There May Be Danger
Page 7
As if she read Kate’s thoughts—she was a good deal more reflective, Kate surmised, than most of the young actresses she resembled—Rosaleen said confidentially, leading the way out of the kitchen down a short stone-flagged passage:
“Don’t tell anyone, will you, Miss Mayhew, but I am not really a country lover! I’d like to have stayed on in dear old London, bombs and all. But I’d promised my expectant aunt to give her a hand with her overdoo family when it arrived, and I couldn’t go back on her. I like little kiddies, anyway, so it won’t be too bad when the creche gets going, I’ll put up with the mud and the other romantic elements of the English countryside for their sweet sake.”
In the high, spacious hall into which Kate followed Rosaleen, the nurse in her neat brown uniform and muslin coif was pouring out the tea from a trestle-table against the wall, and a stout elderly lady, whom Rosaleen introduced as her Aunt Ellida was sitting in an easy-chair, conversing with a stocky, red-faced man in tweeds, who was just not standing in front of the log fire.
“Major Humphries has been explaining, dear, how it is that we shouldn’t really let the gipsies camp out in our field, picturesque though they may be.”
“Can’t understand how anybody can find rags picturesque,” said the stocky man bluffly.
“But most of us weak mortals find good looks and brown skins picturesque, Major Humphries!” said Rosaleen. “And I’m afraid that we benighted Americans are also attracted by pleasant manners!”
“Their brown skins are just dirt, if you ask me. And as for their manners, that gipsy effusiveness is all put on, you know Miss Morrison. They’d rob you as soon as look at you.”
The Major spoke in a slightly softened voice, fixing Rosaleen with a prominent, inexpressive, but somehow humble eye. It was obvious to Kate that his own preferences were for pink-and-white skins and teasing, ironic manners. Rosaleen came and stood beside him with her cup of tea. Never was a greater contrast, in intention and effect, between two trousered human figures.
“Oh, sooner, surely!” she said in her fresh drawling voice. “What kind of a kick would they get out of just looking at me?”
“Oh, but I say, Miss Morrison!” protested Major Humphries, blinking and averting his bluish, boiled-looking eyes from the inquiring gaze of her long-lashed grey ones. “Surely, if you knew what thieving rogues they are, you won’t—”
“We only knew by hearsay, not experience, up till to-day. We thought it would be interesting to see how they lived up to their reputations. And Auntie, too, fell in love with a cute baby in earrings a young woman had in a shawl. She won’t fall so easily next time, though,” said Rosaleen, removing her limpid gaze from the Major’s face to her aunt’s. “I’ve been taking a kind of inventory of what isn’t here, and I’m afraid, Auntie— prepare yourself for a blow—your new clothes-line’s gone.”
“Oh, not my new clothes-line!” cried Mrs. Morrison, sitting up as straight as her easy chair would let her. She was a chic dowager with a head of grey curls, a pearly-powdered skin, and a general billowiness of those parts of her dress and figure which were not strictly moulded by her excellent corsets. “Not my new, lovely clothes-line!”
“Yes, Auntie dear, and all the new, lovely pegs, too.”
“Oh, if that isn’t too bad! Well, we expected them to take rabbits, and firewood, didn’t we? But my clothes-line!”
“I just can’t bear to break it to you, Auntie, but your clothesline was functioning at the time, too,” said Rosaleen gently. “It had your blue knitted jumper on it, and the frilled pillow-cases out of the red room, and your eau-de-nil satin slip.”
Mrs. Morrison, who had uttered a groan at each of these items, clenched her plump be-ringed fists on the arms of her chair, and exclaimed:
“If that doesn’t beat everything for black ingratitude! When I think how I gave that baby my last orange, I could just wring its little neck!”
Major Humphries did his best to disguise his obvious delight at this fulfilment of his warnings, in a veil of insincere condolence.
“Well, there you are, Mrs. Morrison, I’m afraid! It’s what I was saying, I mean to say. These people shouldn’t be encouraged. Human vermin. Like Germans.”
