by Susan Barrie
“Of course, these rooms have beautiful proportions, but the furnishings are not what I would choose myself!” She probably guessed that Lucille was responsible for the choice of chintzes, and even the colours of the carpets, and therefore her remarks were unpleasantly pointed. “Personally, I think blue is depressing in a bedroom, and such big windows require very clever draperies to make the best of them.”
“The windows were originally very small,” Lucille could not resist passing on the intelligence, a little stiffly and resentfully. “Mr. Lestrode decided to enlarge them, but I think his improvements have interfered with the Elizabethan character of the house.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Electra had caught sight of the flowers on the dressing-table in her room, and she dived on them and inhaled the perfume of the roses that Lucille had carefully picked for her, and a little of her criticism faded for the moment. She beamed at Lucille, and declared she always had loved those deep, mauvish-red roses that seemed to be dying out nowadays. “But you must admit it is Mr. Lestrode’s house, and as master in his own house he has the right to do whatever he thinks,” she could not refrain from impressing upon the housekeeper.
Lucille’s pale skin warmed, as if her resentment was getting slightly out of hand, and she made for the door and said in a muffled voice as she did so: “If there’s anything else you require you must let me know. We’re a little short on some things, but we’ve plenty of essentials,” and she descended to the kitchen regions with the flush still in her cheeks.
Frederica joined her as soon as she had seen her mother and sister settled. She was perfectly well aware that Lucille was upset, and she hardly knew what to say to soothe her.
“Your mother is very attractive, and very young,” Lucille emphasised. “But I hope she won’t be staying here long! I—I find her a little difficult to get along with!”
Frederica said hurriedly that few people ever took a great deal of notice of what her mother said. For one thing, she didn’t always mean what she said herself, and could change her attitudes like the wind in an astonishingly brief space of time.
“Besides, she’s rather excited at coming to stay here,” she added defensively. “It’s rather gone to her head.”
Lucille, flitting about the kitchen preparing the lunch, paused long enough to send a sudden, rather curious glance at her.
“You honestly think that?” she asked. “Knowing your mother—and your sister!—you honestly think it’s excitement and nothing else that is causing them to behave offensively?”
“What—do you mean?” Frederica asked, helping herself to a stick of celery and beginning to nibble it thoughtfully.
Lucille looked almost pitying.
“You’re so nice yourself,” she said, “and so utterly unlike those relatives of yours. But it does seem that you’re a bit dense! Rosaleen is already as good as established here, and your mother knows it! Only last night Mr. Lestrode let me into a secret, and the secret is that he’s going to be married one of these days quite soon! ... and one doesn’t have to have all one’s i’s dotted and all one’s t’s crossed before gathering that the lady of his choice is Miss Rosaleen Wells!”
Frederica stared hard at her.
“And you?” she asked. “How—what—do you feel about it?”
The housekeeper looked even more surprised. “What am I supposed to feel about it?” she counter-questioned. “You’re not imagining that I’m terrified of losing my job, are you?”
“But isn’t this ... rather more than a job to you?”
Lucille smiled slowly, and then handed Frederica another stick of celery.
“Chew that,” she advised. “It’s supposed to be good for quite a lot of things, including rheumatism. But what you’re suffering from at the moment is not rheumatism, but slightly muddled thinking. You’ve made up your mind I’m in love with Humphrey, and that I’m hoping one day he’ll take some real notice of me, and marry me! Aren’t you? But it so happens I’m not in the least in love with him, although I do hold him in very high regard ... and I’d hate to see him make a mess of his life by marrying your sister!”
Frederica studied her in disbelief.
“But I was absolutely certain—” she began.
“I know.” Lucille attacked the salad bowl with determination. “But I didn’t want to disabuse you, because it didn’t seem to me necessary—until your mother and sister arrived on the scene. Humphrey knows perfectly well that when I leave here I shall go and work for children, in some capacity or other, and I’m really only staying here until he gets married. I’ve often been afraid that it might be ages before he made up his mind, but now all at once his mind has been made up for him! The fair Rosaleen has worked swiftly, and possibly quite without subtlety, but she’s hooked her man nevertheless!”
Frederica stood staring down into the salad bowl—such an attractive salad bowl, with rings of cucumber and tomato and lettuce and chives, that Lucille was arranging as if she was giving all her attention to a work of art—and for the first time in her life quite a shattering sensation of dismay took possession of her. She actually felt as if some personal disaster menaced her own life, and that nothing would ever be the same again because the world had turned upside down. All the highlights were low-lights, and there was a dreadful feeling of emptiness ... a quite extraordinary sensation of actual deprivation.
She lowered the remains of the stick of celery she had been chewing, and dropped it distastefully into the rubbish disposal unit. She eyed the array of cold cooked meats on the kitchen table, the potato salad, the fresh salad, the fruit salad that would be later served with ice-cream in the dining-room, the coffee-tray that was all ready to be carried into the dining room, and the knowledge that it was her mother and sister for whom all these baked meats and trimmings were prepared—as well as, of course, Robert Rawlinson, whom she had not yet met—repelled her to such an extent that she actually felt physically revolted by the sight of so much food.
In addition she felt a burning sense of shame because her nearest and dearest were so blatantly out for what they could get.
“I don’t want any lunch,” she said in a choked voice. “I’m going up to my room!”
Lucille called after her in a kindly voice.
“I’ll bring you a cup of tea.”
