by Sara Seale
“Well, we can’t idle,” she said suddenly. “We must do the tree now.” She jumped up, scattering the dogs, who awoke with yelps.
“It’s no use asking you to help, Charles, I know,” she said. “You never will.”
He smiled a little crookedly.
“I’m too old and too disillusioned to enjoy getting myself pricked with holly, my pretty. I leave that to your decorative self. The sprig behind the ear is very—provocative, isn’t it, Shand?”
“Silly old fool!” she laughed and snatched the sprig out of her hair and threw it on the fire.
They stood in front of the tree when it was finished and Nicky said dreamily:
“Lots of these decorations are the same ones we had as children. Mouse always dismantles the tree herself. I remember Michael and I always passionately wanted the angel on the top. Charles brought it back one year from Munich. But Mouse never allowed anyone to have it—not even us—and it was always put away again for next year. We used to think it awfully mean.”
“It really is a story-book picture,” Simon said, and indeed, the great hall of Nye soaring to the shadows in lovely arcs and curves of ancient timber, with its minstrels’ gallery hung with holly and in the very center the lighted tree glowing and dancing with fire in the half-light, might have been an illustration to any Christmas fairy tale.
He thought fleetingly that he had likened Nicky once to an illustration in an old French book. The Bredons and Nye had this pictorial quality—something oddly attractive and not quite real.
“Let’s go and find some sherry as a reward for our labors,” Nicky said, leading the way back into the library again. “I suppose my revered relations will be arriving any minute. How sickening, it’s going to be a wet Christmas.”
“I’m glad you can come on Boxing night,” she said with polite formality as they stood by the fire sipping their sherry.
The Shands had all been asked, since it was to be a big affair. They couldn’t very well be left out, but Nicky had been highly relieved when John Shand had refused on behalf of himself and his wife.
“What are you going to do—dance?” he asked.
“Oh, no,” she said with a grimace. “You’ll have to make up your mind to a thoroughly old-fashioned evening. We shall play childish games and drink punch at twelve o’clock. The family expect it, you know.”
But when, on Boxing night, after they had sat down thirty odd to dinner, they raced all over the house playing hide-and-seek and other time-honored favorites, Simon observed with amusement that no one entered more wholeheartedly into the proceedings than Nicky. She wore white and her wide whirling skirts flew about her as she ran, her slender young body scarcely ever still.
Only Charles stood slightly apart watching his guests with that puckish, half-cynical smile that was so much a part of him.
Alice Bredon sat by the fire, disapproving of everyone and everything, her back like a grenadier’s, but old Lady Edderton, seventy if she was a day, was enjoying everything. They played sardines, and Nicky went to hide. Simon, who didn’t know his way about the house, frequently got lost, and quite by accident stumbled on her hiding-place before anyone else discovered it. Her white dress betrayed her, and he slipped behind the heavy tapestry hangings of a hidden alcove and sat down in the deep embrasure beside her.
“Who is it?” she whispered.
He didn’t answer at once, but put out a hand to feel for her. It was too dark to distinguish faces.
He felt her draw back into her corner.
“Freddie, if it’s you—” she said with quite a different note in her voice.
“It isn’t Freddie. It’s me—Simon,” he said gently.
“Oh.” He could feel her relax and knew she was leaning forward trying to see his face. “Are you enjoying the party?” she asked in a whisper again.
“Very much,” he whispered back. “It’s Christmas as it should be, don’t you think?”
“I think so, really, but Charles hates it.”
“How old are you, Nicky?”
“Twenty.”
“Is that all? Why, you’re quite a baby really.”
“Did you think I was older, then?”
“Perhaps not really. But at times you seem sophisticated and assured—which is what you aim for, I expect.”
“It’s what I am.”
“Not entirely. Underneath I suspect you’re quite different.”
For a moment she was intensely aware of him, intensely conscious of their isolation from everyone else, and knew again that strange attraction she had experienced so unwittingly with his kiss. For a wild instant she wanted him to kiss her again. There in the darkness he seemed to have no individuality. He was entirely male and she was acutely alive to him.
There were footsteps and giggles in the long polished corridor, a hand came through the curtains and poked. With smothered laughter Liza and Freddie squeezed themselves into the embrasure.
Later, when they all trooped downstairs again, Liza hung behind.
“Sorry if I interrupted, darling,” she said to Nicky in her high shrill voice. “I didn’t know it was an assignation. Why didn’t you tell me? I’d have held off the others for you.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Nicky said sharply. “There was no assignation, and you didn’t interrupt anything.”
She knew Liza’s tongue. She was the source of most of the scandal that got about Hammertye.
“So you say, my sweet. Anyhow, I don’t blame you.”
Liza wandered off in search of Freddie, doubtless to bait him with her idea.
But Nicky saw nothing of any of the Shands until the end of January, when the weather changed abruptly to bitterest winter. The countryside awoke each morning to hard black frost and hunting was stopped. Presently the snow came and people took improvised sledges up on to the Downs and made bob runs.
