“And I thought,” said Elisabeth, “that I would like to be friends with you.”
Callie could hardly believe that she really had said that. She stared for a minute in silence, and then happiness rushed over her, and she broke into excited, blissful laughter.
“Let’s run all round the croquet-lawn, jumping all the hoops!” she cried.
They dashed out into the sunshine.
Uncle Fred was sent to find them, when it was time to go. He brought them back, holding a hand of each, and instructing them how to keep in step—two of their steps, to one of his.
Even then, they couldn’t do it.
“I’m sure,” said Mrs. Umfraville, looking kindly at her guest, “that Elisabeth has enjoyed having Callie. She looks untidy. I like to see a little girl looking untidy, in the garden.”
“You can see three—four of them—any day, at Rock Place,” said Aunt. “At any hour of the day, what’s more, and not only in the garden.”
“In a day or two Elisabeth will have someone to keep her company. My other niece, Bella, is coming to stay.”
A frightful pang of jealousy shot through Callie. Bella! And she would actually be staying in the house, and with Elisabeth all the time—
A lady wearing a green dress with lace, holding up a parasol—who might or might not have been there all the while—suddenly impressed herself on Callie’s notice.
It must be Mrs. Geraldine, Elisabeth’s mother. She was very pretty, even though she spoke in rather an affected voice.
“It’s so delightful for my solitary Elisabeth to meet someone of her own age. Placed as I am, she and I can never be anything but ships that pass in the night.”
As though struck with her own phrase she repeated it, on a different note.
“Ships that pass in the night!”
She looked down at Elisabeth, and then put one arm round her and drew her closer.
“I’ve not only had to be father and mother to my little girl, but sister as well.”
“Still,” said Aunt, in her practical way, “it’s not at all the same thing, is it? Couldn’t Elisabeth come over to Rock Place and play with the children?”
“Oh yes, please!” Callie cried irrepressibly, her eyes fixed on Aunt.
They all laughed, but Callie didn’t mind. She was intent only on the hope held out to her.
“If you don’t mind a set of the worst-brought-up children in England,” said Uncle Fred to Mrs. Geraldine. “This hobgoblin-looking creature, with a head too large for the rest of it and eyes like saucers, is one of our stranger specimens.”
“That will do, Fred,” said Aunt. “We could drive over and fetch Elisabeth to-morrow or next day, after lunch, and perhaps send her back in the evening, if she may come.”
“Would you like to, darling?”
“Yes, please,” said Elisabeth.
“Then the day after to-morrow,” Mrs. Umfraville declared. “Bella may be here then.”
Aunt replied that of course Bella must come too—they’d love to have her.
Callie reflected on the number of untruths that were told by grown-up people. For them, evidently, it wasn’t wrong as it was for children.
Mrs. Geraldine thanked everyone, and particularly Uncle Fred—who had done nothing whatever.
Then they said goodbye.
Callie, abruptly seized with shyness, turned her head away from Elisabeth and said “’Bye” without looking at her.
But when she was actually in the pony-cart and Uncle Fred had taken up the reins and Aunt was disentangling her skirts, which had become curiously twisted round her legs, she felt desperate, and, thought how hateful Elisabeth would think her.
She looked round miserably.
Mrs. Umfraville had already stepped back into the flower-bed with poised trowel, although politely remaining still upright and static until her callers should have driven off.
Mrs. Geraldine, the white parasol held open behind her, was watching them with her head a good deal on one side.
And Elisabeth ran round to Callie’s side of the pony-cart and said in a quick, low voice:
“Don’t forget we’re best friends. I wish it was you who was coming instead of that Bella.”
Everything, in an instant, was perfect again.
Callie, in a dream of happiness, sat in her corner of the pony-cart, or climbed up the hills as she was bidden.
Only one sentence attracted her attention in the occasional conversation that went on between Aunt and Uncle Fred.
“Attractive woman, that. What’s the husband?”
