Yours to Command

by Mary Burchell

  YOURS TO COMMAND

  Mary Burchell

  Imagine what a shock it was for Sydney to discover that the newly appointed Headmaster of the boys’ school at which she was matron was none other than her ex-fiancé, Hugh Lulworth, whom she had not been able to forget!

  Tormented by her love for Hugh, it was no wonder that she sought comfort in the warm sympathetic understanding of Lucas Manning, the famous actor. She was enjoying her work and was romantically entwined with Lucas, whose two young wards were in her care.

  Would Hugh’s arrival change her whole life again?

  CHAPTER ONE

  SYDNEY DAYNE stood at the window of her sitting-room looking over the bare garden to the bright green playing-fields beyond, and wintry though the scene was now she found it endearing in its friendly familiarity.

  It was less than a year since she had come as Matron to Park House, the largest of the five school houses which made up Fernhurst, but already, she realized, the place had become almost home to her.

  She had thought at the time that she had never seen anything more colorful or (viewed from a distance) peaceful, or more intensely and refreshingly English. In some way the scene had comforted her for the loss of her own home. It had even comforted her a little for the loss of Hugh Lulworth, but only a little.

  Settling down at Fernhurst had not been difficult in the ordered friendliness of Park House, where Mr. Dingley, the senior classics master and, still more, Mrs. Dingley had ruled for so many years with genial despotism, that there remained few crises or problems for which precedent could not supply a solution.

  Sydney got on well with Mrs. Dingley, admiring her mixture of kindness and common sense, and she liked Mr. Dingley so well that, on the retirement of the previous Headmaster at the end of last term, she had even hoped that he might succeed to the post. But, as Mrs. Dingley herself freely explained, this was not to be.

  “George is too old to take on extra responsibilities now,” she had declared, “even if the Governors would have considered him, which I doubt. He’s within five years of retirement himself, and, though I think he’s the best housemaster this school has ever had I can’t see him as Head of Fernhurst. No, no, it will have to be a younger man, and quite right too,” she added cheerfully. “Someone with a good facade, as well as something behind it. Someone who can look someone on Speech Day among a gaggle of governors. It takes an impressive, even a slightly flamboyant, personality, to hold his own and look distinguished beside Sir Peter Gaynor and Dame Ellen Mowbray.”

  And in all this Mrs. Dingley had proved right; for the newly appointed Headmaster, who had made a brief but telling appearance at the end of the previous term, had seemed to possess just those qualities which she had enumerated.

  Well, Sydney thought, as she turned away from the window, it was to be hoped his first term would open smoothly. Admission Day had gone without a hitch so far.

  But at this point signs of a possible hitch began to manifest themselves, for there was a knock on the door and at the sound of her “Come in” the door opened halfway and the somewhat owlish, spectacled countenance of a small boy appeared in the aperture.

  “Please, Matron,” the apparition said, with scarcely concealed excitement, “one of the new boys has fallen off a wardrobe and he looks as though he might be dead.”

  Bearing in mind other false alarms and sternly quelling a mental vision of herself breaking the fatal news to distracted parents, Sydney maintained outward composure.

  “What was he doing on top of a wardrobe, Curtis?” she enquired mildly, as she prepared to accompany the bearer of ill-tidings. Curtis seemed to think this irrelevant.

  “If he’d broken his neck, Matron, would his head wobble about!” he enquired eagerly, as he trotted along beside her. “Because his head didn’t exactly wobble about, but it looked kind of unsteady. Though, of course, people can still live with a broken neck sometimes, can’t they? My uncle knew someone once who—”

  “All right,” said Sydney, firmly silencing any ghoulish recollections relative to Curtis’s uncle. “You can tell me that another time. What is the name of the boy who fell?”

  “I don’t know, Matron, because he’s a new boy and he’d only just come into our dormitory and—”

  “Made straight for the top of the wardrobe,” suggested Sydney sceptically. “Why was that?”