“Like Germans!” echoed the nurse. “I should have thought there never were two kinds of human beings less alike than a German and a gipsy!”
Major Humphries bristled an eyebrow at her and said shortly:
“Both vermin, both want exterminating, that’s what I meant! Never known any Germans, I’m glad to say!”
“I was in Berlin once for a year with a German family,” said the nurse.
He looked at her as if he thought she might at least keep this disreputable episode to herself.
“They weren’t vermin,” pursued the nurse cheerfully, apparently oblivious of his bristling disgust. “Most orderly and law-abiding lot of people I ever came across, they were. The children were so obedient it made me feel quite worried. You’d have just loved to have them in the Home Guard, Major Humphries.”
“I should not!” said Major Humphries with suppressed explosiveness, picking up his hat. “If it’s to be gipsies or German, give me gipsies!”
And Rosaleen interposed quickly and sympathetically:
“Of course! How’s the Home Guard, Major Humphries?”
Kate thought that Rosaleen shot a narrowed, rather angry look at the nurse. Evidently, she did not want her admirer baited by anyone but herself.
“Fine,” replied Major Humphries, turning to Rosaleen with a rather touching alacritous response to the sympathy in her voice. “I only hope we do get some Germans over here, that’s all I can say! Well, good-bye, Mrs. Morrison. Glad you’ve seen the light about the gipsies. You let the policeman know double sharp next time they come squatting in your field, that’s my advice!”
“You don’t tell me that after helping themselves to my eau-de-nil slip they’ll have the nerve to come back here?” said Mrs. Morrison in horror.
Major Humphries laughed, genuinely amused.
“Sure to! Why, they’ll have marked this place as good hunting-ground.”
“Well! And where’ve they got to now, do you suppose?”
Kate remarked:
“Mr. Atkins was ordering them off Llanhalo Farm a couple of hours ago.”
Major Humphries was, Kate surmised, a fox-hunter, and even their common hatred of gipsies could not endear Mr. Gideon Atkins to him, for he muttered:
“Oh, that fellow!” in a tone scarcely more friendly than that in which he had spoken of his country’s enemies.
“Don’t you like him, Major?” inquired Rosaleen innocently. Innocence suited her large grey eyes, and Major Humphries blinked once or twice before opining firmly that Atkins was a frightful fellow.
“I wonder you go there as often as you do, if that’s how you feel about him!”
Major Humphries snorted slightly!
“I don’t go over there for the pleasure of it, I can tell you! I’ve been trying to come to some arrangement with Atkins about hunting over his land. It stuck in my throat to do the polite to him, but Llanhalo’s some of the best hunting ground in the county. Used to hunt over it regularly till this feller turned up.”
“Oh dear, I hope you got some good result from your visits, Major Humphries! Too sad to think of all those li’l foxes wondering what can have happened to the horses and hounds!”
“Result! He’s wired Llanhalo Coppice all round, I hear—that’s the result I’ve got! No good trying to reason with the fellow, evidently, and no good trying to soft-soap him! All we can do now’s wait for his funeral, it seems to me,” said Major Humphries, gloomily lining up, to Kate’s amusement, with the popular pre-occupation.
Rosaleen, still half quizzically condoling, saw him off the premises.
Chapter Eight
“Well,” observed Mrs. Morrison sententiously, “the English or rather Welsh, countryside has many interesting cross currents.”
“If you mean Major Humphrie
s,” said Nurse Maud, collecting the cups together, “I should say he’s more like a stagnant pool than a cross current.”
Nurse Maud—Kate had not yet heard her surname—seemed to be on terms of surprising intimacy with her employers after only twenty-four hours. But perhaps, reflected Kate, she was an old friend as well as an employee. In which case it was rather strange, however, that she should be wearing her starched uniform and white muslin coif when she was not yet, and, it seemed, would not be for weeks, on duty.
“You must stay and meet my husband. Miss Mayhew,” said Mrs. Morrison. “He’s upstairs, trying to persuade the builder’s foreman to put a little ginger into his plasterers. Your builders, Miss Mayhew, are certainly a highly individualistic lot of men.”
