“It makes one look so nice,” said Anne sadly.
“Nice?” said Sylvia, surprised.
“Well, I mean you and Emmy,” said Anne. “I mean you both look so nice and have such lovely hair. I feel horrid when I look at you.”
“I can’t help my hair being tow-coloured,” said Sylvia apologetically. “Emmy’s is lovely. I wish I’d been a land girl. They do really useful work and get a heavenly bleach on their hair and such lovely complexions. Except the spotty ones, but they’d be spotty anywhere.”
Emmy, hearing her own name, as one nearly always does, turned from Martin to the girls.
“Don’t be a Land Girl,” she said earnestly to Anne. “I wish I had dark hair like yours. Mine goes all fair in streaks. And look at my hands.”
She spread on her knees a pair of well-shaped hands, roughened and seamed with dirt.
“That’s the result of having a good hard wash before you came,” she said ruefully. “I don’t really mind, but sometimes I would like to have clean hands, especially when I see mother’s.”
“Who is happy then?” asked Anne, which made her companions, unused to such philosphical questionings, feel slightly embarrassed.
“Well, I am really,” said Emmy stoutly, “because I love bulls and I can live with Martin and help to run the herd even if peace does come. And if he gets married he is going to give me Macpherson’s house when he retires. He’s our agent and simply won’t retire till the war is over, so I hope it will go on for a bit. He’d be miserable if he weren’t running Rushwater. Oh, well done!”
Robin, standing up to the net, had just put a ball over neatly where neither George nor Leslie major could reach it and so won the set.
“He doesn’t get about very quickly, but he does place the balls,” said Emmy.
“Robin only has one foot,” said Anne. “The other’s artificial.”
Emmy said she was most awfully sorry. Then there was a fresh change of players, Robin, the Leslie boys, and their cousin Emmy, and Agnes suggested that the others should come up to the Temple and see the view. Accordingly they went slowly up the hill behind the house by a path winding among beech trees, between lakes of bluebells, till they emerged into a clearing where stood a high pyramidal monument erected by Martin’s great-grandfather. To the north of it the beech-woods and downs sloped up and away for ever. To the south the ground fell away in grass terraces to where Rushwater House lay basking in the spring sun, and beyond it was a vast panorama of gentle English countryside bounded by distant hills.
“It all makes one feel a bit old,” said Martin suddenly, a remark which struck everyone dumb, because it seemed so dreadfully true and yet unreasonable.
“Why?” said his aunt Agnes, very kindly, but somehow conveying an atmosphere of wanting to take his temperature.
“Poets and people,” said George Halliday quite unexpectedly, “say autumn is sad, but I must say I think spring often gets one down like anything. Something in the air, I suppose.”
He stopped suddenly, startled by his own voice and wondering if Lady Graham would despise him for ever.
“I think that is so true,” said Agnes. “It is just what I meant,” at which George fell into a mental swoon owing to the piercing sweetness of her character.
“What you mean, my love,” said David, “is that you don’t think at all, but wish to be agreeable. Spring can be damnable. But I don’t think any of the poets have really got on to it.”
“One couldn’t say ‘In looking on the happy spring fields’,” said Martin thoughtfully. “At least one could, but it wouldn’t scan.”
“O grief for the promise of May,” said Anne, in rather a soft voice as she did not wish to make herself conspicuous.
“By Jove, yes,” said David admiringly.
Agnes asked what the promise was.
“It’s a bit out of a kind of poem by Tennyson,” said Anne colouring as she spoke. “I don’t think it’s a very good one,” she added deprecatingly.
“It’s a rotten one,” said David, “but I can’t think of anyone else who would have had the wits to quote it.”
George Halliday gave it as his opinion that Anne would be wizard at cross-words, while his sister Sylvia remarked that she supposed that spring was like puppies and kittens and chickens and would be all right if it didn’t grow up.
“What made me feel old,” said Martin, “was the Temple. Do you remember the summer those French people were at the vicarage David, and we were Royalist conspirators against the French Republic? I wonder what happened to them all.”