  “Why, Matron?” A look of blank innocence, not to say near-idiocy, came over Curtis’s features. “Well, he—just did, you know,” he explained.

  By this time they had arrived at Dormitory IIc, where a group of very excited little boys of about ten or eleven years were milling round one solitary rather yellow-faced one who was sitting on the floor.

  “I’m all right, really,” the little boy said suddenly at this point. “I thought I was going to be sick. But I’m not going to be sick, after all—I think.”

  “Well, just lie still for a few minutes.” Sydney smiled encouragingly at him while she felt him all over, quickly and expertly, to make sure no bones were broken.

  “Has he broken anything?” enquired Curtis hopefully, so close behind her that he was almost breathing down the back of her neck. He seemed faintly disappointed when she said, “No,” though he strove good-naturedly to hide the fact.

  “Anyway, I’ve got a corking big lump coming up on the back of my head,” volunteered the patient a trifle boastfully.

  “And slight concussion, if I’m not mistaken,” thought Sydney. But aloud she simply said, “What’s your name?”

  “Edward. Ed-Edward Manning, Matron,” he replied, his voice suddenly unsteady.

  “Well, Edward,” said Sydney, who was good at gauging just when to call some of the younger ones by their first names, “I don’t think there’s very much wrong with you. But, just to make sure, I’m going to send you over to the San. for the night. Otherwise the noise of the other boys might make your bumped head ache. You’ll like Sister Matron, who is very good at looking after young fellows like you. And in future try to keep your mountaineering for the holidays and don’t go climbing about on the furniture.”

  Later she sought out Mrs. Dingley, since anything quite so untoward should, she knew, be reported to either Mr. Dingley himself or his wife.

  “Which one was it? Manning, you say?” Mrs. Dingley shook her head resignedly. “It would be, of course!”

  “Would it?” Rather surprised, Sydney recalled the child’s nice dark eyes in a thin, intelligent face, which even the yellow tingle of dizziness had not made entirely unattractive. “He didn’t look a mischief-maker.”

  “Oh, I don’t suppose he is. Any more than all of them are, I mean,” Mrs. Dingley replied. “But one wouldn’t actually choose him to be the one to have an accident. He’s Lucas Manning’s ward, you know.”

  “Lucas Manning?” Sydney looked interested. “The actor-manager?”

  “Yes. There are two of them. Wards, I mean. The sons of his elder brother. The parents were killed in an air crash, I believe, and he became their guardian. The little one is over in the Prep.”

  “How interesting. I had no idea.”

  “Well, we haven’t really had much time to talk about anything yet, have we?” Mrs. Dingley said, “what with our arriving only last night and the first batch of boys coming by the early train. We haven’t even discussed this business about the new Head.”

  “Is there something fresh about the new Head? I thought—”

  “My dear girl, he isn’t coming, after all!”

  “Then we’re without a Headmaster?”

  “Oh, no we are not! Our resourceful and conscientious Governors”—Mrs. Dingley’s eyes twinkled mischievously—“interrupted their Christmas holidays for the express purpose of finding someone else. A new
man has been appointed and will be arriving the day after tomorrow.”

  “Then everything will go on satisfactorily, after all?”

  “To tell the truth, perhaps even more so than if the first man had come. I should not, of course, have indulged in any gossip or comment if he had been appointed,” Mrs. Dingley declared with emphasis. “But, since he has not, I feel at liberty to say that she would never have made a good Head’s wife, my dear. Too self-satisfied. Altogether too self-satisfied.”

  Sydney smiled.

  “And you’re assuming that the new man’s wife will do?”

  “He isn’t married.”

  “Not? Surely that’s unusual in a Head?”

  “Very. I can recall only two other cases, to my knowledge. But this man is exceptionally young for the job. Well under forty, I believe.”

  “Well, we shall soon know,” Sydney replied with a laugh, and turned to go. “What is the new Head’s name, by the way?” she enquired, looking back over her shoulder.

