by Guy McCrone
As the two married couples made their way along the shore road towards their rented houses, leaving the young people to their own devices, they were startled by a bicycle bell, and shouts of “Get out of the way!” They turned to find Henry, perched on his penny-farthing bicycle, steering with one hand and carrying his carpet-bag in the other. He was going as slowly as possible so that Phœbe and Arthur could pant along beside him. He nearly fell off through trying to wave his handbag at the others as he passed them.
“Phœbe came down to meet Henry, after all,” Mary said to Bel when the three had passed on in front.
Bel merely said “Yes.” But now she was fixed in her resolve. These free-and-easy Arran holidays must come to an end. Nothing was to be gained from this ridiculous unconventionality. Next summer the family would find themselves in some resort where convention must be observed.
Chapter Three
MRS. BARROWFIELD was one of those women who don’t need to look at their knitting. Her hands seemed to be leading a busy life of their own as they fashioned stockings for her elder grandson. The rest of her was at peace, as she sat in a wicker chair in the little front garden of the farmhouse her daughter had rented for July and August.
Though it may seem strange on a Scottish island, Mrs. Barrowfield was sitting under a palm-tree. Strange, but not impossible, for, as the shores of Arran are washed by the waters of the Gulf Stream, and the mountains catch the rains and winds from the warm south-west, frost is no great menace. It was a little unkempt garden, with an odd flower or two springing up, rather from among the uncut grass, than from any discernible plot. But it was surrounded by a low hedge of fuchsia now in full bloom, and the view from it swept the beauty of the bay.
The late afternoon sunshine caused the old lady to contract her almost masculine features now and then. A starched cap, spotlessly white, was set upon her grey curls, and her best shawl was on her shoulders. It was only right that she should receive her son-in-law with proper dignity.
Although she could not see the pier from here, she had heard the beat of the steamer’s paddles, caught odd, drifting music, and seen black smoke blow down the wind. Bel would be coming back with Arthur; and, by the way, there would be that queer Hayburn boy. She had almost forgotten him. She didn’t quite know what to think about Henry. But Phœbe had engaged herself to him, and Mrs. Barrowfield liked Phœbe. It was too bad that he had lost all his money. Or perhaps not—at his age?
But her hopes and fears for Phœbe and her future were presently interrupted. A piping voice said: “Hullo, Granny,” and her granddaughter Isabel opened the little garden gate and came in, leading her younger brother Thomas by the hand.
As grandmothers will, Mrs. Barrowfield found herself re-examining her descendants with critical affection. She was pleased to note that, in so far as six can be the image of thirty-three, Isabel was the image of Bel. Little Thomas, a gentle little boy of four, reminded her more of David Moorhouse than of his father.
“Well, bairns? Have ye had a nice picnic? Come here to me, Isabel.” The child went. “Ye’ve got hair like yer mother.” Her grandmother took the round crook comb from the child’s fair hair, combed it a little, then pushed it back into place over the front of her head. Having smoothed down her little, braided serge dress, and adjusted her pinafore, she said: “There now. Tell me what you saw.”
“Glen Rosa,” little Thomas said, looking at his grandmother solemnly.
“Tell Granny who spoke to you in Glen Rosa,” Isabel said, prompting.
“A Duke.” Thomas did not approve of wasting syllables.
“A Duke? The Duke of Hamilton?”
Isabel filled in the details breathlessly. A gentleman on horse-back had spoken to Aunt Phœbe, Thomas and herself, as they were fetching milk for the picnic. He had been talking to the farmer’s wife, and had bent down to ask them if they were visitors from Glasgow, how they were enjoying their holiday in Arran, and if their father and mother were well and enjoying Arran too? Aunt Phœbe had said they were all enjoying themselves very much. And Isabel, and even little Thomas, had said: “Thank you, sir.”
“Where were the rest?” Mrs. Barrowfield asked.
“Getting sticks for the fire,” Isabel said. “He didn’t see them.”
The old lady purred as she took up her knitting again. She was, of course, a staunch partisan of her own grandchildren. That the landowner, using the kindly formula of greeting he was known to keep for summer visitors to his island, had greeted Bel’s children, and not Mary McNairn’s, couldn’t fail to give her satisfaction.
