Love Comes Home

by Molly Clavering

  “Telly-grramss,” said the voice, and Jane, quickly rewording the message as she dictated it, proceeded to say: “Paymaster Lieutenant Commander Marsh, R.N. . . . Can you stay this week-end Craigrois. Particularly anxious to have you. Cranstoun.” ‘There, that’s done. He’ll come all right,’ she ended to herself, and once more rang off.

  With the idea of still further simplifying matters—or complicating them? she couldn’t be sure which—she asked Peregrine to dine with them on Saturday, giving as a reason that her friends the Mariners would be there, and she would like him to meet them.

  “Kitty can chaperone us, she’s rather good at it,” she added, thinking that his reception of the invitation was too hesitating to be flattering. “She chaperoned me for months on end at Chatham.”

  “I don’t know that that is much of an achievement,” he said drily. “But I’ll come. As far us goes, I suppose I’m the one who ought to chaperone you all.”

  “Oh, no, Perry!” cried Love, already quite recovered from the snubs he had administered only two hours before, and bearing him no malice for them. “You’re one of the young men of the party! Stair will be gone, you see.”

  “I don’t know that I’d undertake to chaperone you,” he said with a slow, measuring glance. “If the arranging of this party had been in my hands, you’d be eating bread and milk in the schoolroom upstairs while your elders and betters dined.”

  “Love would have to be there whether you arranged it or not,” Jane interposed hastily. “To amuse John.”

  “Oh! Is John coming? How divine!” cried Love.

  “I hope so. He is George’s greatest friend in the Service,” said Jane in a matter-of-fact tone. “They’ll want to see each other again.”

  “I see. And will he want to see Kitty again? Is he a great friend of hers too?”

  “Certainly,” said Jane, pretending not to see the hideous grimace with which Love greeted this.

  “In fact, it’s going to be a regular joyful gathering, all boys and girls together,” said Love, when she had straightened out her features to their normal positions. “I hardly think that John will require me to amuse him.”

  “Don’t be an utter idiot, Love,” begged Jane, and as Love sailed away like a taller, younger edition of Lady Cranstoun at her stateliest, Peregrine remarked with a short laugh: “It won’t do that brat any harm to find her pretty little nose out of joint for one weekend.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Jane, but she said it doubtfully, and was to feel more doubtful still when John arrived on Friday evening.

  Gunn bustled out to the hall to receive him with a beaming smile accorded to few guests, for, as she had coyly admitted to Mrs. Sword, there was something about a sailor, as the song said, and John had quickly become a prime favourite with her, difficult though she was to please. “You’ll find them all up in the old schoolroom, sir,” she said, after greetings had been exchanged, on her side with prim decorum, on John’s with frankness and good-humour.

  “Right, Gunn. Don’t bother to come up with me, I know my way there by this time,” he replied, and took the stairs three at a stride.

  “A fine young gentleman,” was Gunn’s comment, as she tenderly hung his disreputable soft hat in the cloakroom off the hall.

  John, springing upward in the direction of the school-room, had time to wonder what Gunn had meant by all of them—unless fat Violet was there giggling and eating sweets in a corner? Oh, well, the more the merrier, and he didn’t much want to see either Jane or Love alone. The elder sister’s coolness was almost easier to bear than the younger’s unspoken certainty that she was the girl for him. ‘Thank God for Violet!’ he thought, turning the door-handle and walking into the sunny, shabby room with a “What cheer!” that sounded gay and carefree enough to pass muster.

  “John!” and “Johnnie darling!” cried two charming feminine voices in duet, one clear soprano, the other deep throbbing contralto, but both alike in their tone of joyous expectancy. John, blinking, beheld their owners advancing round the corner of the old schoolroom piano towards him with hands outstretched, and shrank inwardly.

  ‘My God. Kitty,’ he thought, even as he gave one hand to her and the other to Love, while his eyes searched for Jane. ‘This just lands me neatly in the dead centre of the soup!’