  “Lulworth. Hugh Lulworth. He has been Head at some rather small but very exclusive school in Hampshire, I understand.”

  Sydney held on to the handle of the door and watched the room go round. She wondered confusedly if she had gone the same sick yellow as young Manning. But Mrs. Dingley appeared to see nothing wrong.

  Sydney waited for a moment until she thought her voice would sound normal. Then she said carefully, “did you say—Lulworth?”

  “Yes. An unusual name. I don’t think I’ve ever come across it before, have you?”

  “Once,” Sydney replied, a trifle huskily. Then she went out of the room.

  Once! But that once had altered her life. Hugh Lulworth—and all that he had meant in the two years between the first meeting with him in Marcia Downing’s drawing-room and the moment when they parted in anger and mutual frustration.

  It had started not long after her mother’s death, when Sydney, the eldest and the only girl in a family of four, had already become the pivot on which her family’s life had begun to turn. Her father, shattered by the loss of his wife, had sought the support of his twenty-year-old daughter in almost every contingency, while the boys, varying in age from eight to sixteen, saw in her the natural substitute for their mother.

  Sydney had been very willing that this should be so, and, abandoning her half-completed nurse’s training, she had devoted herself enthusiastically to her new role.

  And then Hugh had come into her life. Standing there now, a little aimlessly in the hall of Park House, she recalled him exactly as he had looked when he first walked into Marcia’s room. Tall, easy-mannered, fine-featured, with intensely clear, grey eyes which seemed to miss nothing. At any rate they had not missed Sydney, and even before that first meeting was over she had dared to believe she was not the only one to feel that powerful, inexplicable attraction which does sometimes spring up between two people almost on sight.

  At first everything went beautifully. The dreadful, emotional tug-of-war came only when it became clear that Hugh wished to marry Sydney and take away the one person essential to the smooth and happy running of the Dayne household.

  At last it seemed that the ideal housekeeper had been secured, although she would be able to come only a month before the date now fixed for the wedding.

  She arrived loaded with references and a somewhat inflated idea of her own value. But from the first she was a dismal failure, and after two weeks she left.

  Sick with a sense of disaster, Sydney telephoned the news to Hugh, who came up from his Hampshire school at the weekend for consultation. But consultation, Sydney found, consisted on Hugh’s part of an insistence that they should go on with the wedding and leave the family to shift for themselves.

  “But I can’t just walk out and leave them!” Sydney pleaded.

  “Are you suggesting it would be easier to walk out and leave me?” Hugh wanted to know.

  “No—of course not.”

  “Then we go on with the wedding as arranged?”

  “Hugh, I must find someone first!”

  “And if you don’t?” he enquired, sceptical after too much previous experience.

  “Hugh, I can’t abandon them—” she insisted again. But, taking both her hands firmly in his, he said slowly, “Sydney, you have to face it. Either the family comes first, or I do. You must choose, and choose now. But I warn you, I’m not prepared to be second with the girl I marry.”

  “The circumstances are special,” she pleaded.

  “They always are, and they always will be,” he told her sombrely. “Choose now, Sydney.”

  If he had said, “Please, darling, I love you and need you as much as the boys and your father,” perhaps he would have won. But, distracted, nervy, and driven beyond her powers of sane judgment, she began to argue angrily. And then so did he.

  It ended in the only way it could end. She returned his ring, and the engagement was over.

  Time began to measure itself out again, in the way time does, and with every day and week and month the gulf between her and Hugh widened, until there was no longer any way back and she could only console herself with the assurance that the family’s need somehow justified the sacrifice she had made.

  But presently even this doubtful satisfaction was denied her. For six or seven months after the break with Hugh, there suddenly came a solution to the family problem for which Sydney would once gladly have given a year of her life. Her father married again; a charming, good-humored, motherly widow who proved to be almost the ideal stepmother for the three boys.

