The entire party, food, drinks, glasses, chairs, tables and cushions, promptly had to be moved indoors again, and in the bustle and confusion Jane had not time to realize that she was missing John, until suddenly she looked up and saw him standing in the sitting-room doorway, the half-smile lighting his dark face, his head cocked a little to one side as he listened to Kitty’s cry of rapturous surprise.
“John, my pet, this is lovely! George said you couldn’t come!”
“Careless of George. I told him to tell you I was coming. Shall I go away again?” His clear voice came to Jane’s listening ears in one of those sudden lulls which occur during the noisiest party. Unembarrassed, he continued: “It’s Jane’s farewell party, isn’t it? I couldn’t miss that.”
The buzz of talk broke out again, and Jane was bombarded with loud regrets that she was going. That they were sincere she knew, but it seemed to her that John had sounded too composed to be more distressed than any of the others, these pleasant acquaintances of a few weeks. Half-afraid that she would blush or stammer when he spoke to her, and give herself away completely, Jane took refuge in the middle of a talkative group; and, by the time he had edged his way through the crowd to her side, she was ready to meet him with a gay word of greeting, a manner as unconstrained as his own. All in a minute she had slipped away to speak to someone else, carrying with her the poor consolation that she had surprised and angered him.
The room, in spite of open windows and doors, was blue with smoke, people began to leave, Kitty drove the reluctant George away to dress, and still John lingered and Jane dodged him among the thinning guests. It would have been funny to watch if it weren’t so maddening of Jenny, thought Kitty, whose lynx eyes had missed very little of these manoeuvres. She beckoned to Jane at last, being one of those confident people who consider that the wheels often require a push to make them go round, and that she could apply this moving force as well as Providence.
“Jenny darling!” she said round-eyed. “An awful thing. George is dead certain to want his respectable greatcoat, and it’s up in the loft. Could you be a sweet and get it?”
Jane, imagining that here was an easy way of escape from what was becoming an unbearable strain, eagerly agreed, and slipped into the hall to drag at the ropes which released a ladder from overhead, the only means of reaching the loft. Down it came with a shattering crash as usual, blocking every door in the hall except the sitting-room and the front-door; and up it sped Jane, so thankful to be alone that she forgot to be frightened as it creaked and shook even under her light weight. The loft, low-beamed, dusty and dark, was exceedingly stuffy and airless on this warm spring evening, but Jane was too miserable to mind. After that visit to Canterbury, the lingering return, John’s successful attempt to spin it out by giving her dinner on the way home, she had been almost certain that he was in love with her; but if he were, he could never have behaved as he was doing to-day. Forgetting her dress and the dust, Jane sank down on George’s tin uniform case and gave herself up to melancholy brooding, hunched in the darkest corner of the loft, and as far from the ladder as possible.
She was not crying, but she was not far from tears, when the sound of the ladder squeaking protestingly under a man’s firm footsteps brought her to her own feet in guilty haste. George, coming to see if she had found his greatcoat yet. . . .
As she opened the lid of the uniform case and let loose an overpowering smell of moth-balls, she mumbled, her head almost inside it: “I’m sorry, George. I won’t be a minute.”
A smart crack as a head met a beam, and a hearty “Hell!” in a voice certainly not George’s, was her answer. Jane sprang up and turned round in a flash, crying the intruder’s name in a tone of angry incredulity. “John! What on earth have you come up here for?”
“Is that all you can say when I’ve just about split my head open?” he complained. “If this is womanly sympathy, take it away. I thought that when pain and anguish wring the brow—and mine’s singing if not wringing—a ministering angel thou.”
“Oh, don’t be so ridiculous,” said Jane petulantly. “If you’ve come up here to be funny, I shall go down, that’s all.”
“Gangway!” called Kitty’s voice from below, and with a noise like a house falling down the ladder began to rise.
“Wait! Kitty, wait till we’re down!” shrieked Jane.
“Sorry, darling!” Kitty’s voice soared sweetly from below. “But there’s no room down here for anyone to pass. I’ll rescue you in a minute.”