  And there, thunder and lightning, was Jane, hob-nobbing with old George in the window-seat, yet watching this touching scene of welcome with amused gaze. “Hullo, John! Isn’t this a nice surprise for you?” she said in her cool voice, like water dropping gently into a deep, still pool.

  “Isn’t it?” he echoed, standing there like a fool with his hands imprisoned by two sets of soft eager clasping fingers, and old George, confound him, grinning away like a hyena.

  “Have you brought me a cap-ribbon?” asked Love, not relinquishing her hold, while staring hard at Kitty doing the same thing.

  “Not this time, Love, I’m sorry. I forgot,” he said. “Would you mind letting me go, both of you? I’ll come quietly—” with a desperate laugh—“but I’d rather like to get at my cigarettes.”

  “Of course, my dear,” cooed Kitty, dropping his hand a split second before Love let go, and giving her an answering stare with an added lift of eyebrows. “I’m very angry with you, Johnnie, darling. Why didn’t you answer my last letter?”

  “D—didn’t I? Frightfully sorry. I thought I had, but we’ve been pretty busy lately,” he muttered lamely.

  All the time he was acutely conscious of Jane’s quiet smile, as if she knew about him and Kitty, and didn’t care. And didn’t care! That was what got him on the raw. Once more guilty conscience and the knowledge that he looked a complete tool made his temper rise. If she didn’t care, then, by God, he’d carry on making love to Kitty in front of her, and see how she liked that!

  With the thoroughly angry man’s savage instinct to hit out blindly in the hope of hurting what he is fondest of, he turned to Kitty. “It’s marvellous finding you here,” he said, looking at her as if the room contained only themselves.

  Whether his shot reached Jane or not he never knew, for hard on Kitty’s low-voiced reply, sweet and rich as heather-honey dripping from the comb, came Love’s quick laughter.

  “Wonderful technique! I congratulate you both!” she said. “And after that, wouldn’t we all be the better for a drink?”

  ‘The little devil,’ thought John, and was amazed and indignant to see as she passed him on her way to the door, that she was blinking a tear off her long eye-lashes. ‘Ridiculous child,’ was his next thought, ‘she can’t possibly be serious!’ But he took her by the arm and walked downstairs with her behind the others. “Kitty and I are very old friends,” he said, mildly and most unwisely, for Love always made astonishingly quick recoveries, and was ready tor him now.

  “Old friends? Is that what you call it, John? And how does George enjoy these fine displays of old friendship?”

  “George isn’t an ass,” said John shortly, and dropped her arm as if it had been red-hot.

  Love, having regained her composure, was not likely to lose it again. “Then George must either be myopic,” she retorted, “or a great deal more complaisant than most husbands.”

  “What do you know about husbands?”

  “Not much—yet. But I do know that if I behave like that I wouldn’t expect my husband to stand by and watch me at it,” said Love, and he realized that she was honestly angry and disgusted.

  “You’re too young to know what you’re talking about,” was all he could think of in reply, and that was a feeble come-back was proved to his satisfaction immediately.

  “There are some things that I hope I’ll never be old enough to understand, then,” she said, and tunning past him, flew across the hall and into the drawing-room, arrow-swift, arrow-straight.

  Feeling like a pariah, John moodily drank sherry and scowled at the others, until a light touch on his sleeve roused him.

  “John,” said Jane, looking up at him with candid eyes, “I�
��ve finished your pullover. Do you want to see it?”

  “Please, Jenny,” he said, a sudden wild hope that she was going to make it up brightening his gloomy face.

  “Come on, then. It’s in the boudoir, upstairs. . . . We’ve always kept our knitting and sewing there, in mother’s tall-boy,” said Jane, leading the way. “Love and I have each a drawer that mother gave us for our own when we first began to struggle with knitting-pins and dropped stitches, and somehow we’ve never thought of leaving our work anywhere else.”

  The boudoir was small but airy, gay with flowery glazed chintz, sweet with pot-pourri and the scent of cut grass floating in at an open window. The whole atmosphere of the room was intimate, friendly, altogether pleasing, and the many framed photographs of Lady Cranstoun’s four children at all stages of their growth, added to the general effect of happy comfort and homeliness.

