Violet gave a final croak and said proudly: “I tried—hup—and tried—hup—to tell you to—hup—I’m quite all right—hup—now!”
“My poor carpet,” said Lady Cranstoun in a tone of patient sadness. “Ring for Gunn, will you, Janey?”
As usual, Gunn made one of her magic appearances before Jane had even reached the bell, with a cloth and a basin of hot water in her hands. Maggie stopped jumping about to grin at her.
“Gunn, you old sinner!” he exclaimed. “I always knew you listened at the door, and this proves it up to the hilt.”
“Now, Mr. Maggie, if you please, sir,” said Gunn with superb calm, “how can I get at the carpet with you standing right in my way? And it’ll be stained if I don’t mop it up this very minute.”
“Pah!” said Sir Magnus, and with a gesture which his delighted family had supposed confined to the stern sires of melodrama, tramped from the room.
“All he needs,” sighed Love rapturously, “is a horse-whip, and he’d be quite, quite perfect.”
“Magdalen,” said Lady Cranstoun, losing her temper for once, “you are an exceedingly tiresome, naughty girl, and I am most displeased with you.” She also swept out, to find her husband and try to soothe him.
“Well,” said Love, “the announcement of my engagement doesn’t seem to be one of our most striking successes, does it?” She spoke lightly, but her sensitive underlip, which so often gave way, quivered, and Jane saw that she was on the verge of breaking down.
“Come upstairs and unpack,” she said. “And Maggie can take Violet out into the garden to see if the plums are ripe.”
“Father is being pretty—pretty Victorian about this, isn’t he?” asked Love distressfully, as she stood by the window in her room, twisting and wringing a pair of gloves which she had idly taken up.
“Oh, well, I believe most fathers take that line on these occasions,” said Jane, who was unpacking quickly and efficiently. “They never seem to think it possible that their daughters will ever want to marry. I expect grandpapa was exactly the same when mother and father went hand-in-hand to ask his blessing. And—it was broken rather abruptly, you know, wasn’t it?”
“That great idiot Violet!” said Love angrily. “I really wished that she had choked on those cake-crumbs. She deserved to.”
“At least,” said Jane, “you have the relief of knowing that the news is broken. It isn’t still dangling over your heads.” She was hanging dresses and suits in the wardrobe, her face hidden from Love, her voice muffled as she added: “Poor Love! No one has had time to wish you joy yet, we were so completely taken by surprise. But I do, with all my heart.”
“Thank you, Janey dear,” said Love, and she sounded grateful if subdued. A quick glance showed Jane that she was still maltreating the gloves in her hand. “Tell me,” she said, more brightly, “have you been seeing much of Peregrine while I’ve been away?”
“Not more than usual, I think,” said Jane. “In fact, now that you speak of it, rather less than usual. The shooting season, you know. Men are hard to see once grouse and partridge can be shot every day.”
“You like Peregrine, don’t you, Janey? Don’t laugh. It’s important,” said Love.
“Yes, I do. He isn’t the dry stick I took him for at first,” Jane said frankly. “But why is it important?”
“Oh—” Love sounded vague. “He likes you, Janey.”
“That’s very nice of him. But how are you so certain of it?”
“Because he told me so, of course,” Love said, sounding surprised.
“Do put down those wretched gloves before you’ve mangled them beyond wearing,” said Jane, instantly sorry. For Love, tossing them on her dressing table, turned resolutely to her sister, who was sure she was going to ask a question which she did not want to answer: “Do you mind about John and me?”
She could see the words forming on Love’s lips, and hurriedly cried: “You untidy creature! Look at this clean silk shirt, stuffed in between two pairs of shoes! Didn’t someone pack for you?”
The diversion served. “As one maid was told off to look after Milly, Violet and me,” said Love drily, “you can imagine just how much attention Violet and I got. We both had to do our own packing.”
“I hope Violet’s efforts weren’t as deplorable as yours.”
