“Can’t I stay here, mama?”
“No, darling. It’s better for you to be at Quintmere.”
“Will Grannie stay here with you still?”
“Yes. Now wait here quietly, while I go out to Aunt Joyce.”
Lydia went into the hall, closing the drawing-room door behind her.
“Now, are you quite sure you really want me to take Jennie back, or would she be of any comfort to you here?” said Joyce.
“No, no — it’s better for her to go with you. Oh, Joyce, she’s too little to realize it — she hasn’t even been crying. I’m very, very thankful.”
Joyce Damerel raised her brows in a quick, characteristic movement.
“She adored him. I wouldn’t count too much on her not realizing, Lydia. Jennie may be slow, but her feelings are terribly violent.”
Lydia particularly disliked the suggestion, and inwardly resented the truth in it that she suspected.
“Please take her now, Joyce — if you’re ready.”
She went into the drawing-room again, and found Jennie sitting on the floor, her eyes dry, but her face strangely white.
The means of self-expression, either physical or mental, available to childhood, are curiously limited to the primitive after all.
“I’m very sorry, mama,” said Jennie, in a feeble, bewildered voice. “I don’t think I’ve been eating anything naughty — but I’m almost sure that I’m going to be sick.”
XXII
IN her heart Lydia never quite forgave Jennie for the three days’ illness that followed on her father’s death.
It was Joyce Damerel who nursed the child, and expressed to all inquiries her complete conviction that the violence of Jennie’s grief at her loss was alone responsible for a physical collapse, unprecedented in her whole healthy childhood.
Poor little girl! People said it so often and with so much wondering compassion, that it almost seemed as though they forgot, or minimized, Lydia’s supreme claim to bereavement.
Involuntarily she could not help remembering the resentment that had invaded her long ago, at her own father’s death, when she had heard grown-up people say that she was too young to realize her loss, when they had told her that her one thought now must be for her widowed mother.
Jennie’s youth was allowed rights that had never been conceded to Lydia’s....
With her mother’s strength of will and personality, it became more and more evident that Jennie had inherited her father’s depths of feeling.
If at nine years old she had been a personage, not an appendage, at seventeen she was a force.
During the years between Lydia battled with her, was aware of ultimate defeat, such as she had never experienced in her life before, and grew to accept as part of herself an inward bitterness such as the efficient progress of her self-advanced early years had never dreamed of.
Before she had reached the age of forty she felt sometimes as though the endless struggle to dominate Jennie, which she perfectly acknowledged to herself, had worn her out.
Sometimes she remembered words spoken to her long ago by the little pale London girl, who had worked with her in the far-away time at Madame Elena’s shop: “You’ve never loved anyone.... I’m sorry for you when you do love... you won’t know how to set about it” She loved Jennie with a sentiment far more poignant than any that she had ever known for Jennie’s father.
She dimly realized that her love, possessive and tyrannical, was embittering both their lives.
“You ought to send Jennie away from home,” said Joyce Damerel once, when Jennie was of schoolgirl age.
“Home” now was a very small house, not more than a few miles away from Quintmere.
“No.”
“It might be hard on you, but it would be the best thing for her.”
“Joyce, you don’t seem to understand. Jennie is all I have, and my one thought in the world now.”
“I had to let Billy go, when he was much younger.”
“Billy is a boy. Jennie will outgrow this phase of thinking that she can’t get on with her own mother.”
Lydia said this, but she did not herself altogether believe it.
Old Lady Lucy said that Jennie was only a very young child, and that Lydia took a little self-will and naughtiness far too seriously — but Lady Lucy never saw Jennie at her worst, when she was violent and rebellious and self-assertive. Only Lydia saw that, and she was beginning to realize that it was only she in whom lay something antagonistic that Jennie apparently found in no one else.
Sometimes Jennie was contented, and easy to live with for months at a time. She loved the country and the country people whom she had known from her babyhood, and she had magnificent health.