  Left suddenly with a great sense of futility and blankness, Sydney no longer wanted to remain at home, however welcome she might be.

  Nursing no longer attracted her, though she thought she would like to do something where her partial knowledge of it might prove useful. And so she decided to become a matron at a boy’s school.

  So it was that she had come to Fernhurst, where the present was absorbing, the future secure, and the past, or so she had believed, effectively buried.

  And now all that was to be brushed aside. Hugh, out of the stormy, unforgotten days, was suddenly being swept back into her life, it seemed. Hugh the new Headmaster of Fernhurst!

  “I can’t possibly face it—him!” she thought distractedly. “Not every day. Not—”

  “Pardon me,” a singularly well-pitched voice said behind Sydney, and she swung round with such an expression of startled distress that the man who had addressed her went on, “I’m terribly sorry! Did I startle you? I saw you were absorbed in those books, but I didn’t realize you hadn’t heard my footsteps.”

  “The—books?” Sydney glanced back at the bookcase. She had not even known that she had been gazing at it. It was into the past that she had been looking—and all she had seen was Hugh Lulworth.

  “It’s quite all right.” She smiled with mechanical courtesy. “Can I help you? Do you want to see someone?”

  “Yes. My name’s Manning. I deposited my elder nephew here this afternoon and took the younger one across the road to the Prep. Then, just before I left there I heard that Edward had managed to have some sort of accident. Perhaps if I could see Mrs. Dingley, or the Matron—”

  “I am the Matron,” Sydney said, feeling her smile become a trifle more normal. “And you must be Mr. Lucas Manning.”

  “I am,” he agreed. And when he smiled, the rather thin, dark, intelligent face became familiar to even so casual a theatre-goer as Sydney.

  “You have no need to worry about Edward,” she said reassuringly. “He took a nasty tumble, it’s true, but nothing was broken. I think he may have had a slight concussion so I’ve sent him over to the Sanatorium. If you like, I’ll take you over to see him.”

  “I should be glad, if you have time.” Somehow, the faintly cynical, but good-humored smile, was at his own expense this time. “The responsibilities of a guardian weigh more heavily than those of a parent. At least, I suppose they do. I can’t say for certain, not being a parent.”

/>   “Well, one comes to them more gradually as a parent, I guess,” Sydney said, smiling in her turn. “Will you wait just a moment while I fetch a coat?”

  She rejoined Lucas Manning in a matter of moments, and together they went out into the dusk which was already falling.

  “It’s only about five minutes’ walk,” she said a little shyly, because she was not quite sure how one dealt with a famous man of the theatre. “I hope you won’t mind walking.”

  “Not if you don’t,” he assured her. “I’m sorry I haven’t my car, but we came down by rail and taxied from the station.”

  “Edward took his mishap very well,” she told him, as she explained what had happened, feeling that he might like to hear more about that. “A lot of boys would have made more fuss.”

  Lucas Manning smiled and said, “I’m glad Edward is in your house.”

  “Thank you. I am glad too. But it’s Mr. and Mrs. Dingley’s house, of course. And they are simply splendid with boys.”

  “If you would be so kind. Then”—he glanced at his watch—“I can catch the five o’clock back to town and get a bite to eat before the show.”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Hugh Lulworth from Bedewell. I hear he’s a splendid chap.”

  “Oh, he—is.”

  “Do you mean that you’ve already met him? I thought I understood from Mrs. Dingley that he hadn’t even visited the school yet.”

  “He hasn’t,” Sydney said flatly. “At least, not while any of us have been here.”

  “Then you knew him already?”

  For ever afterwards Sydney was to wonder why she gave a reply that was unnecessary, indiscreet, and completely indefensible. But, in some inexplicable way, she felt she had to unburden herself of her leaden secret to someone, and in a voice that sounded smaller and more forlorn than anything she had intended, she said, “I was engaged to him once—for over a year.”