“He’s all right,” said Uncle Fred. And he added, most irrelevantly: “I suppose one’ll have to do something about the old Grove, sooner or later.”
“It’ll be a lot of work,” muttered Aunt.
“And no Lemprière ever works!” returned Uncle Fred fatalistically. “Look at Fanny!”
“Fanny has bad health.”
“She wouldn’t have bad health if you didn’t encourage her to have it by doing everything for her.”
“That will do, Fred.”
Uncle Fred whistled three or four bars of “Oft in the Stilly Night” and then said that he supposed he was a bit of a bad penny, always turning up where he wasn’t wanted.
To this Aunt made no rejoinder. Not even a civil contradiction.
The Palambos lived in a small, long house, thatched and with picturesque ogee windows heavily draped in ivy and clematis, at the end of the village street. The garden was at the back of the house and only a wicket gate and a miniature lawn, divided by a pathway, separated their porch from the road.
The door was opened by a very young maid who said that Mrs. Palambo was at home, and opened a door to the left of the little entrance hall.
Mrs. Palambo—thin, aquiline, and with a perpetual air of vexation—rose from her embroidery frame. Her church needlework was famous.
A little black Pomeranian dog flew at the visitors, yapping hysterically, and making rapid darts at Uncle Fred’s legs.
“How-d’y-do—how-d’y-do—down, Doggie, this minute—down! He never does this as a rule—I’m sorry—down, good little Doggie!”
Good little Doggie continued to bark, and Mrs. Palambo to apologize, and the Major came in through the French window from the garden and said “That dog ought to be shot,” and the callers seated themselves.
The room, like the house, was long and low and seemed to be largely filled with china in cabinets and on shelves and brackets against the walls, and small chairs upholstered in velvet, and a number of cushions.
“It’s rather chilly, isn’t it?” Mrs. Palambo remarked, quite inaccurately. “Do sit nearer the fire.”
Aunt, who had her own methods of dealing with difficult situations, replied that she wasn’t cold, and she would like to see the cotoneasters, and perhaps the little dog would make friends with Callie out in the garden, and she furthermore indicated that Uncle Fred, being from the West Indies, could never have too much of any fire and would of all things like to be shown Mrs. Palambo’s wonderful embroidery.
And she walked out of the French window, accidentally displacing a heavy jardinière on the way and taking a sharp jab in the side from the window-fastening.
Doggie, with a last agonized yelp, shot under a chair, and Uncle Fred and Mrs. Palambo were left tête-à-tête over the embroidery-frame, Uncle Fred looking helpless and Mrs. Palambo quite pleased.
Callie wandered about in the garden—which was anything but a wilderness, for the Major was an impassioned gardener and a highly skilled one—and hoped they wouldn’t stay too long. It wasn’t very interesting, and she wanted to get to the Umfravilles’ house.
Then the Major gave her a pear from the wall, and she felt sorry she’d thought his garden wasn’t interesting.
Quite soon, after all, the visit came to an end. Aunt left a snowdrift of cards on a brass tray in the hall; Brownie was unhitched from the wicket-gate, and his head turned in the direction of the woods.
“To my certain knowledge,” said Aunt as they drove away, “they’ve had that abominable Pom of theirs for the last ten years, and it’s never been called anything but Doggie.”
The ffillimores, also, proved to be at home. Except on a hunting-day, on the occasion of a Point-to-Point, or an Agricultural Show, one could always be certain of finding them at home, and moreover of finding all of them, for the sisters either all went out together or else stayed at home together. Their existence was entirely corporate, even to sharing their bedrooms in pairs.
The Hall was a large, white Georgian house with a pillared portico and a fine view over the hills to the west, and the open country to the east, stretching into the blue haze that overhung the distant moors.