The ladder crashed home, and they were prisoners. “I might have seen Kitty’s fine Italian hand in this,” said Jane bitterly, and sat down again as far from her fellow-captive as the narrow confines of the loft permitted. “Sickening!”
“Am I wrong,” said John with odious good humour. “Or are you sorry to see me?”
“I can’t see you, thank goodness. It’s too dark.”
“Of, if that’s all—” she heard him groping his way towards her, and suddenly he was sitting beside her on the cold hard uniform case; his arm firmly round her. “Is that better?”
“Certainly not,” snapped Jane. “I suppose you and Kitty think you’ve been uncommonly clever, trapping me up here, but it won’t work.”
“Sure?” he murmured. “What if we’re left here for hours, perhaps all night? Kitty’s quite liable to forget us entirely, and I heard her saying to Mrs. Jenkins that she would go to the movies with her as soon as the party was over.”
Jane said nothing. Kitty, she knew, was perfectly capable of going blithely out of the house and leaving them where they were.
“We—we must shout and stamp,” she said at last.
“Not safe to stamp. This jerry-built floor would go down with us, and they’ll never hear us shouting,” he assured her. “Now, Jenny, tell me. What’s wrong? Why are you hating me so?”
“Hating you?” Jane to her horror heard a quaver in her voice and tried to turn it into a laugh. “Hating you? Don’t—don’t exaggerate.”
“You know why I came this evening, don’t you?” he went on coaxingly.
“Oh, certainly. To say good-bye. It was only polite,” said Jane with tremendous dignity.
“Now, Jenny,” he said cheerfully. “Don’t be thick-headed on purpose. You know perfectly well that I’m going to ask you to marry me.”
“I do not. Why should I be expected to know?”
“Women are always supposed to know these things, aren’t they? Will you marry me, Jane?”
“No. I don’t think so. I don’t know. Do you really mean it?” asked Jane doubtfully. “John, what are you doing?”
He had pulled off his heavy gold signet ring and was now cramming it on to the third finger of her unresponsive left hand. “Making up your mind for you, as you don’t seem able to do it,” he said. “Now we’re engaged.”
“I haven’t said so.”
“Well, you can say it now—or at least, when I’ve kissed you. You’ll be more certain then,” he said, and gathering her very firmly and comfortingly in his arms, kissed her well and truly.
“Now are we engaged?” he asked at length.
“I—I suppose we must be. I feel a bit dazed,” said Jane, clinging to his hand.
“You’re meant to feel dazed. So do I. But you feel happy too, don’t you?” John sounded anxious, and Jane suddenly realized that he was in deadly earnest and rather nervous.
“Oh, yes, John darling. Dreadfully happy. Only I wish I didn’t have to go away so soon.”
“So do I. But it won’t be long before you see me. Are your parents the stern, forbidding kind, or will they hand you over to me with a glad cry?”
“I—I don’t know,” Jane said slowly and doubtfully. “They don’t go in much for glad cries. Somehow I feel that I won’t be very popular if I arrive at home and tell them I’m engaged to a man they’ve never seen.”
“I’m really quite respectable, Jenny darling,” said John, twisting his ring round on her finger. “But if it’ll make it an
y easier for you, I’ve landed a job at Rosyth—one of the Admiral’s secretaries—and I go there in May. You could surely ask me over to your place from there, and then when your father has seen what a handsome fellow and promising young officer I am, we can ask for his blessing. How’s that?”
“Oh, that’s much better,” said Jane with a sigh of relief. “And we can keep it a secret till then?”
“Yes, if you like. George and Kitty will have to be told what they haven’t guessed, of course. Don’t let’s waste any time on it now, though. Ways and means come later,” said John, holding her close again. “What you’ve got to give your mind to at the moment is getting used to loving me.”
“I don’t think it will be so difficult,” said Jane, pulling herself away a little and seriously trying to look at his face in the twilight of the loft. “You see, John, I do love you so very much already.”
