“Would you like to have it?”
“Oh yes, please.”
She added, feeling that it would be dishonest not to do so:
“It’s to give to Elisabeth for a Christmas present.”
Aunt glanced at her quickly and Callie knew at once that she had understood how much nicer the shell would be than any ordinary present.
“You may have it,” said Aunt gendy.
Her voice sounded sad, and Callie was appalled.
“Oh, Aunt, are you sure you don’t want it? I wouldn’t have asked if I’d thought you wanted it. Please keep it.”
“No, no. It’s all right, Callie dear. I should like you to have it.”
“Used it to be in your room?” Callie asked. “I wouldn’t have asked you to give it to me if I’d known.”
“I know you wouldn’t. But I don’t think‘I ever remember seeing it before. It certainly wasn’t mine.”
“Then how did it get into that room where I found it?”
“Probably it dropped from some table or cabinet when the furniture was moved. People used to collect things like that, and keep them as curiosities.”
“Like the things the Misses ffillimore have at The Hall.”
“Yes.”
Callie carefully returned the shell to her pocket.
“Thank you very much,” she said gratefully.
The question that had really preoccupied her mind ever since leaving Rock Place, was now settled. She had hoped all along that perhaps going away to a new place—a thing that none of them ever did unless one counted the boys’ going to school—might solve the problem of a present for Elisabeth.
And, it had, miraculously, done so.
“I’m so glad we came here,” said Callie joyously.
(2)
The next morning was to be spent by Aunt and Cousin Joe in Chepstow, in the lawyer’s office. Uncle Fred, who was to have been there too, put in no appearance.
“He and old Johnny made a night of it,” said Cousin Joe. “It’s quite cheered up poor old Johnny. He doesn’t often get anyone who’ll spend a regular West Indies night with him, nowadays.”
“I hope he’ll turn up later, perhaps,” Aunt said. And old Cousin Joe hoped so too, but neither of them sounded very sure about it. And no wonder, thought Callie, remembering the way in which Uncle Fred always talked about starting, and then never actually did so until long after one had left off expecting him at all.
She wasn’t surprised, when she had gone with Cousin Edith to the little house where she was to spend the day, to find Uncle Fred—looking rather yellow—playing the piano.
“Fred, are you going down to Joe’s office?”
“Presently.”
“Kate’s there now, and they’re expecting you.”
“Right you are,” said Uncle Fred, and he hummed a song with which he had often entertained them at Rock Place, called “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow-Wow.”
Callie came up to the piano. She disliked her own piano lessons with Tansy—scales, and five-finger exercises, and Tansy vigorously singing: “And one-and-two and three and four—mind that G sharp in the treble”—and she didn’t particularly care to listen to the “pieces” with which Awdry and Juliet were supposed to entertain Aunt Fanny and Uncle Tom in the winter evenings. But there was something about Uncle Fred’s strumming of simple airs, that nobody else ever seemed to play, that fascinated her.
Besides, he always knew all the words.
“I shall be busy in the kitchen for a little while, Callie; you’ll find some story-books over there in that bookcase if you’d like them. And presently you can come and help me wash the china.”
“I-will-wash-the-china-too,” volunteered Uncle Fred, fitting the words neatly into a tune that was evidently a polka.
“I wouldn’t trust you,” said Cousin Edith with rather a grim smile. “Besides, you’re to go to the office, though why they want you there I can’t imagine.”
“Neither can I.”
Cousin Edith walked with her little short, stiff steps to the door, and Uncle Fred’s fingers on the keys slipped into yet another tune. It was marvellous, Callie thought, the way in which he could go straight from one tune into another and they always sounded right.
“Fred!”
“Boy and girl together, me and Maimie O’Rorke …
Tripped the light fantastic
On the side-walks of New York,”
softly sang Uncle Fred.
“Fred!”
“It takes one back a bit, doesn’t it?” said Uncle Fred, although without looking round.
“I haven’t heard that vulgar rubbish for years,” said Cousin Edith sternly.
“I haven’t played it for years, either.”
“And I don’t think eleven o’clock in the morning, when you ought to be helping Kate over her business, is a particularly good time to play it now.”
Uncle Fred, however, played it again.
Callie was pleased. She liked the easy swing of the tune, and the funny words.
Cousin Edith went out of the room, and Uncle Fred looked round at Callie, standing at his elbow.
“Well, hobgoblin—what do you think of it all?”
“I think The Grove is splendid, only it’s a pity no one lives there.”
“No one could live there now. At least, none of us. And the next generation won’t have any money for places like that.”
“Why couldn’t anyone live there now?”
“Too many things happened there,” mumbled Uncle Fred, and he began to play, with one hand only, “The Last Rose of Summer.”
Rose—Rosalie.
The association came quite unbidden into Callie’s mind, greatly to her surprise.
It must have been in Uncle Fred’s mind too, she thought, because he looked at her quite hard, shook his rather bald head, and said:
“You’re not like any of us, really. Quite a good thing. Just thank your lucky stars you’re too young to remember any of it, you little hobgoblin you.”
And then he played the song about “Me and Maimie O’Rorke” all over again.
