Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  Paul said deliberately, ‘No, Mr Cribb, I haven’t. As a matter of fact he’s never asked for it.’

  ‘He wouldn’t,’ said Cribb savagely, ‘that’s his way! Now listen to me, young man …’ but Paul, plunging both hands in his breeches pockets, said, ‘No, Mr Cribb, you listen to me! Before I came down here I never gave a thought to politics, except to wonder sometimes, when I saw what was happening to the Boers, how our treatment of them could be justified but I’ve learned a good deal about politics this morning, and I don’t like what I’ve learned! You say this isn’t the way to canvass votes and, by God, you’re right! I can’t imagine a more hamfisted way of going about it! Grenfell, as I said, hasn’t canvassed me in several visits here but neither has he treated me like a stupid child or a recently liberated serf! I’m not clear in my own mind what the Conservative Unionist Party stand for, or even what the Liberal Party stand for but you’ve made me eager to find out! I can see that your party lacks two things—tact and good manners, neither of which have been in evidence since you walked in that door!’

  He moved above the fireplace to pull the bellrope but Gilroy cheated him by stamping out of the room before he could ring. Cribb remained, however, and seemed to be bouncing with rage, so that Paul, again seizing the advantage said, ‘I’m sorry it had to happen like this, Cribb. I don’t think you or I would have lost our tempers if you had come alone. But what else would you expect a man to do when complete strangers walk into his house and quarrel with his choice of friends?’

  Cribb was clearly a man of mettle and apparently possessed a very keen sense of duty, for he somehow mastered his rage and said, in a high-pitched voice, ‘You’re committing social suicide here, Craddock! Good God, man, why won’t you let someone experienced in these matters help you?’ and Paul, scarcely knowing why, felt rather sorry for him as he said, ‘I don’t want to seem ungracious but this is supposed to be a democratic country and we’re supposed to have outgrown political pressures on the individual! Why didn’t you come here like Grenfell, and make some attempt to get to know me before blackmailing me into joining a party?’

  ‘Because it never occurred to me that you needed anyone to teach you common sense!’ snapped Cribb. ‘A man doesn’t buy an estate of thirteen hundred acres without being prepared to defend it! You should have learned that much fighting Kruger!’

  He must have decided at this point that any further argument would involve him in loss of face for he picked up his hat and crossed the room but because Gilroy had slammed the door he had to fumble with the handle and whilst he was thus engaged, with Paul watching him, they heard a step on the stone floor of the office, and both turned as Grace Lovell walked into the room.

  They saw that she was smiling a little sourly, as she said, with studied casualness, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, but I just couldn’t let you go without knowing I approve of every word my fiancé said, Mr Cribb! You Unionists really are insufferable bullies, and I do hope we can make it hot for you down here; Shall I show Mr Cribb out, Paul dear?’

  Paul dear remained rooted, his back to the fire, but Cribb, now in a fighting mood, snarled, ‘I only hope your father feels the same way about it, Miss Lovell! And Mrs Lovell also, both very good friends of mine, as you no doubt know!’, and to Paul, ‘Good-day, Craddock! If it’s war you want you won’t find us as easy to beat as Boers! We have their kind of staying power and a great deal more money!’

  ‘Oh, but they weren’t all that easy to beat,’ Grace said, ‘as you would have found out if you had been in the field like Mr Craddock!’, but it is doubtful whether Cribb heard her for he was already outside the room and a moment later they heard the front door slam and then the crunch of the gig’s wheels on the gravel.

  They remained silent for a moment, Grace standing leaning against the door, her head cocked slightly to one side and her little crooked smile giving her the look of a clever, impudent child, who has just scored a point over grown-ups. Finally Paul, said, breathlessly, ‘That was very sporting of you, Grace, but you didn’t have to burn your boats in order to rub salt into the smart! You realise Cribb will spread the news up and down the Valley in a matter of hours, and you’ll look pretty foolish if you have to back down on it!’

  ‘Well,’ she said, cheerfully, walking across to the fire and giving the sullen log a kick with her boot, ‘I don’t know how you feel about it but I haven’t any intention of “backing down” as you say! As for you, you had your chance in the churchyard on Christmas Eve and didn’t take it!’