Presently, Sarah the housemaid, rather less starched than at Grosvenor Terrace, but still strangely impeccable for these rustic surroundings, appeared at the farmhouse door and led the children away.
But Mrs. Barrowfield was not to be left in peace. For now there was a rattling at the gate, the sound of voices, and Phœbe, Henry Hayburn and her elder grandson came in. They were flushed and hot from coming up the hill. Phœbe, dishevelled and glowing, was in one of her moods. Her queer-set eyes were smouldering. Giving the old lady the merest recognition without bothering to smile, she passed on into the house. Henry, having successfully pushed his ungainly bicycle into the garden, came forward and gave Mrs. Barrowfield his hand.
He saw the enquiry in her eyes as they followed Phœbe. “She’s fallen out with Bel,” he said by way of explanation.
“Dear me, Henry. What about?”
“Aunt Phœbe and I rode down from Glen Rosa to the pier on one of the cart-horses, and mother was very angry. She said it was no way for a lady to behave,” Arthur chimed in pertly.
His grandmother looked about her placidly, her fingers continuing independently with her work. “Yer mother’s getting very genteel,” she said at length. And added: “When I was yer Aunt Phœbe’s age, I often had rides on cart-horses.”
II
When Henry had passed into the house, Mrs. Barrowfield was left once more by herself in the garden. She smiled a little. Her beloved, beautiful and successful daughter Bel was inclined to be pompous these days; to keep remembering what she was pleased to call her position. And, as the years went on, and the tide of prosperity rose round her, Bel, her mother was afraid, would become more and more so. The old woman thought of Bel’s father. The lamented Doctor Barrowfield had been a very self-important sort of man. But she had loved him. And she could not love their daughter any the less, when she showed herself like him.
Still, it was comic, Mrs. Barrowfield could not help thinking, how, every now and then, something happened to shatter Bel’s sense of propriety. And usually it was Phœbe who was responsible for the shattering. Queer how she, Bel’s mother, always found herself siding with Phœbe and not with her own daughter. She wondered why. But here were Bel and Arthur coming up the hill.
Bel merrily made a sign of greeting to her mother, asked if the others had arrived, announced her intention of seeing to things, and passed into the house. Arthur dropped his bag and packages on the grass beside his mother-in-law, and bent down to kiss her.
The old woman patted his shoulder. Ten years of affection, begun as a duty, had ended in a relationship which was close, unforced and warm.
“Ye’ll be tired?” she said as her son-in-law stood, hat in hand, looking at the beauty about him.
“It was warm coming up here,” he said, still looking into the distance. “Where are the bairns?” he asked at last, turning.
“Getting their faces washed. Sit down and rest yourself.”
Arthur picked up an empty wicker chair that his wife had been occupying earlier in the afternoon, and sat himself down beside Mrs. Barrowfield. For a few moments he would rest and let Arran sink into him.
The smell of the sea, of the farmyard, of the tangle of moss-roses growing wild in a corner of the garden; the smell of bog myrtle and heather borne on the breeze from the hills above them. A golden quality was coming into the early evening light. The sun, striking lower, had begun to clothe the mountain across the bay in warmer tones; an
d, lighting it from one side, was throwing boulders, craggy outcrops and the sunken bed of a stream into black relief. The little herd of cows belonging to the farm were lowing as they passed the garden gate, driven in by the farm-girl to the evening milking.
Arthur continued to look about him, sighed with satisfaction and said: “This is fine!”
Mrs. Barrowfield’s needles clicked with satisfaction. She liked having a man to herself. Doubly so, if the man were Arthur. “What’s all this about Bel and Phœbe?” she asked presently, dropping her voice that it should not reach the open windows.
Arthur gave his version of the story of Phœbe and the cart-horse. He was inclined to agree that Bel had made too much of it. “But that’s not what’s bothering Bel now,” he went on. “Ye see,” he said, dropping his voice still further, “last week Henry Hayburn got the sack.”
“The sack! From his work?”
“He was sent away.”
