by Guy McCrone
They ran along the winding, narrow road, raising the dust behind them. Farm-boys, drowsing in carts, came to life, jumped from their seats, went to the heads of their horses, then looked back angrily at this new-fangled thing that passed them by. A high-stepping young pony from a nearby mansion house reared up on its hind legs, threatening to break the slender shafts of the governess cart to which it was harnessed.
Larks were singing. Everywhere by the roadsides, on the moors, by little streams, against the grey stone dykes, the flowering gorse was a triumph of yellow. Over there the birch-woods were still bare, but now there was a purple haze over them, purple from the buds full of rising sap that would presently burst and put forth the young green. Here and there, as they passed under high trees, nesting rooks flapped and squabbled in the branches.
Phœbe could not have told why she had thus suddenly given way to Henry, suddenly allowed her anger to be drained out of her. On every count he had been unreasonable over this matter of a house. Was she not to be its mistress? Would she not spend more of her time there than he would? And yet now, as she sat beside him, she did not seek to press the question he had left unanswered.
She was instinctive rather than reasonable towards her own. And she became bewildered when her two men, her husband and the young man who was to all intents her son, pulled in opposite directions. But today Henry had pulled her towards himself, and for the time, at least, she felt content that it should be so.
“Have you seen this house, Henry?” she asked him as the car ran on,
“Of course.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
Now the road was rising, now passing among trees, now running up through a cutting. Suddenly they were on the hilltop.
“Henry, stop! You must stop!”
“Stop? Why?”
“We must look at this!”
And indeed there was much to look at. Loch Lomond, Ben Lomond—the Ben, as Glasgow people call their mountain—and beyond these the mountains of the Western Highlands lay before them, sharply cut from the bright March air. The upper cone of the Ben and the summits of more distant mountains were still white with snow. Lower slopes were brown with dead heather or yellow with the winter bracken. And nearer, beyond these moors from which the winding road would presently take them, was the fertile Buchanan country, with its white farmsteads, a mansion house or two standing among the trees, then, at a greater distance, the young woodlands stretching down to the shores of Loch Lomond itself, a sheet of bright water scattered with shaggy islands.
“It’s beautiful!” she said.
“You’ve seen it before.”
“Of course. But never quite like this.”
Henry let the car run forward on the incline.
“The house is just there, near the bottom of the hill,” he said.
III
A day of colour and emotion. And so Phœbe was to remember it. The blue of the sky. The gleaming whiteness of the high clouds. The yellow gorse. And this sudden, renewed uprush of feeling for the impetuous, difficult man who was her husband. An uprush that had nothing of reason about it—was it not, indeed, born of Phœbe’s anger and Henry’s wilfulness?—unless it were the reason that these two were still, after many years, of one flesh; still able, on such rare days as this, to strike the fire of passion, each from the other.
Phœbe sat in the window of her drawing-room in Partickhill watching the early spring evening die over there in the distance beyond the river, beyond the high cranes of the shipyard, beyond the Renfrew hills.
Henry’s long legs were stretched out before him as he lolled by the fireside. The reading lamp on a side-table was already lit. Some journal, arrived by post that evening, lay across his knee. He had not yet, however, broken the wrapper. It was unusual for him thus to sit relaxed and desultory of an evening. But for Henry, too, this day had not been as other days. He must remain near Phœbe.
They were a strange couple, this. Both of them quick; neither of them stupid in the things of every day; passionate, but still, in the language of passion, strangely inarticulate. And yet, stirred by today’s happenings, they felt compelled to grope, each towards the other.
“So you’re to have a new house, Phœbe?” He held the journal in its wrapper between his face and the fire.
“Well, you’ve arranged that, haven’t you?” But her voice was gentle and warm.
“You liked it?”
“I thought the country out there was beautiful this afternoon.”
“But you liked the house, too?”
“Yes. I liked it very well. You can afford to keep it up, can’t you? And Bel and everybody else keeps dinning into me that we must live up to our position now. I suppose living at Whins of Endrick would be doing that?”
