by Guy McCrone
For a moment Bel sensed that she was merely presenting her with a façade. That a quite different person might be there behind this charm. No young girl that she knew would have the hardihood to do what Miss Rennie had done. She had, surely, taken great risks. And yet Bel liked her none the less. She saw no reason to question what Lucy Rennie had told her, nor did she stop to think that this might not be quite the whole story.
“Is your home in London?”
“Yes. I have nearly all my work there. I do a certain amount of public singing, but most of my engagements are private.”
“Private?”
“Yes. People with handles to their names, and so on, give musical parties and pay me to sing at them.”
III
Further talk was interrupted by Wil Butter, a large, gawky, good-natured boy of fifteen, who burst into the room carrying Arthur pick-a-back, and followed by Margy, his sister, a long-legged girl in a pinafore. Arthur was screaming, delighted and hysterical. It was not every day that he had large cousins devoting themselves to his amusement.
Sophia followed them. “Children, shake hands with Miss Rennie and your Auntie Bel, then go away at once. We can’t hear ourselves speaking. Here’s tea. No, children, you’re not to eat the biscuits. They’re for the visitors. Arthur, you have one, dear. That’s right. That’s a nice one. Wil, Margy, what did I say? Hand them to Miss Rennie at once. Margy, ask Jenny for the sugar. She’s forgotten it. Lucy, how do you like your tea? Weak? Well, that’s all right. It’s pretty weak as it is. Sugar’s just coming.”
As Bel watched Lucy, sitting easy and self-possessed in the midst of all this good-natured uproar, a scheme was forming itself in her mind. Smart people gave musical parties in London, did they? She wondered if she dare. It would be so very up-to-date, so very interesting. But, then, how did one go about it? And what did one pay?
“I’m sorry to say I didn’t hear you sing at Mr. Tausch’s concert in the New Public Halls the other Saturday,” she said.
“I didn’t either,” Sophia broke in, or, rather, deflected the ceaseless stream of her talk in their direction. “William, my husband, and I meant to go. Then I can’t remember what it was kept us. Anyway, a lady in the church told us you were just wonderful. She said you brought tears to her eyes. Now—what was it you sang she said was so beautiful? Anyway, she said she had never been so touched by singing in her life!”
Miss Rennie smiled. Even this flattering nonsense was grist to her mill. She sang for her bread-and-butter. And it did her self-esteem no harm to know that even that kind of person liked her work.
Would she be singing in Glasgow again? Bel asked. Not in the meantime. But she was in private rooms for a week or two, using the City as a centre. There was a piano where she could work, and give odd lessons. Thereafter, she was going back to Ayrshire to spend New Year with her family.
Bel rose to go. Sophia went to find Arthur for her. He had been carried off again by the larger children. Miss Rennie said she must go, too. She would leave with them.
As they said goodbye to the Butter family, Bel’s mind was working. Should she ask this woman to her house? Arthur seemed to object to the entire Rennie clan, but that was ridiculous. After all, she had met this woman at his sister’s. She was interesting, clever and different. Why be stodgy?
“You must come and see me, Miss Rennie,” she said as they stood at the end of the little terrace.
“I should like to.” Mrs. Arthur Moorhouse, after all, looked a woman of some consequence.
IV
A little group of ragged children, wheeling a dirty baby in a soap-box, scuttled past them. A white-faced mite, who looked two or three, but had the sharpness of six or seven, detached himself from them and held out a filthy paw to the ladies.
“Gie’s a ha’penny.” His black eyes were pitiful in his little sharp face.
The ready emotion of a performing artist brought tears to Miss Rennie’s eye. She drew her purse from her muff and gave him a sixpence.
Bel, not to be outdone, gave Arthur the same to give to the urchin.
“Poor little things!” Lucy Rennie said, as she watched the child scamper back to the others.
“My husband says there’s terrible distress among these people this winter, Miss Rennie. There are subscriptions and charities being organised for them everywhere.”
