His first impulse was to ride by with only a curt greeting, and then he changed his mind. He decided to let her know that he had overheard her conversation with Arthur Fanshawe.
‘So you were amused by Mr. Fanshawe’s jokes,’ he said fiercely.
She was honestly mystified.
‘His jokes? Has he made any?’
‘You know what I mean. You and he seem to agree that Botany Bay is an immensely funny subject.’
Alethea was very much distressed. Arthur’s remark had not amused her at all. She had thought it stupid and tasteless. And now it was exasperating to find herself credited with having joined in the laughter of fools. Nothing is more humiliating. And then she looked at Nicholas, and she realized that to him the thing was more than a mere trivial annoyance. She saw that he was deeply wounded. When she met his unhappy eyes she felt as if she had joined in throwing stones at a helpless creature. This strong-looking man was curiously vulnerable. It was perhaps ridiculous of him, but Alethea felt nothing but contrition. She blushed for her behaviour towards a newcomer.
‘Botany Bay?’ she said. ‘What must you have thought of us? Do please forgive me for behaving so that you could even imagine that I was being so impertinent. For, honestly, I wasn’t. What did make me laugh was to find that there was anyone left in these days who could still think of Australia in terms of Botany Bay. It shows that we are at least a hundred years behind the times. You ought to be laughing at us. Don’t you feel that our hunt dates back to the days of Leech and Caldecott?’
Alethea was so sorry that Nicholas should have been wounded, that her expression as she spoke was wonderfully charming. She called upon him to smile with her at the follies of the country-side, and it struck him that it was a very winning smile which he was invited to share. She looked entirely beguiling. His ill temper slipped away from him. He smiled back.
By this time they had reached the white wooden gate which led to Radway, and Alethea prepared to turn in. Then she felt that after what had happened, Nicholas needed some special gesture of friendship and she looked back.
‘Come in and have some luncheon,’ she said.
‘Isn’t it too late?’
‘No. It’s only two o’clock, and I always get back about this time on Tuesdays if I can, because grandfather is late after going to the Bench. He will be so glad to see you.’
When they reached the house the Colonel had not yet come in, and the two sat down to luncheon together. Alethea took the cover off the dish at the end of the table and disclosed a couple of roast ducks. She gave Nicholas a despairing look. Colonel Bracton considered the business of carving at a meal to be one of those sacred rites which devolve upon the head of the family in his capacity of High Priest of the Household. No one but himself might touch the sacred carving knife. Alethea was therefore the most inexperienced of carvers, and roast ducks were altogether beyond her.
‘Do you think you could possibly get anything off these creatures?’ she asked Nicholas.
He was amazed. He had always looked upon Alethea as extremely capable, and he was proud to find that she expected him to be her master in this domestic art.
‘I expect I can hack something off,’ he said, taking the carvers.
‘Hack?’ she exclaimed. ‘What in the world are you going to do? Please be careful.’
‘That’s only a figure of speech,’ he said, tapping one of the ducks with the knife. It gave out a hard and hollow sound.
‘There seems to be very little on it,’ he said uneasily.
Alethea laughed with delight.
‘You are no better at it than I am,’ she said. ‘ I know there’s plenty there. They were very fat before they were cooked. But ducks are the most difficult things in the world to carve. How helpless we both are!’
She spoke as if this were a virtue on their parts.
‘We shall have to tear the brutes limb from limb,’ he said.
She gasped.
‘Grandfather will never forgive us if they don’t look right,’ she said.
Nicholas had never thought of carving as one of the fine arts.
‘Does it matter what they look like?’
‘It matters far more than whether we get anything to eat.’
He thought how his Australian friends would mock at a world where the manner of eating was of more importance than the eating; and he joyously realized, as he did a dozen times a day, that he lived in England.
‘Then what can we do?’ he asked.
‘Starve, in sight of plenty,’ she answered dramatically.
‘We shall have to go to Brokeyates for luncheon after all,’ he said.
‘No. We will ring for Kate.’
They did so, and the parlourmaid appeared.
But she too was no carver. The presence of an expert in the house had paralysed the powers of all amateurs.
‘Perhaps cook could manage it,’ she suggested.
Cook was sent for, and Nicholas enjoyed the sight of the household assembling round the unconquerable ducks.
Cook was a courageous woman. She knew how to make a salmi, and so she had ideas as to the situations of the joints of birds. Fearlessly she took the carvers in hand, the others crowding round to watch her gallant adventure.
And then the door opened, and Colonel Bracton came in.
‘What in the world is going on?’ he asked.
‘Sir Nicholas has come to luncheon and no one can carve the ducks,’ Alethea explained.
‘So you had to send for the household,’ said the old man, chuckling as he came to the table. ‘ Well, well, it isn’t everyone nowadays who knows how to take a bird to pieces. I’m glad to see that not much harm has been done as yet.’ And in two minutes he had divided one of the ducks most delicately into artistic joints, had given each one of the party a large helping, and yet seemed to have left most of the duck undisturbed on the dish.
