“I know she’ll say yes.”
Callie didn’t have to ask. Awdry did so, enthusiastically seconded by Juliet and Mona, and Uncle Fred said:
“We can none of us imagine why any of you want to see one another again, but I daresay it can be arranged.”
And Aunt wrote a note, that was to be given to Mrs. Geraldine by Juliet, who was allowed to go with the pony-cart so as to be company for Uncle Fred on his return journey.
Callie envied her passionately until Elisabeth, saying goodbye, whispered:
“I wish it was you who was coming instead.”
(3)
One of the nicest things about Awdry and Juliet, Callie felt, was that they were not in the least jealous of her having Elisabeth for a best friend.
They just seemed to take it for granted.
They liked Elisabeth, too, and were always ready to walk to Culverleigh Woods and meet her and Bella there.
St. Martin’s summer had set in, and it was so warm that they could still sprawl on the thick dry moss under the beech-trees, scooping up handfuls of rustling leaves and stirring up the ants’ nests with twigs in order to see the ants scuttling about in dismay.
Sometimes they all kept together, and sometimes Callie and Elisabeth wandered away by themselves whilst the town-bred Bella made vigorous and conscientious efforts to learn how to climb a tree, encouraged by Juliet above and Awdry below.
Elisabeth knew far less about life in the country than even Bella did, but she seemed more at home there. Perhaps it was because she did not try to climb trees, or do anything else for which she had neither aptitude nor training.
Callie thought her more and more wonderful.
One day Elisabeth brought her a present.
It was a little pale-blue enamel locket, with a tiny hole in the middle where, said Elisabeth, there had once been a pearl but it had dropped out.
The locket was shaped like a heart and could be opened.
Inside it were some uneven little ends of pale-brown hair that Elisabeth had not very skilfully chopped from her head with Mrs. Umfraville’s gardening-scissors.
“I love it better than anything I’ve ever had in my life!” Callie cried.
“I wish the pearl was still there, but it fell out a long time ago and was lost. I’ve had the locket ever since I was quite little.”
“Is it all right for you to give it away? Won’t your mother mind?”
Elisabeth shook her head.
“No. She’ll understand. I did want to give you something I was fond of; I think that’s much nicer than a bought present.”
Callie was speechless.
She knew that she would never have thought of anything like that—she had already decided to spend all her money on a bought present for Elisabeth—but after what Elisabeth had just said, she realized that her way was the only way in which to give a present to somebody one loved very much.
“I’ll always keep it, all my life,” she said solemnly. “And we’ll write to each other.”
“And never forget each other.”
“Oh no, no! But I wish you weren’t going away.”
“So do I,” said Elisabeth mournfully.
“But you’ll come back, won’t you? Mrs. Umfraville is always having Bella back again.”
“Bella’s father and mother are quite rich. We’re not.”
“But I’m sure she’ll ask you again, too,” Callie asserted confidently. She felt it would be quite impossible for Elisabeth not to come back, when they both wanted her to so dreadfully. God was usually kind, about giving one what one asked Him for. Nor did one have to have the faith that would move mountains, as Callie knew well. Quite a little faith seemed to do a good deal.
“It’ll be all right,” she repeated. “I know you’ll come back.”
“Mother wants to, as well. She told me so. I’ve hardly ever heard her say she wanted to come back to any of the places we stay at. Usually, she never wants to see them again.”
“Why?”
Elisabeth shook her head.
She looked sad.
Callie knew that Elisabeth worried dreadfully about her mother, because she had so little money and nobody to take care of her. There had even been moments, of which Callie was terribly ashamed, in which she had felt rather jealous of Elisabeth’s devotion to Mrs. Geraldine, although she knew perfectly well that one ought to love one’s mother more than anybody in the world, and that everybody, of course, did.
She herself, having no mother, was able to love Elisabeth best.