(3)
That evening—the last one before they were to go home again—the three old Newton cousins came and had dinner at the hotel and Callie was allowed to stay up for it.
She felt very grown-up and enjoyed it, although the talk was nearly all about business and how The Grove was to be put up to auction, and the land—which had all gone to seed, said Cousin joe—had better be divided up into lots, mortgage and all.
“And if we don’t do any better out of it than we did out of the plantations, we’d better see about rooms in the workhouse before next winter. Or we could all go to the Klondyke,” Uncle Fred remarked.
“The plantations—” said Cousin Johnny Newton, and he went off into a long speech to which Callie didn’t listen. She had to go up to bed before the visitors left, to the room that she was sharing with Aunt.
On the table by the side of her bed lay the pink shell. Callie thought about it, and about Elisabeth, until she went to sleep.
She had been fast asleep—so fast, that she couldn’t at once wake up properly—when she realized that a candle had been lit somewhere in the room and that someone was speaking very softly either in the doorway or just outside it.
“She’s too young to realize any of it, let alone remember.”
Callie knew she must be dreaming still because once before, on board ship, she’d heard someone talking, and saying just exactly the same thing, and surely it couldn’t really happen twice.
“I’m glad you’ve got her. Nice little thing, though not particularly like anyone—unless it’s you.”
“Is she like me?”
That was Aunt speaking. Perhaps one was beginning to wake up properly.
“What you were.”
“Well, everything stopped for me when I was twenty years old. Even coming back here hasn’t made things real. Still—I get along very well. Fanny, Tom, the children, you k
now.”
“Waste——”
Callie sat up, sure now that Cousin Edith and Aunt were really there, talking in the doorway.
She was just going to call out when Cousin Edith’s dry, clipped voice spoke again:
“Lucy ought to come home. Joe’s always saying so. There’s you, and his child. Unless—I’ve sometimes wondered. … Well, I suppose there’s a lot we shan’t ever know, now. Good-night, Kate.”
“Good-night, Cousin Edith.”
Callie lay down again, very quietly.
She wanted to think about her shell, and Elisabeth, and the fun of telling Awdry and Juliet about having had late dinner in the hotel.
Chapter IX
(1)
The months, and even the years, were speeding by, apparently gaining momentum as they passed. It was the early spring of 1914 and Awdry had put up her hair and wore long dresses and was said to be “come out”—which meant that when the ffillimores gave their annual dinner-party she was invited, and sat between Major Palambo and the Rector.
Juliet was to be promoted to similar privileges in the summer, and then only Callie and Mona would still do regular lessons with Tansy in the schoolroom.
Reggie was a midshipman and scrawled cheerful, enthusiastic letters from the Mediterranean.
Cecil, having tried for, and failed to get, a scholarship, had not gone to Oxford, since nobody could afford to send him there. Neither Cecil himself, nor anyone else, could think of any profession for which he was suited and his father, in despair, decided that he had better learn something about farming.
He was therefore at an Agricultural College in the Midlands.
He had been there eight weeks, and had spent a short Easter holiday at Rock Place.
It was evident to all of them that he was not particularly happy at the College, nor interested in the work there. But he had no alternative suggestions to offer and never said anything about himself.
Sometimes Aunt, or one of the girls, would talk about Cecil in a worried, compassionate sort of way, to Callie—Cecil’s acknowledged partisan.
“There must be something he could do.”
Callie, too, was sure there must be something—but what it was, she couldn’t imagine. And it was undeniable that Cecil lacked energy and far preferred sitting doing nothing at all, to any occupation yet devised.
“After all,” Aunt said, “he’s half a Lemprière. Do you remember, Fanny—‘No Lemprière ever works’? He’s the only one of the children who takes after your side of the family.”
Aunt Fanny, prone on her sofa from which she moved less and less often, acquiesced without enthusiasm.
“Even Fred would always play cricket—or the piano, for that matter,” she pointed out. “But Cecil isn’t musical. He can’t help that. It’s funny, that not one of them has inherited music from Mama.”
“Neither did you or I,” said Aunt, “only the boys.”
They sometimes referred to “the boys,” meaning their brothers, but only Fred was ever mentioned by name.
Uncle Fred was back in Barbados again, and had not been to England for more than three years. He sometimes wrote to Rock Place, and had recently enclosed a snapshot of himself and his dog.
He had put on an astonishing amount of weight. “The Lemprières are like that,” fatalistically said Aunt Fanny, who had herself become very massive. “Callie, you’ll have to be careful when you’re middle-aged.”
Callie, who was slighter than any of her cousins, laughed at the thought of an incredible period when she should be middle-aged and heavy like Aunt Fanny, or even solid and stocky like Aunt.
She knew, regretfully, that she was not pretty and that her brown hair, though bright and thickly-growing, was not to be mentioned in the same breath as were the fuzzy, light-red crinkled mops of Awdry and Juliet, far less the splendid dark-auburn waves of which Mona had now become very vain. On the other hand, all of them had light, short eyelashes, whereas Callie’s were dark, and curled upwards. Her round head still looked too large for her slim figure.
