In an unexpectedly thin high voice she sang something not very audible about red roses, a dark-eyed señorita and an unscaleable convent wall.
“I believe,” said Miss Cathy impressively to Aunt, “that our dear mother sang that very song to our dear father when they were on their honeymoon. He had a liking for it that was almost passionate.”
“It must be a very old song,” replied Aunt—and she admitted afterwards, at home, that it was not the best-chosen comment in the world, but she hadn’t really been thinking of what she was saying. Her mind had been on Reggie’s Hornpipe rather than on old Mr. and Mrs. ffillimore singing and honeymooning some seventy-odd years earlier.
Aunt took the piano-stool herself for the Hornpipe, and although the music was in front of her with Tansy all ready to turn over the page, she played it with her head turned over her shoulder so that she might watch the performers. Indeed she continued to play, as though wound up, for some six or eight bars after Reggie and Mary Berringer had come to a stop and were standing, breathing heavily, facing the clapping audience.
Reggie grinned cheerfully and remembered to salute in a nautical manner—but Mary merely looked cross and frightened and scuttled back as quickly as possible to Mademoiselle.
“Ah, comme tu es peu gracieuse!” said Mademoiselle, and she muffled her up in the Scottish plaid again.
Callie felt very glad that she wasn’t Mary Berringer, with that awful Mademoiselle.
The second half of the concert—which bore a marked resemblance to the first half, since nearly all the same performers reappeared, in the same order—was rendered memorable to Callie by the sight of a little girl, whom she had not seen before, seated between Dr. and Mrs. Umfraville.
She knew the doctor and his wife.
The little girl attracted Callie immediately. She was pretty, with long curling light-brown hair cut into a short fringe, like the children of the du Maurier drawings in Punch—whom, in fact, she resembled.
“Who’s that?” Callie whispered to Juliet.
“Elisabeth Geraldine. Mrs. Umfraville’s her aunt. She often stays with them. Isn’t it a funny name?”
“Is Geraldine her surname?“
“Yes.”
Callie stared, fascinated.
Elisabeth Geraldine looked at her in return and presently she smiled.
Callie was entranced.
Later in the evening she asked, feeling oddly shy, if Elisabeth Geraldine was nice, and was relieved when the other children said yes.
“She generally comes to tea with us at least once, when she’s staying with Mrs. Umfraville.”
It would be lovely, thought Callie, to get to know her and perhaps have her for a friend.
She was given to ardent fancies, although they seldom found any expression outside her own imagination. This one added glamour to the last piano-duet—“The Mill-Wheel”—and the final part-song by the male portion of the church choir: “Come where my Love lies dreaming.”
Then Mr. Visto made his customary speech, thanking the ladies who had got ready the hall, thanking Major and Mrs. Palambo for the flowers on the platform, thanking the performers and the patrons and being himself thanked for presiding over the entertainment.
The schoolmaster started the National Anthem, everybody joined in, and the concert was over.
The carriage was waiting to take Aunt Fanny home and she had already offered to convey the Misses ffillimore, who must otherwise have bicycled, for although there were plenty of hunters in the stable at The Hall they kept no carriage horses.
Aunt and the children were to walk.
“Good-night, Mr. Visto—it was most successful, I thought. Good-night, Tansy. Come along, Mona, don’t dawdle.”
Dr. and Mrs. Umfraville were close by.
“Do let some of the children come over and play with Elisabeth. She’s with us for a month.”
Callie’s heart bounded at the words, and at Aunt’s ready assent. She did hope she’d be one of the ones to go—but she was sure to be, for they always made her take her turn, coming in between Juliet and Mona or—if the boys were at home—between Juliet and Reggie.
They walked home through the starlit night. Little curls and columns of white mist rose up from the ground and wreathed themselves fantastically across the hedgerows where the beech leaves were still green. “Like the evening mists in South Wales,” said Aunt. “What on earth is that?”
It was a figure looming close to them, suddenly, out of the mist and seeming strangely gigantic.