  ‘You meant what you said? It wasn’t said simply to confound that bully?’

  ‘I meant it,’ she said coolly, ‘but it was a rather different tale from the one I rode here to tell you.’

  ‘You mean that you were listening all the time, and it helped you to change your mind about us?’

  ‘I haven’t been very clever, have I?’ she said, ‘I’m giving away too much and too quickly!’ Then, facing him, ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen you, Paul, can’t you understand that? I thought of you as someone pleasant, kind, and well-meaning but I didn’t know you were a rebel and I certainly didn’t give you credit for that much nerve! I loathe people like Gilroy and Cribb, and everything they stand for, but until ten minutes ago I assumed you were only a watered-down version of them! Well, you aren’t, quite obviously you aren’t, and it makes a big difference! I’m not in love with you and it wouldn’t be honest of me to pretend I was but we’ve got more in common than either of us imagined and that’s a better basis for marriage than story-book slush!’

  He crossed to the fireplace and lifted her hand, looking at it thoughtfully and noting the regularity of the long tapering fingers that somehow gave the hand strength as well as delicacy. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘without “story-book slush” marriage must be a very dull institution, too dull to have lasted as long as it has. Maybe it emerges if the marriage is any good but I suppose it’s much the same as any other endeavour—its success depends on what people are prepared to put into it. All I know for certain is that I’m willing to trust my instincts but I don’t think you are, not really, and that’s why it might be wiser to see a lot more of each other and be damned to what Cribb and Gilroy broadcast up and down the Valley!’

  She looked at him steadily, without withdrawing her hand. ‘That’s not how you were talking to them,’ she said, ‘it’s more how I should have imagined you talked if someone had told me about what happened.’

  ‘The two things aren’t the same,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, but they are, because both are a calculated risk! You took one without a second thought but now you buck at taking another? You asked me to marry you and I said I’d think about it. Well, I have thought about it, and I’d be very happy to, so to the devil with hanging fire until all the fun’s gone out of it! If we are going to marry let’s do it without orange blossom and stale jokes!’

  ‘You would be prepared to marry soon?’

  ‘Today, Paul.’

  ‘We can’t cheat Celia and the gossips out of everything. Half the Valley would regard marriage at Easter as indecent!’

  ‘It’s no concern of Celia’s,’ she said seriously, ‘or of anyone else’s in the Valley and that’s important to me, Paul. This is one thing I’m not obliged to share with anyone but you.’ It did not seem preposterous that she should carry her passion for privacy into marriage and he found that he was beginning, at last, to be able to anticipate her approximate line of thought.

  ‘Very well, Grace,’ he said, ‘and you would probably like to be married away from here, in front of a couple of impersonal witnesses?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I should like that very much if it could be managed.’

  ‘It shall be managed,’ he said, grimly, ‘for all I want is a chance to prove how right it could be for both of us. We could get a special licence but that would require your father’s permission and Celia would have to be
won over. Could that be done, do you suppose?’

  ‘All Celia wants it to get me off her hands. I can leave father to her. I don’t imagine he’ll be bothered to attend.’

  He began to understand something of the source of her bitterness, although he could not quite rid himself of a suspicion that she enjoyed over-dramatising a situation.

  ‘All right, then, that’s how it will be! I’ll ride back with you this afternoon and talk to Celia and if you’ll stay for lunch I’ll take her up on that dinner invitation I declined yesterday.’ Then, because her expression remained serious, he tried laughing at her. ‘I must say you don’t look much like a girl who has just accepted a gentleman’s proposal!’ he said, taking her face between his hands and kissing her gently on the mouth. Her lips were no more than submissive, so that he thought of Claire Derwent’s lips as he said, ‘You really are sure, Grace? We aren’t under any obligation at all to rush things. I told Celia yesterday that I wouldn’t have you hustled!’

