A sudden memory of his boyhood, book-encompassed, stirred eagerly in Ludovic.
“Is it called ‘The Young Exiles ‘?” he cried.
“Oh! have you read it too?”
Their eyes met, and a delighted sense of recognition seemed to dance in both.
“I like the beginning part of it best, when the father is first arrested, and they go to the Czar. Do you remember?”
“Yes. And have you come to the part...”
They were as much excited as old friends meeting unexpectedly in a foreign country.
Ludovic remembered the book, which had absorbed him twenty years earlier, a good deal more clearly than he remembered the reviews which were now the objects of his monthly perusal.
They talked about “‘The Young Exiles” until the house was reached.
Lady Argent greeted them with smiles and kind, outstretched hand, but Ludovic felt convinced by the rather nervous cheeriness of her “Well, children dear, how do you like the garden?” that Mrs. Tregaskis had been impressing upon his mother the necessity for carrying off the situation with a high-handed brightness.
The brightness of Mrs. Tregaskis herself was beyond question.
“We heard you having a great pow-wow as you came along,” she said gaily. “What was it all about?”
She looked at Rosamund, but it was Frances who, after an instant’s pause, replied gently and gravely: “It was about a book, mostly.”
“Ah! story-books, story-books, story-books!” Mrs. Tregaskis shook her head good-humouredly. “I suspect both these little people of being book-worms.”
The laugh in her kindly gaze was inflexible, and Lady Argent responded to it by a faint tinkle of mirth that Ludovic savagely told himself was sycophantic.
“Well, I was a bit of a book-worm myself, once upon a time. No, no, don’t ask me how long ago.” No one showed any signs of doing so. “It must have been quite a hundred years ago, since I wasn’t much bigger than Frances is now, if you can imagine such a thing.”
She gave her ready, jolly laugh with both hands on her wide hips.
“I used to sit up in an old pear-tree in the orchard (down tu Tintagel ’twas, ma dear), and read everything I could find — not the sort of story-books you children of today get hold of, I can assure you, but books that you’d think very stiff and dry, I expect.”
She was now addressing herself, almost in narrative form, to Rosamund and Frances, but Ludovic noted with venomous satisfaction that the politely unresponsive expression on both faces seemed to discourage her slightly.
She turned to Lady Argent again, with another slight laugh, as it were of proud apology for her own literary infancy.
“I really believe I’d worked my way through the whole of Motley’s ‘Dutch Republic’ before I was ten years old, and as for Don Quixote, he was my hero. In fact my lightest literature was Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queen,’ most of which I knew by heart.”
“My dear! At ten years old! Just think of it!” This from Lady Argent. Ludovic contented himself with the bitter ejaculation: “Liar!”
Which civil and ingratiating apostrophe was naturally confined to his own breast.
“Don’t you find that this generation has a positively vitiated taste as regards fiction?” Bertha Tregaskis demanded of her hostess, who, having all her life been innocently devoid of any taste for fiction at all, replied in an unsure voice: “Do you mean sort of penny dreadfuls, Bertie, dear? which they always say the housemaids like, though I’m sure mine have the most superior taste, for they read books like ‘St. Elmo’ or ‘Donovan’ for choice, I believe. I know my maid told me she was reading a novel called ‘Infelice,’ whatever that may mean. So educated of her, I thought, to choose a book with a foreign name like that.”
“‘Infeleese ‘?” repeated Mrs. Tregaskis uncomprehendingly. “Oh, Infelice! I know what you mean. My dear Sybil!”
More laughter.
“Have I said something absurd?” Lady Argent helplessly inquired; “I never do know anything about books, you know — so unlike Ludovic.”
She looked proudly at her son.
“You know he writes, Bertie?”
Ludovic had writhed under this simple announcement ever since his tenth year.
“But how splendid!” cried Mrs. Tregaskis with enthusiasm. “Who publishes for you?”