“It’s bad in London, too. I’ve sung at one or two charity evenings.” She looked after the ragged children. “If you have a large drawing-room, Mrs. Moorhouse, I should be glad to do it for you. It’s quite a good way to raise money.”
Bel was enchanted. But she must go warily. After all, there was Arthur.
“It would be wonderful, Miss Rennie. Come and see me next week, and meanwhile I’ll discuss it with my husband. There is nothing I’d like better.”
She fixed a day, and bade Lucy Rennie a cordial goodbye. This was amazing! And for charity! Arthur couldn’t be such a bear as to refuse. He couldn’t be so narrow-minded. Sometime this weekend she would await her opportunity and ask him.
“Come along, Arthur; we’re going to be late.”
Arthur the Second trotted home behind a mother who was carried forward on wings of delight and determination. As he had no such wings but merely his own sturdy enough little legs to depend upon, he found it hot work.
Bel was set upon having her evening. That it be charitable, was very proper; that it be smart, was imperative.
Chapter Five
THERE are certain strong, elderly women who work off their energy interfering with other people. Mrs. Robert Dermott was one of these. But as her interferences were on the whole benevolent, and as, in the case of the poor at least, they were accompanied by cheques of her own signing, she seemed to make strangely few enemies. If she were not interfering in person, then she was writing letters of interference. Of such are the convenors of committees.
Mrs. Dermott wrote letters all over her large, ugly and comfortable Clydeside house. At Aucheneame, her bedroom and all the living-rooms had a desk with pen and paper waiting ready to her hand. Even in the large conservatory full of palms, maidenhair fern and chirping canaries, there was a slender bamboo table waiting to creak beneath her weight as she leant upon it writing. Her spectacle-case, attached to her person, was kept full of stamps, for, as she would have told you, she hated to have to be hunting for things.
A purposeful, though not dislikeable lady, if you could stand up to her, with much of the strength and drive belonging to her husband. It was no wonder that this couple had long ago reduced their only daughter to meekness and docility. And yet, between her letter-writing and committee-attending, and after her own fashion, Mrs. Dermott was very fond of Grace. She had been thinking about her recently, and she was worried. Grace was twenty-nine and unmarried. It was high time she was. What was wrong with the young men? She was reasonably pleasant to look at, gentle and feminine, and not half-witted. What more did young men want? What kept them away?
It had never struck Mrs. Dermott that her husband’s wealth, and the crashing personalities of both of them, had tended to push suitors to a distance.
On the early evening of her return from Glasgow, Mrs. Dermott sat at the writing-desk in her bedroom sucking the end of a pen and thinking. She thought of the strained look and the tears in Grace’s eyes as they had driven home that afternoon. She had noticed such symptoms before. Putting two and two together, she was almost certain that the girl loved David Moorhouse. This morning, Mrs. Dermott had asked him to visit them, just as she would have asked any young man, or indeed any pleasant person who would have been willing to come. For what was the use of all the paraphernalia of hospitality if you were inhospitable? Grace, for all her seeming passiveness, had betrayed excitement at the prospect of David’s visit. She must, then, take the young man seriously, and do what was best for her daughter.
What about this David Moorhouse? What sort of person was he? He had already been four or five times in Aucheneame, and Mrs. Dermott, in so far a
s she had thought about him at all, had liked him.
Neither she nor her husband were highly critical. They were too intent upon themselves. They met many people, and took them as they found them. He made his friends in the business world, and she in the world of philanthropy. Like most successful public people, their friends were those who worked well with them.
But now, Mrs. Dermott pondered, it was time she found out more about this young man. She must ask Grace about him. As casually as possible, of course.
II
As she rose to find her, Grace’s father came into the room.
“Hullo, Robert,” she said. “I didn’t know you were home.”
Her husband stood warming his back at the bedroom fire.
“I have been thinking about Mr. Moorhouse,” Mrs. Dermott went on, “and I’ve taken an idea that Grace likes him.”
Robert Dermott merely stroked his patriarch’s beard with an enormous hand and said: “Is that the way of it?”
“He seems a nice sort of young man.”