The park was wide and irregular, with clumps of gorse, or sturdy may-trees, in its many grassy hollows, and one or two groups of fine Spanish chestnut-trees. Rabbits played and bullocks grazed there, and the two painted gates that divided up the drive served no apparent purpose except that of exasperating those who had to get out of their vehicles in order to open and shut them. There was, indeed, an old man, heavily pensioned, living in the lodge, but he very seldom appeared. In his own eyes, and in those of the Misses ffillimore, his existence and his pension and his residence at the lodge rent-free in perpetuo were all equally justified by the fact that he could remember the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Coronation and could sometimes be, induced to say so to visitors. He had been groom at the Hall for more than forty years, and was named Hodge.
Nowadays in Hodge’s place was a middle-aged, grey-bearded man still referred to as “the boy”—which had been his original designation in the lifetime of old Mr. ffillimore.
When Brownie drew up in front of the white steps and the portico, the boy came round the corner of the house in shirt-sleeves and riding-breeches and went to the pony’s head.
“Shall I take him round to the stables, ‘m?”
“No, thank you. He’ll stand.”
The front door was wide open, and Miss Totty, with two spaniels and a bulldog at her heels, came hospitably out to greet the callers and take them into the drawing-room.
“The girls will be down directly,” she told them. “Poor old Sarah has had an accident, scalded her hand, and Cathy and fflorens are looking after her. Isabel is writing a note to Dr. Umfraville.”
Aunt expressed concern for poor old Sarah, and offered to take the note.
“We should be very much obliged if you would. We were going to send the boy over on the cob.”
She ushered them through the square hall, carpeted in coconut matting, and with masks, antlers and stuffed fish in glass cases covering the walls, and thence into the drawing-room.
It was a very large room and appeared even larger owing to the number of enormous mirrors, framed in gilt moulding, that hung on the walls, almost from ceiling to floor. They reflected red brocade chairs, sofas and ottomans, oil-paintings of horses and one or two still-life studies, a shining grand piano in a mahogany casing, rotund white lamps in Dresden china, crimson figured-brocade curtains, a vast number of portfolios, spilling prints from either end, bowls of autumn roses, and gold, tortoiseshell, silver, glass and ormolu ornaments jostling one another on circular tables, marquetry, marble-topped and mother-o’-pearl inlaid.
In one corner a tall harp, shrouded in green baize, stood—a now silent reminder of the far-distant youth of the Misses ffillimores’ mother.
A huge jardinière of blue glazed pottery on gilded legs stood in the middle of the embrasure that held three long windows. Pink geraniums and trailing smilax streamed down from it into the thick pile of the Aubusson carpet.
In the other window was an aviary, with chirping green birds hopping about on perches.
Double doors, now closed, were at either end of the room.
Over the marble fireplace hung a large oil-painting representing the ffillimores in early youth. The four sisters—brown-faced, straight-gazing, straight-haired and plain—leant, in white frocks, pantalettes and blue sashes, against a stone pedestal. On the top of it, wearing numerous frilled petticoats and a little braided jacket, straddled, like an over-dressed infant Bacchus, their only brother—then aged three. An attenuated greyhound and a shadowy horse lounged in the background. The artist had included them in the picture at the request of Mr. ffillimore, but it was known that he was not interested in anything but portrait-work—and the horse and the greyhound were, in fact, more like faint recollections of a nightmare than convincing presentations of animal life.
Mr. ffillimore’s collection
of birds’ eggs still adorned the drawing-room, lying on cotton-wool in little cabinets wherever space for them could be found. He had also collected butterflies, but these having been unhappily attacked by moth, they had been taken up to the attics. The ffillimores admitted that they could not have borne to destroy them.
Callie thought The Hall drawing-room—which was the biggest room she had ever seen—absolutely entrancing. She longed to go round and look at everything.
She could scarcely believe her ears when Miss Totty said:
“Now, child, would you like to take a walk round the room and see what there is to be seen? We never forbid little people to touch, so long as they are careful.”
“Oh, thank you!” said Callie, and she went very slowly all round the big room, gazing at everything and handling only a heavy cut-glass prism and a large album, bound in white velvet with forget-me-nots painted on the cover and a silver clasp.