Her husband did not reply to this at once.
She looked across to the distant hills and the cold, dying sunset. Yes. The property of Whins of Endrick was a pleasant place. Again to herself, she pictured the mid-Victorian, merchant Gothic house standing among green lawns and birch-trees. It was a place of little distinction, perhaps, but the picture pleased Phœbe very well. Yet it seemed a large, lonely place, for herself and Henry. Could she, a woman, ever learn to drive a motor-car? she wondered.
“Of course we can keep it up. I wouldn’t be such a fool as to take it if we couldn’t do that.”
“And your work?”
“The car. It means breakfast sooner, that’s all.”
Phœbe turned from the window and looked about her. Here was her home. Leaving this house would cost her something. It was her young marriage. Robin’s boyhood. But now, in her gentler mood, she chid herself for wasting feeling over bricks and mortar.
“When Robin comes home and is back in the yard he can stay in lodgings if it’s too much for him to travel,” her husband said.
She came over to him. “Oh, Henry, do you think Robin will ever be able to stand your kind of work now?”
For a moment, Henry seemed to harden. “He’s got to. He can’t throw away everything I’m building up for him.”
“Building up for him? Aren’t you building it up for yourself?—No, dear! I didn’t mean that!” Tonight she could not bear to let the different, softer Henry escape her. “I know exactly what you mean. But surely you see that Robin may never be—well, just very strong.”
“Other young men have been ill and got better, Phœbe.”
She knelt down on the hearthrug before him, putting her hands on his knees. “Oh, of course, he’s going to get better. We mustn’t expect anything else, must we?”
“No.” He was looking gloomily past her into the fire. “He’ll have to. He’s all we’ve got.”
Phœbe leant forward looking up into her husband’s face. Its trouble was lit up by the firelight. What was he thinking? He looked almost angry now, defensive. It seemed to her as though he were inwardly arguing with himself, arguing with his fears. He had conquered so much in his life. Was it impossible for him to grasp the chance of defeat now? What if Robin became well enough only to remain abroad? How would Henry take that? But she would not look into the future. If she must be torn between the two of them, father and son, it must not be tonight. Tonight she belonged to Robin’s father.
Still kneeling, she straightened herself in front of him. “Everything’s going to be all right, Henry,” she said.
He bent forward, drew her to him, and hid his face in her breast.
Chapter Twelve
THE day following these happenings was to be Isabel Ellerdale’s last day in Grosvenor Terrace. Tomorrow morning’s train was to take her, together with her son Lewis, home to South Kensington.
Bel’s feelings were mixed. She had, of course, told everyone how wonderful it had been to have her daughter with her again, even for a short two weeks; and little Lewis was a cherub. But cherubs, Bel found, especially when they had missed the benefit of faultless training at the hands of their grandmothers, tended to be noisy and destructive, and could m
ake their grandparents feel the weight of those advancing years. And so, perhaps, it was better that Lewis and Isabel should withdraw once more into the golden distance; thus allowing Bel to boast of the high mettle of her grandson and the distinction of his young mother, without exhaustion and at peace.
And yet on this last day the drag upon Bel’s affection was real enough. For still, her daughter, crisp and critical, and her grandson, young and barbarian, were of her own flesh, and the sight of their preparations for the return journey to London somehow depressed her.
She was not particularly pleased, therefore, to have Sarah come to her as she sat watching Isabel pack, and to be told that Mrs. Butter, young Mrs. Butter and young Mrs. Butter’s little boy awaited their pleasure in the parlour downstairs. The ladies descended with reluctance to be met by a gust of greeting from Sophia.
“Bel, dear! We just flew in for a minute to say goodbye to Isabel! It’s tomorrow you go, isn’t it, Isabel dear? And here’s wee Billy.” She indicated her grandson, an open-mouthed child rendered expressionless by a threat of adenoids. “His Granny promised to take him to see the plant that eats flies in the big hothouses in the Botanic Gardens. Didn’t she, dearie?”