Lydia would have liked her to form friendships — such as her own with Nathalie — amongst the contemporary daughters of squires and small landowners. She thought Jennie’s independence of these a sign of selfsatisfaction, and, unacknowledged to herself, she felt a secret dislike of Jennie’s sturdy comradeship with her Cousin Billy, and of her unfailing popularity with Billy’s friends.
The world was changing, and the young womanhood of the new century, exemplified in her daughter, failed utterly to commend itself to Lydia.
She had herself formed friendships in Devonshire now, and Nathalie Kennedy and her husband were established not far from Clyst Milton.
Lydia knew that they, and others amongst her own generation, sometimes commented with wonder on Jennie’s inability to live at peace with a mother who so earnestly desired to make her happy.
The knowledge soothed her a little sometimes.
Jennie, it was only too evident, did not require soothing. She was, except when in one of her undutiful fits of defiance, calmly and arrogantly content.
Sometimes Lydia wished that her only daughter were pretty; sometimes she felt that beauty would have been such an additional asset to Jennie’s already overweening claims on life that it was almost a relief to know her devoid of it.
She was not, except for a healthy complexion marred by tiny freckles, as good-looking as Lydia was even now. Of the square Damerel build, Jennie lacked her mother’s grace, and her eyes were grey and very direct looking, instead of sombre and slightly shadowed, as were Lydia’s. Her face was round instead of oval, and her thick hair was as straight as Lydia’s own, and of a very much lighter brown.
The only family likeness to be discovered in her, to Lydia’s amused vexation, was to a faded old daguerreotype of Grandpapa Raymond as a young man.
“I suppose we’re going to the cricket match this afternoon, mama?”
“If you like. Who’s playing?”
“Only Ashlew — Married v. Single. Billy’s going to play.”
“Well, we can go down after lunch. Put on a clean frock, please, Jennie, if you have one left.”
“I haven’t,” Jennie said, without any regret in her voice.
Lydia herself wore a crisp black-and-white foulard, and wished that Jennie appeared to be more aware of the contrast presented by her own stained and crumpled blue linen frock, made very short, and with a black patent leather belt, fastened with no attempt at trimness, round Jennie’s substantial waist. Her blue straw hat swung from her ungloved hand.
Lydia took in every detail of her daughter’s appearance, as she always did, but she made no comment. To “nag” was not only against her principles, but would have given Jennie a definite grievance of which to com plain. And she was not altogether averse from letting Lady Lucy and the Kennedys, and Joyce and Billy Damerel, see for themselves to just what lengths Jennie’s carelessness of her mother’s known wishes would go.
Jennie’s arrival, however, was greeted with more enthusiasm than censure, when they reached the little enclosure round the green-painted cricket-pavilion.
“Hullo, Jennie!” Her Cousin Billy, a fair, handsome boy a few years her senior, called out to her instantly: “Who do you think’s coming here to-night? — and how do you think he’s coming?”
/> “Oh! not someone by aeroplane?”
“Got it in one! It’s Roland Valentine!” Jennie’s unrestrained shriek made her elders look round, but whilst Lydia studiously turned her head quickly away again, Lady Lucy said indulgently: “Billy has been frantic with excitement all day. It seems that this young Canadian flying friend of his really does mean to come over here in his machine. I am really very curious myself — I hope he will arrive without an accident.”
“It will be a great event for these parts,” placidly said Nathalie Kennedy.
She had lost her colour in India, and had not kept her figure, like Lydia. She sat in the tea enclosure, just where she had made the tea so often as a girl, and watched the young and energetic daughter of the new curate making it now.
“The mania for flying is on the increase. Our boys talk of nothing else,” her husband added.
“There may be something in it,” Lydia said stiffly.
She was really thinking of Jennie’s incomprehensible passion for machinery, about which she was now talking to Billy with an assurance that Lydia found it irritating to listen to.