“You haven’t had dealings with them before, then?” inquired Kate, wondering how long it was since the Morrisons had crossed the Atlantic.
“I certainly have not. Up till this summer, my experience of your lovely country was mostly taken from hotels and furnished apartments. We only came over in the summer of last year. My husband wanted a rest, and thought he’d like to pursue his antiquarian hobbies in old England. We meant to make a long trip, and when the war found us still over here, we decided to make it longer still, and settle down here and see if we couldn’t help you folk in your fight for freedom. So, as Rosaleen and I are both very, very fond of little kiddies, we thought we’d make looking after some of them our war-work. And that’s how you find us here, Miss Mayhew. It isn’t my fault if this old house isn’t ringing with children’s voices this minute. I’d never have believed that putting in a bit of plumbing and making a house weather-proof could take this long! But I strongly feel, Miss Mayhew, that where there’s kiddies, there must be plumbing. Don’t you think so, Nurse?”
“I’ll say I do!” replied Nurse Maud feelingly, picking up the tray and carrying it out. “And the more of it the better.”
“Of course, we really need electric light, too,” pursued Mrs. Morrison. “But that’s impossible at present. What do you think of our lounge-hall, Miss Mayhew?”
Kate thought that it might be a trifle draughty in the winter. Four doors opened out of it, one of them the wide, heavy front door of the house, and an old staircase with an oak handrail and twisted banisters led down into it beside the fireplace. As Kate made admiring comments on the dignified design of its wide treads and turned newel-posts, there appeared at the turn of it, and came leisurely down, an elderly gentleman in a blue suit and white canvas shoes.
“Why, Douglas, you have been a long time! This is Miss Mayhew, who’s a friend of that charming Miss Hughes.”
Mr. Morrison shook hands. The dark, humorous, small eyes in his broad sallow face looked at Kate both kindly and quizzically, as if he could easily, if he liked, have thought of a great many elaborate and charming things to say, but thought that on the whole he would just stick to “Pleased to meet you.” Having said which, he pushed a thick lock of grey hair away from his right eyebrow, and remarked:
“I went upstairs to ask Lupton what to do about the damp in the buttery wall, and I’ve come away knowing all about his wife’s toothache and how his grandfather once cured a rupture by crawling through a hollow ash tree.
“Well, you’ve missed Major Humphries, dear.”
“Good,” said Mr. Morrison dispassionately.
“I was just telling Miss Mayhew what an antiquary you are, and how you bought this place because of its quaint beams and brackets, and because you thought there ought surely to be a priest’s hole in it, without a thought of whether priest’s holes and beams were what my infants would chiefly want.”
“And has it got a priest’s hole?” asked Kate.
Mr. Morrison replied gravely:
“Well, there are a few small recesses in the bedroom walls here and there, but more of a size to hold candle-sticks than priests. So far, I haven’t been able to find any romantic hidey-holes at all, but I have not given up hope that one day a stair may give way beneath my foot and reveal a secret chamber, preferably, of course, containing a skeleton. I am beginning sadly to think, though, that in the days of Good Queen Bess, folks must have been strictly Protestant in these parts.”
“Very likely,” agreed Kate. “But there’s still Jacobites, you know, and smugglers.”
“Smugglers! Now who, my dear lady, would smuggle what, in this romantic but scarcely commercial spot? No such worldly and profitable occupation as smuggling has ever sullied the pristine innocence of these country dwellers communing with the deeps of Mother Nature: they live too far inland. If you were to mention poaching, now, a blot or two might be discovered on that pristine innocence. Mother, there are two pheasants in the larder.”
“Two pheasants! Where did they come from, Doug?”