The expressionless child said nothing.
“And do you know, Auntie Bel, we were busy tickling it with a bit of grass, just to see if it would snap shut, and we thought maybe it was going to, but a gardener came and told us not to touch the exhibits. Wasn’t it a shame? Well, we’ll just have to try another day, won’t we, dearie? So then Billy said he would like to visit wee Lewis before he went back to London, and we just ran across to see if you were in!”
Bel could not believe that this emotionless child had expressed a desire to see either the fly-eating plant or his little second cousin, whom he had never seen before; but she pulled the bell to summon Sarah, and upon her appearing asked her to bring Lewis down.
“And d’you think Billy could have a wee biscuit, Bel dear?” Sophia went on before Sarah had time to go. “No, thanks. We don’t want tea or anything, dear.”—Bel had not offered it—“But it’s just that I’m sure he’s hungry, with his walk in the garden. Aren’t you, Billy?”
The expressionless child standing at his mother, Polly Butter’s knee, answered with a firm “yes”.
“And how is your husband, Polly?” Bel said, sitting down and assuming a manner that was, she hoped, just sufficiently gracious and yet regal enough to impose decorum upon this altogether too familiar gathering.
“Wil’s just the same old sixpence, isn’t he, Polly dear?” Sophia interposed, but Bel determinedly kept her head turned towards Wil’s wife, paying a disciplinary inattention to Wil’s mother. Polly, grasping her intent, blushed apologetically all over her round, plump face, and hastened to make conversation demurely. “Well, yes, he is very busy, Auntie Bel, thank you.”
Bel, confused now by her determination to be dignified, was not quite clear why she should be thanked for Wil’s busyness; but Polly was going on.
“You see, with Uncle David in France, and everything.”
“Of course.”
“He had a letter from Uncle David yesterday. He’s feeling much better. Isn’t it nice?”
This was so guilelessly said, that Bel, in whose mind less amiable thoughts were perhaps hovering, could only—avoiding her daughter Isabel’s eye—indicate that a weight had indeed been lifted from her mind.
At this moment Sarah reappeared with Lewis and a plate of biscuits. The little boy, having himself paid no attention to an offer of a biscuit, planted himself without saying a word in front of his elder cousin and remained thus, his small hands behind his back, watching Billy’s untidily open mouth as it chewed; only now and then withdrawing his stare to follow the descent of the crumbs that kept falling on the carpet.
“Aren’t they just lovely together!” Sophia exclaimed.
Bel and Isabel smiled mistily. Each of them thinking how much superior in every way little Lewis Ellerdale was to little William Butter.
“Mentone must be a lovely place,” Polly resumed, guessing perhaps that the beauty of Mentone was a safer topic than the beauty of grandsons. “Uncle David enclosed a postcard in his letter just to show us.”
“I have always heard it was, Polly,” Isabel hastened to say, since she saw that her mother did not just then look like responding.
“Wil is missing his Uncle David terribly at the office, isn’t he, Polly dear?” Sophia said.
“I’ve never really heard him say so, Aunt Sophia. And after all, it was Wil who thought Uncle David should go.”
“Well, Polly dear, he said he was missing him to me!”
As nobody believed this, there was a pause.
“Has he seen Lucy Rennie, I wonder?” Sophia tried again.
“I’ve no idea,” Bel said.
Sophia said no more. Now she gave herself over to watching the children with foolishness and fondness.
Bel watched them, too, but without bringing much of either of these qualities to her watching.
Billy had finished his biscuit, and as nothing more looked like happening, Polly rose to put an end to a call which she had felt from the moment of Sophia’s suggesting it, would prove cool and fruitless.
