Susan Settles Down

by Molly Clavering

  “Then what’s she giggling about?”

  “It’s only that the Pringles make me hysterical after a bit,” explained Peggy. “And—and he will keep calling them idiotic names like Blinderslosh!”

  Susan felt that this mirth was excessive, and Oliver’s joke of the feeblest, but she held her peace, only resolving to get some explanation from him later.

  Her chance was at hand. Jed Armstrong took Peggy by the arm, and saying, “You wait here. Peggy and I’ll go and get them,” left brother and sister alone.

  5

  For a short time there was silence, broken only by Oliver’s whistling. He looked so cheerful and innocent that Susan found it difficult to be severe.

  “Not quite fair of you, Noll,” she said, during a pause in the whistling.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “You know quite well. Peggy isn’t fair game for you, my dear.”

  “Peggy? Pooh—she’s only a baby. I’ve no interest in her whatever.”

  “As long as she hasn’t any interest in you—” began Susan slowly.

  “Can I help it if she has?”

  “Yes, I think you probably can.” Susan’s hazel eyes, always so much more serious than her laughing mouth, met her brother’s darker gaze, and read a certain shame in it. Answering his look she said: “Don’t do it, Noll.”

  “All right, all right. I’m not going to,” he cried, turning away and hunching his shoulders irritably.

  Susan, guessing that she had won, said no more, and sounds of approaching voices brought them out from the cool twilight of the barn into sunshine that dazzled their eyes at first. They found the Misses Pringle being made much of by Jed, who had suddenly become amiably talkative. Though this seemed a sinister symptom to Susan, the three sisters, particularly the skittish Cissie, were more than content to take it as a tribute to their charms.

  “Come on, and I’ll show you something worth seeing!” he was shouting genially. “Never mind the others, they don’t know a good beast when they see one. I’ve a prize bull here I want you to look at.”

  Waving the rest back with one gigantic hand, he led the Pringles, torn between wholesome fear of the bull and delight that they should have been chosen to view it, across the yard.

  “What’s he up to?” muttered Oliver. “I wish I knew—”

  So far as they could see, Mr. Armstrong was “up to” nothing. He opened the gate of an enclosed pen backed by a shed and walked fearlessly in. The Misses Pringle, clucking like agitated hens, gathered timorously about the entrance, afraid to venture farther.

  It was Peggy who first caught sight of Captain Kidd.

  As the goat came mincing round the corner of the courtyard, his yellow eyes gleaming malevolently, his mephistophelian countenance turning from side to side in search of prey, she and Susan, followed more slowly by Oliver, took refuge in the barn, from which point of vantage they awaited events.

  These were not slow in following. Captain Kidd caught sight of the three elderly ladies, and reared up on his hind-feet. In this heraldic attitude he advanced towards them, tossing his beard viciously. The two younger Miss Pringles, with a long and tremulous yell, darted into the bull’s enclosure and slammed the gate behind them, leaving their strong-minded sister to face the foe as best she could. She did so for the space of perhaps five seconds, while the onlookers in the barn watched his stately progress with misgiving, Peggy audibly wondering why “Uncle Jed” did not “do something.”

  “Good boy!” cried Miss Pringle in trembling accents. “Good Billy, nice beastie, then. . . . Oh!”

  The last exclamation was a high shriek, for Captain Kidd, enraged either by her appearance, which except for the beard and horns was not unlike his own, or her temerity in thus addressing him, made a lunge at her.

  “Oliver!” cried Susan, “that brute is dangerous, I’m sure of it! You must rescue the poor old thing somehow!”

  As Oliver left the barn, Miss Pringle’s nerve finally gave way and she fled, shrieking, towards the house, pursued hotly by Captain Kidd. In an instant Jed Armstrong and the two younger sisters emerged from the pen, and while they clung together, crying that poor Bell would be killed, he and Oliver joined in the chase.

  Susan and Peggy, following more cautiously, were in time to see the final tableau of Oliver supporting the eldest Miss Pringle, her stately condescension vanished, her scanty grey locks streaming, while Captain Kidd and his owner strove for possession of her red straw hat. Something had to give way, and as neither Mr. Armstrong nor his goat would yield an inch, it was the hat which at last disintegrated.

