It was David who remembered first that they ought to turn back. “The children want to meet you by themselves,” he told Nadine. “I’ll leave you by the car to wait for them and walk on towards the Forest.”
They turned quickly, crossed the patch of marsh and the banks of shingle and were back in the old cornfield again. But they were too late. The children and the dogs were standing there by the car in a bewildered, puzzled little group, and Nadine’s heart smote her intolerably.
She cried out to them, an inarticulate cry filled with her love and her remorse, and dropped on her knees among the stiff corn stalks with her arms held out. But they did not come to her with their usual headlong rush and it was, most unexpectedly, Caroline who was first in her mother’s arms. Never before had she been the first to get there; usually she hung back because she knew Mother liked little boys better than little girls. But today the boys were so slow that she couldn’t help getting there first.
Nadine, her little girl clasped in her arms, looked questioningly over her head at her two sons. They were regarding her with a most unusual concentration; sorrowful upon the part of Ben, tinged with scorn in Tommy. For the first time in their lives they were highly critical of her, and she found it quite difficult to meet their eyes with smiling steadiness. It must come sooner or later, she knew, this moment when the children know for the first time that their mother is only a frail human creature after all, and can at moments fail them. But it is a bad moment. Very bad.
David fled from it. He went on up the rutted lane, and then across the main road and on through the lanes towards the Forest. He walked for miles, walked himself into the quietude of weariness, and was guilty of that unforgivable sin in the Damerosehay household; being late for dinner.
— 3 —
Lucilla sat in the drawing-room waiting for Nadine, as a few days ago she had waited for David. But her feelings now were very different. Then, relaxed by her happiness, her mind had wandered back into the past and she had seen the way that she had travelled bathed in the rosy light of her present joy. In spite of its sorrow it had seemed an inevitable way, leading to the haven where now she was. Now, that haven threatened, she dared not look back; she feared to see too clearly the mistakes and failures of her own that had perhaps helped to bring about her present trouble. Somewhere, in her training of David, she must have gone wrong, or else his adherence to the Church she loved would not have been lost; she had, she remembered, pushed her own beliefs far too vigorously down his throat. Somewhere, in her handling of George’s and Nadine’s quarrel, she must have erred disastrously. She had been too interfering perhaps; probably it had been unwise to take her children from Nadine and leave her so lonely. But it was too late now. She took a grip on herself. She had meant to do right and it did not do to dwell morbidly on mistakes that were past. She must continue to believe, as she had said to David and Ben a few days ago, that everything, even perhaps our mistakes, are necessary to the pattern. “But I must not make more now,” she said to herself. “I must force nothing. Just once I will tell them the truth as I see it, that’s my right, then I will be quiet. Surely the place will teach them; the house and its history, the garden, the birds and the children.”
Then she laughed at herself a little, for she realized she was taking it for granted that she and Damerosehay thought alike, whereas it might be that Damerosehay would think with David.
“We all of us try to make God in our image,” she said. “It is one of the worst of our temptations.”
Then she did not think anymore because through the gate in the garden wall she saw Nadine’s car slide by. She had a quick feminine impulse to look at herself in the glass, to see if the beauty that still remained to her was at its best as a weapon in her hands, but she resisted the impulse; she was old and Nadine was young; that sort of warfare would be ludicrous now.
And then the door opened, Nadine and the children were with her and every other feeling was drowned in intense curiosity as to what in the world Nadine had done to her hair. She erected her lorgnette and stared and stared again. Lucilla was a woman to her fingertips; even on her deathbed she would have postponed departure to investigate a new style of hairdressing upon the head of her nurse.
For she saw the new fashions so seldom at Damerosehay, and she delighted in fashion; though slightly scandalized by this new one of a married woman going about out of doors with no hat on and her hair brushed up on top of her head and held there in a bunch of curls like a baby in the bath. But how well Nadine dressed! Her plain tweed coat and skirt, though ridiculously short, was superbly cut and of the loveliest shade of green imaginable, and the bright silk scarf knotted round her throat perfectly and exactly matched her lipstick. Nadine’s shoes were green too, Lucilla noted, and her pearl earrings lustrous and very large. Lucilla would have liked to have been able to describe these extras as vulgar, but in honesty she couldn’t; there was that about Nadine which made whatever costume she wore appear dignified and seemly.
Lucilla’s examination, though thorough, was swift. It was not polite to use her lorgnette in this way, she knew, and she was ashamed that the astonishment of Nadine’s hair should have betrayed her into this momentary discourtesy. She came very sweetly to meet Nadine, took her face in her hands and kissed her; being very careful not to get anywhere near the lipstick, for though repeatedly assured by her family that the thing was kiss-proof she nevertheless had her doubts. “Welcome, my dear,” she said gently.
A tiny flush stained the pallor of Nadine’s face. Few things in this world embarrassed her but her mother-in-law’s lorgnette did. Somehow they always made her feel perfectly certain that she had a smut on her nose. She glanced for a moment into the glass to see, but her lovely face was unblemished as ever.