II
And, indeed, Sophia’s visit, along with her grandson and his mother, had done little to decrease Bel’s feelings of depression. Her mood seized on all of them, now that they were gone, and judged them more harshly than she would, in a brighter and more generous moment, have ever dreamt of doing. But today she hated the thought of Sophia’s foolish good nature. She hated the thought of Polly’s smug young wifehood. She hated the thought of Polly’s husband, Wil Butter, with his cleverness and push. She hated that Wil was becoming more and more a force among the Moorhouses, and that he did not bother to hide his disregard for the opinions of the older family. And now Wil had actually taken upon himself to advise his Uncle David to have a holiday! Bel even hated the thought of little Billy Butter, for eating his biscuit untidily and dropping so many crumbs on the parlour carpet.
“Who on earth is this Lucy Rennie, you all keep talking about?” Isabel asked as they came back from bidding their unwanted guests goodbye at the front door.
Bel took up the parlour hearth shovel and the brush and began to sweep up Billy’s crumbs from the carpet. “Oh, she’s a woman your Uncle David was once in love with,” she said crossly. “I dare say your Aunt Sophia would like to think he may fall in love with her again!”
“Uncle David!” Isabel went into a little peal of laughter.
Bel straightened herself from her sweeping and looked at her.
“How old is Uncle David, Mother?” Isabel asked.
“About my age.”
“Well!”
“Well, what, Isabel?”
“How can he fall in love with anybody?”
“Why not?”
“It wouldn’t be decent!”
Bel bent over her sweeping once more. She resented this, and yet she did not quite know how to reply to it. “People have married again in their early fifties,” she said defensively.
“Oh, married. Yes. That’s different. For convenience sake, perhaps. But surely not, well—swept off their feet!”
“How do you know?” Really, the presumption of young people, Bel reflected, as she took the crumbs, all of them now on the shovel, and put them into the fire. Did they think that at the age of, say, forty, all passion came to a standstill?
“But I always thought, Mother—” Isabel stopped, still looking amused. Her mother was right. Isabel had a young person’s difficulty in imagining how her elders could have any such feelings.
Bel disliked this talk intensely. She was torn between two strong and opposing impulses. One, to tell her daughter roundly that she need not be so arrogant as to think that the blood of her parents was already congealing in their veins; the other, loyally to maintain a veil of decorum between her own generation and the younger one. The escape she chose from thi
s impasse did her no particular credit. “I don’t know how we ever got to talking about these things,” she said stiffly, rearranging the fire-irons. “Is that someone out in the hall?”
And it was. To her relief, Phœbe Hayburn came in.
“Hullo. I’m not waiting. I only wanted to say goodbye to Isabel and tell you that Henry has bought a house.”
“A house, Aunt Phœbe?”
“Whins of Endrick near Drymen.”
“An estate?” Bel asked.
“I suppose you might call it that. Where’s Lewis, Isabel? Upstairs? I want to say goodbye to him, too.”
“But what about this house, Phœbe? Tell us about it. You must be pleased.”
“Yes. Quite pleased, Bel. Henry is, anyway,” Phœbe said. “Come on, Isabel.”
Left to herself, Bel went to the window and looked out into her own back garden. She twisted the cord of the window-blind with impatient fingers. Green buds were showing on the black stems of a little smoke-begrimed lilac-bush. Couched to spring, a large marmalade cat was watching a sparrow hopping on the dingy grass.
How did it come about that Arthur and herself should, at their time of life, have so little to show for their importance? They seemed to be eternally rooted to this terrace house, while those they had helped at different times in the family’s history went on and passed them by? Mungo and David had lived in country splendour for years. Now Phœbe and Henry. And Phœbe did not even bother to look pleased about it. It wasn’t that Arthur was poor, Bel knew. He had established their elder son in a flat in Hillhead, and bought Isabel her house in London. It was a pity, Bel reflected. Arthur had always worked so hard. Indeed, it wasn’t fair!
The marmalade cat, the lilac-bush, and the sparrow began to swim unsteadily before her. She took out her handkerchief and sought to control herself. Why was she so depressed? It was unlike her. She would follow the girls upstairs and see what they were up to.