  She took her time answering this, looking at him steadily, so that he saw her in sharper focus, wondering a little at her composure but as baffled as ever by her remoteness. He marked other, equally familiar things about her, the clipped fringe, blue-black against her pale forehead, the ivory lustre of the skin stretching along the jawline to the deep cleft of her chin and one other feature that he had forgotten, dimples, starved of laughter, on either side of her wide mouth. She said, at length, ‘You have been good to me, Paul, and I know you mean always to be good. Well, you won’t find one aspect of me wanting, and I’ll prove it!’ and suddenly she threw her arms about his neck and returned his kiss in a way that drove all doubts from his mind, so that nothing existed for him beyond her lips or the strong pressure of her body that seemed almost to clamour for him. When she drew back he was filled with a yearning of her that demanded immediate release and catching up her hand he pressed it to his lips and said, breathlessly, ‘I’ll tell them, Grace! I’ll tell them you’re staying, dearest!’ and rushed from the room as though he intended proclaiming his triumph from the housetops but when he bore down on Thirza Tremlett, dusting an engraving in the hall, he checked himself and said, gruffly, ‘Tell Mrs Handcock Miss Lovell is staying to luncheon and ask Chivers to saddle Snowdrop and bring both horses round to the front door at two o’clock sharp!’

  Through the open door Grace saw that the girl was startled by his eruption and wondered idly if she too had been engaged in eavesdropping but the possibility did not concern her overmuch. Half the Valley would know about it by now and she wondered, smiling one of her small, crooked smiles, what they would make of it, and whether they would credit her with a technique superior to Claire Derwent, the hot favourite in the Shallowford matrimonial stakes throughout the summer.

  VI

  No one could say how the news spread to every corner of the Valley in such a short space of time. Things usually did, of course, but not quite so rapidly as on this occasion. Perhaps the news was blown back on the Sorrel by the indoor staff at Heronslea, who heard Lord Gilroy and Cribb discussing it over luncheon, or perhaps Thirza Tremlett, the housemaid, had been keyhole peeping after all; or maybe Ikey Palfrey, an exceptionally observant lad, noticed the way Paul looked at Grace when he helped her mount in the forecourt, and told Gappy, the gardener’s boy, ‘It’s ’er, like I said!’, for Gappy, living on the Coombe side of the estate, had offered to wager on Claire Derwent. At all events, it soon got about and was common in the kitchens and barns.

  Elinor Codsall heard it from Matt the shepherd that same afternoon and Matt must have got it from the wind gossip of Priory Wood pines for he had been outalong since first light and nowhere near the Big House. Elinor told Will as soon as he came into the kitchen and kicked off his boots and Will, for once, showed an interest in Valley tittle-tattle, exclaiming, ‘Well, I’m bliddy glad to hear it, midear! It’ll ha’ been lonesome for un in that gurt ol’ place, especially o’ nights, eh?’ and winked, half-expecting her to blush, but twenty-eight successive nights beside Will had used up Elinor’s blushes and all she said was, ‘Oh, giddon with ’ee! Come and zit down, man, I’ve made treacle pudding for ’ee!’

  Martha Pitts heard it from the Bagman, who got it from one of the gardeners, Horace Handcock perhaps, who heard most things long before everybody else and Martha too was delighted. She had a great regard for the young city man who seemed so anxious to be a good landlord and had been hoping that the Big House would soon have a mistress to take some of the work off his hands. She told Arthur and Henry as soon as they came in at dusk and Henry said, ‘Well, damme, who’d ha’ thowt it? The Lovell girl, you zay, who was to have been wed to that waster, Ralph Lovell?’ His mother thought this a good opportunity to drive home a lesson on the subject of his bachelorhood and said, crossly, ‘Aye, and tiz time you thought about getting wed, boy! Baint the maids round here good enough for ’ee?’ to which Henry replied, with a wink at his father, ‘The maids is well enough as maids, Mother! Tiz when they cease to be maids they shows their true colours!’ and went on to talk about more serious matters, like the overflowing brook on the north slope of the wood.