It came as a great surprise to Callie, that very evening, when Aunt, coming in as usual to tuck her up in bed and look at the sleeping Mona, said:
“You’re very fond of Elisabeth, aren’t you?”
Callie nodded, speechless.
“Well, she’s a very nice little girl. We might perhaps be able to have her to stay, one day. But don’t forget she doesn’t live down here. She’ll be going away soon.”
“I wish she wasn’t.”
“I know. That’s really why—Well,” said Aunt, “it isn’t much use to put too many eggs into one basket, I’m afraid.”
“What does that mean?”
“That if you drop the basket, or it gets broken, all the eggs get smashed, and if you think too much about one person and get too fond of them, and then they have to go away or something, you feel as if you hadn’t got anything left at all. It isn’t always true, but that’s what you feel.”
Callie, sleepy but interested, understood her with an effort.
“But, Aunt,” she said, “can one help it, how much one loves somebody?”
“As a matter of fact, one can’t,” admitted Aunt. “And that, I suppose, is the start and the finish of it. Still, I just thought I ought to warn you.”
“Thank you,” said Callie meekly.
But she did not take the warning very seriously.
Old people always said things like that, just because they were old.
Chapter VII
(1)
Uncle Fred, week after week, stayed on at Rock Place and played the piano and called upon everybody in the Culverleigh neighbourhood, making himself so popular with the Misses ffillimore that they, or their brother, provided him with a mount whenever he elected to go out hunting—and played card games or the Race Game every evening with the children. At intervals he said that he must—positively must—go and see about The Grove. He’d come home for that, practically.
Uncle Tom, who was very hospitable, always replied: “No hurry, surely.”
Aunt Fanny said the same.
And Aunt, who would have to go and see about The Grove too, because it really belonged to her, never seemed to say anything about it at all, though Callie had a feeling that this wasn’t because she’d forgotten, or wasn’t interested.
Then, suddenly, in the first week of December, it appeared that they really were going.
“But you needn’t be away more than a day or two,” pleaded Aunt Fanny. “You could stay at the Hotel in Chepstow, and drive over there and then settle everything with old Joe Newton quite quickly.”
“I wonder whether one couldn’t do it all by letter,” said Uncle Fred, who was never seen to put pen to paper. “Upon my word, I don’t really see why not.”
“Fred!” cried Aunt, her voice expressing consternation.
“Oh, all right, dear. I’ll go if you like.”
Next day, however, Uncle Fred was again vacillating.
“Very well. I shall go by myself,” said Aunt.
“We might both go in the spring.”
“No, we mightn’t. Cousin Joe Newton isn’t getting any younger, and he’s worrying about it, and besides, I want to know how I stand. It’s all so unbusinesslike.”
“How easy it is to see that you’re not a Lemprière, Kate.”
Callie wondered what he meant until she remembered that Uncle Fred and Aunt were not really brother and sister, but only half.
She also remembered the water-colou
r sketch that she had seen of The Grove and Aunt Fanny’s explanations, and all of a sudden something seemed to drop into place in her mind with an almost audible click.
“I was born at The Grove, wasn’t I? Wasn’t that the place where I was a baby, before I went out to Barbados with Grandmama?”
Aunt nodded.
“And I can’t remember it one bit,” Callie said regretfully. “I wish I could.”
“You’d better come along too. Or better still,” said Uncle Fred, “go instead of me.”
One knew that he didn’t really mean it. Callie only wished that he did.
To her unbounded astonishment Aunt Fanny, in her deliberate way, announced slowly:
“I think Callie could quite well go. Why don’t you take her with you? She ought to visit the churchyard at St. Brinvels, and see the old place before it changes hands. And Cousin Edith would like to see her.”
The churchyard? thought Callie, confused. Then she remembered that Grandpapa and Grandmama Meredith were buried there, and her mother, who had been killed in a carriage accident and whom she could only think of by her romantic name of Rosalie. But she couldn’t feel that she wanted to be taken to South Wales merely in order to look at dull gravestones in a churchyard. She just thought it would be fun to have a holiday from lessons, and to see the fine house and garden of the water-colour sketch.