“They were much worse,” Love assured her, “for she just threw everything in, and then sat on the lids till they shut by brute force. There are one or two advantages in being Violet’s size and weight, you see, even if John does prophesy that by the time she’s forty she won’t be able to get into any ordinary vehicle, and will have to travel on the back of an open lorry!”
“How very rude of John!”
“Janey, you will be nice to John when he comes, won’t you?”
“Of course,” said Jane coolly. “Why shouldn’t I be?”
She turned to leave the room. At the door she looked back, and Love had picked up the gloves again and was pulling and twisting them, her small face pale and strained.
“Guilty conscience. I suppose, silly child!” she said to herself with a sigh. “But surely she must realize, if she cares for him, that I’d much, much rather it was her than Kitty!”
Three strange days followed, days in which Sir Magnus shut himself up in the library to work at his book with an energy and diligence hitherto unknown; in which Lady Cranstoun, in the intervals of repeating pathetically, “Love is only a child!” gazed in a baffled way at Jane as if she wanted to say something, and did not know how to begin in the face of the resolute cheerfulness which Jane had adopted and wore like armour. Days when Love crept about the house and grounds, leaving the piano shut and her sewing-machine untouched; in which, as Maggie finally said in exasperation, after enduring this atmosphere for as long as he could: “The place is like a morgue, and there might have been several deaths in the house instead of an engagement, and Love is the chief mourner!”
He addressed this remark, to his sisters after luncheon, angrily lighting a cigarette as he spoke.
Jane said: “Don’t be silly, Maggie. It’ll be quite all right once John has seen father,” with a bright, artificial smile.
Love said nothing at all, but went quietly out of the room.
“There. You see?” said Maggie in gloomy triumph. “If she was going to be hanged on Saturday she couldn’t be more mouldy. I hope her young man enjoys it, that’s all I say. Rather him than me.”
“This is an awkward sort of situation for her,” Jane said mildly, “and you don’t make matters any better by teasing her, Maggie.”
“Pooh!—nonsense. Good for her,” he answered, but he looked a trifle guilty as he added: “I wonder where she’s gone off to now? Moping in some corner, I suppose. It would do her no harm to play tennis. I’ll go and see if she will.’’
“How can you play with your hand like that? Or is it only bad enough to keep you from going back to the farm?” asked Jane nastily.
He was undisturbed. “That’s it,” he said cheerfully and went away.
But a prolonged search of the house only revealed the fact that Love had gone out, and Maggie, angry and more uneasy than he liked to admit even to himself, took his gun to go out and pot at pigeons in the stubble. It seemed to him that there was something very far wrong with this whole affair. Both Jane and Love were behaving unnaturally, for the former should have been drooping, since John had been her young man once, he was sure; and instead, Love was acting like the rejected one, and Jane like nothing on earth. ‘I give it up!’ he said to himself with a shake of his dark head.
Love, in the meantime, was walking fast up the glen, her mind in a whirl of misery and indecision. John had asked her to marry him during a dance, when they were both excited by the music, the soft shuffle of rhythmically moving feet, and their own closeness. It had seemed romantic and right at the time, but she had hardly seen him since, and his leave-taking, under the eyes of his host and hostess and the malicious gaze of Milly Graham, had been b
risk and prosaic, as befitted a sharp sunny morning with a car waiting at the door. What would he be like when he arrived at Craigrois on Saturday? And what would she herself feel towards him? Her plans, so excellent in theory, were having a disconcerting habit of proving very difficult in practice. For the first time Love began to doubt the wisdom of trying to make the wheels go round, and the discovery that she might not be infallible was unpleasant and worrying.
“Oh!” she suddenly exclaimed. “This is too awful. What have I done?” and sinking down on a convenient mossy tree-trunk, she began to cry as energetically as she did everything else.
A robin left its twig to come hopping on tiny feet, its head cocked on one side inquiringly, to look at the enormous creature who sat huddled in a heap making such very strange noises; a squirrel, indignant that the peace of the afternoon should be broken in this fashion, chattered and scolded in the branches above her, hurling down bits of moss and stick to make his annoyance felt. But Love wept on. Even when the robin, startled by an approaching footstep, flitted away, and the squirrel, catching sight of another intruder, swung himself from the swaying tip of one leafy bough to a more distant tree, Love noticed nothing; and Peregrine Gilbert, walking softly through the wood, gun under arm, on his way to Craigrois to join Maggie at the pigeons, stood staring in perplexity at the sobbing figure of the younger Miss Cranstoun.