  Captain Kidd bounded off with the larger portion, which he proceeded to eat, savagely and voraciously, before the fascinated eyes of the entire tea-party, and Jed triumphantly proffered the mangled remains to the now speechless Miss Pringle.

  Long after the sisters, only slightly pacified, had taken a hasty departure in the donkey-drawn governess-cart, Oliver continued to laugh helplessly at intervals, and to mutter: “I’ll never forget that goat eating the Blinderslosh hat, never, as long as I live. Poor old Belly, or was it Jell? I don’t know t’other from which—with her venerable locks flowing—”

  “It really was rather a shame,” said Peggy.

  “What I can’t understand,” said Susan, “is how Captain Kidd came to appear just then? I thought you said you’d had him safely shut up—”

  Jed returned her suspicious look with one absolutely expressionless. “So I did,” he said. And added thoughtfully, after a pause, “I think the fairies must have let him out.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  1

  “I had a dream last night,” said Cilly importantly.

  “Did ye? Well, staun’ still while I do your hair, see, or ye’ll get it tugged.” Jo-an’s voice was listless, and she plied the hair-brush in a half-hearted fashion as she brushed Cilly’s silvery curls.

  Bun looked up from the floor where she sat with a sock half-way over one foot. “What was it about?” she asked.

  “About me. I was a dear wee eagle, layin’ a egg up a tree.”

  “But you couldn’t of got up the tree,” objected Bun. “You can’t climb trees.”

  “Can, in d’eams,” said Cilly firmly. Peeping out from under her veil of curls she saw that Peggy had added herself to the audience in the nursery, and continued with redoubled vigour. “There was a tiger up the tree, gerrowlin’ at me!”

  Bun stared at her cousin with solemn dark eyes. “And then what happened?” she asked.

  “I woke up,” answered Cilly.

  “But where was the egg?”

  “The tiger ate it!”

  “Tigers don’t eat eggs, do they, Peggy?” Bun appealed to her aunt, who was assisting Colin into his minute trousers.

  “Not that I know of!” said Peggy with her gay laugh.

  “This tiger did,” said Cilly. “It was my tiger, an’ my egg, an’ my d’eam—”

  Released from Jo-an’s ministrations, she jumped about the floor in high feather.

  “Come, noo, Bun, an’ let me see to that hair o’ yours,” said Jo-an.

  A shower of thick, dark locks, straight as if soaked by rain, fell about Bun’s shoulders. She tossed it back and cried: “You’re a funny wee dreamer, anyway!”

  “Funny wee d’eamer!” echoed Colin, and gave one of his shouts of laughter as if delighted by his own cleverness.

  “Colin, my man, if you won’t stand still, how am I to get these breeks of yours on? One foot at a time, now—” said Peggy.

  “Colin’s b’eeks!” said her nephew joyously, and laughed again.

  “Jo-an says if you laugh before breakfast you cry before night,” observed Bun.

  “Dear me, I hope not, or we’ll all be in tears to-day,” Peggy said, and pulled a jersey over Colin’s primrose-coloured head.

  “Jo-an won’t. She isn’t laughing,” said Bun, who had twisted her head round far enough to catch sight of Jo-an’s unsmiling face.

  Jo-an only said,
“There, noo, that’s enough.” But Peggy was suddenly aware that the young nurse was unusually silent this morning.

  “Yesterday was your day out, wasn’t it, Jo-an?” she said. “I hope you enjoyed it.”

  Jo-an started, the colour flooded her cheeks and then drained away, leaving her curiously pale. “Oh, it was a’ right, Miss Peggy,” she said in a stifled voice. “See an’ not lose yer ribbons to-day, Bun. They’re new ones.”

  “It was such a fine day,” Peggy went on. “The walk up to Reiverslaw must have been lovely.”

  “It was a bonny day,” was all Jo-an said, and her small rosy mouth shut tightly as if on some close secret.

  The breakfast gong boomed downstairs, and Cilly cried excitedly, “I’m goin’ to have a egg for brekfuss’! A dear wee brown tiger’s egg—”

  “Such nonsense,” said Jo-an. “Another word and you’ll not get an egg at all!”

  This sharpness on her part was most unusual, and Cilly murmured in a very subdued manner: “I’m goin to have a dear wee hen’s egg for brekfuss’.”