“Collaborating, I expect,” said David carelessly. “At least the girl is. What was the name? Ursule, that’s it. She would have collaborated like anything with anybody to get sweets or anything nice to eat. I’ve never met such a whole-hearted eater in my life.”
“Mary was a conspirator too,” said Martin. “Before she married John.”
“So she was,” said David. “And the result is those two boys playing tennis. Well, well.”
“You were very naughty and unkind to her David,” said his sister Agnes, coming out of a dream of the hot summer when John Leslie had fallen in love with Mary Preston. “You made Mary think she was engaged to you, and she was dreadfully unhappy.”
On hearing this interesting echo from past times Martin and Emmy fell upon Lady Graham with a request to have the whole story, but Lady Graham said they must go back as mamma would be getting up.
“And probably painting the front-door blue with golden birds on it,” said David. “How right you are Agnes.”
So the party retraced their steps to the house, where they found Lady Emily sitting on a bench outside the drawing-room talking to her elderly housekeeper, Siddon, who had stayed on all through the war and was now looking after Martin.
“Good-afternoon, my lady,” said Siddon severely to Lady Graham. “Her ladyship got up about ten minutes ago and wishes to move the portrait of Mr. Leslie in the hall and put it in the morning-room, so I thought it best to persuade her ladyship to come outside. Tea is ready, my lady.”
Lady Graham praised Siddon’s action and drew her mother into the house. The others followed and were shortly joined by the tennis players. All the young people made hearty teas and there was a good deal of general talk and laughter.
“Now,” said Lady Emily to anyone who happened to be listening, “we must go and see the church before we go home. Mr. Dale, you must come with me and we will have a long talk about John’s boys. They tell me you are quite marvellous and do everything with one foot.”
Robin expressed his willingness to accompany her ladyship, reserving the question of discussing his pupils.
“And what are you all laughing about?” said Lady Emily, with one of her rapid snipe-flights, addressing the other end of the table where a good deal of suppressed giggling was going on.
“Oh nothing, Gran.,” said Leslie minor. “I only said Mr. Dale didn’t clean his teeth with one foot, and that idiot brother of mine laughed into his tea. So we were all laughing,” he finished lamely.
Leslie major said under his breath that he would put his brother’s head under the stable-yard pump after tea, a good deal of kicking under the table took place and Martin, watchful always of his guests, got up.
“Then that is settled,” said Lady Emily. “Mr. Dale will take me to the church and David and Martin will come too, and Agnes.”
“No, mamma darling,” said Agnes, with surprising firmness. “I must have a talk with Emmy and visit Macpherson because he has his sciatica rather badly. We ought to start about half past five.”
“Oh, poor Macpherson,” said Lady Emily. “Agnes, we will start at five-fifteen and stop at Macpherson’s house and you and I will have a delightful talk with him.
“No, mamma,” said Lady Graham. “I will go to Macpherson, because if you go you won’t have time to see if the sweetbriar hedge round father’s grave is coming on properly. And don’t let mamma tire you, Mr. Dale, because I know how tirin
g it must be to walk about on one foot.”
Lady Emily appearing to be convinced by this very specious reasoning, the company left the tea-room. The Leslie boys invited George and Sylvia to be driven backwards round the park, an invitation which was enthusiastically accepted; Agnes went away with Emmy, and Lady Emily moved with her train towards the front door. Robin, always feeling a little responsible for Anne, paused to see where she was. Overlooked by everyone, even by Martin the good host, she was standing apart, looking a little frightened.
“Coming?” said Robin.
“I didn’t know where I was meant to go,” said Anne. “I thought perhaps Lady Emily going to the church was rather private.”
“I haven’t the honour of knowing Lady Emily well,” said Robin, “but from what I have heard and seen of her, I think she loves to share everything with friends.”
“Would I count as a friend?” said Anne.
Robin said of course she would as she had come with Lady Graham; and as a kind of scullery maid was straining at the leash to clear away the tea things he hurried Anne down the passage and out of the house.