“That is exactly what I asked the gentleman who brought them here, and he replied, with a wooden look, that he couldn’t say. So all I can tell you is, they came out of this gentleman’s pockets. I think perhaps he was a magician, needing a little practice, and materialised these birds just to show what he could do. You never saw a neater illusion, Miss Mayhew. There he was, one minute empty-handed, a little thin old fellow with a very sad moustache. And then he slipped his hand into his jacket pocket as if to get out his pipe, and out came a cock pheasant with a tail half-a-yard long! You couldn’t see any bulges, either, in this gentleman’s slender figure. It was a quite fascinating little exhibition.”
“Oh, Doug dear, Major Humphries says we ought not to encourage the gipsies!”
“This gentleman was not a gipsy. He was a respectable farmer with a taste for conjuring-tricks.”
“Mr. Davis?” ventured Kate.
“Yes, according to Mr. Gwyn Lupton, that is the conjuror’s name. He stung me good and hard for the privilege of watching his illusion. I believe the local inhabitants have the idea that ‘American’ is a synonym for ‘millionaire’. Radnorsheer, poor Radnorsheer, never a park and never a deer—I presoom you know the old rhyme, Miss Mayhew? And never a Squire of five hundred a year, but Richard Fowler of Abbey Cwm Hir. Gosh, what a centre of interest to the local population that unique Mr. Fowler must have been!”
“Well, if he was alive now, I’d be making tracks this minute for Abbey Cwm what-is-it,” said Rosaleen disconsolately from the doorway, and came in and flopped with an air of exhaustion upon the settee. “Show me a man that’s unique, after half-an-hour of the millionth edition of England’s Glory out there, and I’ll just fall straight on his neck.”
“So you say,” said her uncle, offering Kate his cigarette case. “But there was a very interesting young man, that archaeologist who was here yesterday on a walking tour and then, when we had a chance of his company under our roof for a week, and you could have fallen on his neck all you wanted—always supposing he had no objection—you and your aunt turned him out into the snow.”
“Heck, Uncle, where do you think Auntie and I could have put him, when there isn’t a bedroom in the house apart from our own that isn’t just crawling with painters and white-washers?” demanded Rosaleen. And Mrs. Morrison even more vigorously repudiated the implication of inhospitality.
“I was never so ashamed in my life as when I had to say we hadn’t room for him, after the way you invited him, Douglas, but where there’s a guest there surely has to be a bed! He was an outstandingly nice young man, though. I wonder where he got to in the end. He said he was going to try Llanhalo down the road.”
“You can bet your life, Ellida, that if he tried Llanhalo, he tried in vain,” said Mr. Morrison sadly. “I cannot see Gideon Atkins warming an archaeologist, however youthful and agreeable, in his bosom. He made it quite clear to me some time ago that he regards us antiquaries as little higher in the scale of creation than the caterpillar.”
“Well, I hope that nice young specimen hasn’t crawled on too far,” said Rosaleen regretfully. “He said he’d come over one afternoon to tea. I’d be real heartbroken to think I wasn’t going to see him again!”
Kate dropped her cigarette. It went first on her lap and then on to the stone flags, from which Mr. Morrison retrieved it and insisted on throwing it away and giving her another.
“Did you say his name was Kemp?” asked Kate.
“That was his patronymic. Christian name, Colin.”
The absurd Kate, although this time prepared for the name she heard, nearly dropped her second cigarette at the sound of it, and was much annoyed with herself for doing so.
“I know him. Or rather, I used to,” she said. “I wonder what he’s doing in this part of the world. I thought he was in South America.”
This time it was Rosaleen who dropped, not her cigarette, but her petrol lighter. She laughed merrily as she picked it up.
“This dropping things seems to be infectious, doesn’t it? Fancy that nice young archaeologist being a friend of your, Miss Mayhew! If we’d known, we’d have found a corner for him somewhere, if he had to sleep on the table! And fancy him having been in South America, Uncle Doug! Did he tell you that?”
“I don’t remember that he did, Rosa. Owing to your aunt’s preoccupation with the bed-famine, our period of conversation was strictly limited. Well, it’s too bad to think we drove away a friend of Miss Mayhew’s. But maybe he hasn’t gone far. Did he know you were going to be in these parts?”