“What in the world are you all doing, walking about the world at this time of night?” said Uncle Fred, as calmly as though he had parted from them all a few minutes earlier.
The girls screamed, and Reggie called out: “Why, it’s Uncle Fred!”
Aunt stopped dead and gave a kind of smothered exclamation, and Uncle Fred—one couldn’t mistake his deep, drawling voice—said:
“Hallo, Kate!”
It was the first time that Callie had heard her called “Kate” instead of Aunt.
Chapter V
(1)
Day after day, Uncle Fred said that he must go and see about The Grove. He’d come home for that.
The Grove was a large house in South Wales which had belonged to Grandmother and which had stood empty for years. Callie had seen a photograph of it in Grandmother’s big red-velvet album, with the ivory clasps and the wreath of roses stamped on the cover.
At Rock Place she had also seen a pale water-colour sketch of a garden lawn, with croquet hoops and a summer-house and at the top of a grass slope, one side of a big stone-built house, with a great many long windows and magnolias growing against the wall. That was The Grove.
It hung in Aunt Fanny’s bedroom.
“You were born in that house,” remarked Aunt Fanny one day, when Callie was looking at it. “It was my home before I married Uncle Tom.”
Callie looked more closely at the sketch.
“There are people sitting on the lawn!” she exclaimed, noticing them for the first time.
The group was so small as to be almost indistinguishable but there was a lady in a shawl seated in a wicker-chair and another one, in a long white dress and holding a large floppy hat by a ribbon, standing beside her, and two very long figures, with straw hats tilted over their faces, lounging on the grass at their feet, and some dogs.
“Who are they all?” Callie asked.
Aunt Fanny amiably moved from the dressing-table in front of which she was seated, to inspect the water-colour.
“That’s Grandmother, sitting in the chair,” she announced, “and your mother standing next her—I think it was before she married—and my two brothers on the grass.”
It took Callie a minute to realize who Aunt Fanny’s two brothers had been.
“Uncle Fred and his brother who was called Lucy?” she said confusedly.
Aunt Fanny said yes. Then, after a long pause, she added—rather as if the idea had only just occurred to her, as it had to Callie:
“Of course, Lucy is your father, isn’t he? I suppose you don’t remember him.”
“Oh no. I used to think I hadn’t got a father at all.”
“No wonder,” said Aunt Fanny, not at all as though she were shocked or surprised, but in a very matter-of-fact sort of way.
After another long pause—but one got accustomed to long pauses with Aunt Fanny—she spoke again.
“Of course you know your mother was killed in a carriage accident and your father felt it most dreadfully, and he’s been travelling about ever since. He did go to Barbados for a little while, but he didn’t like it there.”
“Grandmother always said he’d come back, but he never did.”
“Well, she had Fred,” remarked Aunt Fanny simply. “Fred was always her favourite.”
“Why didn’t they all live at The Grove? It looks very nice.”
“It was too large, and your grandmother thought she ought to see about the property in the West Indies, and they hoped T
he Grove would sell—which it never did—and now it belongs to your aunt.”
“To Aunt?” said Callie, astonished. “Will she go and live there?”
“Oh no. She lives with us. We couldn’t spare her. But I’m afraid there’ll be rather a lot of business for her to see to,” said Aunt Fanny vaguely. “Uncle Fred will have to help her.”
“Why is it Aunt’s?”
Callie had early learnt, with relief and pleasure, that at Rock Place nobody minded answering questions. Her grandmother had never encouraged Callie to talk at all, and had snubbed her if she asked questions.
“It’s Aunt’s,” said Aunt Fanny, “because it belonged to her father, Mr. Charlecombe, who was my stepfather. My own father—and your grandfather—was Mr. Lemprière, of Barbados. So the sugar plantations, which were worth a lot of money many years ago, belonged to the Lemprières, and The Grove was your grandmother’s for her life and now it’s Aunt’s, because she’s the only Charlecombe.”