Mrs. Barrowfield laid down her knitting, rested her hands on her lap and turned to Arthur. “Did Henry tell ye this, Arthur?”
“Yes. On the steamer coming across.”
“And was he not ashamed to tell ye?”
Arthur considered for a moment. “No,” he said. “He was quite joco.”
“He looked joco when he came in here a minute since. He didna look up nor down.” She thought for a moment, then asked: “And what does he think he’s going to get married on?”
Arthur shook his head. In Moorhouse circles it was unheard of to be dismissed from one’s work.
“What does Bel say?” the old lady asked presently.
“She’s not very pleased.”
But now Bel reappeared herself, to make a third in this whispered colloquy, and to express her own displeasure.
“The plain fact is,” she said, sitting on the grass between their chairs, that she need not raise her voice, “the sooner Phœbe and Henry decide to give up their engagement the better. I don’t believe either one or the other of them knows what the word responsibility means! I don’t believe they’re even in love with each other! Like grown-up people, I mean. I think Phœbe was just sorry for Henry, when she promised to marry him last autumn. I remember how queer she was on the night it happened.” Despite her indignation, Bel, turning to gaze out to sea, let memory take hold of her. Yes, on that night Phœbe had been very strange.
“But can anybody make them break it?” her mother asked, bringing her back.
Bel shrugged. “Well?” she demanded in a whisper which was hot with desperation. “What is it to be? He’s crazy and she’s crazy! And the one encourages the other!”
“I’ve always been told he was clever,” her mother said.
“And is he to keep her waiting, while he goes on being clever? I don’t think being sent away is at all clever! And all the time she’ll be getting older! And maybe at the end they’ll find they don’t want each other! This kind of thing may go on wasting the girl’s life for years!”
Mrs. Barrowfield laid a hand on Bel. “Don’t excite yerself, my dear. Don’t excite yerself! They’re good bairns. Both of them.” She turned to Arthur. “Did he tell you what he was sent away for?”
“Some job he refused to do.”
“Refused?”
“In his opinion the calculations werena right, or something.”
Bel, who had been dabbing her eyes, sat up and demanded fiercely, “What right has he to have an opinion?” She stared indignantly before her and added: “And then he arrives down here with his bicycle, and behaves like a clown!”
Nobody answered this. They sat in silence looking at the view before them. The light on Goatfell had become still more golden. The wind was quite down. Smoke from the chimneys of thatched cottages was rising up perpendicularly against the dark woods. They could hear hens cackling in the yard behind the house as the farmer’s wife called them to be fed. Boys with a dog, far away on the sands, were throwing sticks into the water. In the stillness, they could catch, even at this distance, the animal’s excited barking. Far out on the horizon a ship was moving.
Mrs. Barrowfield took up her knitting. Once again she found herself siding with the young people against her daughter. If Henry and Phœbe had the spirit to be crazy and to behave like clowns, perhaps, after all, it might be no bad thing. There was more to this story than had yet been told her. Bare facts were not enough. She would make an opportunity to question Henry, herself.
Little Isabel came out of the house to greet her father and tell them their meal was ready.
III
The face of the old minister, people said, resembled nothing so much as the face of an eagle; a pleasant eagle, most likely, if you met him out walking on any other day but Sunday. Now, however, there was no pleasantness in it. He had a flock to save, and that, if anything could be, was a matter for deadly earnest. He paused, transfixing for a long instant a worshipper who had dared to cough. Then, taking in all the ladies of the congregation with a sweeping glance, he delivered one of the broadsides for which he was famous. “And as for you, with your flowers waggin’ in your bonnets. They’ll no’ be lasting long where you are going! They will all be burnt up!”
Arthur the Second looked up nervously. The poppies, corn-flower and wheat-ears surrounding the crown of his Aunt Phœbe’s straw hat would not stand a chance, he was afraid. And the curling lime-green ostrich plume which, along with the lime-green veil, drooped so elegantly at the back of his mother’s fair and shining head would be inflammable too, he feared. Probably his granny, with her tight little black bonnet, would do better. The licking flames would find less to catch hold of.
