The awful child, thoroughly satisfied with herself, stretched out a careless hand for the sherry decanter, and the movement roused her victim.
“No, you don’t. You’ve had plenty,” he said grimly, taking it from her. “Children of your age, however old they may feel, shouldn’t have more than one glass. You have had two, and that’s one too many.”
“Perry, you absolute cad!” shrieked Love, rising and throwing herself at him with the swift litheness of an angry kitten. “My own sherry, in my own house!”
“Not at all. Your father’s sherry, and his house too,” said Peregrine, pleased to find that at last he was master of the situation. “I’m dashed sure he doesn’t allow you to drink it like water.”
He spoke a little breathlessly, for he was warding her off with one hand, while holding the decanter out of her reach with the other. As he retreated, Love advanced, and the two performed a wary cake-walk round the room, dodging the furniture by instinct, threading their way between sofa, chairs and small tables, with an occasional crash as some article was pushed on to the floor by one or other. The situation was rapidly becoming acute, for Love had grabbed his tie; and, holding on grimly, was gradually choking him when the door opened and Lady Cranstoun, an apology for lateness on her lips, entered in her stately manner.
The apology was fated never to be uttered. On viewing the spectacle of her guest, “such a quiet, pleasant young man, a great asset to the neighbourhood,” purple in the face, with one of her cherished Bristol glass decanters wavering in his grasp as he strained away from her younger daughter, Lady Cranstoun for once lost her poise.
“Oh, Mr. Gilbert! For heaven’s sake don’t break my green glass!” she wailed.
Peregrine, appalled but helpless, merely uttered strange croaking sounds, and as Love let go of his tie, staggered back and fell into a chair. Sherry splashed over him in an odorous fountain, but the decanter was safe. His hostess, running forward as lightly and swiftly as her daughters, seized it and placed it tenderly on the nearest table before turning to scarify Love.
“How could you, Magdalen? So undignified and so extremely rude,” she said. “Mr. Gilbert must think you a perfect savage. Please try to remember that you are grown-up, or you will have to go back to the school-room.”
“It was only a game, mother,” gasped Love, between laughter at the pitiable sight presented by Peregrine dripping with sherry, and indignation at being spoken to like a naughty child in front of him.
“I hope you will forgive my mannerless little girl, Mr. Gilbert,” said Lady Cranstoun, turning to him with her most gracious smile. “Oh, you poor thing! Sherry all over your coat, and your shirt and trousers too! Magnus must lend you some more clothes. You can’t sit down to dinner like that or you’ll catch cold.”
“I didn’t know you could catch cold from sherry,” said the irrepressible Love. “Can you?”
“I am most displeased with you, Love,” was her mother’s cold reply. “Run and tell your father to look out a suit for Mr. Gilbert—or no, tell Gunn. Oh, Gunn!” as that invaluable woman appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Gilbert has had an accident with the sherry and spilt some. Please take him up to Sir Magnus’s dressing-room and see that he has everything he needs.”
Peregrine meekly followed Gunn, whose back, even to the starched ends of her apron-strings, bristled with contempt for a guest who so plainly did not know how to behave in a drawing-room. At Craigrois, those quivering white bows seemed to say, people were not in the habit of throwing sherry about; and it took all Peregrine’s self-control to prevent him from shouting in her unresponsive ear, ‘Damn it all, it isn’t a habit of mine either!’
While he gloomily changed into the clothes which Gunn had laid before him with the gesture of one casting pearls to swine, and which, to add insult to injury, were much too short for him, his only ray of consolation was the hope that Lady Cranstoun was telling her daughter her opinion of such hoydenish manners in no uncertain terms.
But that Love was totally unchastened was only too evident, for when, uncomfortably conscious of a considerable display of wrist and ankle, he was ushered into the drawing-room once more by the displeased Gunn, she greeted him with peals of wholehearted girlish laughter, undeterred by the presence of her parents. Peregrine, longing to box her ears, or shake her until her teeth fell out, ground his own like the villain of a melodrama.