  “It is a portrait-gallery with a vengeance.” said Jane, opening a drawer and taking out a white sleeveless pullover, knitted in cable pattern, with a dark blue, and a dark red stripe round the bottom. “Here you are, John. I hope it will fit.”

  “Jane,” he said, clutching the gift as if it were a lifebelt. “Jane, was it you who asked me here this week-end? With George and Kitty?”

  “Yes,” said Jane. “Why? I thought you’d be so pleased to see them again.”

  Under that clear and candid gaze he uttered a sound that was almost a groan. “Glad? My God. Glad?” he said miserably.

  “I see,” said Jane quietly. “You know, I wondered if there was something like that.”

  “It was my fault!” said John.

  “It must have been partly your fault, John.”

  “And look at the damned mess I’ve landed myself in!”

  “Poor, poor John. What with Kitty and Love, you’re going to have a pretty tough week-end of it, aren’t you?” said Jane, and the gentle kindness in her voice was much worse than anger or distress, for it was entirely impersonal.

  “Kitty—and Love! Why, she’s only a baby!” he cried. “It’s you—” He broke off. Jane was shaking her head.

  “Oh, no, John, I’m out of it.”

  “You really mean that?”

  “I really mean it. You see, I’ve no ambition to struggle for a man. I couldn’t do it with any sort of success, so I’ve just thrown in my hand. I’d much rather never marry at all than have to take part in an endless competition to keep my husband. Now Kitty revels in it. It puts her on her mettle at once, shows up her powers of attraction at their best, when she has a rival. And I think Love has signs of being the same. You’ll have to fight it out with them, and as Kitty is your friend’s wife, and I suppose you don’t want to break up George’s life altogether, I suggest that you concentrate on Love—”

  “But damn it all, I don’t want either of them!” he cried resentfully.

  “No? You’ve given them other ideas on the subject,” said Jane. “Haven’t you?”

  “It was only fooling, Kitty knows that whatever she may like to pretend.”

  “Oh, yes, Kitty knows every move of the game by this time. She ought to, she’s played it long enough. But—does Love, John?”

  “Good Lord, Jenny? Are you deliberately trying to hand me on a plate to Love as if I’d nothing to say to it?”

  “No. I’m only making helpful suggestions,” said Jane mildly. “You started it with Love. I had nothing whatever to do with it.”

  “And are you going to leave me to battle with the pair of them until Sunday night? It’s inhuman,” said John despairingly. “I can’t face it. I’ll go back to Rosyth to-night.”

  “Nonsense. You won’t do anything of the kind. It’s up to you to settle this absurd business while you’re here with both of them.”

  “I don’t care for you when you come over all dictatorial,” said John.

  “Don’t you? Well, it doesn’t much matter whether you care for me or not,” said Jane carelessly.

  “At least, Jenny, you’ll see that I’m not left alone with either of them for long?” said John. “Hang it, you might lend a hand.”

  “I’ll make no rash promises,” said Jane. “But I don’t think there will be very many opportunities for têtes-à-tête over the week-end. Let’s go back to the drawing-room, or your girl friends will be tearing each other into little tiny pieces.”

  “The tinier the better, as far as I’m concerned,” he said moodily. “I believe I’m a misogynist.”

  “You should have thought of that sooner,” was all the comfort he got from Jane.

  “Hard as nails nowadays, aren’t you?” he grumbled, following her from the boudoir.

  “I believe experience usually has rather a hardening effect,” Jane flung back, and silenced him, if not her own heart, which kept crying out that she was being unkind when a little softening would have made him hers again. ‘But I don’t want a weather-cock,’ Jane told herself angrily. ‘I want someone reliable, who’d stick to me even when I wasn’t there!’ And she found herself repeating aloud a stray verse which she had read in some book, forgotten completely, and now remembered at the appointed moment.

  “Constancy is still the same,

  Whether it win or lose the game,

  True as the dial to the sun,

  Although it be not shone upon.”