“Something unsatisfactory, I believe—he left her two years ago. The Umfravilles are very good to her and the child. They think she was badly treated.”
Callie looked, up startled.
Was it Elisabeth who’d been badly treated?
Uncle Fred’s next utterance reassured her.
“Women like that always do get badly treated, in the long run. She belongs to a fairly recognizable type.”
“That will do, Fred.”
Callie would never have noticed that familiar phrase, so constantly heard at Rock Place, but for Uncle Fred’s rejoinder, which came, she afterwards realized, quite a long while after Aunt’s last words.
“Who’d have though t you would ever have turned into a prude, little Kate?”
Uncle Fred’s tone made it sound like a question—but perhaps it wasn’t really one, for he received no answer.
Chapter VI
(1)
Elisabeth came to spend the afternoon at Rock Place, two days before the boys had to go back to school. They all liked her and she seemed at home with them.
Callie felt radiantly happy, especially when they played hide-and-seek and Elisabeth came to hide beside her in the largest of the corn-bins in the yard and they crouched down together, half stifled, giggling, and apprehensive, and clutching one another.
It was a good hiding-place, in which no one thought of looking.
Elisabeth told Callie that her father didn’t live with them and that, though she was sorry, she didn’t mind very much because she loved Mummie the best.
“But you haven’t got a father or a mother, have you—poor Callie!”
“I’ve got a father, but I might just as well not have. He hasn’t ever taken any notice of me since I was a tiny baby. Grandmama looked after me when I was little, and she always said he’d come to Barbados one day, but he never did.”
“Perhaps he’s dead, and they don’t like to tell you,” Elisabeth suggested.
“I don’t think so. I’m sure Aunt would tell me. I sometimes wonder if he’s done something frightfully bad, like a murder or something, and is a fugitive from justice, like they are in books.”
“But you wouldn’t like to be the child of a murderer, would you?”
Callie admitted that she wouldn’t: It would be better if her father were only an unjustly suspected fugitive from justice, she said.
Then a brisk pattering sound above their heads caused Elisabeth to push up the lid of the corn-bin. It was raining, quite hard.
“I don’t see anyone. Shall we run for home?” she asked.
They climbed out and raced hand in hand towards the house, the rain like a frail, slanting silver curtain through which they ran.
Tea was in the dining-room. Uncle Tom never had any tea, and Aunt Fanny remained on her sofa and was given a tray on a little table.
Aunt poured out cups of tea and of milk, and Tansy cut slices of bread. There were two cakes to-day—a plum cake and a seed one.
“The last proper cake we shall get until next holidays,” declared Reggie.
“There’ll be one in each of your tuck-boxes and plenty of jam and potted meat,” Aunt said.
Cecil, looking surprised as he always did if anyone was specially kind, said “Thank you” in a voice that, Callie noticed, really sounded grateful. He was like that.
“The school ought to say thank you, really,” said Uncle Fred, who was lounging on the
window-seat doing nothing, as usual. “Naturally, they count on the boys bringing back enough to keep them from actual starvation.”
The chattering went on: Cecil saying hardly anything, but appearing content, Mona always two or three sentences behind everybody else, Tansy pursuing stray crumbs round her plate with meticulous elegance and qualifying her acceptance of everything that was offered to her with such sentences as: “A very small portion, for me” and “Just a wee drop more, then,” and Juliet making everyone laugh by the inconsequent remark: “I saw a heron in bed yesterday morning.”
“Did it have two pillows or one?” enquired Uncle Fred.
“Does it sleep in the spare room?” from Reggie.
“Does it have early morning tea?” shrieked Awdry.
Juliet giggled and explained—what was clear already to everyone except Mona, gaping in astonishment—that what she really meant was that she’d seen a heron, flying towards the pond, from her bed on the preceding day.
The joke lasted them for quite a long while.
After tea, the rain came down harder than ever. There was a consultation about driving Elisabeth back to the Umfravilles’ house.
“I’ll take her,” Uncle Fred said.