“A glass of sherry, Gilbert?” suggested Sir Magnus hospitably. He had, apparently, not been told of his guest’s contretemps, and seemed to find nothing surprising in the fact that that guest was now wearing one of his suits. Possibly he merely considered it a harmless idiosyncrasy. Peregrine, restraining himself, managed to utter a courteous refusal, and Love went off into further paroxysms of laughter.
“Poor dear old Perry!” she gasped.
Her mother frowned repressively, but Sir Magnus looked interested, if a little astonished. “Christian names already?” he asked. “You young waste no time nowadays. Still, I am not sure that it isn’t quite a pleasant, friendly habit. Eh, Gilbert?’’
Peregrine, who thought it anything but pleasant, was spared the necessity of answering by Gunn’s sepulchral voice announcing: “Dinner is served, my lady.”
But Sir Magnus was not going to let the subject drop so easily. “Perry, eh? Rather nice, that. Unusual. I suppose you are generally called Perry, Gilbert, by your own people?”
“No, Father. I thought of it all myself,” said Love, beaming with modest pride. “I’m so glad you like it! Peregrine is such a mouthful, isn’t it?”
“Perry. Perry.” Sir Magnus repeated the name, rolling it on his tongue as if it were rare wine. “Perry. The name of an excellent drink, made from pears, I believe, something in the nature of cider. Is that so, Gilbert?”
“There is a drink called perry, sir, but I’ve never tasted it,” said Peregrine. “And about my name, personally I prefer—”
His host, who was becoming a trifle deaf, though he refused to acknowledge it, and other people were too polite to bring it to his notice, did not hear the latter part of Peregrine’s remark.
“Well, as I said, it is all very pleasant and friendly,” he said genially. “And if it will make you feel at home, my boy, we shall be delighted to call you Perry. Eh, Helen?”
(‘Oh, God!’ thought Peregrine, savagely eating grilled sole. ‘Even my name isn’t going to be my own in this frightful house!’)
Wild ideas of putting Allander in the market at once and flying to Devon or Suffolk, where he would be out of reach of the Cranstouns, coursed through his mind as his hostess said: “Of course well call him Perry if he wishes it.”
Then the door opened, and Jane, coming in, distracted their attention. An angel from heaven could not have been more welcome to Peregrine at the moment than this rather tired and out-of-spirits young woman in a uniform which he had always thought hideous until now.
“Did you have a good meeting, dear?” asked Lady Cranstoun with her usual intense interest. “I hope Cathie turned up? She has been rather slack while you were away. . . . Oh, did you see Mr. Gilbert? . . . In fact, I had to go down once or twice just to make sure that everything was going on all right.”
“So I heard,” said Jane. “How do you do?” she nodded and smiled at Peregrine, slipped into her chair, and said, “I won’t have fish, Gunn. Just bring me what everyone seems to be eating now.”
“A full turn-out?” asked Sir Magnus.
“Pretty fair,” said Jane briefly. “By the way, Mother, what possessed you to pass Effie Dow her second-class test? I wish you wouldn’t. I can’t un-pass her again, and she doesn’t know a single letter of the morse alphabet.”
“She seems such a nice, intelligent girl, and so keen. And I do think, dear, that after all, keenness counts for so much, and ought to be encouraged,” said Lady Cranstoun earnestly.
“She’s never been keen enough to learn anything. The others are awfully sick about your having passed her, and I don’t blame them. Two hav
e left the company on the head of it,” said Jane.
“Mother knows best, dear,” murmured Love, and then, to forestall a reprimand, hurried on: “Oh, Janey, we’re going to call him Perry. Don’t you think it’s nice?”
“Who are you going to call Perry? I don’t think much of it as a name,” said Jane.
“Who? Why, him, of course,” said Love ungrammatically. “Peregrine Gilbert.” She was impatient at such stupidity. “And if we all do it, it will sound so silly for you to go on Mr. Gilberting at him. You’ll have to call him Perry too.”
Across the polished table Jane’s eyes met Peregrine’s coolly. “I’ll wait until he asks me himself, I think,” she said. “I haven’t forgotten how miserable you made poor Fiona Moncrieff last year, Love, by insisting on calling her ‘Gussie’ after she’d taken the trouble to bury the Augusta part of her name in decent obscurity.”