She occasionally wondered why she couldn’t have looked like her mother, and remembered what Aunt had once said of her:
“Whatever age Rosalie had been when she died, one would always have felt that she’d died young.”
Thinking of her as Rosalie—a girl in a story—Callie always felt that she knew exactly, from those words, what kind of a person Rosalie had been.
She thought oftener of her father, because he was still—presumably—alive; but with none of the faintly romantic interest that coloured her thoughts of her mother, who had died so young.
She had not consciously remembered either of them for a long while, when the letter came from France.
Uncle Tom, unlocking the post-bag as usual and distributing the contents, handed it to Aunt.
Presently he said “Any news, dear?” as he sometimes did, and at that, Aunt suddenly pushed back her chair, so that they all looked at her. Callie saw that her face had changed. It was white, but there was another change beside that.
Her voice was different, too.
“I think I’d like to go up to Fanny, if you don’t mind. Read that—no, wait, I’d better take it to show Fanny. I think we shall have to go out to the South of France.”
Juliet and Awdry both echoed “The South of France!” in astonished tones.
Uncle Tom made an inarticulate noise that was certainly not one of surprise. It sounded, thought Callie, more as though he were concerned, and perhaps rather sorry. Then he said:
“Why not let me see the letter, while you drink a cup of tea, and then you can go up to Fanny?”
Aunt, who sat at the foot of the table, passed a thin purply-looking envelope to Callie without a word.
It was addressed in a spidery, sloping hand and bore a French stamp. So much Callie saw, before handing it on to Uncle Tom.
He adjusted his spectacles and drew out the letter—also on thin, purplish paper and written in blue ink.
“Good Lord, dear, I can’t read this. It’s in French to begin with, and all the letters have tails a yard long.”
Callie, without in the least wishing to do so, found herself giggling at this, although she was not feeling in the least amused, but rather frightened.
She felt ashamed, also, when she saw that Awdry had poured out a fresh cup of tea for Aunt and was pressing it on her in dumb show.
“It’s only from some hospital sister or other—a nun, I think—to say that one of us had better go out there. He’s too ill to write himself but he told her to,” said Aunt, in a very steady voice.
He?
“Is Uncle Fred ill? Is he going to die? Oh, I do hope he isn’t!” wailed Mona suddenly.
“Be quiet, Mona,” hissed both her sisters in unison.
“But——” Mona began to whine.
“Uncle Fred is in Barbados. It’s nothing to do with him, I don’t think,” Callie said softly, and she pushed the honey towards Mona, whom they all treated as though she were still a small child instead of a thirteen-year-old girl.
It wasn’t Uncle Fred.
It was one’s own father—Aunt’s other brother. Callie felt quite sure of it.
Aunt had gulped down the cup of hot tea, and stood up.
“It’s all right,” she said to no one in particular. “I don’t want anything more.”
She moved away from the table, and Uncle Tom got up from his place and opened the door for her, handing her the letter and patting her on the shoulder at the same time.
“I’ll be up directly,” he said.
Then he went back to his eggs and bacon.
Awdry telegraphed an enquiry to Callie.
Would it be safe to ask a question?
Callie could only indicate uncertainty.
It was Mona who, as often happened, rushed in where any of the others would have feared to tread.
“Is somebody very ill?” she asked in her most lamentable drawl. “And has Aunt got to go and look after the
m, and who is it?”
Although shocked at Mona’s shameless indiscretion, Callie was unable to feel anything but grateful for it.
She listened anxiously.
It seemed ages and ages before Uncle Tom had finished buttering his piece of toast, cutting it into neat halves, and wiping his fingers on his table napkin. Then he spoke, very deliberately.
“Your mother’s brother—Uncle Fred’s brother—has been ill, off and on, for some time. He’s in hospital in the South of France, now, and the people there are afraid he may be going to get worse.”
“I never knew Uncle Fred had a brother,” said Mona.
“Yes, you did, you little silly,” Awdry told her sharply. And she added, in a low, rather uneasy sort of voice, “He’s Callie’s father, isn’t he?”
Uncle Tom might not have heard this, for he was slightly deaf and Awdry had spoken almost under her breath.
Nevertheless Callie felt perfectly certain that he had heard, and was going to pretend that he hadn’t. Sure enough, when he did speak, he said, addressing no one in particular, but looking down at his plate:
“You’ve all heard of your Uncle Lucy, who’s been abroad so many years. I’m afraid he’s very ill indeed, and we must do all we can to help your mother and aunt and save them any trouble, especially if one or both of them have to take this long journey to France.”
He seldom spoke at such length, and even Mona was silenced.
(2)
Tansy arrived as usual, and left her bicycle leaning against the yard gates and walked up the path to the house. It was a sharp, clear April day with a blue sky and white rolling clouds, and a blackbird was singing in the still bare lilac bush at the bottom of the garden.
Callie stood in the porch, her cold hands rolled in the black stuff apron that she still wore for lesson hours in the morning, and looked out at the daffodils and the wallflowers, and at Tansy, hastening along with the wind blowing out the ends of her usually neat hair.
Just as she called out “Good-morning, dear,” to her pupil, Cora came to the hall door and as Tansy hurried in said to her:
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