The two sisters who had been attending to the housekeeper’s scalded hand presently came in, and Miss Isabel appeared with her note to Dr. Umfraville from the library. As soon as Aunt’s sympathetic enquiries after Sarah had been answered the conversation turned, as it usually did with the ffillimores, to the subject of horses.
Aunt—polite rather than knowledgeable—said little, but Uncle Fred expressed himself so well and with such an air of knowing what he was talking about, that Miss Totty, Miss Isabel and Miss Cathy were soon addressing themselves exclusively to him. Miss fflorens was always the most silent of the sisters, and was sometimes rallied by the others on her dreaminess.
She got up after a little while, and went over to Callie and offered, in a deep, rather mannish voice, to show her a musical snuff-box.
It proved to be a gold box, beautifully chased, and when the spring of the lid was pressed and it opened, up rose a tiny little bird, less than an inch in diameter, who twittered a tiny little song and then meekly flattened itself down again and was shut in under the gold lid.
“That,” said Miss fflorens, “was one of our dear mother’s wedding presents. It is French.”
Callie thought the musical snuff-box lovely—as indeed it was—Miss fflorens very kind, and The Hall more like Heaven than an ordinary house that people lived in.
If they had been going anywhere except to the place where the little girl of the concert was staying, she would have been very sorry when the call came to an end.
As they said goodbye Miss Totty said to Aunt Kate: “Perhaps we could persuade Tom and Fanny to dine with us one night—and of course you, dear Kate—and if Mr. Lemprière should care to come too, we might have a little music.”
“Thank you very much. We should be delighted—but my brother and I are going to South Wales in a day or two, on business,” said Aunt.
The Misses flillimore ejaculated regretfully, and Uncle Fred said that he, also, was sorry.
Then they drove off, Brownie trotting briskly at first and having to be pulled up rather against his will while Callie climbed out of the cart to open and shut the gates, but slackening his pace as the steep, shaded ascent to Culverleigh Woods came in sight.
At the foot of the hill they all got out, and while Uncle Fred and Callie held on to the sides of the cart, Aunt, unsupported, walked by the pony’s head.
The woods were, as always, very dark and very quiet, the ferns grown to an immense height and the moss, of many shades of green, carpeting the steep slopes on which were rooted the great beech-trees, the slender rowans, small, stout holly bushes and tangled undergrowth.
Not for nearly half a mile did the green aisles lighten, the trees spread out in less close formation, and the docks and the foxgloves—now brown skeletons with only an occasional lingering purple bell still clinging to the stem—spring from the loose red earth.
Aunt and Uncle Fred were talking, in a detached, spasmodic way, after the fashion of people whose thoughts travel a long way between each loosely-uttered sentence.
“D’you suppose any of those four has ever thought of getting married?”
“Thousands of times, I should imagine,” Aunt candidly replied. “But I doubt if anybody else has ever thought of it, for them.”
“That’s what I meant.”
“Tom says that old Mr. ffillimore always said he would rather see his daughters in their coffins than see them married.”
“If he’d only lived long enough, he could have had his wish.”
At Uncle Fred’s sympathetic aspiration, Aunt laughed. Then she became silent, and at last said:
“They have the kind of life they like. They don’t really care about anything so much as they do about riding. Of course, if Bob had ever married, it would have been different. They’d have had to make a life of their own, then.”
“Why wouldn’t you have him, Kate?”
“How do you know he ever asked me to have him?”
“Everybody knows,” said Uncle Fred sweepingly. “And it was like his damn cheek, too—an old stick like that! Still, it’s a nice place, and he’s not a bad sort. But I don’t blame you.”
“Thank you, Fred.”
“I suppose you could have done better, if you’d wanted to.”
“Then you suppose wrong,” said Aunt in her most abrupt way. “Old Bob ffillimore was the only chance I ever had. But I’ve never wanted to get married anyway, so it’s all for the best.”
She gave a tug to the reins and stopped the pony.