Nicky was out all day revelling in the dry crisp weather, but Charles huddled over a fire, shivering and cursing the English climate.
“This settles it,” he told Nicky one evening. “I’m off as soon as I can fix things up, and if you’ve any sense you’ll come with me. You must have had enough of Nye by now.”
“But, darling, it’s only because you won’t get out you’re so miserable,” protested Nicky, who didn’t want to leave England yet. “They were skating up at Bassetts Ponds today. Old Shand has opened it to the public. You know you adore skating.”
“In its proper place, and that’s Switzerland with all the accompanying etceteras. This country isn’t adapted to winter sports,” Charles grumbled. “Anyway, I want warmth, not ice.”
But he consented to go with her to Bassetts Ponds the next day. He was a good skater and next to Michael there wasn’t anyone Nicky preferred as a partner. She thought of the many winters when she and Michael had skated together on the old hammer ponds, Michael teaching her outside edges and the intricate spins that he did so gracefully himself.
The woods rang with laughter and the crisp clicking of skates, and Nicky saw Mary Shand, superintending a huge urn, from which she dispensed hot soup to the skaters.
“This reminds me of my girlhood,” she told Nicky comfortably. “We had fine ice skating parties in Cumberland. The snow was so deep in the roads the farmers used to come in sleighs, and many’s the ox I’ve seen roasted on the ice.”
Nicky felt the same sense of warmth and serenity that she had experienced upon their first meeting. She drank her soup and talked with pleasure to Mary Shand. Old John, looking on with his usual aggressive expression, nodded to her curtly and moved away. His unmannerliness was motivated by embarrassment as much as personal dislike if the truth were known, for although he had nothing but contempt for the Bredons, he was entirely at a loss as to how to deal with them.
Simon was skating with Stella Lucy, who was not very expert, and he glanced curiously at Nicky as he passed her chatting to his mother. She wore a bright emerald green woollen cap from which the ends of her red hair turned outwards and
upwards like a little girl’s. Simon handed Stella over to her father and joined Nicky with a group of others by the soup urn. Braziers of burning charcoal stood around the ponds and people were blowing on their fingers and holding them out to the warmth.
“We haven’t had anything like this for years,” Simon said, taking a cup of soup from his mother.
“No. We won’t be hunting till next month now, I suppose,” said Nicky, and someone asked what the date was.
“The twenty-fifth of January,” Mary Shand replied, in her deep north-country voice.
Something suddenly clicked into place in Nicky’s brain. January the thirty-first was the date on which Simon’s loan was to be repaid. Less than a week away and she had no idea what Charles had done about it. A loan, like so many other things in the Bredons’ casual philosophy, was a thing quickly pushed on one side and forgotten until it became pressing. After the first awkwardness, Nicky had never given it another thought.
She looked up to find Simon’s eyes upon her and she wondered what he was thinking. He had never mentioned the matter from that day to this, just as he had never again kissed her. But there was something in his expression that made her feel distinctly uncomfortable before he looked away and spoke to someone else.
She decided that she must tackle Charles that very evening.
But Charles laughed it off and refused to take the matter seriously at all.
“Don’t be so ridiculous, Nick,” he protested. “The fella’s a reasonable being even if he is a blooming tradesman. He’ll just have to wait like everyone else, that’s all. Just imagine putting a time limit on a friendly loan, anyhow! I never heard of such infernal cheek. In any case, I’ve definitely decided to clear off abroad till the spring, so the thing’ll have to wait till I come back.”
For the first time in her life Nicky felt distaste for the easy shiftlessness in which she had been reared since childhood. Everything slid off Charles’s airy shoulders, and she had never before stopped to think that the responsibility must fall on somebody. It was useless to argue with him once his mind was made up, however, and Nicky went up to bed with vague forebodings.
Oh, well, it couldn’t be helped. As Charles had said, Simon would have to wait for his money like everyone else, and as for that ridiculous bargain they had made, well, naturally he wouldn’t hold her to it for a single instant. The man wasn’t quite crazy, and he had been educated a' gentleman even if he hadn’t been born one.
She asked Simon to dine at Nye on the thirty-first. Charles was in London, and she took Mouse into her confidence.
“I want a very special sort of dinner,” she said. “Intimate—with good masculine food and just the right wine. Something that will make him mellow and receptive—you know.”
“What are you trying to do to the poor gentleman?” asked Mouse with one of her disapproving looks. “He may be very nice-spoken, but he’s trade all the same, and you shouldn’t make eyes at him, Nicky.”
Nicky burst out laughing.
“Make eyes at him!” she exclaimed. “Why he doesn’t even like me very much—not as a person, I mean. You’ve got it all wrong, Mouse darling. He lent us money, and I’ve got to ask him to wait for repayment, that’s all.”
“That’s all!” echoed Mouse but she said no more.
Borrowing money, even when the gentry did it, still seemed to her one of the deadly sins. How did they keep their self-respect, wondered Mouse, when they were always up to their eyes in debt?