“Aye.”
“I wish you would find out something about him, Robert.”
“I know a lot about him already. I thought things might be taking a turn that way. So I took some trouble to find out.”
“And do you mean to say you never bothered to tell me?”
“It wasna verra important.”
“Then why did you bother?”
“I bother about every young man that comes here. I’ve a daughter in the house.”
“She’s my daughter, too, Robert.”
A smile slowly lit up Robert Dermott’s eyes. “Sir William knows him and his brother,” he said.
“And what are they?”
Dermott told his wife. Three Ayrshire farmer’s sons. The eldest still a farmer, but, rather surprisingly, married into the Ayrshire county. The other two brothers, Arthur and David, were prosperous cheese merchants, who somehow managed to have the bearing of professional men. Two sisters, who had made everyday marriages. And the young half-sister who was engaged to Henry Hayburn.
“You seem to know all about them. You’re a sly old rascal.”
“D’you want your lassie to get married to a cheese merchant?”
“Yes. If it’s going to break her heart if she doesn’t, Robert.”
Dermott turned and looked into the fire. “You took me. I was only the son of a herd.”
Mrs. Dermott rose and kissed her husband—an indulgence she did not often permit herself. The Dermotts were built on a scale too imposing somehow to do much kissing.
A housemaid came in with gleaming copper cans steaming with hot water. She saw to the room and laid out such clothes as they might want for the evening. And as he stood watching her, Robert Dermott thought of a cottage fifty years ago, where the peat smoke had found its way out through a hole in the thatch. It was a far journey from there to here, but he had made it. He was not the only one who had made this journey—and with dignity—in Victorian Glasgow.
III
It would seem an impertinence that a young man, situated as David Moorhouse was, should coolly plan a visit to the only daughter of a shipping prince, to find out if he could possibly like her enough to ask her to marry him. That was the exact purpose of this visit he had arranged for himself. And yet to state it thus is somehow to misstate it. For the worldly aspect of an alliance with Grace Dermott did not greatly influence him.
David Moorhouse belonged to a rising family. But none of them were narrowly mercenary. Each and all of them had a fundamental, peasant dignity. If David had come to visit Grace, it was to seek the answer to a question that he was earnestly putting to himself. Trimmings had little to do with it. In no way could he be called contemptible. He was handsome. He was quite straightforwardly kind. He had good manners, and a certain fastidiousness. He was quick to adapt himself to the ways of those about him, because he had been born sensitive. In other words, he was socially adroit. He must not be labelled a common schemer. There was nothing of that about him.
And yet it was a very collected sort of young man who gave his name to the man-servant that winter afternoon at the door of Aucheneame. He had a complete hold of his emotions, for the good reason that he had no strong emotions to take hold of. And when, some moments later, he stood in the open doorway of Mrs. Dermott’s drawing-room and caught a glimpse in a mirror of himself standing with a smile on his face, ready to be welcomed by his hostess, the elegant cut of his frock-coat and trousers reassured him. He would be able to give his usual easy performance, and from behind that, he hoped to be able to make up his mind.
Grace and her mother were in the room. Mrs. Dermott, advancing upon him in a way that was somehow reminiscent of one of her husband’s ocean-going steamers, conducted him to a chair by a heaped-up fire, speaking at the same time words of welcome, regret at the coldness of the day, and assurances that tea would be here immediately, all in her loud, assured voice.
Grace’s colour had risen and her eyes were shining. Surely he had guessed aright her feeling for him. It was for him now to search for his own.
It was bleak outside the large windows, but the bright leaping fire seemed to gather the little party into its friendly glow. Darkness was falling quickly now, but the shadows, as they deepened in the great tasteless room, merely served to make their circle more friendly.
Tea came, and the master of the house was called. The Dermotts could not help themselves. Their warm-heartedness towards each other was easily extended to take in their guest. If they had had no deeper interest, if he had merely been a passing visitor, it would have been much the same. Grace’s parents had much to say. He could sit, eat his buttered toast and observe. Grace seemed quite unembarrassed. She poured out tea and looked after everybody, smiling indulgently at him as one young person to another, when the talkativeness of her parents clashed; or when, as happened frequently in their vitality and enthusiasm, they fell into argument with each other.