And lovelier than ever, thought Lucilla. She always forgot, between visits, how very arresting her daughter-in-law’s beauty was, and today the sight of it made her feel almost weak with fright. What chance had she against it? It was a beauty to drive men mad. She understood David, and a little of her anger against him ebbed away. And some of her anger against Nadine too; such a woman could not help but be blinded, now and again, by the smoke from the fires that she kindled.
Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes;
Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears.
The words came to her in David’s clear voice and she remembered that he had spoken them when he played Romeo.
Love is a flaming heart, and its flames aspire
Till they cloud the soul in the smoke of a windy fire.
She had read that somewhere, too. They were blinded, always, these poor lovers. They could not help themselves.
“You look very well, Nadine,” she said gently. “Sit down, dear. Tea will be here in a moment.’ ”
Nadine sat down very meekly in a low chair by Lucilla and untied her scarf. How slender her hands were, thought Lucilla, and how lovely the column of her throat. Now she came to look at it again that absurd new style of hairdressing suited her. It was like a coronet set upon her beauty.
“The children are going to have tea with us since you are here,” said Lucilla. “And Margaret will be here in a moment. I don’t know where David is. You met Mother, did you, darlings?”
“Yes,” said Tommy, loudly and a little rudely, and bit deep into a bun, though the teapot had not yet arrived and no one had invited him to help himself. Ben said nothing. He just gazed at the sugar basin very, very sadly. Caroline, not fully understanding her mother’s delinquency and much elated by having somehow or other been the first to be hugged by Mother, stood very close to her, her hand on her knee.
“Nice little midget,” murmured Nadine, and kissed her daughter’s smooth shining head. Caroline, overwhelmed with speechless joy, sucked her thumb ecstatically and gazed at her grandmother with shining eyes. It really almost
seemed as though Mother had changed her mind and liked little girls best after all.
Lucilla could not understand it. Ben and Tommy were exuding from every pore that icy disapproval which a man, disappointed in his female relatives, can express so well in utter silence. Nadine and Caroline, on the other hand, feeling no doubt the bond of their sex, seemed drawing together. Yet while she talked to Lucilla and fondled Caroline Nadine’s eyes were continually wandering appealingly to her sons. But they would not meet her eyes. They were very, very displeased with her. Surely, thought Lucilla, Nadine had not already told the children about David? Lucilla could not believe it. Yet, if she had, it was obvious upon whose side the children were. With a lifting of the heart Lucilla realized that, consciously or unconsciously, the children would be most potent advocates.
And then Ellen came in with the second-best teapot. Lucilla stared in astonishment. Why the second-best? They always had the best when there were guests.
“Good afternoon, madam,” said Ellen coldly to Nadine, and set down the teapot with a resounding bang that all but cracked it.
“Good afternoon, Ellen,” said Nadine. “It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?”
Ellen deigned no reply. She drew herself to her full height, sniffed, folded her bony hands at her waist and with one keen swift glance through her steel-rimmed spectacles told Nadine exactly what she thought of her. Then she left the room, closing the door with quite unnecessary firmness.
The incident was somehow completely shattering. At Ellen’s glance Nadine had braced her shoulders as though she feared a blow and now, so unnerved that she quite forgot the children’s presence, she turned startled eyes upon Lucilla. “Grandmother,” she whispered, “did you tell her?”
“No, dear,” whispered Lucilla, equally unnerved, “I didn’t. David told me not to.”
“Told you not to what?” demanded Tommy suddenly and very loudly.
Lucilla, who had also been momentarily oblivious of the children’s presence, jumped, and turned anxious eyes on Nadine. Now she would know if Nadine had told the children.
“Nothing,” said Nadine. “Hand me my tea, darling.”
So Nadine hadn’t told them. Lucilla was trembling so much that she had to use both hands to lift the teapot. It almost seemed as though children, like dogs, could sense things without being told.
It was a profound relief when Margaret, in her gardening clothes and bringing the freshness of the garden with her, came in to greet Nadine with that awkward admiration which was always hers when confronted with her beautiful sister-in-law. Her unawareness of strain in the atmosphere, her complete lack of envy as she sat there delighting shyly in Nadine’s loveliness, were utterly refreshing. “Dear Margaret!” thought Lucilla, and her strained figure relaxed thankfully.
But in a moment Margaret had her taut again. “Why in the world,” demanded Margaret, “are we welcoming Nadine with only the second-best teapot?”