Callie was delighted.
Uncle Fred never started to go anywhere or do anything until hours after the suggestion had been made. It meant that Elisabeth would stay on.
They went up to the nursery, after seeing Tansy—fastened into an ulster and with goloshes on her feet—pedalling away through the puddles on her bicycle. The dogs lay sprawled upon the floor, and Reggie sprawled beside them.
The others seated themselves upon various portions of the furniture not intended to be sat upon—Callie and Elisabeth next to one another on the table, their legs gently swinging.
“Oh!” cried Awdry suddenly. “Why didn’t Bella come with you, Elisabeth? I thought she was going to.”
Callie felt slightly superior because she had already made this enquiry, and had it answered.
“She isn’t arriving till to-morrow. I’m rather glad. She isn’t really much fun, is she?”
“She always wants to play charades,” Cecil said. He loathed charades, or anything else in which he was forced to take an active part.
“She means to be an actress when she’s grownup,” Elisabeth told them.
“That’d be rather fun,” Juliet said, industriously plaiting and unplaiting the fringe of the nearest curtain.
“Mummie says her parents will never let her. They might perhaps let her learn to recite, and be a lady reciter at charity things.”
“Would that be any fun?” asked Mona.
“Awful, I should think,” Cecil muttered.
Elisabeth thought that it would be more fun to be a proper actress.
“If one was allowed to go on the stage, which I suppose one never would be. What are you going to be, Cecil?”
“I don’t want to be a soldier, or a sailor, or a clergyman, or anything to do with engineering.”
“Couldn’t you go out to the West Indies and be a planter, like Uncle Fred?” Callie asked, to encourage him.
“I might. I’d much rather stay at home. Papa seems to think I might do that, only he says I shan’t be any use to him until I’ve learnt how to handle a horse properly.”
“You can handle a horse properly,” said Callie promptly. “It’s only that you don’t much like them.”
“If you don’t like them, you can’t handle them properly,” Cecil answered, but from the way he looked at her, Callie knew he was grateful for what she’d said.
Awdry, lying flat on the floor, said: “It does seem a waste that Reggie likes horses so much, and would be able to help Papa, and wants to be a sailor as well. I mean—if only each of the boys wanted one thing, instead of one wanting two things and the other neither.”
Callie couldn’t help agreeing with her, in spite of an obscure feeling that what Awdry had just said would somehow still further discourage Cecil, who seemed so permanently discouraged already.
“Think of going to all the places abroad. I wish I was a boy,” Juliet said.
“I suppose we’ll just have to get married, and stay in England.”
“If anybody ever asks us.”
“Oh, somebody’s sure to. We couldn’t possibly be old maids,” said Juliet. “Look at Aunt!”
“Or Tansy.”
They all giggled.
“Do you suppose anybody’s ever asked either of them?”
“Of course not,” asserted Reggie from the floor. “If anyone had, they’d have said yes like a shot.”
It seemed incontrovertible.
“Well,” said Callie, “I don’t ever mean to marry, but I’ll help Ju and Awdry with their children. And Mona, if she ever gets married.”
“Plain Jane? Nobody will ever ask her,” said both Mona’s sisters confidently.
Nobody contradicted them, and Mona’s protests passed unheeded.
A remembrance crossed Callie’s mind of the words that had passed between Uncle Fred and Aunt on the afternoon that they’d seen Elisabeth at the Umfravilles’ house.
They seemed to mean that one person—the deadly dull old Mr. Bob ffillimore—had once proposed to Aunt. And evidently she’d felt, probably quite rightly, that even to be an old maid would be better than marrying old Mr. Bob.
The whole idea made Callie want to laugh, it all seemed so ridiculous—but when the others asked what she was laughing at, she wouldn’t tell.
She knew it would be dishonourable to repeat what she’d heard by accident, but her true reason for not doing so was because she knew very well that no one would be able to help feeling amused, and she couldn’t bear Aunt, who was so kind always, to seem absurd.