“Then is she very rich?”
“No, not at all. People don’t buy large houses nowadays, and I expect it’s all gone to rack and ruin, poor old place,” said Aunt Fanny placidly. “You see, it belonged to your grandmother as long as she was alive, and she wasn’t interested in it, once she’d left there, and besides, she kept on thinking that one of the boys—one of my brothers—might want to live there. But they never did.”
“Yes, I see,” said Callie gravely. She felt sorry that the nice house and garden should have “gone to rack and ruin” and that nobody should live there any more.
“What will Aunt do with it then?”
“Have a sale, I expect. There was one some years ago, when old Cousin Joe Newton was able to see about it, and I believe there are still some things left that were so large nobody would buy them. It was his wife, Cousin Edith Newton, who did that sketch. There’s a photograph of her in the drawing-room.”
There was, and a very uninteresting photograph it was too, of a forbidding-looking lady with a nutcracker face, and very straight hair brushed back from a high forehead. Callie knew, because the girls had said so, that she was called “old Cousin Edith Newton” and that opposite her, in a little gold frame studded with turquoises, was the faded photograph of an elderly gentleman with white whiskers and he was “old Mr. Meredith” to the Ballantynes, but Aunt said that he was Callie’s own grandfather, her mother’s father, dead long ago.
It was impossible to think that any of them looked in the least interesting. Even the picture of Callie’s mother, that Grandmother had shown her, looked much more like that of a girl in a book than that of anybody’s mother. Her dress was like a sort of fancy-dress, and she had ribbons twisted in and out of her masses of hair, and held a basket of flowers in one beautiful slim hand, balanced on a marble pedestal against the draped folds of a huge velvet curtain.
Callie’s idea of a real mother was based upon the mother of Diane and Geoffrey Ermington, who was middle-aged and rather stout, and talked a great deal about the servants, the illnesses of herself and her friends, and the difference between people who were “quite quite” and those who were not “quite quite.” But she petted Diane and Geoffrey quite a lot, and brought them surprises whenever she’d been away, and read to them when they were ill with influenza.
One couldn’t imagine the girl in the picture doing any of those things. In fact Callie, when she thought of her at all, thought of her as “Rosalie,” which was the name under the photograph in Grandmother’s old album.
Grandmother had spoken of her once or twice, telling Callie how sad it was that she’d been killed in a carriage accident: Uncle Fred had never said a word.
Callie was much happier than she had ever been before.
Occasionally she wished that she had a special friend of her own—Awdry and Juliet had one another, and were twin-like in their inseparability—and she made the focus of this day-dream the girl with the odd name whom she had seen at the concert—Elisabeth Geraldine.
(2)
Uncle Fred came down to breakfast very late every morning, and sat about in the porch or over the drawing-room fire, according to the weather, always smoking and always declaring that he was off to see about Aunt’s property for her, but never going.
In the evenings he played the piano, and sang in a light tenor voice that was pleasant to listen to, although none of his music was what Tansy called classical, but far from it.
He only exerted himself when he was asked to play cricket, and even then he appeared to achieve success without making any very great effort.
His batting, said Tom Ballantyne seriously, was in County Cricket class.
Uncle Fred, who had stayed at Rock Place before, was in request in the neighbourhood and seemed to enjoy riding or driving to the homes of other people.
He had been in the house more than a week when Callie’s secret wish was realized, and she met Elisabeth Geraldine.
(3)
“The Palambos haven’t been called upon for a long while. Neither have the ffillimores. They’re both owing,” said Aunt Fanny, looking mournfully reproachful, although the omitted duty, strictly speaking, was her own.
She had come in to luncheon and was eating cold pigeon-pie, sitting at the foot of the large mahogany table.
“So are several others. I could go for you, Fanny, and leave cards this afternoon,” Aunt said.
“Could Aunt have Brownie and the cart, Tom?”
“Yes, yes, she could.”