Ludovic felt convinced that she expected him to disclaim ever having got as far as publication, and took a vicious satisfaction in replying: “‘Cameron’s Review ‘has taken one or two small things, but they really are so very few and far between that only a fond parent could look upon me as a writer, in any sense of the word.”
“Nonsense,” murmured his mother. “Don’t listen to him, Bertie. He had a most beautiful thing, pages and pages long, all about Early English Poetry in the ‘Age of Literature,’ only a few weeks ago.”
Mrs. Tregaskis appeared to be as much impressed as the fondest of parents could desire.
“You don’t say so! Splendid! Scrumptious!” She almost shouted in her enthusiasm.
“I envy you dilettantes, who have time for all that sort of thing. A poverty-stricken Cornish woman like myself has to write what and when she can, just to turn an honest penny now and then.”
“Bertie! you don’t mean to say you write, as well as everything else?”
“Oh my dear Sybil, the greatest rubbish, you know — just a story here and there, to bring in a much-needed guinea.”
She laughed the gallant laugh of one who would scorn to deny the need of guineas.
“How too wonderful she is,” said Lady Argent in an undertone to the universe at large. “Bertie, you must let us read your stories.”
“Oh no, my dear. They’re only just scribbled off between a Mothers’ Meeting and a dairy class — just anyhow.
What would the writer say to that?”
She looked roguishly at Ludovic.
“How I envy you! If I had nothing else to do but sit in this magnificent study, I should try and write a book, perhaps; but as it is... I envy you.”
There was an instant’s silence.
An unpardonable instinct to see whether it were possible thoroughly to disconcert his mother’s friend seized upon Ludovic.
“I wish to goodness,” he said slowly, and with an entirely assumed bitterness of tone, “that I had something to do besides sit in a study and scribble — it’s not fit for a man.”
It was almost the first time that his mother had ever heard him allude to his infirmity, and she flushed from brow to chin.
But Mrs. Tregaskis was more than equal to the situation, as its creator had surmised that she would be.
The jovial lines of her face softened into kindly compassion, and the slow noddings of her head were portentous with understanding: “Aha!” she murmured eloquently, and the depths of comprehension in her brooding gaze left Ludovic utterly defeated. Then, after a moment’s silence, obviously consecrated by Mrs. Tregaskis to her complete and all-embracing understanding of Ludovic Argent, she gravitated skilfully towards a brighter outlook.
“What a joy that little gift of writing is, though! I always say it’s like the quality of mercy, twice blessed — it blesses him that gives and him that takes.”
“My dear Bertie!” said Lady Argent with her soft laugh, and under a vague impression that Bertie was being epigrammatic and slightly daring with a passage from the Scriptures.
“Well, it’s very true,” laughed Mrs. Tregaskis. “I’m sure the readers of ‘Cameron’s’ and the ‘Age of Literature’ often bless your son’s contributions, and as to ‘him that gives,’ I know it really is the greatest joy to me sometimes, when the real work of the day is done, to feel I can let myself sit down for a few minutes and turn out half a dozen little French couplets or some fanciful piece of nonsense about children and fairies — you know the sort of thing. It does seem to rest one so.”
“To rest one!” echoed Lady Argent, with at least three notes of admiration in her voice.
“Children, do you realize what a wonderful person your — your guardian is? She’ll tell you all sorts of stories about fairies and things. I know you’re perfectly marvellous with children, Bertie,” she added in a most audible aside.
“Little people generally like my long yarns about the Cornish pixies,” admitted Mrs. Tregaskis. “Have you ever seen a pixie, Frances?”
“No,” said Frances coldly.
“Ah, they don’t grow in this part of the world. But there are wonderful things in Cornwall, as you’ll find out when you live there.”
“When do you go?” asked Ludovic of Rosamund.
Her sensitive face flushed.
“To-morrow, I think,” she half whispered, with a glance in the direction of Mrs. Tregaskis, that seemed to Ludovic to convey hostility and a half defiant fear.
“Well, Sybil,” Bertha observed, “am I to see the garden, too?”