“Well, she looked more like ‘Gussie,’” said Love.
“And I suppose you think you look like Love? You’d be the first to cry out if we started to call you Maggie,” said Jane.
“That’s different. It would only mean endless confusion,” Love explained in a dignified manner. “Maggie and I would never know which of us was being spoken to.”
“This argument is rather stupid and childish, isn’t it?” said Lady Cranstoun. “Jane, you have rather missed the point, my dear. Perry asked Love to call him that. It is very charming of him when it happens to be a pet name used by his family and intimate friends.”
Peregrine opened his mouth to deny this piece of fiction, but thought better of it. If Lady Cranstoun really believed it, who was he to try to undeceive her? He said nothing, and Jane, who had noticed his startled look, nodded her head very slightly as if to say that she understood the whole thing, and murmured only: “Oh, well, of course, that alters the case completely.”
But her glance at him was sympathetic, and he felt ashamed of having dismissed her as the mediocre daughter, deficient in brains and looks, of outstanding parents. She now seemed to be the only really human member of the family, blessedly ordinary. Certainly he would take her to see the blackcock fighting.
Then Gunn came in and said discreetly but distinctly to her: “You are wanted on the telephone, miss. A trunk call from North Queensferry,” and Peregrine wondered how he had not seen before that she was uncommonly pretty. For Jane, rising with an excuse to her mother, and going out of the room as if she had to restrain herself from running, had given him a glimpse of a radiant face, the pearly complexion almost luminous, the eyes shining. It was as though a lamp had been lighted in a dark room, to see that small composed face so altered.
“Dear me, how tiresome people are to ring up during dinner,” said Lady Cranstoun. “I suppose it is about camp. I believe they are speaking of going to Fife this summer.”
Love said nothing, but she looked disbelieving, and, Peregrine thought, a little annoyed.
Sir Magnus said: “I hope Jane won’t come home looking the wreck she did last year.” He was frowning, there was vague disapproval in his tone. “Don’t know that I altogether agree with this camping for girls.”
“Fortunately the courts at Holyrood are early in July, and they don’t go to camp until August, or I shouldn’t allow Jane to go this year,” said her mother placidly. “It’s a very healthy life, Magnus, and I am sure the responsibility is good for Jane.”
“It wears her to a thread, anyhow,” Love broke in. “And it may be healthy but it’s most frightfully unbecoming!”
“Is that of such overwhelming importance?” Lady Cranstoun spoke crushingly, but Love was uncrushable.
“Of course it is, Mother! Beauty is only skin-deep so you must take care of your skin. Besides, how would you like it if you heard a woman say to her daughter when they met your daughter shopping from camp on a broiling day, clumping along in thick black stockings—ugh!—and black shoes that weighed the world, and a face like a bursting tomato, I hope, my dear, that you will never think of taking up anything which is likely to make you look like that!’ I heard her myself. True motherly feeling, I call it!” said Love, coming to the end of her incoherent but graphically descriptive outburst, and glaring defiantly at her mother.
“A foolish, selfish, unthinking woman,” Lady Cranstoun replied firmly, and added inconsequently: “And Jane never goes red in the face.”
“Isn’t that lucky for her?” murmured Love, with a piercing look at her sister, who had just come back. “Or she’d be blushing as red as a beet now.”
Only Peregrine heard this, for Lady Cranstoun was saying: “Well, dear? Camping arrangements, I suppose? Couldn’t you give Louise Wetherby a tiny hint that she might ring you up at a more convenient hour?” And Sir Magnus was muttering: “When is this meal going to end?” And Jane was explaining rather breathlessly: “It wasn’t Louise, Mother. It was John Marsh, a man I met at Chatham, who has been appointed to Rosyth.”
“Oh!” This was a sudden shrill cry from Love, so loud and unexpected that everyone at the table jumped, the under-tablemaid uttered a smothered exclamation, and even the imperturbable Gunn allowed a port glass to tinkle against its fellow as she lifted it from the tray to set it at Sir Magnus’s right hand.