St. Mary’s Church stood in a pleasant way within the grounds of Rushwater House. It had no particular merit, being mid-Victorian Italian-Gothic with Saxon dog-tooth mouldings in grey brick over the west door and a kind of campanile at one side, but it had been built by Mr. Leslie’s grandfather at the same time as the house, and five generations of Leslies had worshipped there. Some rather depressing ecclesiastical evergreens grew dankly on the north side, making a dismal grove where small Leslies of each epoch had enjoyed frightening themselves and their younger brothers and sisters. On the south side the churchyard was embanked above the Rushmere Brook, and the sun was gently warming the gravestones. Here Robin and Anne found Lady Emily leaning on her stick, looking with affectionate interest at her husband’s grave. This monument was of no interest at all, being the ancestral mid-Victorian burying plot surrounded by a rather jail-like spiky railing, but since her husband’s death early in the war Lady Emily had with infinite correspondence, telephoning and summoning the hard-worked agent Mr. Macpherson to private conferences at times highly inconvenient to him so that he had to make on the meagre petrol ration journeys which were certainly quite unnecessary, arranged for a sweetbriar hedge to be planted outside the spiky rusty railings; a hedge which, so old Tacker, the sexton averred, gave him more trouble than the whole of the churchyard put together with her ladyship worriting him in season and out of season. To whom Mrs. Tacker, who had been a housemaid at Rushwater House in her youth, said she s’posed he was old Uncle Joe Staylin and she’d thank him to get her some greens or she’d never get them washed and on in time for his dinner.
The hedge was by now doing very nicely and it was one of Lady Emily’s pleasures to come over to her old house with her younger grandchildren and make them pinch a leaf between their forefinger and thumb and smell the fragrance that remained. As she stood leaning upon her black stick, herself rubbing a leaf and smelling its fragrance, her keen hawk eyes a little dimmed, the beautiful thin curved lips in her old lovely face bent in a remembering smile, David thought he had never seen an old age so handsome, so distinguished as his mother’s. Looking for someone to appreciate his feelings, he saw the Fielding girl standing a little apart and took a step or two in her direction.
“Just look at my mamma,” he said.
Anne looked at Lady Emily and then looked questioningly at David.
“How does she strike you?” said David. “To give you a lead I will tell you at once that I think she’s the most beautiful work of art one could see. Like an exquisite piece of alabaster.”
“And rather mother-of-pearl,” said Anne after a moment’s reflection, looking up at David.
“I didn’t know,” said David, looking down at her with interest, “that anyone could look at one under their long lashes now-a-days. And how right you are about mother-of-pearl.”
“I think,” said Anne, rather alarmed by the allusion to her eyelashes, but pleased by his approval of her words, “that nacrée would be even better for Lady Emily—if it doesn’t sound affected,” she added.
The Fielding girl was indeed coming out with a vengeance, thought David. It might really be worth cultivating her. He had an impression that she had lived beside the springs of Dove and could do with a little appreciation.
“My mamma,” he continued, “has a delightful look of a very maternal falcon. And she can pounce like one.”
“I think,” said Anne, emboldened by this confidence, “that she reminds one of old happy far-off things.”
“Good,” said David. “Very good. Are you a Wordsworthian in addition to your other attractions?”
“Only the bits everyone knows,” said Anne. “Otherwise I honestly think he is dreadfully dull.”
“So do I,” said David. “At least that’s a lie, because I never even tried to read the Excursion. Nor do I intend to. Would you like to see the inside of the church? Not that there is anything to see.”
To tell the truth, Anne was not quite sure if she wanted to or not. She liked David Leslie. Her old governess, Miss Bunting, had always spoken of him as her favourite pupil and his name to Anne had a quality of romance. But there was something in his pleasant airy way of treating her—too pleasant, too airy, almost condescending, she secretly thought—that made her draw back. She rather wished Robin would come and rescue her, but Robin and Martin were sitting on the low wall of the churchyard reminding each other of what the lance-corporal had said to the Brigadier on the Anzio beach-head.