He was surprised how calmly they were taking it. His mother and his Granny had not moved a muscle. For a moment he wondered if his Aunt Phœbe’s eyes had begun to dance, but a second look found them cast down and prim as ever. His father and Mr. Hayburn did not seem to be unduly troubled either. So perhaps it was all right. Perhaps this Arran minister, with his strange Highland accent, did not mean everything he said. Besides, anyone so calm and radiant as his mother, or so friendly and indulgent as his Aunt Phœbe, were far too nice to have the trimmings burnt off their hats.
Arthur’s mind sought refuge in the basket of strawberries his father had brought with him from the Glasgow fruit market yesterday evening, and the bowl of thick farm cream that was to accompany them to the midday dinner-table, when the family had arrived back in church.
The sun streamed through the plain glass windows of the little, unadorned church. Dust particles, floating through its slanting rays, turned for a moment to silver, then were lost again against the shadows. Outside, a corncrake was sounding his ratchet among the green corn. Somewhere a bee was buzzing. Now they were all standing up to sing the last hymn, trying to catch the tune from the slow, toneless voice of the precentor. Now the service was over and they were standing outside the little church, talking with acquaintances, and basking in the July glory about them.
As the church was some way out of Brodick, Arthur Moorhouse had borrowed his landlord’s gig, and now was gone to fetch it at the nearby farm where it had been left. Although at Grosvenor Terrace his wife had a carriage of her own and a coachman to attend her, this Arran unconventionality was pleasant to Arthur. Like many another countryman who had found fortune and formality in the City, he liked to remember at times that he himself was a farmer’s son and could harness a horse to a gig and drive it with the best of them. It was, perhaps, one of the greatest charms of Arran that it allowed the striving and successful to give up the struggle for a time, to touch back to their own simple beginnings.
The gig had been overloaded during their coming. Henry announced his intention of walking back. Bel promised to delay their meal for half an hour. Phœbe declared she would join him.
The weekend had not, so far, gone particularly well for this temperamental couple. They set out in the direction of home, saying nothing, pleased to be alone together. Henry seemed as disinclined for talk as she was, so Phœbe left him in pe
ace. The Arthur Moorhouse atmosphere had been noticeably chilly. The clash of Phœbe’s high spirits with Bel’s propriety had only been the beginning of it. When it was known that Henry had been forced to relinquish an excellent business opportunity, specially made for him, merely because he, Henry, had chosen to set what looked like nothing more than his own wilfulness against greater experience, then the temperature had dropped steeply.
It is not pleasant to feel oneself regarded as the single failure in a family of successes. And it was just this feeling that was beginning to penetrate. Yet, rightly or wrongly, Henry felt confident that success was in him. He knew he was quick, educated and diligent. If, outwardly, he seemed undisciplined, it was merely because he could only acknowledge a sharp, unforgiving inner discipline. But, for the success-mongering Moorhouses, this, it would seem, was not enough. But how could he make them understand?
Life, until the collapse of last autumn, had been handed to Henry to play with. A dangerous toy. But he was one of those young men an assured fortune would not have spoilt. He would merely have put what he needed of it to the uses of his calling. And, unlike his own brother Stephen, have continued on his way, quite heedless of the privileges that money might have bought him.
He had been awakened early this morning with the crowing of cocks, the cackle of laying hens, and the other, pleasant farmyard noises. He had lain across the hills and valleys of his lumpy Arran bed, staring at the crude, faded roses of his wallpaper, thinking.
Last night, made tactless, perhaps, by her smouldering annoyance, Bel had talked much about the doings of the family. David and Grace were now taking over Aucheneame. Mrs. Dermott had determined to come into Kelvinside, buy a suitable house, and devote herself to her committees. Her daughter and son-in-law were planning to extend the garden and build on a nursery wing to the house. Mungo Ruanthorpe-Moorhouse had bought a tiny and very valuable Shetland pony against the time when his son should be able to sit on its back. The baby’s grandfather, Sir Charles, Bel understood, had already transferred a substantial block of Consols to his grandson’s name. Every word she uttered seemed so pointedly to refer to the success of the others, and their power to spend lavishly, that even Henry’s indifference had begun to do more than wonder if her talk were deliberately aimed.