocre.
Love, who knew that he was in the house, and had no intention of being dismissed in any sense of the word, here poked her head round the library door, made an undutiful grimace at her father’s unconscious back as he sat at his desk looking for some papers on fanning which he was sure Peregrine would find interesting, and said: “Come on, Perry! Don’t sit stuffily in here. I haven’t anyone to talk to, and there’s sherry waiting to be drunk in the drawing-room.”
Peregrine, too much stunned at being addressed by his name in this chopped-up and mangled form to demur, followed her meekly through the hall, and found himself, almost without knowing how he had come there, in the wide, white panelled drawing-room.
“Have some sherry, Perry?” Love picked up the green Bristol decanter invitingly. “How silly that sounds: Sherry, Perry. Don’t you think so?”
Peregrine cleared his throat, found that he had recovered his voice, and said in his most formal manner: “Is it necessary for you to call me by that absurd name?”
“Not if you’ve got another,” Love answered promptly. “But Peregrine is such a mouthful, and I thought ‘Grin’ was really a little too like the Cheshire cat. Have you got another name? I’ll call you by it if you like.”
“I don’t see why you should call me by my Christian name at all, Miss Cranstoun.”
“My dear old stick-in-the-mud! Have you been asleep for a hundred years, or something? This is the twentieth century,” Love said pityingly. “No one has time for all these Misters and Misses nowadays. You must have heard that everything moves to a quicker tempo than when good Queen Vicky was crowned. Jane’s ‘Miss Cranstoun,’ and if you call me ‘Miss Love’ it will only confuse Gunn. Take a deep breath and try saying ‘Love.’ It’s really very easy.”
Peregrine stared at her and wished that he had put on his glasses. What a minx! If this was the result of sending girls to be finished in Paris, it seemed to Peregrine that they would be better left unpolished.
“It may be easy, but I have no intention whatever of calling you ‘Love,’” he said stiffly.
“Well, Magdalen, then, if you feel so shy about it,” said the abominable girl, pouring out sherry.
“Neither!” almost shouted the unhappy Peregrine, seizing his glass and draining it at a gulp.
“I wish Jane were here,” observed Love, drinking her sherry in small lady-like sips in a pointed manner.
“So do I,” said Peregrine with unintentional fervour.
Love’s face brightened. She leaned confidentially towards him. “I thought you’d miss her. You do prefer Janey to me, don’t you, Perry?”
“Infinitely,” said Peregrine, goaded into open rudeness. “‘And will you stop calling me by that absurd nickname?”
“It’s not a nickname, only a shortening,” Love explained in tones of weary patience. “But let’s talk about Jane. You know. Perry, Jane is a very ingenious girl, very ingenious indeed, though you mightn’t think it.”
“Indeed?” said Peregrine, thankful for this change of topic, but wondering what form this alleged ingenuity took. He could hardly be expected to know that the younger Miss Cranstoun had never been able to distinguish between ‘ingenious’ and ‘ingenuous,’ innocently and unobservantly supposing them to be the same word.
“Very ingenious,” Love repeated. She was pleased to have captured his interest at last, and in a subject towards which she particularly wanted to guide his thoughts. “She is quite a lot older than me, in years, but what do years matter? I feel,” she said with a heavy sigh of responsibility, pensively helping herself to more sherry, “as if I knew so much more than Janey, as if really I ought to be the elder.”
“Indeed?” Peregrine repeated his parrot-cry politely. He suddenly found, as a good many people did, that he had to struggle with laughter, but he did not want to offend this serious young creature by letting her see it, annoying though she had been about his name.
“Janey gives i
n to mother far too much,” went on Love, “and it’s quite ridiculous at her age. She ought to assert herself more, and someone will have to help her.” She fixed the shrinking Peregrine with a gaze which the Ancient Mariner could not have bettered, and added firmly: “I thought that you’d be the very person for that, Perry.”
“I?” said Peregrine, not even noticing in his agitation that she had once more used the horrible name by which she seemed determined to address him. “My dear girl, I hardly know your sister—the merest acquaintance—a newcomer to the district—feel sure she would resent such interference—” His incoherent murmurs died away, and Love continued to look at him pityingly.
“You’re shy,” she announced. “That’s all. I knew you’d have ten fits at the idea, but you think it over. Janey’s just your kind, and you’ll get on like a house on fire when you know each other better. And if you’re afraid that mother will object when you begin to take her out, or call to see her a lot, don’t bother about that. I’ll deal with mother.”
“I quite believe that you’d be equal to it,” said Peregrine with deep feeling. The programme which she had mapped out for him filled him with horror, and though he did not mean to see any more of either Jane or her terrible younger sister than he could help, he was afraid that it was going to be difficult to dodge the responsibilities which Love was laying upon him so calmly and firmly. Of course he would have to give up his frequent visits to Craigrois, and that would be awkward, since Sir Magnus had nominated him as candidate to the Committee, and was prepared to push him through the election. In fact, thought Peregrine irritably, once you got into the clutches of the Cranstoun family, your soul was no longer your own, far less your affairs. Sir Magnus had already shown signs of wanting to run Allander for him, Lady Cranstoun was more than willing to help with the interior decoration of the house, and now this brat was arranging for him to squire her sister. It occurred to him to wonder what the sister would say if she knew, and a faint feeling of sympathy that was hardly liking, began to stir in him for the unfortunate Jane. ‘She isn’t really as bad as the rest of them,’ he thought, ‘though I doubt if we’d ever want to know one another well. But she’s keener on birds and things than she’d like me to know. I’ll take her up to look at the blackcock. It will please her, and perhaps keep this awful child quiet for a bit.’
Love Comes Home Page 7