  “What’s that about the dial and the sun?” asked John.

  “Only a few lines about constancy,” said Jane, and she looked at him with some bitterness. “You wouldn’t appreciate or understand them.”

  And he started as if she had stabbed him, and for the rest of the evening devoted himself to Kitty and Love, dividing his attentions with such scrupulous impartiality that he might have been weighing each look or glance or low-voiced remark, and the two young women who were the recipients of these favours, far from being flattered, became exceedingly restive.

  Kitty, much the older and more experienced, was able to bide her feelings, but Love’s irritation increased throughout Saturday, and being denied any suitable vent, was in a dangerous smouldering state comparable only with Vesuvius on the eve of eruption, by the time that Gunn announced ‘Mr. Gilbert,’ and Peregrine, taller and leaner than ever in dinner-jacket and stiff white shirt, came into the drawing-room.

  The scene on which he entered was a charmingly natural one to the casual or unobservant eye. Jane sat in a low high-backed chair, winding green wool which George Mariner, on his knees before her, held outstretched over his extended hands, with the effect of a lover supplicating his hard-hearted fair. At the piano was Kitty, singing in a soft, intimate voice to John, just above her breath, while he leant on it watching her, the polished surface giving back a dim reflection of his darkly handsome face. Love stood behind the singer, looking cool and virginal in white, backed by the heavy faded brocade curtain which framed the long window.

  “Good evening, Peregrine!” said Jane, who sounded in excellent spirits. “Forgive me for not advancing like a proper hostess to greet you impressively with a handshake, but I can’t put down this wool or George will escape, and it will look as if someone had been playing cat’s-cradle with it in less than a second. Let me introduce you: Kitty! Mr. Gilbert. Peregrine—at the piano, Mrs. Mariner. Kneeling at my feet, Lieutenant-Commander Mariner. John you’ve already met, and I think you know my little sister Love?”

  “Only too well,” said Peregrine with a smile which took the sting out of his words. “How are you, Marsh? Looking after your Admiral all right?” He bowed low towards Kitty, who, not leaving her seat at the piano, where she knew she looked effective, bowed and shot him a devastating look from those dangerous twin weapons, her bright eyes. Love came forward and put her hand into Peregrine’s.

  “I’m so glad you’ve come to enliven things a bit,” she said in bell-like tones. “It’s rather a dull party, I’m afraid. Dear old friends talking naval shop all the time. You and I must try to amuse each other.”

  Her hand was burning, Peregrine noticed, and wondered just how far the no
se-disjointing operation which he had prophesied to Jane, had progressed. That Love was suffering, even if only from hurt pride, was evident. He passed over her deliberate rudeness with a quizzical lift of the eyebrows, squeezed her hand and said: “We can talk our own gossip in a corner without disturbing them.”

  George was saying plaintively: “I’m growing corns on my knees, and no wonder I’m dull. Every time I meet anyone for the first time I’m discovered in some degrading female occupation. It can’t be good for the reputation of the Service.”

  “Nonsense, George dear,” said Jane, winding wool busily. “It only makes people realize, in a practical way, that sailors are handy men. Do sing again, Kitty, won’t you?”

  “It might be nice if we could all have the benefit of hearing you this time, instead of only John,” added Love, whose tongue was rapidly getting out of control.

  Kitty, smiling sweetly at her, said: “Of course, my dear. I thought my singing was boring you, and I know that John is fond of it. What would you like me to sing?”

  “Oh, anything. Ask John,” said Love, turning away, but turning back again at once, to say, grudgingly but honestly and with a pathetic striving after her best manner: “Your voice is so good that it really doesn’t much matter what song it is.”

  “Thank you so much.” Kitty’s polite amiability was hard to bear, as everyone in the room except George realized. He beamed delightedly at Love, and said in a loud aside to Jane: “I say, Jenny, I like Love. She’s a sweet little thing, isn’t she?”

  “About as sweet as an unripe sloe,” murmured Peregrine, who had overheard him.