“Hi! Martin,” David called. “Come and look after mamma. We are going to see the church.”
Martin waved a hand amicably at his uncle. David and Anne walked towards the church. Or to be quite truthful, David strolled towards the church with Anne half a pace in the rear, for she felt extremely shy of him and did not wish to presume.
“Porch,” said David, pausing at the entrance and rattling at the heavy handle of the church door. “It seems to be locked. I’ll have to go round to Tacker’s cottage and get the key.”
“Oh, please don’t,” said Anne.
“Would you rather not go inside?” said David. “I admit it’s pretty mouldy.”
“Oh no, I didn’t mean that,” said Anne. “Please. I only thought it might be a trouble. I’d really love to see inside. I mean if it’s a bother, I don’t mind a bit.”
Taking no notice of these contradictory flutterings, David gave the iron handle a last rattle. The door opened suddenly and he almost fell into the church down the low step. Anne followed him and looked round. The interior of the church was cream-washed and sufficiently lighted by some rather revolting glass of the Munich school and some greenish leaded window which gave an aquarium-like atmosphere.
Anne looked at it and didn’t know what to say. Mr. Leslie seemed so clever and so man-of-the-world that she felt whatever she said might be wrong. And then she thought that to say nothing seemed rude, but cudgel her brains as she might, she could think of nothing at all. So she walked into the chancel and began to read the inscriptions on the monuments of departed Leslies. Suddenly she uttered an exclamation which can only be described as a squeak.
“Anything wrong?” said David sympathetically.
Anne could only say, “OH.”
“You make me think of Man Friday,” said David. “Might one enquire what you are oh-ing about?”
Anne pointed, speechless, to a slab on the north wall of the church on which were the words
TO THE MEMORY OF
MAUD BUNTING
FOR MANY YEARS A FAITHFUL FRIEND AND GUIDE
THIS STONE WAS PLACED BY SOME OF HER
AFFECTIONATE PUPILS.
“Are you looking at Miss Bunting’s memorial?” said David. “She used to be our governess. She died a couple of years ago and Gran wanted her buried here, so John and Agnes and I put up the stone. She was a remarkable woman and had no illusions about me at all. It was rather sad tha
t she died among strangers, but it can’t be helped. Good old Bunny.”
“But she didn’t die among strangers,” said Anne indignantly.
David looked at her.
“She died with us,” said Anne stoutly. “At least she died in the Cottage Hospital, but she was my governess all that year and Mummy would have had her buried at Hallbury, but Lady Graham and Lady Emily wanted it to be at Rushwater.”
“I am so sorry,” said David. “I ought to have known. No, that’s not true, because I don’t see why I should have known.
But I am sure Lady Fielding would have done everything perfectly if mamma hadn’t barged in as she so often does, bless her heart. I do hope your mother didn’t mind.”
“Of course not,” said Anne. “But please don’t say strangers, because we were very fond of Miss Bunting—we truly were. And she gave me a copy of Keats on my birthday that old Lady Pomfret had given her,” she finished, suddenly finding herself much nearer tears than she liked.
“I am,” said David, “a complete and despicable fool. I ought to have realised about Bunny being with you. I really knew underneath, but it all got overlaid somehow. Please don’t mind so much. We will go out into the sun again and see what mischief mamma is up to. She is probably planting mustard and cress on Papa’s grave because it comes up quickly.”
As David was wrestling again with the heavy iron handle to shut the door Anne said, “Oh Mr. Leslie, please don’t tell anyone.”
“No pupil of Bunny’s is allowed to call me Mr. Leslie,” said David. “And if I knew what I wasn’t to tell anyone, I certainly wouldn’t tell them.”
“I mean,” said Anne, searching painfully for the right words, “about my nearly crying about Miss Bunting. I didn’t mean to, only I couldn’t bear you to think that she died among strangers, because we did like her very very much. And she told me you were her favourite pupil,” she added inconsequently.
“Look here, Anne,” if you tell me things like that I shall cry too,” said David. “And a strong man in tears is a terrible sight.”
Peace Breaks Out Page 12