“Oh yes, of course. I’m longing for your advice — you know so much about a garden, and those things you made me get for the rockery last year aren’t doing quite as well as I hoped. Do come and tell me what you think of them.”
Mrs. Tregaskis rose. Her eye rested for a moment on the children. Then she said briskly: “The children must show us the way. I expect they’ve ferreted out every corner in the place, during that grand exploration before tea, if they haven’t actually danced upon your most cherished rock-plants. I know what country kids are like.”
Ludovic thought of the two little forlorn figures that he had found under the great ilex-tree, and Mrs. Tregaskis’ joviality seemed to him singularly out of place.
He rose and opened the door.
“Form fours — quick march — left, right, left, right,” cried Bertie playfully, giving Rosamund a gentle push by the shoulders.
Rosamund and Frances went out.
II
MRS. TREGASKIS shut the door behind them with astonishing briskness and whisked round to face her hostess.
“A little diplomatic ruse, my dear, to get those infants out of hearing. And once out of doors they’ll be tearing all over the place and forget our very existence. I really must talk to you about them — that eldest girl means trouble if I know anything of spoilt children. I foresee a scene this evening.”
“Why, Bertie dear? I thought them so very brave and good, poor little things.”
“Oh, you know what children are! They’ve practically ‘got over’ it as people say, already, but there’s bound to be an outburst, I’m afraid, at the ‘last evening’ — you know the kind of thing. The men have been taking away the furniture, such of it as is going to be sold, this afternoon while we’ve been out, and I do rather dread taking them back to that half-dismantled cottage. Rosamund is very highly strung, poor child, and she always infects the little one.”
“Poor children,” sighed Lady Argent, while Ludovic was wishing that Mrs. Tregaskis had not taken up a position that rendered it impossible for him to walk out at the door.
“Poor me, too, I think. It’s very stupid to mind it, but these days have been a frightful strain, in a way — one has somehow felt for them so much more than they’ve probably felt for themselves. But what with mothering them, and seeing to the business part of it all, and packing up, I really feel a rag.”
She sank limply into an armchair and Ludovic made for the unguarded doorway as rapidly as he could.
“My poor dear! But why shouldn’t you all stay here for the night, and avoid going back to the cottage at all. Do do that, Bertie dear.”
“Sybil, you angel!” cried Mrs. Tregaskis, reviving abruptly. “What a lot it would save me — I’ve simply been dreading to-night. But wouldn’t it be a fearful nuisance?”
Ludovic opened the door, stumbled on the threshold, then awkwardly readjusted his crutch and shut the library door with a hasty bang.
He had almost fallen over Rosamund Grantham, crouching outside the door.
She raised a deeply flushed face, and he looked gravely down at her. He was shocked only at the unchildlike misery and exhaustion that showed in her dark-circled eyes.
“Let me help you up from the floor,” he said after a moment, as though her position were the most usual one for a guest to select.
She let him take her hand and raise her from the floor, and then followed him slowly across the hall into a small morning-room.
Ludovic supposed that he ought to say: “Listening at doors is dishonourable,” but the sense of courtesy, apparently less in abeyance than where Bertha Tregaskis was concerned, revolted, and he moreover felt convinced that Rosamund was as well aware as himself of the breach she had committed.
Presently she said in a low voice: “I know it is dreadful to listen at doors. I have never done it before, but I felt certain — certain — that they would try and arrange something or other without telling me — perhaps separate me and Francie or something; there’s nobody to understand anything, and I don’t know what is going to happen to us.”
“They can’t separate you and your sister,” said Ludovic earnestly; “no one could do that.”
“Then what are they settling in there, all by themselves? I know they are talking about us, because I could hear a little — but only a very little — that was the worst of it.
She began to struggle with tears.
“My mother asked Mrs. Tregaskis to stay here with you and your sister, for tonight, instead of going back” he told her straight.
“Why weren’t Frances and I asked if we would? Why is it arrange like that without telling me?” she demanded resentfully, her voice shaking.