  “I should hope so, indeed,” said Jo-an.

  Peggy went down to the dining-room rather thoughtfully. She hoped that Jo-an was not going to give notice, but it looked very much as if she might. No place suited her restless temperament for more than a month or two, and she had been at the Manse longer than anywhere. Her parents were beginning to congratulate themselves that Jo-an had “settled doun,” and Mr. Cunningham also had commented on it. . . . But now. . . . Peggy shook her head. “I’ll wait a day or two, and then if she isn’t happier, I’ll have to tell Mother,” she decided. “Perhaps if she spoke to Jo-an it might steady her.”

  Then she forgot all about Jo-an, for Jim, bounding into the room, seized her round the waist and whirled her about until her head swam.

  “It’s the Ram Fair to-day!” he said, releasing her. “Want to go, Peg?”

  “Oh, Jim, how lovely!” Peggy cried breathlessly. “Of course I want to go—”

  “You shall, then, and I’ll pay your entry money,” said her brother, rattling some silver opulently in his trousers-pocket.

  When they started out in Jim’s motor bicycle and sidecar, a few hours later, a red head was pressed to one of the upper windows, watching them, a pair of dark, rebellious eyes saw them go; but Peggy did not look up. For the time being Jo-an had no place in her thoughts.

  2

  “By the way, Donaldina,” said Susan, pausing as she was about to leave the kitchen after her morning interview with the cook, “why can’t we have soup to-night? There’s a large, handsome bone in the larder—”

  Donaldina replied in shocked tones: “If ye please, mem, yon bone’s promised tae Taura, an’ if we bile a’ the guid oot o’t afore he gets it, he’ll no’ be pleased.”

  Susan had become accustomed to the respect, verging on reverence, with which her large black dog was regarded in the kitchen, and she suspected that, willing in their service though Donaldina was, she would let them go hungry rather than forget “Taura’s” supper.

  “Oh, of course, if Tara is to have it, that’s a different matter,” she said, and returned to the sitting-room smiling a little.

  Neither she nor Oliver had realized when they rather dubiously accepted this offspring of a Labrador who had contracted a mésalliance with a neighbouring Newfoundland, what a powerful personality they were introducing to their household; but they had never regretted it. Tara, large, handsome, in a coat of glossy, curly black tipped with bronze where the sun caught it, combined the Labrador’s pleasant temper and intelligence with the Newfoundland’s faithfulness to a small circle of intimates, and a somewhat sombre air when depressed. His manners, except when on rare occasions he unbent so far as to frolic in a stately fashion, were so correct that his owners were sometimes abashed by his look of grave disapproval when Oliver played the fool. He did not beg; to steal he was ashamed; nor did he ever make meals uncomfortable as some dogs will by watching with a grudging eye each bite that went into a human mouth.

  “I’m afraid,” Susan said guiltily, as Donaldina brought in the coffee after dinner, and Tara, spruce and debonair, bustled in after her, sure of a welcome, “that we won’t be able to take him to Abbeyshiels with us to-morrow, Oliver.”

  “No,” said Oliver, and shook hands with Tara, who offered first his right and then his left paw solemnly. “The Ram Fair isn’t for you, old man. You’ll have to stay at home to-morrow and look after the house.”

  Tara looked at them, his ears and tail drooping, but apparently he accepted the decision, for as they set out for the Ram Fair on the following morning he saw them off with an air of manly resignation, and presently retired within doors again.

  “Well, here we are!” shouted Oliver in self-congratulatory tones, as the Squib, after a succession of ear- and nerve-shattering reports, finally came to rest at the roadside in a cloud of odorous blue smoke.

  Susan never set foot in her brother’s car without the confident expectation that disaster would overtake them before their journey’s end, and her murmured “Thank God!” as she got out was piously fervent.

  Oliver did not share either her fears or her relief. “She’s brought us in very nicely,” he observed with simple pride, patting the Squib’s dusty red bonnet affectionately.

  “She has certainly heralded our arrival very effectually,” said Susan. “We might as well have been attended by a brass band in full blast.”

  There was no false modesty about the Squib and her blatant progress. A small but interested group of loafers, sprung as if by magic from the ground, had gathered about the car and proceeded to exchange animated comments, the reverse of complimentary, on her general appearance.