“Get in, Callie.”
And Callie, getting in obediently, felt sure Aunt had no idea that she had heard, and been much amazed by, the conversation.
(4)
As the pony-cart drove up to the doctor’s open front, door, Mrs. Umfraville rose, apparently from the middle of a flower-bed, shook the loose earth off her gloved hands and advanced, waving a trowel. She was square and middle-aged, with a sunburnt amiable face.
“How nice of you to come. I’m just seeing to some rather jolly little Swiss chaps that Grace Berringer gave me. I think they’re going to settle down all right. Callie, I was wishing only this morning that I’d got someone of your age about the place, to make friends with Elisabeth. You’ll find her in the summer-house.”
“Is that——?” began Aunt.
Callie heard no more.
She already knew her way about the garden, for the Umfravilles continually asked all the children they knew to come and play croquet, or hide-and-seek, or to help with the hay-making.
She dashed across the croquet-lawn, past the circular rose-bed and down to the stream that ran right across the bottom of the sloping garden.
The thatched summer-house, constructed of highly varnished pitch-pine, stood under a group of willows close to the water.
Quite suddenly Callie was overwhelmed by shyness.
She stopped running, and almost crept to the far side, where the summer-house was open.
Sitting inside it, reading a book, was the little girl of the concert.
She didn’t look up.
Callie, very faintly, said:
“Hallo!”
“Oh—hallo!”
They gazed at each other.
Elisabeth’s eyes were not brown, as Callie had thought they must be. They were dark-blue, very large and brilliant, and she had straight, fine dark eyebrows—much darker than her soft hair, which curled so beautifully at the tips.
“Mrs. Umfraville sent me to find you,” said Callie timidly.
“Does she want me?”
“No, I don’t think so. My aunt is calling on her. They told me to come and look for you.”
“Won’t, you come in and sit down?” said Elisabeth politely.
A rustic wooden bench—very uncomfortable, as Callie knew from experience—ran round two sides of the little circular house.
Callie went in and sat down, feeling the rough edges of the twisted wood catch in her serge frock as she did so.
The two children looked at one another.
Elisabeth was the first to speak.
“What�
��s your name?”
“Callie Lemprière.”
“Are you a relation of the Ballantynes?”
“Yes. I’m their first cousin. I live with them. I haven’t got any brothers and sisters of my own. Have you?”
“No.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirteen. How old are you?”
“Nearly twelve,” said Callie, trying not to sound too young.
There was a pause, then, simultaneously, they smiled at one another.
“What do you most like doing?” Callie asked.
“Reading and going to parties. What do you?”
“Playing games, especially cricket, only I’m very bad at it, and riding, and going out in the farm-cart. Reading too, but not best”.
“Could we play now?” said Elisabeth gently. “You see, I don’t often have anyone to play with. We haven’t got any proper home. In London, we live in rooms.”
“What kind of rooms? Do you mean hotels? I was once in an hotel, but I didn’t like it.”
“I mean lodgings.”
“Aren’t they nice?”
“Not very. There’s nothing to do there, and there are hardly ever any books, and there isn’t any room to put anything.”
Callie’s eyes grew wider and wider in sympathy and consternation.
She thought that lodgings sounded awful.
“I hope you’ll stay here a long time,” she faltered.
“We shan’t. We never stay anywhere for very long. But Aunt Mary has invited us for a month, because mother has been ill.”
“Is she better now?”
“Oh yes. She’s quite well now. Why did you say you hoped we’d stay a long time?”
“I thought it would be nice for you, if you live in such horrible places and haven’t anyone to play with.”
Elisabeth continued to look at Callie, as if she was waiting for her to say something else.
Turning very pink, and twisting a piece of her frock tightly in her hands, Callie said it.
“Besides, I—I’d like to be friends with you if you wouldn’t mind. I thought so last night when I saw you at the concert.”
“I saw you, too.”
“Did you?” said Callie, her eyes anxiously fixed on Elisabeth’s face.
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