“I don’t know. I suppose Mrs. Tregaskis thought you would not mind. Do you mind very much? If you would, I — I will see that you go home tonight” said Ludovic desperately.
She looked at him for an instant with a sort of wonderment in her eyes that touched him acutely, and then broke into floods of tears.
Ludovic stood looking out of the window.
“She is utterly bewildered by that woman,” he told himself angrily, “and distrusts her instinctively. Heaven help the child! What will she do in Cornwall? That woman will break her. Dear, kind, wonderful Bertie, as my mother calls her! and those two — sensitive, highly strung, who’ve probably lived in an atmosphere of understanding all their lives…”
He wondered for a wild instant if his mother could be persuaded to receive Rosamund and Frances as daughters. It hardly seemed probable, in view alone of her admiration for their self-appointed guardian. How could the charges of the benevolent cousin be reft from her under no pretext but their reluctance to be benefited, and Ludovic Argent’s passionate conviction that such beneficence would be the ruin of both?
“I’m not crying any more,” said Rosamund’s voice behind’s him, after a few moments.
He turned around.
“What shall I do? Shall I tell my mother that you are to go home again this evening?
She shook her head.
“No, thank you. In a way, they’re quite right. Frances would only cry, which would be bad for her.”
“Where is she now?” asked Ludovic.
“In the garden. She doesn’t know,” said Rosamund, colouring again “about my listening at the door. She would think it dreadful, and I know it is, — but somehow nothing seem to matter, except just to know what was going to be done with us.”
She looked mournfully at him and he saw her, bewildered and defenceless, thrust among alien standards and with all the foundations of her tiny world rocking. No wonder that in a suddenly revolutionized scale of values honour had seemed to count for less than the primitive instinct of self defence.
“What can I do for you?” he said, almost unconsciously venting aloud the strong sense of impotent compassion that moved him.
“Oh” she cried, “nobody can make things come right again — even God couldn’t, though I’ve prayed and prayed.”
“Do you mean — your mother?”
“My mother had to die,” she told him seriously. “She cou
ghed and coughed every night, sometimes right on till the next morning. The night that she died, it was dreadful. She never stopped. I prayed for anything that might stop her coughing like that, and God answered the prayer by making her die. When I heard she wasn’t coughing any more, I thought it was all my prayers being answered, and I went to sleep, and then in the morning she came and told us that mother had died.”
She stopped and looked at him, with the most pathetic look that can be seen on a child’s face, that of bewilderment at pain.
“Go on,” said Ludovic in a low voice.
“Cousin Bertie said we could go in and see her afterwards, but I wouldn’t — she shuddered— “I thought it would frighten Francie so. And we didn’t go to the funeral, either. Were you there?” she asked suddenly.
“No. I only came back from Paris yesterday,” he told her gently.
“Cousin Bertie went. She was very kind, and made us go in the garden, and told us a lot of things about heaven, and mother being quite well again now and happy, and somehow it didn’t all seem so bad then. But now we’re going away, and — and there’s nobody to understand. Except you,” she added mournfully.
“Haven’t you any relations at all?”
“No. Only Cousin Bertie. She is very kind, and she is taking us to live with her — but oh, she doesn’t understand!”
The despair in Rosamund’s voice seemed to Ludovic Argent to sum up all the inadequacy that he had felt in Bertha Tregaskis. She was very kind — she was taking the orphans to live with her — but she would never “understand.”
He felt her lack of understanding to be yet more apparent when Mrs. Tregaskis called Rosamund and Frances back to the library, just as Frances timidly pushed open the French window of the room where he stood with Rosamund.
An imploring look from Rosamund made him follow them quickly into the library.
Lady Argent welcomed him with a glad look in which, nevertheless, he detected a slight surprise.
“Well, you two,” began Bertha in a tone of careful gaiety, “what do you think of an invitation? Kind Lady Argent wants us all three to stay here for the night. Then cook won’t have any trouble about getting supper ready for us, and we shan’t have to bother any more about squeezing into the bedrooms with all those trunks! Isn’t that splendid?”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 58