At home, Nicholas would have resented being treated as an incapable child, in company with a young lady, a parlourmaid, and a cook; but here he found himself enjoying the experience. He was not used to seeing elderly gentlemen supreme in their own houses, for he had come from a land where the younger generation had already taken command; and yet he couldn’t help being amused to find that he and Alethea were treated as two children, as they were handed their portions by the head of the house. They exchanged surreptitious glances of understanding over their narrow escape from disgrace by nearly having made a hash of the roast duck.
Colonel Bracton took advantage of the episode to entertain them with stories of his prowess as carver at many a Tithe dinner. Such reminiscences recalled a society which seemed to Nicholas as remote as the middle ages. A young Englishman would have found the Colonel rather a bore, but Nicholas absorbed every word. He looked upon this as part of his initiation into the life which his grandfather had lived; and though it seemed to concern itself with trifles, yet he felt for some reason that he was being made a citizen of no mean city.
The Colonel always had a sleep after luncheon on Petty Session days, and as he looked upon Nicholas to-day as being Alethea’s guest, he made no exception to his rule. He therefore retired to his study, a room containing no books, but full of a medley of guns and fishing tackle, and he left the other two alone.
It was an intimate hour or two, for Alethea seemed ready quite naturally to allow her guest to share in her everyday avocations. She did not treat him as a stranger. They went first to the stable, to see that the stable boy had given a rub-down to Alethea’s hunter. This boy was the only servant employed by Colonel Bracton in his stables, and Alethea could not have hunted at all unless she had made herself, to a certain extent, responsible for the care of her own horse.
They then walked to the village to call for the letters and newspapers before the Colonel woke up to ask for his Times. He was still asleep when they got back, so Alethea took up her embroidery and put in a few stitches, while Nicholas read her scraps of the news.
He found this natural easy c
ompanionship extremely pleasant. It was his first experience of English home life.
Then Alethea found a bag of chestnuts, and with great delight they began to roast them in the wood ashes of the hall fireplace. While they were doing this, the sound of hoofs was heard on the gravel outside.
‘Heavens! A caller!’ Alethea exclaimed, and she peered through the window. ‘It is Mr. Fanshawe. Let us escape.’ And before Nicholas could collect his wits, he found himself creeping along behind Alethea, both bent double, so as not to be seen through the window, and escaping through the door which led to the servants’ quarters.
They met Kate on her way to answer the bell.
‘The Colonel is asleep, and I have gone out,’ Alethea said, as they passed her. And to save the maid from perjuring herself, she led the way out into the garden.
Nicholas found that his annoyance of the morning had completely vanished. He realized that Arthur Fanshawe did not count, unless one was prepared to allow that he was worth counting.
Chapter Five
ARTHUR FANSHAWE had recognized Sir Nicholas’s horse in the stable-yard as he rode up to the door, and the sight did not please him. His mortification was increased when he was informed that Alethea was not at home. He felt sure that this was untrue. He had fancied that he heard voices in the hall before he rang the bell, and his ring had certainly been succeeded by that superlative silence which follows upon talk suddenly cut short.
He rode home, resolving that ‘something must be done’. He could not decide what it should be, but his mother soon made that clear. She pointed out that it was ridiculous to think of his waiting indefinitely for Colonel Bracton to die: the old man might live to be a hundred. Meanwhile, Alethea would soon be ‘talked about’, an impossible position for any modest woman. She was one of the few girls in the neighbourhood who had been properly brought up, her grandfather having trained her to respect her elders, and not to choose her own way. It would be disastrous were this paragon to fall under the influence of a young man from the Colonies. Alethea must be married at once, but she must first be given a sharp reprimand.
Arthur was very much irritated with Alethea, and he had never less desired her as a wife. But he wanted to give her a snub, and he had an instinctive feeling that she would never take one from him until she was in such a position that she could not resent it. Marriage appeared to be the only possible course. To engage himself to Alethea would also put Sir Nicholas very decidedly into his place. Arthur did not care for the idea of proposing, but he made up his mind to do it the following day. It was not a hunting day, and so he would have time to spare.
And that same evening, sitting in the library at Brokeyates, his eyes rather drearily passing over the somewhat forbidding backs of the rows of unopened books, Nicholas too was thinking of marriage. The afternoon at Radway had brought home to him the loneliness of his life. He thought of the past. He could not remember his father, and his mother and he had always hated each other. In Australia, he had always known himself an alien, and here in England he was finding it impossible to make friends. Once again he lived through the events of the morning—Arthur Fanshawe’s insulting tones, the impatient rebuff given to him by the master. And as he mentally recoiled once more beneath the sting of these memories, there rose before his eyes a very different picture. He saw Alethea’s deep brown hair, as it had caught the light when she had sat for a moment in that very chair which now faced him, empty. He remembered the oval face with its dark blue eyes, and the rounded throat. That throat of hers! How lovely it was! And yet it was the kind of throat which seemed unaccountably to have gone out of fashion since the days when Queen Victoria was a girl.