As it seemed probable that she would continue for some time—she showed no signs of stopping—and it would be brutal to leave her, he spoke. “What in the world is the matter?” he asked.
Because he was rather alarmed, not being accustomed to dealing with young women who watered the ground so liberally with their tears, he merely succeeded in sounding savagely angry.
“Oh! Oh! I’ve gug-gone and got engaged to J-John!” sobbed Love, not looking up, careless whom she addressed, lost to everything but her own woe.
“Well, surely that calls for rejoicing rather than tears, doesn’t it?” asked Peregrine sardonically. “You’ve worked hard enough to bring it off, haven’t you?”
“Bub-beast! Pig!” said Love brokenly and sobbed harder than ever.
“Yes. You’ve told me that bit before,” he said. “Let’s consider the preliminaries said and get down to it. You’re engaged to Marsh, and you find you don’t like it much. Is that it?”
“No, it isn’t. It’s nothing so simple,” sobbed Love. “I don’t know whether I like it or not. That’s partly what’s the matter! I haven’t had time to find out yet, and he’s coming on Saturday, and I d-don’t know what to do! I’m not even sure now that he likes being engaged. And please go away, you’re only laughing at me, and I can’t bub-bear it!”
“I’m not laughing,” said Peregrine, and though a smile flickered over his lean, watchful face, his voice was respectfully grave. “You’d better tell me all about it. Perhaps it’ll help.”
As she said nothing, he set his gun carefully against a tree-trunk, and sat down on the moss beside her. After an almost imperceptible moment of hesitation, he put his arm, tentatively and awkwardly, round her shaking shoulders. “Out with it. Why did you get engaged to Marsh, in the first place?”
“Because he asked me, of course,” answered Love, in a voice still broken with sobs, catching her breath childishly as she tried to strangle them.
“That’s not much of a reason, is it? If you don’t want to make your life a burden to you, you’ll have to learn to say ‘No.’”
“But I didn’t want to say ‘No,’” said Love impatiently. “How stupid clever people always seem to be!”
“Then—forgive me for seeming more stupid than ever,” said Peregrine drily, “but if you didn’t want to say ‘No,’ and have apparently said ‘Yes,’ why are you crying?”
“Oh, I can never explain,” sighed Love helplessly, and as she seemed about to cry again, he did not press her, but said hurriedly:
“Then don’t try. Let’s talk about something else.”
“All right. I want to ask you a question—a very important one,” said Love, sitting upright and sniffing hard. “Oh, dear, my hankie’s so wet that it only makes my poor nose sorer to use it.”
“Have mine,” said Peregrine, resignedly pulling a clean square of white linen from his breast-pocket. “Now ask me your important question.”
Love blew her nose, wiped her eyes, and said at once: “Are you going to marry Jane?”
“Marry Jane? Marry? Jane?” be said, utterly taken aback and almost stammering, his free hand flying to his forehead to feel feverishly for spectacles which were not there.
“That’s what I said. Are you going to ask Jane to marry you?” Love repeated slowly and distinctly, and added: “Because if you aren’t, I don’t know what I shall do. It makes it worse than ever!”
“I fail to see what business it can possibly be of yours,” began Peregrine, coldly furious now that his first embarrassment had worn off.
“Now, Perry, it’s no use talking to me as if I were a heckler at one of your political meetings,” said Love, roused from her depression by his resistance. “I told you it was important, and I must have an answer. For Janey’s sake,” she added impressively.
“If you didn’t appear to he serious, I should think that you were merely being damnably impertinent,” he said. “As it is, I can only suppose that you’re a little unhinged by your own troubles. If being engaged is such a trial to you, why do you want Jane to suffer in the same way?”