She noticed gratefully that it was Cecil who turned the conversation into another direction, when he saw that she really didn’t want to answer.
(2)
The boys had gone: Cecil speechless and wearing a curious pale-green, mottled appearance, Reggie talking loud and fast to the dogs and Muff the cat, and unwilling to look any of his relations in the eye.
Aunt Fanny shed tears as the station cab, with the large trunk and the two wooden play-boxes on the roof, lumbered away from the gate. Aunt, Tansy and the girls shed no tears but stood in the lane, waving until the cab had turned the corner and Reggie’s handkerchief could no longer be seen, flapping from the window of the fly.
They looked gravely at one another, in silence.
The only sounds to be heard were the clip-clop of the horse’s hoofs, the rumbling of the wheels dying away into the distance, and then the sudden clear note of a bird, splashing and fluttering in a puddle.
Everyone moved slowly back towards the house.
Callie felt guilty because, much as she hated seeing the boys go, and deeply sorry as she felt for them—specially for Cecil—she couldn’t help feeling more glad than sorry because Elisabeth was coming to Rock Place again that very afternoon.
Uncle Fred drove over and fetched her. Aunt, as usual, had had to hunt him into starting off in reasonable time, but he had, on the whole, been less dilatory than usual.
At Dr. Umfraville’s house there had evidently been less effort made, for it was nearly four o’clock before he reappeared, with his mission accomplished.
Elisabeth sat beside him, and she hadn’t altered, as Callie was half afraid she might have done. She was still as pretty as Callie had remembered, and she looked as if she, too, felt excited and happy.
Bella Umfraville, whom Callie had practically forgotten all about, was there too, and had been made to sit on the other side of the pony-cart, near the door.
And no wonder.
She was a very large, very heavy girl, brown-eyed and brown-haired, rather pretty in spite of prominent white teeth jutting well out over her lower lip.
“Hallo!” she shouted, even before she was out of the trap. “Hallo, Awdry! Hallo, Ju! We can’t play cricket this time, can we, without the boys? Last tim
e I came, we played cricket.”
That was both the best and the worst of Bella.
She seemed to know nothing whatever of that paralysing preliminary shyness that always made it so difficult to start talking to visitors.
Callie, gazing at Elisabeth, saw that she, also, was feeling slightly embarrassed by Bella.
On the other hand, Bella’s readiness to be entirely at home and at her ease, did make things very easy. They all found themselves talking, wandering about the yard and garden and ending up in the orchard, where the swing was, biting into windfalls and throwing them down again, and twisting the ropes of the swing round and round. Only Callie and Elisabeth used it as a swing, standing up face to face and propelling themselves violently backwards and forwards. The Ballantynes had all swung themselves through infancy and early childhood and were tired of it, and Bella declared that it made her feel sick.
“There’s a swing in the Square Gardens at home, and Mother always thinks it’s so nice for me, but I never use it. Besides, I’m too old.”
“What do you do in the Square Gardens?” Juliet asked her.
Bella twisted her features into a grimace.
“Walk round and round with Fräulein, and sometimes I meet the Wilkinsons. You know, Joan and Phyllis. They’re supposed to be my great friends.”
“And are they?”
“I suppose so,” said Bella indifferendy. “I’ve known them ever since we went to live in the Square.”
Callie looked at Elisabeth and she saw that at the same moment Elisabeth had turned to look at her, and she felt certain that the same thought was in both their minds.
It seemed to her that nobody in the world could ever have been as lucky as she was.
Elisabeth wasn’t talkative and noisy like Bella, but she wasn’t shy either.
“I wish you lived here always,” Callie whispered ardently when Elisabeth had to go.
“So do I,” said Elisabeth. “It would be nicer to be with you than with anyone, except my mother.”
Callie adored her.
“You’ll come again, lots of times, before you go back to London, won’t you?”
“Ask your aunt if I may,” breathed Elisabeth, her eyes fixed on Callie.
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