  “I suppose she’ll be safe enough if we leave her here?” said Oliver, surveying the Squib with the doting pride usually shown by a young mother exhibiting her first baby.

  “Safe?” Susan echoed faintly. “My dear Oliver, do you imagine that anyone in his senses would want to run away with the Squib?”

  This remark was greeted with smothered guffaws and grins by the audience, and by Oliver with the scowl reserved by brothers for their sisters.

  “Don’t make such a fool of yourself!” was his low-voiced but heated request, interrupted by Gibbie Johnston, owner-driver of Muirfoot’s sole taxi, who had strolled up.

  “Weel, sir,” he said with a genial smile and a finger to his cap for Susan’s benefit—a signal honour, as she realized, for in this independent country such courtesies were only observed where liking went with them—“weel, sir, I see ye still have the auld bag o’ nuts on the road! Ye’ve never needed to borry the Miss Pringles’ wee cuddy yet to drag it hame for ye?”

  If this opprobrious suggestion had been made by Susan, the vials of Oliver’s wrath would have been poured on her devoted head; but from Gibbie, as a fellow-man, he took it almost blandly.

  “Come, now, Gibbie,” he said. “I bet you’d be pleased enough to have my engine inside your own old bone-shaker of a barouche!”

  “Aweel,” said Gibbie with the air of one making a handsome concession, “I’ll no’ go sae far as to say the en-gine’s hopeless a’thegither. But the boady! Are ye no’ feart it’ll rattle to bits an’ leave ye sittin’ amang the wheels?”

  As further pleasantries of this nature seemed to be forthcoming, Susan left them to it, and walked slowly on through the goods station towards the park where the Ram Fair was being held. The railway yard, where empty trucks were awaiting their freight of rams, was choked with cars, which had also overflowed into the field beyond. A dull noise that from the road had sounded like the sea beating on a rocky coast now began to resolve itself into its component parts: the deep-toned buzz of many men’s voices, the shrill yapping of collies, the continuous roar proceeding from the brassy throats of eleven auctioneers, and, above all, the ceaseless hoarse crying of the rams themselves. There were upwards of three thousand of them, and in their imperious belling the dominant male note resounded, fearless a
nd challenging, utterly unlike the plaintive bleat which was the only sound Susan had associated with sheep hitherto.

  She paid her entrance money at the gate and joined the crowd in the park, which doped gently away down towards the roaring rings. Everywhere on the poached and trampled grass men stood in quiet, serious groups, or laughed loudly at some joke, and slapped the jester on the hack with hands as large as hams, as hard as their own shoe-leather. Strong tobacco and the pungent smell of sheep and sheep-dip tainted the clean air with whiffs of the tweed in which almost everyone was clad. There were shepherds, their far-seeing eyes knowledgeably appraising this beast or that, their wistful, ivory-toothed dogs clinging like burrs to their heels; there were men in riding-breeches and leggings, men in inch-thick suits obviously made by their local tailor, and other men whose tweeds as obviously had been cut by a master-hand. The comradeship of mutual interest bound them together in a solemn temporary equality, even seemed to make them look alike, so that out of the mass of lean, hard-bitten, blue-eyed, brown faces it was next to impossible to distinguish friend from stranger.

  It took Susan less than half a minute to realize that it was hopeless to look for Jed Armstrong, or any other acquaintance, in such a crowd. Big man though he was, there were others present of the same magnificent build towering among their fellows, where most were of good height, and even the smallest appeared either stocky or wirily strong. Susan wished that she could have had with her one of those gloomy spirits who shake their heads in dismal gloating over the decadence of the race, for here they might have seen what would have helped to give the lie to their prophecies. Here, bred on the land and for it, sprung of sturdy stock, was the very antithesis of the effeminate youth that lisps pornographic verse in so-called Bohemian surroundings to others of like kind. Perhaps the men here were narrow-minded, thinking of little beyond their crops or their beasts; perhaps coarse-fibred, too reminiscent of the strong earth by which they lived, to please the idealist. But at least their vices and failings were those of men, they knew nothing of the lust which seeks an outlet in perversion. It seemed to Susan, as she stood absorbed in watching, that they were akin to men of Oliver’s stamp, those clean-run sailors who always bear with them the freshness of salt water.