David, trying to be pleased, assured himself that she was more appealing than he had ever known her.
“Are you very anxious to be married?”
“I don’t want life to slip past me.”
His conversation with Bel. He was honestly seeking the answer. Could this gentle young woman hold on to life for him? Keep it from slipping past him? Allow it to unroll itself richly and naturally before him? Prevent it from drifting on to the end, arid and aimless, a thing of unsatisfied instincts, a barren passing of the time? David was beginning to think so.
He felt happy and at ease. If Grace really wanted it, her parents, surely, would not make it difficult. She was not in her first youth. Marriage might easily miss her now. Rightly he guessed that the way would be made plain for him to find his place as the prince consort in this shipping dynasty.
The fine china and solid silver were being removed, blinds were pulled down, curtains drawn. Robert Dermott had gone off to see to some business. His wife rose.
“You will stay for a meal tonight, Mr. Moorhouse? It’s nice to have you all to ourselves.”
David was pleased to accept.
“I have a letter to go to the post, if you’ll excuse me. You must just try to put up with Grace by herself for a little. Do you mind?”
No, David didn’t mind. So they were throwing her deliberately in his way, were they. Very well. So much the better.
IV
Grace Dermott had repose of manner. Perhaps it came from having to live with stormy, energetic parents, having to keep calm in the centre of the turmoil they created around her. This quality stood her in good stead. Even now, when the storm raged in her own senses, she continued to seem at peace.
Left alone with David, she rose, stirred the fire, and bade him take the great chair that her father had quitted, regretting the while that it was grown too dark and cold to be outside.
David, too, seemed at his ease. In this atmosphere the couple talked. Of trivialities. Of the terrier lying on the rug in front of the fire. Of the people they k
new. Of books. Of recent visits to the theatre. Of themselves. Of what does any civilised man or woman talk, when the battle of sex is being fought out between them? Any talk is a revealing of the one to the other. Its subject does not matter.
Grace’s sensibilities were not any less quick than those of the young man who sat before her. Like herself, he was restrained and friendly. They had let themselves fall into a pleasant adult intimacy. There was no callow boy-and-girl self-consciousness. Yet each was intensely conscious of the other.
She had no doubts about herself. If this young man who was bending forward, his face aglow in the firelight, wanted her, she was his for the taking. Quite ridiculous things moved her. A way he had of putting back his thick chestnut hair. The set of his mouth and eyes when he smiled. Certain inflections of his voice. In other words, she was prepared to adore David Moorhouse in the most normal way possible.
But when she came to try to read his mind towards herself, Grace was baffled. As his good-mannered talk flowed on, she was puzzled. What had brought him here? Love for herself? She had no idea. She could find goodwill, pleasure in her company, a sincere attempt to make himself attractive to her. But further than that she could not yet penetrate. Suppose he were thrown thus intimately together with any other young woman? Would he behave in the same good-mannered way? She could not tell.
Meanwhile she must be glad she had him by her; take what she could from this hour; encourage him, in so far as dignity would permit, to visit her again.
Grace sat late before her bedroom fire that night. She was not unhappy. At parting he had given her his hand and asked if he might come soon again. It might be difficult to guess his feelings, but in doing this he had, at least, given a sign.
Chapter Six
ARTHUR MOORHOUSE saw his foreman turn the key in the main door of Arthur Moorhouse and Company. “I’ll go up to the Infirmary myself, James, and I’ll meet you at the Cross at three.” He turned in the direction of the Traders’ Club. He was glad to find the sombre dining-room empty, though indeed he had expected this, for most members ate their midday-meal at home on Saturdays, or snatched food quickly elsewhere before they went to golf—a game which, at this time, was beginning to be fashionable. He sat at a table by himself, glad to eat his chop in peace. It had been a distressing morning. There had been an accident to one of his packers.