CHAPTER
7
— 1 —
BY ten o’clock in the morning Hilary had already done what many people would have considered quite a good day’s work. He got up always at six, had his tepid bath, shaved and dressed, donned the threadbare cassock he always wore in the house as protection against the Vicarage draughts, went downstairs to his study and prayed and meditated for an hour. At seven forty-five he crossed the garden and the lane to the small grey church half hidden among the great churchyard yews, and struggled into his surplice and stole in the vestry while Thomas Trickup the verger, who was also the village butcher, and a very excellent churchman besides, tolled the bell. At eight Hilary said mass, his weekday congregation consisting, winter and summer alike, of Trickup, Miss Marble from Lavender Cottage, Margaret when she could get away, and a robin. On Sundays he had quite a large congregation, for he had been Vicar of Fairhaven for over twenty years and brought it up very firmly in the way it should go, but it would take him another twenty years, if he lived as long, to persuade any but the faithful four to come to church on a weekday. Yet Fairhaven liked to hear the bell tolling out every morning, sounding through the winter darkness as though to tell them that the night was over or ringing through the spring and summer birdsong like another bird calling in the sky. The ungodly, rousing from sleep, set their watches by this bell, and the godly, whilst also setting their watches, remembered that at this hour Hilary was praying for them. They were glad of that, for they liked Hilary.
The least intuitive among his colleagues sometimes wondered why it was that Hilary was so popular a parish priest. He was not very clever, and certainly nothing to look at with his limp, his bald head and his tendency to stoutness, and evidently the powers that be thought little of him, for having more than twenty years ago rewarded his patriotism with the gift of a parish and a stipend almost too microscopic to be seen they had now apparently forgotten all about him; Vicar of Fairhaven he still was and would be, presumably, forever. But there were others who did understand why Hilary was so well liked, and they envied him. For Hilary was an utterly unselfconscious and therefore a completely happy man, and none are so well-loved as the utterly happy.
Not all the credit was his; Lucilla had handed on to her eldest child her own lovely enjoyment of little things; but a good deal of it was. He had found out early in life that people did not find him very interesting and his humility had decided that they were probably quite right. If they didn’t bother about him neither would he bother about himself. To the best of his ability he would do the work he loved in the world he loved and think no more about it; if it turned out at the last that the one had helped the other he would be glad, but it would be arrogant to feel any certainty about that in this present life, and weakening to worry over it. A wise countryman, not gifted with great and compelling gifts, should pass steadily and quietly on his way, not questioning too much or expecting too much, unhurried as the seasons that regulate his life, disciplined by their rhythm, facing ever outwards to the wide horizons that are his special treasure. So Hilary argued, and so he lived, and as the years went on was unknown to himself regarded with ever increasing affection.
Yet even had he realized the world’s changing attitude towards him it is doubtful if he could have been much happier. He had adjusted himself so well to the shortcomings of his personality and the hardships of his life that they fitted him as comfortably as the lumps in his hard bed. He was quite at home now with his inability to write a good sermon and the draughts and ugliness of his red-brick vicarage, and the physical pain that had been with him since the wounds of the war was now an old friend. Against the background of these things the riches of his life shone as gaily as the little red berries on the sombre churchyard yews. He was very rich, he considered, above all in the possession of that old grey church, the way that led to it and the prayers that he said in it. These things seemed to him peculiarly his own, and beyond price.
Nearly a week after Nadine’s arrival he crossed his garden as usual at seven forty-five. It was a glorious morning. The summer had been drenchingly wet but since Nadine came they had been enjoying one of those glorious mellow spells of autumn sunshine that last on and on until they are finally shattered by the equinoctial gales. It had been splendid harvest weather, thought Hilary with satisfaction, and stopped still in the lane outside his garden to rejoice in the warmth and the clear light, and the thought of all those golden stooks of corn that had ringed in his parish like the tented encampments of fairy sultans. Country life was good, he thought. Among all the terrible complexities of modern life it was blessedly unchanging.
Here in the country’s heart
Where the grass is green,
Life is the same sweet life
As it e’er hath been.
Trust in a God still lives,
And the bell at morn
Floats with a thought of God
O’er the rising corn.
God comes down in the r
ain,
And the crop grows tall—
This is the country faith,
And the best of all.
Hilary’s memory was stored with the hymns that he taught his squeaking little choir boys and he murmured this one to himself as he turned in under the lych gate to the sounding of the bell.
The yews of Fairhaven churchyard were far-famed. Once they had made the great bows that the yeomen of England carried on foreign battlefields, but now they towered in undisturbed majesty over the weatherworn headstones beneath them. Even where the sunshine touched it their green was deep and opaque but in the shadows over the graves it was black as pitch; yet everywhere the little red berries were strung in the darkness like lanterns in the night “The jewels of the just,” murmured Hilary.
Dear beauteous death! the jewel of the just,
Shining nowhere but in the dark;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust;
Could man outlook that mark!
He paused in his leisurely journey up the moss-grown path to the vestry door to look for the hundredth time at the inscription on the headstone under the largest yew tree of all. “Aramante Emilie du Plessis-Pascau . . . A melodious noise of birds among the branches. A running that could not be seen of skipping beasts. The whole world shined with clear light and none were hindered in their labour.” Never before had he seen that text upon a gravestone, yet surely there was none so instinct with glorious freedom. The singing birds, the skipping beasts, the men set free from pain and disease to be forever unhindered in their work, “the whole creation, that groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now, delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” He was in the vestry by this time, struggling into his surplice, filled as always with a sense of leaping expectation as he prepared to celebrate that sacrament where he believed that the two worlds met.
The Bird in the Tree Page 17