He knew that when she came to Brokeyates that morning, he had watched her as if she were some re-incarnated spirit, someone who belonged to the place, and who had always belonged there, but yet who was altogether out of his reach. That visit had been so short, and when it was over, it had become dreamlike, and Alethea herself had seemed magical and unreal. Now he possessed a new memory of her—the memory of to-day. This was the same girl, although he could scarcely believe it. That friendly natural creature who had not known how to carve a duck, who escaped from Arthur Fanshawe by the back door—this was the Alethea who had left in his library the image of that lovely fleeting ghost. The two impressions swam together, making a new being.
Till now, Nicholas had never contemplated the idea of marrying. As long as he lived in Melbourne, there had been a bar between him and the girls he had known—a bar set up by a sense of inferiority and kept in position by a sense of pride. And his life with his mother had not led him to consider the presence of a woman as something to be desired in a house. Then he came to England, and at first, Brokeyates had filled his life. He had had no time for anything else. Now, his home was ready, beautiful and empty. He sat in it alone. And as he sat there, there swept over him the certainty that all the ways of his life had converged upon this one point—‘the time and the place and the loved one’ were at last coming together.
So it came about that Alethea, who had lived to the age of twenty-three without having a proposal, now had two in one day.
Arthur Fanshawe came first.
Alethea went that morning for her usual walk to the village, to fetch the newspapers and to exercise the dogs, and when she came back she found Arthur waiting for her in the drive. She thought at once that he looked ominous. ‘Solemn, determined, and rather cross,’ was how she summed him up, and she guessed at once that he had known that she was at home the day before.
Arthur did not move when he saw her approaching. He stood with his arm through his horse’s bridle, tapping his gaiters with his hunting crop, and he awaited her, like a monarch.
She felt amused and rather defiant. She thought it like Arthur to make a formal visit in order to inform her that he was aware that he had been snubbed. Most people would wish to appear unconscious of it.
She came towards him with her most friendly smile.
‘Mr. Fanshawe, don’t tell me that you have been standing here ever since the bell rang yesterday afternoon! I bolted into the garden when I heard a caller, and they told me afterwards that it was you. You know how panic seizes one at the sound of the door bell.’
‘Didn’t you know who it was, when you ran away?’
‘Why do you ask me that?’
She thought it unbelievably clumsy of him.
‘Because I want to know.’
‘O, well. Yes. I did.’
‘Then I think it was beastly unfriendly of you.’
This was so disarming that she had to laugh.
‘Yes it was. I agree. Please forgive me. But you know how, when the bell rings, one is always seized by an irresistible impulse to fly.’
‘I don’t think I do,’ said Arthur, who seldom felt an irresistible impulse.
‘How terrible! Then you have no sympathy with my weakness.’
‘Sympathy? Perhaps not. But great concern. Very great concern.’
She could not follow the subtle distinction.
‘I am sorry you should be so very much concerned,’ she said lightly. ‘ Please don’t be.’
‘I am,’ he replied gravely. ‘ Very much concerned over anything which concerns you. Do not imagine that I am thinking of my own feelings. It was not at all that I minded your refusing to see me. Although, of course, I did mind that too,’ he added quickly, feeling that he had not said quite what he meant to say.
Alethea waited, curious to know what then it could be which had so concerned him.
‘It was not my personal feelings which were wounded,’ he went on; ‘wounded though they well might have been.’
(‘That was well put’ he thought. ‘I have not surrendered my dignity by admitting that my feelings were hurt: I have merely pointed out that her conduct was sufficient to hurt them.’)
‘What pained me,’ he said aloud, ‘ was to find you acting like a silly girl.’
‘Like a silly girl? That is a matter of opinio
n,’ Alethea here interjected.
He silenced her with his hand. It was the gesture of a schoolmaster.
‘Of course you are aware,’ he said, ‘that your conduct concerns me very nearly. I have, in my mind, long set you in a position which compels me to care most keenly how you behave. Your actions affect me, almost as though they were my own. You will understand, I am sure, what I mean.’
‘I don’t think I do,’ said Alethea.
He looked at her, incredulous.
‘We have known each other for some years,’ he said, ‘practically from childhood, and you must know that I admire you. Yes, Alethea, I admire you most sincerely. So much so that I have always hoped some day to persuade you to become my wife.’
‘O, no,’ said Alethea.
He smiled at her. It fell in with his conception of female modesty that a young lady should appear unconscious of her powers of attraction.
‘What I have said will make it clear to you why I cannot tolerate in you the foibles and follies which I expect to find in other girls. You must not fall below the ideal which I have created for you.’
‘Cæsar’s wife,’ she said with a touch of irony. ‘ But then, you are not Cæsar, nor am I your wife.’
He missed the allusion, and thought she was speaking at random, confused by the vista opening before her.
‘Yes Alethea, we are made for each other,’ he said, and in his own ears he sounded astonishingly lyrical. ‘Neighbours we have long been, and now the time has come for us to be still nearer. I had thought to wait to speak of this, until your duty to your grandfather had been completely done. I had thought that perhaps you ought not to leave him before his death; but now …’
Alethea insisting upon interrupting the flow of his eloquence.
‘Please leave me to my duty,’ was what she curtly said.
‘No, Alethea. I have carefully thought the matter out. Your grandfather’s old servants will make him quite as comfortable as you have done, and you will be near enough to go to see him every day. He would die with an easier mind if he left you well established.’
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