“Something in it!” echoed Colonel Kennedy. “But the whole future of the world may lie in it! Just think what it would mean if” Lydia had often heard the Colonel express his views before, and she did not pay much attention to him now, although she wore her usual air of graceful attentiveness, and kept her eyes intelligently raised to his face.
The cricket match began, and presently the Colonel stopped talking, and Lydia let her eyes stray round the familiar field, remembering that first summer that she had seen it — Sir Rupert Honoret’s private secretary, taking a holiday with the kind people at the Rectory.
Lady Lucy’s old pony-cart was drawn up in the old place, just under the great elm tree, and further on a group of school children played and shouted, clambering over a pile of heavy wooden hurdles that were stacked together in a heap.
Just as Lydia was looking at them, a very little boy of not more than five years old succeeded in clambering to the summit of the pile, and stool there triumphant, precariously straddling from the top of one hurdle to another.
“He ought not — it isn’t safe,” flashed through Lydia’s mind, and almost at the same moment the outermost hurdle slipped, and half the stack came crashing to the ground, bringing with it the little, climbing boy.
There were screams from the children, loudest of all from the child who lay pinned to the earth by the heavy pieces of wood.
Lydia sprang instinctively to her feet, quicker of thought, as of movement, than either Nathalie or her husband.
The much abused quality of presence of mind had always been essentially hers.
But she was pushed on one side, as a young, tall figure dashed out from behind the pavilion, and tore with incredible speed across the grass.
By the time the Colonel’s long legs had hurriedly reached the group of screaming children, and the men on the pitch had turned round and broken off their game, and the village spectators on the benches had understood that there had been an accident, Jennie’s strong arms, unaided, had lifted the weighty hurdles and raised the shrieking child into her lap.
“Where does it hurt, Jackie?” She was calmly running her hands over the little boy’s limbs, with all the air of an expert, as Lydia approached.
“Ow — my leg!” Jackie yelled.
His mother, an untidy, slatternly woman, looking terrified, hurried up.
“Oh, Jackie, didn’t I tell you, you naughty boy!” she cried, with a white face.
She made no attempt to take the child, but Lydia said sharply: “Here’s Mrs. Madge, Jennie. You’d better give Jackie to her.”
Jennie simply shook her head.
“I’m afraid it’s his leg. Hush, Jackie, now — the doctor’ll be here directly and he’ll put you right.”
Lydia stepped forward resolutely, quite devoid of any confidence in the handling of broken limbs by her careless, inexperienced child, and subconsciously indignant that this want of confidence did not appear to be shared by the spectators.
“Let someone take him at once, who knows something about children,” she said low and scathingly to Jennie, and knelt on the ground beside her.
“Don’t touch my — leg,” roared Jackie, as he saw another unfamiliar pair of hands hovering above him.
“Mrs. Madge, will you take him?” said Lydia clearly.
But Mrs. Madge shrank away.
“Oh — he didn’t ought to be touched, Mrs. Damerel — not till doctor comes. He’ll be here this instant — he’s only just gone off the field. Keep still now, Jackie.”
“Don’t — touch — my — leg,” reiterated the little boy, sobbing more quietly. He lay still on Jennie’s lap.
“However did it happen?” said somebody curiously.
Several people began to explain volubly, and most of them appeared to have seen the child’s fall, and the astounding rapidity of Jennie’s rescue.
“Them heavy hurdles, too! However her did it!” they said admiringly. “You’m pretty strong-like, Miss Jennie.”
“I pulled two of them off him,” said Jennie complacently.
She looked pleased, and proud of herself and her promptitude.
“Here be Dr. West!” Lydia had to move, to make room for the doctor, who took her place kneeling on the ground beside Jennie, and made his rapid examination of the child lying across her lap.
“Right leg, I’m afraid,” Jennie indicated.
The temerity of Jennie, the self-assurance! Lydia actually felt herself flushing with vexation.
“Keep back,” she said to the people round her.
“Keep back, and let the child have some air.”