“It wouldn’t be the same,” Love answered, growing animated. “Janey knows I’ve made plans for her, and so I had to take John off her hands.”
“Your plan being that she should marry me?” he said. He sounded really very angry now, Love thought, and she began to feel a little afraid of what she had stirred up, but no one could ever have accused her of not having the courage of her convictions, and she met his stern look boldly and squarely in spite of her tear-swelled eyes.
“You sit there and tell me quite calmly that Jane knows of this—this preposterous plot of yours? That she deliberately allowed you to take Marsh off her hands, as you put it?”
“Of course not. Please try not to be so stupid Perry!” cried Love. “I never told Janey who I had picked for her to marry, I only sort of threw you together, and as for John, she didn’t know why I was doing that either. I don’t suppose she liked it, but it is all for her own good in the end, and I thought that she’d be quite comforted when you asked her to marry you. But she didn’t know all that. I told you she’s very ingenious indeed.”
“Well, I’m damned!” was all that Peregrine could find to say to this statement, so extraordinary as to be incredible to him, but evidently quite reasonable to Love.
“So, if you haven’t proposed to Jane yet, I hope you will do it pretty soon,” she pursued, and he realized with a sigh that he would have to give her a plain answer, even though he considered that she had been abominably officious.
“No,” he said, “I haven’t asked Jane to marry me, and you may as well know once and for all that I have no intention of doing so!”
“Not? You aren’t going to? Never at all?” cried Love, after a gasp of incredulous anger.
“Never. I like Jane far too well to want to marry her, quite apart from the fact, which you appear to have overlooked, that she doesn’t want to marry me.”
“Oh! It’s too, too bad of you!” And two fresh tears, of enormous size, rolled out of her eyes and splashed down on the moss between them, for she had pulled herself away and was looking at him as accusingly as if he had been a murderer. “After all the trouble I took with my plans!” sobbed Love.
“I warned you. You should have read what Burns had to say about plans,” said Peregrine.
“Horrible! Hateful! I loathe you!” she wailed. “I shall tell everyone I know to vote for Danny Buchanan! And what am I going to do about John now that Janey isn’t going to marry you?”
Peregrine had reached the end of his patience; he felt that this was unreasonableness carried to
its uttermost limits. “Do what you like,” he said shortly, leaping to his feet. “I don’t think for a moment that Jane will want Marsh back—if she ever really wanted him at all and the whole idea isn’t another figment of your fertile imagination. You’d better stick to him yourself. I shall send you a handsome wedding-present as a thank-offering, because if you marry a sailor, at least it will mean that you’ll be removed from the neighbourhood. I hope he will beat you, it would do you good.”
He snatched up his gun with none of the care observed when setting it down, and strode off through the wood to an indignant crackling of dry twigs under his hasty feet.
Love, mopping her eyes with his handkerchief, which she still held, found that they were now dry with rage. “Hateful, revolting, vile!” she muttered. “What beasts men are!” She rose and hurled the handkerchief violently from her. It caught in a low-hanging branch and hung there, a limp and unavailing flag of truce, while she rushed home, determined to be so loving to John that he would be in the seventh heaven of delight.
“I’ll show them all!” she muttered again, and ran straight into Maggie round a bend in the twisting path.
“My God!” said her brother kindly. “What a sight you are! Nose like a ripe strawberry, cheeks like a map with all the rivers marked in white on a dark grey background—”
“You pig, Maggie! I suppose my eyes are like boiled gooseberries, too?”
“As they’re so bunged up as to be quite invisible,” he retorted, “I can only hazard a guess that they are just like the fruit with which you’ve compared them. But come on, Lovey-dovey”—persuasively, taking her arm and turning her to get the best view of her ravaged and dirty face. “What have you been up to? If this is what being engaged does, take my advice and break it off!”
“It’s not that at all,” said Love mendaciously, though she believed she was only speaking the strict truth now, “I’ve been qu-quarrelling with Perry!”
She tore herself from his hold and ran on towards the house and the safe shelter of her own room.
Love Comes Home Page 22