  Arabella Codsall learned it from one of the dairy-maids and it says something for the impression it made on her that she received the news in silence. There were times, these days, when Arabella retreated into silence, a change in her that disconcerted everyone at Four Winds. This is not to say she was mute. She still spoke approximately three times as many words each day as most people on the farm, but seemed to have ceased to expect replies to trigger off renewed outbursts and resorted to the long, muttered monologue, which family and staff could safely ignore. She had two repetitive themes nowadays, one directed at Martin, and the other at her younger son, Sydney. Martin’s began, ‘Well on the road to ruin we are, you, me, the boy, the farm, everything about us and I’m sure I don’t know what I’ve done to merit it …!’, whereas the monologue addressed to Sydney was more cautionary than abusive, beginning, ‘You see the fruits of the lusts of the flesh, Sydney! Take heed of a man like your brother Will, who can turn his back on bottom land like this and banish himself to hill country, bringing shame on us and a pauper’s grave on himself,’ and so on, a lamentation to which Sydney, ever a thoughtful, silent boy, would listen with rapidly blinking eyes, as his mother heaved herself about the big kitchen, going about her work with the joyless movements of a bond slave. But although Arabella made no comment on the new Squire’s intention to marry she thought with sour satisfaction of his choice, for Bruce Lovell’s reputation in the Valley was a scandalous one and it followed that his blood would bring tribulation to the deceitful young man at the Big House who had played his part in reducing her domestic audience to two.

  News of the engagement reached the Potter Dell at dusk and Tamer Potter, lifting his nose, scented deprivation and strictures in the rumour. He had been relieved when the estate had been taken over by a bachelor, whom he sensed would regard him and his brood as characters and had done nothing since Paul’s arrival to check the march of dock and nettle across Lower Coombe fields. Now, perhaps, changes might be on the way, for it was not improbable that a man with a wife to support would see him for what he was, a cunning and indolent old loafer, and urge him on pain of eviction to plough fields that had long lain fallow, or engage in the back-breaking labour of hedging and ditching. For his part he wished the young fool up at the Big House would remain single and count his blessings.

  Farmer Willoughby, of Deepdene, heard the news with satisfaction. His gospel was love and Mr Craddock’s championship of Elinor had established him in Willoughby’s heart as a patron of love. He knew nothing of the Lovell girl, whom the Squire was now said to be marrying; but was sure that such an upstanding young man would choose wisely and he wished both of them well, even in the matter of procreation which, strictly speaking, did not feature in Farmer Willoughby’s conception of love.

  Edward Derwent was told the news at supper that night. His wi
fe Liz should have known better than to broach the subject just as her husband was sitting down to a large helping of cold duck. She succeeded in demolishing his appetite with a single sentence for his eyebrows came together like the prongs of a badger trap and growling that here was another piece of woman’s tittle-tattle, he turned to Rose for corroboration. Rose confirmed the news. Alone among the Valley folk she was not much surprised by it for Claire had told her where the Squire’s interests lay on the night of the fireworks. Now she wondered, a little wretchedly, whether she should relay the news to Claire, in Kent, but Derwent, satisfied that there must be something in it after all, left his food untouched and stumped off to the yard, lighting his pipe and leaning against the oak pillars of the byre to contemplate his cow stalls with masochistic gloom. He found himself wishing that he had never set eyes on the young fool up at the Big House. It was a tiresome and troublesome business to be levered out of one’s comfortable pessimism only to discover that he had been right after all and would live and die as a tenant, without graduating to the status of freeholder for surely this was certain now. Marriage implied continuity and a married squire meant a squire with heirs to consider. In addition to that it was now painfully apparent that any heirs Craddock produced would not have Derwent blood in their veins, as he had once been led to believe possible. It would have been better, he reflected bitterly, if the estate had jogged along in its old pre-war muddle for all that recent changes brought to High Coombe were two cliff fields and the loss of his favourite daughter, currently wasting her time in a tea shop on the other side of England. Ordinarily he would not have cared two straws whom Craddock married but it was hard to have glimpsed such a bright prospect and then see it vanish, together with his eligible daughter. Standing there in the January fog, puffing clouds of strong tobacco smoke at his blameless cows, Edward Derwent silently cursed Paul Craddock, his bride-to-be, and all his works.