She did not want everyone to hear ignorant little Jennie taking it upon herself to bestow information upon Dr. West.
“Quite right,” said the doctor. “Now we’d better get him to the surgery, and I’ll set it in no time. All right, little chap, all right — mother shall come with you to my house.”
His keen eyes sought Mrs. Madge’s white, frightened face with professional appraisement.
“Now, then, my dear soul, pull yourself together.
Be thankful the boy isn’t killed. I’ll set his leg at the surgery, and then it’s only a step home. We’ll see about getting him to Clyst Milton Hospital later. Now, if Lady Lucy Damerel would let us have the ponycart?” He looked round inquiringly.
“Of course, of course — anything,” said old Lady Lucy tremulously. “Poor little boy, won’t it jolt him terribly?”
“Not with a very careful driver, going slowly.”
“I’ll drive, if you like,” said Jennie confidently.
“The pony is used to me.”
“Be quiet,” said Lydia very low. “Stop putting yourself forward like that, Jennie — I’m ashamed of you.”
But the fates themselves seemed determined in a conspiracy towards Jennie’s uplifting.
While little Jackie was carefully laid on the cushions along the length of one seat in the cart, with his head on his mother’s lap, he clung obstinately to a corner of Jennie’s dress, and would not let her go.
Without a glance at her mother, but at a nod from Dr. West, Jennie climbed into the cart and took the reins.
The doctor, walking slowly, led the pony down the field and out into the lane that gave on to the village highway, at the end of which stood the surgery.
Jackie screamed as the pony-cart moved off, and could be heard again, screaming more faintly, at intervals.
“Well done, Jennie!” ejaculated Joyce Damerel.
The players walked back on to the pitch again.
“How she could have lifted two of those great things all by herself, I can’t imagine,” said Lady Lucy.
“Surely they must be dreadfully heavy?”
“I should think they are!” the Colonel exclaimed, raising and dropping one as he spoke. “Those children ought never to have been allowed anywhere near them — most dangerous.
It’s a mercy there weren’t half a dozen of them killed. By Jove, little Jennie can run! I never saw anything like the way she covered the ground, while the rest of us stood there like stuck pigs.”
Lydia remembered her own instant impulse to dash forward, and the push, that had almost sent her over, as Jennie swept past her. She said nothing, but she saw Nathalie Kennedy’s eyes fixed upon her face with a rather puzzled expression.
“We mustn’t scold Jennie any more for being a hoyden, after this, must we?” said Nathalie, with rather a doubtful little laugh.
Lydia made no reply, but smiled quietly.
She remained on the cricket-field until the end of the match, wondering all the time what was happening at the surgery, and in what intolerable mood of exaltedness Jennie would return to her that evening.
“Bring our little heroine up to dinner this evening, my dear,” said Lady Lucy graciously. “Billy is most anxious that she should meet his friend with the aeroplane. I will send the carriage at half-past seven.”
There was never any question of a pre-engagement at Lydia’s cottage.
Just before six o’clock the pony-carriage came back to the cricket-ground, driven by Dr. West himself.
He came straight up to Lady Lucy.
“Poor little fellow, I’ve set the leg — it’s a simple, green-stick fracture, and he ought to get on nicely.
There’s no need whatever for him to go to hospital.”
“Is Nurse Hopkins there?”
“Going to-night. I’ve seen her, and she’s not very busy just now, so she and the eldest Madge girl can manage him nicely.”
“Where’s Jennie?” Joyce Damerel made the inquiry that was in Lydia’s mind.
“She very kindly went home with the little boy, and she asked me to tell you” — the doctor turned courteously to Lydia— “that she would walk home.”
“Good girl!” ejaculated Lady Lucy. “But isn’t it rather far for her? I hope she didn’t strain herself with those dreadful hurdles. Lydia, if she seems tired, you mustn’t let her come to-night, though Billy will be disappointed.”
“Jennie is very strong, grandmama,” said Lydia gently. “I don’t think she’ll be tired.”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 174