“Very well, I’ll go and drop cards. With any luck they’ll all be out, a day like this,” Aunt said hopefully. “The Palambos weren’t speaking at all, last time I was there,” she added.
“C’est assez,” said Uncle Tom, looking rebuke-fully to the right and to the left.
The children exchanged glances. The curious relation that prevailed between Major and Mrs. Palambo was a source of unending interest to them.
“I bet they have rows over the son who ran away,” Reggie murmured to Juliet.
“He didn’t run. The Major kicked him out.”
“How do you know?”
“Old Hook told me. He said: ‘You couldn’t hardly expect the Major to do no other, considering.’”
“Considering what?”
“Considering the way he was brought up, to ask questions at meals about what didn’t concern him instead of finishing up his vegetables,” swiftly interposed Tansy—for Reggie was in arrears with the first course and Tansy had a peculiar talent for improving the occasion.
“Why not do the whole lot?” languidly suggested Uncle Fred.“ I’ll come with you if you like.”
Callie felt her heart jump with excitement. It was her turn to go out in the pony-cart with Aunt.
“Would you, Fred?”
“Oh, certainly.”
Aunt looked across to the foot of the table.
“Fanny, would you like me to call on Mrs. Umfraville?”
“Certainly,” said Aunt Fanny with the utmost indifference.
“Whose turn——?”
“Mine,” said Callie joyfully.
“Then be clean and tidy, with a nice pair of gloves on, at a quarter-past two,” Aunt said, spilling water freely on the table-cloth as she poured it into Mona’s silver christening-mug.
Callie knew that the first call would be at the long creeper-covered house at the end of the village where the Palambos lived. The Hall was three miles beyond the village and would come next, and then, driving round through Culverleigh Woods, one would reach the long drive with fields on either side of it, at the end of which, looking unexpectedly small after such an impressive approach, stood Dr. Umfraville’s house. He was seldom in it, for whenever he was not either hunting or fly-fishing, he was riding over the countryside on his great grey horse, visiting his patients.
Mrs. Umfraville, who had a passion for gardening, was as much at home as the doctor was out.
Callie had scarcely expected Uncle Fred to turn up for the expedition. He so often suggested, in a de
sultory way, doing things, and so seldom did them. But there he was, with a panama hat tipped over his eyes, and a huge pair of driving-gloves.
Aunt quickly exchanged her own gauntlets for a more elegant pair.
“I’d much rather you drove, Fred. Mind the wheel, Callie.”
Callie “minded” the wheel and sat forward in the cart, in the corner opposite the driver. Aunt, dropping her card-case with one hand and retrieving it with the other, tripped over her own skirts and fell, rather than seated herself, into the corner nearest the door, behind Callie. All of them sat sideways, facing the road ahead.
Callie’s heart was beating faster than usual, she thought, and she had no desire to talk. She felt excited and hopeful, and yet afraid to hope.
Uncle Fred and Aunt talked most of the time, and she heard what they were saying, although without paying any attention to it, her own thoughts were so much more interesting than their grown-up conversation.
“I never can make up my mind,” said Uncle Fred thoughtfully, “whether I prefer to visit the Palambos when they ignore one another completely, or when she contradicts everything he says, or when he talks at her the whole time. I always hope that one of these days one of them will suddenly shy a flower-vase at the other one’s head.”
“If it ever happens, we shan’t be there. We shall just hear about it from someone who was there. It’s always the way. Like when people get shot in public restaurants.”
“Dear Kate, I’m so sorry for you. I can see you feel that you’re missing the best out of life.”
They both laughed.
“Kate.”
“Well?” said Aunt, as Uncle Fred paused, flicking the whip idly at the high banks of the narrow lane, where late honeysuckles clung.
“You never really feel that, do you?”
“What?”
“That you’re missing the best out of life.”
“Certainly not,” said Aunt curtly. “Why should I?”
Then they were silent, while Brownie walked leisurely up the hill.
“Oughtn’t you to get out? It’s steep.”
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