(2)
Incredibly, Callie did go to South Wales.
Uncle Fred, after pulling out an enormous carpetbag and looking at it despairingly, announced that he couldn’t really face the journey at the moment.
“Better take the hobgoblin. She’s dying to go.”
Callie heard no more, for she was sent up to the schoolroom while the question was, presumably, discussed.
By evening, Uncle Fred had resigned himself to starting the very next day and Cora and Aunt between them had packed the carpet-bag. But Aunt said to Callie:
“You’re coming too. Aunt Fanny thinks you ought to see the place, and perhaps you ought.”
Callie looked up anxiously, pleased, but wanting something more.
It came.
“And I’d like to have you,” said Aunt. She paused for a minute or two and then added: “You don’t know much about your mother, do you? Perhaps I’ll be able to tell you something more about her, there. And Cousin Edith Newton, who lives at Chepstow, knew her quite well. She’ll like to see you. She knew your father, too.”
“Was it old Cousin Edith’s father who captained the Newton Players when Uncle Fred used to play cricket there?”
“It was her husband—Cousin Joe Newton. You’ll see him, too.”
“Is he still alive?” cried Callie, astonished. “He must be fearfully old.”
And after all, they started without Uncle Fred. He sent down a message to say that he had overslept and would certainly follow them to-morrow.
“Or what about a later train?” Aunt Fanny asked. “You could wait for the afternoon one.”
But at that Uncle Tom put down his foot. All this chopping and changing, he said, had got to stop. The carriage had been ordered—was practically at the gate—and it must now take them to the station, and no more nonsense.
Fred could do as he liked about following them.
“You’ll get more help out of Callie than out of that lazy fellow,” said Uncle Tom, much more severely than he usually spoke.
“He can’t help it. And I daresay he’ll turn up there in a day or two,” Aunt said, and at almost the same moment Aunt Fanny observed leniently that no Lemprière ever worked, and Tom mustn’t be hard on Fred.
Awdry, Juliet and Miss Tansfield waved from the garden gate, and the carriage drove away towards Culverleigh station.
(3)
It rained and it rained and it rained.
Chepstow Castle, pointed out to Callie by the head waiter in the hotel where they stayed, was only visible from time to time when the white fog that shrouded everything cleared for a moment.
White fog rose up from the river and swirled round the larch-woods and the hills, of which the tops remained invisible.
“It may have cleared by to-morrow morning,” Aunt said.
But it hadn’t.
They were still sitting at breakfast in the coffee-room, surrounded by brass and pewter and oak, and with coloured sporting prints on the walls, when the waiter—the one who had told Callie about Chepstow Castle—informed Aunt that Mr. and Mrs. Newton were downstairs asking for her.
Aunt jumped up, shaking the table so that her coffee-cup spilled over, and went out of the room without a word. Callie, eating toast and marmalade, thought about Elisabeth.
They wrote to each other—Elisabeth didn’t have time, she said, to write quite as often as Callie did—and there was a hope that she might be coming down to Devonshire again for Easter, although that seemed a long way off.
Callie was absorbed in wondering what she could give her for a Christmas present. She dreamed of finding something so wonderful that it would be perfect—but in her waking hours she couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t just ordinary and dull.
Never, never could she have a marvellous idea like Elisabeth’s own idea, in giving her the blue locket. Callie carried it in her pocket, because she hadn’t got a chain to put round her neck—and anyway, if she had, the others would have had to know about it—and she often held it tightly in her hand, loving it.
In came Aunt once more and with her were an old lady and gentleman, very like one another. They were both small, and wrinkled, and wore brown clothes—only the old gentleman had a yellow waistcoat, and the old lady a very hard-looking hat, tipped over her eyes and with particularly huge black jet hatpins sticking out on either side of it.