“Sweetheart!” muttered John huskily; and there was a long spell of pure love-making, untroubled by any thought of the future.
Kitty, noisily rattling the ladder down some time later, had to call loudly to them before they came to their senses and realized that they could descend at their own pleasure.
Chapter Two
WELCOME HOME
The Mid-day Scot was almost due to leave the echoing cavern of Euston on its run north. All down the length of the train people were exchanging last words with harassed glances towards the guard, as if longing for him to blow his whistle, wave his green flag, and release them from the horrors of ‘seeing off,’ which tyrant custom had inflicted on them, except at one window, where Jane and Kitty, heedless of time and place, were talking as freely and fast as ever. George and John both having days-on in their respective departments, Jane’s leaving-taking was not as impressive as it might have been; but to be honest, neither she nor young Mrs. Mariner was sorry. They had so much to say even at this last moment, even though they had been together all morning and had motored up from Chatham side by side.
“I can’t imagine what made the parents send me that telegram to say the car would meet me at Glasgow,” said Jane, hanging far out of the carriage-window, her eyes bright with interested speculation. “Father always makes us take that vile slow train to Milton Riggend, though it’s only about half an hour by car.”
“He’s gone off his head with joy at the thought of having you home,” suggested Kitty.
“Much more likely that he’s mixed me up with someone more important who’s going to stay at Craigrois,” said Jane drily. “The prospective Unionist candidate, for instance. A car would be sent to fetch him all right.”
“Well, let me know the answer when you write, my poppet,” said Kitty. “Oh. dear, you’re off, and I had hundreds of things to say to you!”
“Good-bye. Kitty darling!” called Jane as the train began to more slowly out. “Love to dear George!”
“I’ll take care of John!” cried Kitty, waving madly.
“Don’t flirt with him and alienate his affections, or I’ll sue you!” shrieked Jane in tones of peahen stridency: and withdrawing from the window, still laughing, she backed into a hard yet yielding substance which she recognized too late as a human form.
It was a tall, rather stooping man who blinked nervously at her through tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, murmuring apologies as if he had been the bumper rather than the bumped.
“I’m so sorry,” said Jane, trying to stop smiling. “I didn’t know there was anyone else in the carriage.”
“There wasn’t—er—that is—er, there’s only me, and I can quite well find another seat if you would rather be alone,” he said earnestly.
“Of course not. Don’t be absurd. Do you think I’m Garbo travelling in disguise?” He seemed so shy and helpless that Jane quite forgot to treat him with the reserve due to a total stranger. “I haven’t booked the whole carriage, and the train’s pretty full as it’s Saturday.”
“Very kind of you.” He sat down in a corner, crossed his legs and promptly uncrossed them again, seemed about to speak, and then, apparently in an agony of embarrassment, muffled himself in sheets of The Times.
‘This will be something to tell Kitty,’ thought Jane, opening a novel, but taking a last peep over it at the long legs which still twitched as if aware of being under observation. ‘I do wonder why father has suddenly become so generous with the car!’