“My dear child! What on earth is the matter?” said Lady Cranstoun.
Love’s eyes were full of tears. “It—it must be a—a pin sticking into me somewhere!” she babbled. “l’ll g—go and look—”
She rushed away, but not soon enough to prevent them all from seeing that the tears were pouring down her cheeks and splashing like a thunder-shower, so large and continuous was their flow, over her flowered chiffon dress. Behind her, she left a most uncomfortable silence, finally broken by Sir Magnus as he carefully helped himself to port.
“It must have been a very large sharp pin,” he said in pensive tones.
It was, to Jane’s mind, a thin, unconvincing story. Love’s poise, she felt sure, would have been proof against the pricks of a whole pincushion. But what had upset her to such a degree that she had begun to cry at table, it was beyond Jane’s powers of deduction to find out. All she could do was prevent her mother from hurrying after Love to assist in the search for a purely mythical pin, and parry her father’s mildly speculative questions. Their guest, she noticed, preserved a sceptical silence, gravely looking into his glass like a crystal-gazer staring at the future.
What a stick the man was! John might have been sitting there in silence but it would have been such a different silence. He would have given her one of his looks, not smiling, but with a smile lurking in the background, his handsome head cocked ever so slightly to one side, his blue eyes dancing. Yet this Peregrine Gilbert had seemed animated enough when she had seen him outside the Clachan Inn talking to Buchanan. Younger, he had looked, eager, friendly, everything that he was not now. Of course, Jane had to remember in fairness, he had only too obviously been irritated about his ridiculous name. Love must have been playing him up, and he was just the man to resent that. And ‘Perry’ was pretty awful. Now his real name Peregrine, suited his hawk-like type of looks. It meant a wanderer, too, and he had travelled all over the world, would probably travel more, if he ran true to form. He should have been the sailor, John, who cared so much for home, the would-be member of Parliament. No, that wouldn’t do; for Peregrine Gilbert had bought Allander, and anyhow was not bon camarade enough for the Navy, while the idea of John standing for Parliament made her want to giggle. Perhaps they were better as they were, each in his proper place.
“Shall we go into the drawing-room?” suggested Lady Cranstoun, and they rose and filed solemnly back, to find a pleasant wood fire casting a rosy glow on the white panels of the walls, and making the flowers on the chintz covers dance as if they were blowing in a light breeze. Love was there, curled up in a big chair with her feet under her.
“What ages you’ve been!” she exclaimed. “I want some coffee, with lots of cream.”
“Did you find the pin?” asked Sir Magnus.
“The pin, Father? What pin? Oh, I see! The pin. You mean that pin!” Love showed signs of confusion again. “Yes, I found it.”
“Where was it?” asked her father.
“Oh, darling, don’t make me blush. Just rejoice with me that it’s found, and—more cream, Mother, there’s a pet. I need feeding up!”
This red herring, which shouted aloud its fishy nature to the suspicious Jane, had the desired effect on Lady Cranstoun. “Love, dear. Are you run down? Of course you are thin, but all girls seem to be nowadays, except Violet Graham. You must start taking a tonic at once. I shall ring up Doctor Forbes in the morning.”
“Yes, Mother,” said Love meekly. She sipped her coffee, filched a spoonful of crystallized sugar and ate it with relish, and said: “Oh, Janey, will this boy-friend of yours be available if we need a man for anything?”
“Yes, I should imagine so. Rosyth isn’t far away, and he has a car.” Jane was glad to be sitting with her back to the window, but her voice sounded perfectly ordinary and gave no hint of the carillon of silver bells which rang through her head at the thought of John’s nearness.
“Who is this young man, Jane?” Her father was speaking, taking the words out of Lady Cranstoun’s mouth.
“He’s a paymaster, a friend of George Mariner’s,” Jane explained steadily. “And he’s got a job as one of the secretaries to the Admiral at Rosyth. It’s a good job, I believe, for a man of his seniority.” (‘Oh dear, I do hope I don’t sound as proud of him as I feel!’ she thought in a sudden panic. ‘Love’s as sharp as that pin she made such a noise about!’)
Love Comes Home Page 8