When Simon arrived, he looked slightly surprised to find that Charles wasn’t there, but as Nicky proceeded to entertain him with a charm that he had seldom seen her use before, he suppressed a smile and listened gravely to her chatter.
But when back in the library after dinner, the coffee and glasses had been taken away, a silence fell upon her. She lit one cigarette after another and threw them away half-smoked, and finally she rushed into speech.
“Of course you guessed why I asked you here this evening,” she said.
For answer he took a folded piece of foolscap from his breast-pocket, and held it out to her.
“I’m ready to tear this up when you say the word,” he replied.
She jumped up and stood facing him, her back to the fire and he was reminded of the first evening he had dined at Nye.
“The trouble is,” she said very quickly, “that we can’t pay up on the date you stipulated.”
He said nothing, but waited for her to go on.
“After all you didn’t give us much time, did you?” she said gracefully.
“It was a date you agreed to at the time,” Simon said in an expressionless voice.
“Yes, but—have a heart! Charles just hasn’t been able to raise it. He’ll get a break on the market one of these days. You don’t have to worry.”
She was trying to dismiss the affair airily, as she had done so many times before, but under Simon’s disconcerting gaze it wasn’t as easy as she expected.
“I see. And if he’s unsuccessful in his speculations?” he said, and the mildness of his voice quite misled her.
She shrugged—Charles’s own expressive gesture.
“I’m afraid, in that case, you’ll have to have patience like everyone else,” she said.
He regarded her speculatively, then he said very quietly:
“You aren’t forgetting, are you, that I have my security?”
CHAPTER SIX
“What do you mean?” Nicky asked uneasily
One of the dogs stirred in its sleep, and a log fell into the fire, sending up a small shower of sparks.
He leaned forward in his chair.
“When you signed that agreement a couple of months ago, Nicky, you offered me certain security, which, if you remember, I accepted,” he said still in that quiet, expressionless voice. “I fulfilled my side of the bargain. Is it unreasonable to expect that you will fulfill yours?”
Nicky stood staring at him and went a little white.
“But—but you’d never hold me to that,” she said at last.
“Why not?”
“Because—because I was driven to it in the first place. I had nothing else to offer. No decent man would take such an offer seriously.”
He got to his feet slowly and stood looking down at her, and his eyes were suddenly hard and angry.
“Now I’m going to say to you what I’ve been itching to say before on many occasions,” he said, and his voice had entirely altered. “You and your father seem to think that your accident of birth gives you the right to your codes of honor and standards of living. You borrow and owe money as if it was yours by right so that you can go on keeping up appearances. Do you think that’s honest? Do you really believe that a Bredon is entitled to every privilege simply because he is a Bredon? Your conceit is colossal! Why, compared to your standards, my father is a thoroughly honorable man, and yet you look down on us and snub us because we have worked for our independence while you just live on other people. You’ve got away with this sort of thing too long, my dear. This time you’re going to know what it’s like to pay up for a change.”
Nicky began to tremble. She felt suddenly sick and instinctively moved away from the fire and from Simon. His attack had been so unexpected that she could think of nothing to say to him. On the last few occasions they had met, he had seemed so friendly and kindly that she had not been prepared to come up against that hard unyielding streak he had inherited from his father. Her poor little attempts at carrying off such a situation seemed to her almost laughable now and, indeed, a little insulting. Babbling to Mouse about suitable wine as though he were a susceptible creditor likely to be placated by a good dinner and a few soft speeches.
She met his look squarely. “All right, if that’s how you feel. Though how you imagine you’ll enjoy yourself if that’s what you think of us, I don’t quite know. When shall we go?” she said with an effort at flippancy, and added bitterly: “I suppose you knew Charles would never pay up when you lent us the money.”
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“If I’d wanted you in. that way, Nicky, I wouldn’t have chosen such a roundabout method of getting you,” he said very coldly.
“Oh, well, it doesn’t much matter. You’re not the first, you know,” she said. At least she wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction. But to her surprise the anger went out of his face and he said gently:
“You’ve never had a lover, Nicky Bredon. I knew that when you slapped my face for me.”
Suddenly the fight went out of her. She covered her face with her hands and she could feel the hot shamed tears running through her fingers. She was aware of Simon standing over her and presently he began to speak.
“Nicky—would you marry me, my dear? That would suit me just as well,” he said, and there was a hint of laughter in his voice.
She looked up then, and stared at him with dazed eyes while the tears ran down her face unheeded.
“What did you say?” she asked stupidly.
“I was asking you to marry me.”
Suspicion leaped into her eyes.
“Why?” she asked.
“Why do you imagine?”
“The only possible reason I should think,” she said, all her hurt humiliation in her voice as she spoke. “Your money and my name.”
The kindliness went out of his face.
“You’re wrong,” he said quietly. “I happened to fall in love with you, you little fool. God knows why, for you’ve little enough kindness. Good night. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to play my part better.”
For a moment she almost called him back, for when he went he took with him truth and integrity and a promise of something better. But she heard the front door swing to with its familiar echoing thud, and she slipped to the floor and wept afresh.