“Callie,” said Aunt—and Callie got up and shook hands with them.
The old gentleman said: “Well, well, well. I’m glad we’ve got her in England at last.”
(But one had been in England for ages!)
The old lady looked at her very hard, but she was smiling quite kindly.
“Kate—I believe she’s like you. She’s not like anybody else, is she?”
“No,” said Aunt.
“A little look of Lucy, perhaps. But no—I don’t really think so. Just a family likeness, perhaps.”
Then they sat down and had some breakfast.
Callie was able to go on thinking about Elisabeth’s Christmas present most of the time because they just went on talking to one another. It was about The Grove, and Uncle Fred—“Where’s that lazy, idle fellow?” asked old Cousin Edith—and somebody whom they spoke of as Poor old Johnny, and whom they were to see later.
But presently Cousin Edith Newton turned to Callie, and began to ask her about Rock Place.
She knew all about the names and ages of the others, and said she remembered Cecil and Awdry when they were babies.
“And you too, of course. In fact, I knew Aunt Kate when she was a baby.”
“Aunt?” said Callie, astonished. “Not really?”
The others all laughed and Aunt said:
“Cousin Edith, you know I’ve been ‘Aunt’ ever since Cecil was three years old. Tom and Fanny and everyone—they all call me just ‘Aunt.’ I like it,” she added.
Callie remembered this part of the conversation because of Aunt’s having said “I like it” as though she might, perhaps, not have liked it—though why?—and because of the rather odd way in which old Cousin Edith looked round through a pair of glasses on a tall stick, staring at Aunt, and ending up with a shake of the head.
Soon after breakfast they went, in a closed fly, out to The Grove. It had to be closed, because the rain was still streaming down.
The white mist, however, had lifted and Callie could see the most enormous rocks on either side of the road, and above them tall slopes thickly wooded with larch-trees. There were one or two houses perched on the hillsides, and when they had left Chepstow quite behind them the glistening mud on the river-bed disappeared, and there was the water, ra
pid and silver, and Aunt said it was the Wye river.
“How many years is it, Kate, since you were here last?” demanded Cousin Joe. “Only twelve, isn’t it?”
“Only twelve.”
Aunt’s voice was quite ordinary, so that one didn’t notice it, but Cousin Edith said:
“Only twelve?” and made it sound a long, long while—as indeed it was, thought Callie.
“Let me see. Fred turned up in nineteen-o-five, or thereabouts—last time he was in England. He and Johnny and I rode over here—Johnny’s arthritis wasn’t so bad, in those days—and we’d still got a couple of horses. None now, I’m sorry to say, except old Dollie.”
“Nineteen-o-five” was a fascinating way of saying nineteen-hundred-and-five. Callie had never heard it before, but she felt she would never forget it.
“You’ll come back to us for lunch, of course, and see old Johnny. Poor old chap, his heart’s in the West Indies still and always will be, I suppose.”
“Aren’t you glad to have him at home again?” Aunt asked.
“Why, yes. Funny thing—he and I were always together as boys. The Inseparables, we used to be called. And I suppose, if we’d met in the street we shouldn’t have known one another, at one. time. He’d grown older, when he came back from Barbados—a lot older.”
“It’s a way people have,” Cousin Edith remarked. “I daresay little Kate wouldn’t have known us if she’d met us in the street yesterday.”
“Yes I should, Cousin Edith. You haven’t altered. Not nearly as much as I have, for that matter.”
“Well, perhaps not,” Cousin Edith concurred. “But Fred hadn’t changed much, though he’d put on a lot of weight.”
“He’s put on more, since then.”
“The Lempriéres all run to weight—always did. I wonder whether”
Cousin Joe stopped dead, and there was a silence that made Callie look up at them all, before Cousin Edith finished the sentence for him, quite calmly.
“I can’t imagine Lucy’s ever putting on weight,” she said.
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