She had ample time to speculate on this theme and to embroider it as fancifully as she pleased, for the journey, after a beginning promising amusement, proved dull in the extreme. Her fellow-traveller, beyond a few stammering inquiries as to windows, heating and ventilators, remained shrouded in newspapers, not even emerging to go to dinner. So while the flying landscape outside changed every moment, Jane wondered if perhaps she were going to have a warmer reception than usual at home, instead of returning to the rather cool atmosphere of vague disapproval to which she was quite accustomed. It was not, she knew, that Sir Magnus and Lady Cranstoun did not love her, for their family feelings, if little displayed, were deep; but there was a boundless energy about her parents, a driving force which she herself lacked, and which made her a disappointing daughter. The mere counting up of her mother’s manifold activities made Jane’s head swim; Division Commissioner of Girl Guides, member of the local Unionist Association committee (women’s branch); president of the W.R.I. in Milton Riggend; chairwoman of the Nursing Association, and a member of the central nursing committee for the whole county. Besides all this, she ran a difficult household which had to keep up an appearance suitable to the Cranstouns’ position on an inadequate allowance, and was always ready to throw open the gardens to the public for one charity or another, or to offer to have fêtes, meetings, or Girl Guide rallies in the grounds of Craigrois. And for every one of these occupations, Sir Magnus could show a manly counterpart, and this though his heart was really wrapped up in research into the history of his family and its connection with Milton, his favourite haunt his own secluded library. It often seemed to Jane that they had very little more time for private life than royalty, but if it amused them, by all means let them rush from one committee meeting to another over the length and breadth of the county What annoyed her was that she, with absolutely no inclination in that direction, was forced to take an active part in so many of her mother’s interests. “If you don’t show an example, Jane,” said Lady Cranstoun, “how do you expect other girls to take up any of these things in their spare time?” As the only answer Jane would have liked to give, “I don’t,” would have been very badly received, she weakly said nothing and unwillingly undertook such duties as she could not wriggle out of. Would there be any difference now that Love was home? Somehow Jane could not see Love allowing herself to be jockeyed into doing anything she did not want to. . . . Perhaps she had already refused, and in the reaction caused by the remembrance that Jane, at least, though far from enthusiastic, performed what she had to do with moderate efficiency, the parents had decided that she deserved to be met with the car?
The mystery was solved when she got out of the train at Central Station, in Glasgow, for standing at the barrier, tall and slim and lithe as a young birch, her smooth dark head uncovered, was Love.
Jane was pleased to see her young sister, who had evidently and characteristically returned several days sooner than she was expected, but she was also acutely conscious of a travel-stained appearance in unfortunate contrast with Love’s elegant neatness.
“How on earth did you manage to get the car to come in and meet me?” she asked after greetings had been exchanged and her luggage pointed out to a porter.
“Oh, too elementary, my dear,” Love explained airily. “The parents aren’t at home. They’ve gone to Edinburgh for a week—something about the royal visit in July.”
“I see.” Jane felt a little blank. Love had done it on her own initiative, then.
“Do you see that tall man in the elderly tweeds?” asked Love suddenly. “There, looking like a lost sheep.”
“Jane,
following the direction indicated by a nod of the pretty, smooth head, saw the painfully shy man, her companion on the journey. “Yes. What about him? I’m sure he has lost his luggage.”
“Probably, though he isn’t nearly as silly as he looks. That’s Peregrine Gilbert, the prospective Unionist candidate for the constituency,” said Love. “He’s frightfully clever, and he’s just bought Allander.”
“Nonsense, Love! It can’t be the right man. That one must be an enfeebled professor.” Jane stared at the tall figure involved in a tangle of more alert passengers searching for suitcases and trunks beside the luggage van. “You’ve made a mistake.”
“Of course it’s the man. He dined at Craigrois the very night I got home, last week,” Love said firmly. “And don’t you be misled by his looks. He was Secret Service all through the War, and those spectacles are only temporary because he’s strained his eyes.”
“And he’s bought Allander. He’ll be our next-door neighbour. But—he’ll never be able to address a meeting. It will be all Ers and Ums,” objected Jane, still staring.
“How do you know?”
“Oh—well—” Jane had no intention of telling the sharp-witted Love that she had travelled all the way from Euston with this odd shy person. “He looks as if he’d be tongue-tied,” she ended, not very convincingly, and as Love appeared to be sceptical, she started to walk away towards the station entrance to avoid any further argument.
She felt very flat, as if all the excitement had dropped out of life and left nothing but a dull daily round varied by engagements hardly less dull. Chatham, Kitty and George and their absurd picnic housekeeping, seemed part of another existence, which she had shared for a time but did not really belong to. Even John—and as the car, driven by a sedate elderly chauffeur, cautiously negotiated the busy grey streets of Glasgow, Jane had a frightening pang that John perhaps would not fit into her sort of life when he saw her at home. Would she ever fit into his? Would the parents consider it a suitable marriage? Her mother disapproved of the way that George and Kitty lived, though she had never actually said so.
Love Comes Home Page 3