“No, thank you!” She raced out of the kitchen and up the back stairs, and very nearly collided with the elderly, urbane, comfortable-looking man who had come all this way to meet his old friend Electra once more, and spend a pleasant weekend with her, and successfully reached her own bedroom without having to submit to some obvious flatteries on the subject of her likeness to her mother—which didn’t really exist—and far more truthful comments on the lack of likeness between her and her sister Rosaleen, whom Robert Rawlinson had already met. For although she and Rosaleen shared the same colouring only one of them was a beauty—and that was Rosaleen!
And even the thought of Rosaleen was anathema to her at the moment.
She had already made up her mind that while her mother and sister were staying in the house as the guests of her employer she would refrain from joining them in the dining-room during meal times. After all, when they were not there she had her meals in the kitchen with Lucille ... and what was good enough for Lucille was good enough for her.
But she hadn’t bargained with Humphrey Lestrode’s insistence that she joined them in the drawing-room after dinner. Apparently he accepted it that she felt happier in the kitchen with Lucille while the others lunched and dined in a fair amount of state in the dining-room, waited upon by Lucille, who didn’t seem to feel at all humiliated by the task. But like the children of a household who played in the nursery during the daytime she was to be invited down to the drawing-room when the others were relaxed and ready for her.
At first, she rebelled so forcefully that Lucille had some difficulty in persuading her she would draw more attention to herself, and make herself look rather foolish and obvious, if she sent b
ack a message to her employer to the effect that she preferred her own room to his company, and the company of his chosen guests. So, declining to make any special concession to the occasion by changing into one of her prettier and more formal dresses, she went down after Lucille had argued with her for a full half-hour wearing one of her slim grey uniform dresses, which caused Electra’s eyebrows to ascend quite noticeably when she saw her in it, and Rosaleen to smile as if amused.
Robert Rawlinson, on the other hand, was as urbane and affable as she had suspected he would be, and only Humphrey Lestrode himself looked rather grim and displeased.
“You are not on duty tonight,” he snapped at her. “Couldn’t you dress yourself up in something different to that?”
“Why?” Despite the uniform dress—which she had carefully pressed before she put it on—she was looking very cool and composed, and exceptionally attractive if Rosaleen hadn’t been there to direct any admiring glances away from her. “Is this some special occasion? You should have made it clear that you wanted me to dress myself up, Mr. Lestrode, when you sent your message that I was to come down and join the rest of you, and I would have done the best I could to make myself look really presentable.”
“Ha, ha!” Robert Rawlinson, in an expensively tailored dinner-jacket and soft frilled shirt-front, smoking a most impressive cigar which filled the drawing-room with a delicate aroma, seemed to think her reply was witty enough to call for some sort of a response from him, even if it didn’t draw many smiles from his host. “You have your mother’s spirit, young woman,” he told her, as if he was conferring an accolade. “I remember Electra was always very apt with repartee, weren’t you, Electra? And if you’d been paid to drive Humphrey about in one of those glossy cars of his you’d probably have done the very same thing that your daughter has just done tonight, when summoned to his presence! You’d have let him see that you were a girl of spirit, and that you didn’t personally think he was doing you many favours by employing you.
“By the way, young lady,” turning to Frederica, “if that’s intended to be a uniform it’s very smart! It suits you admirably. I wouldn’t mind being driven about by you myself.”
“If you’re really in need of someone to drive you I suggest you get in touch with the agency who helped me to find Frederica,” the host growled with a background of ice in his voice. And because of the manner in which he made use of her Christian name, and the degree of surprise his sudden use of it filled her with, Frederica missed the rather bleak interchange that followed. “But I always thought you preferred driving yourself.”
“I do, but that’s because I’ve never met anyone like Frederica before ... since her mother never found it necessary to drive anyone.” The elderly Rawlinson was so clearly enamoured with the charms of Frederica’s mother that he couldn’t prevent himself beaming in almost an affectionate way at her youngest daughter. “But, by jove, if she had I’d have let her!” he concluded.
“You hear that, Frederica?” Lestrode demanded with the same cold edge to his voice. “If you’re thinking of changing your job there’s another one waiting for you in London ... and I should think most young women of your age would prefer London!”
“I don’t. I prefer the country,” Frederica said shortly.
“Electra was always a country girl,” Rawlinson murmured fondly.
“But I was lucky enough to live in the country and have a wealthy godmother in town who gave me my first London season,” Electra, astonishingly elegant and soignee on a striped Regency couch, admitted with a cat-like satisfaction. “Unfortunately, my two poor girls never had a London season.”
“But it strikes me you won’t have much difficulty in marrying them off well,” Rawlinson gave it as his opinion, as he followed the movements of Rosaleen about the room as she somewhat restlessly strove to interest herself in various objects of art that were scattered about the room.
“You really think that, Robert?” Electra sounded delighted. Fondly her glance followed that of her old friend. “Well, I don’t mind admitting that Rosaleen’s future is more or less secure...” Was it her own imagination, Frederica wondered, or did her mother really glance meaningly in the direction of Humphrey Lestrode? “And as for Rica...” with the same apparent fondness in her eyes she studied her younger daughter, “well, she won’t always be acting the part of somebody’s chauffeuse, of course, and as a matter of fact I think she ought to try to find something more suited to her and her background as quickly as she can. Oh, I know you’ve been terribly kind,” apologising to her host, “but you must admit there are many things Frederica could do that would promote her future more surely than taking over a man’s job. I was quite horrified the other day when I saw her all covered in grease.”
Robert Rawlinson walked up to Frederica and laid a hand on her slim shoulder.
“Have you ever thought of becoming a secretary?” he asked. “You’d fill the bill handsomely in my office, I’m sure. There’s a job waiting for you there any time you like to apply.”
Frederica, who felt the weight of his slightly pudgy hand on her shoulder a little heavy, and disliked people—especially men—who laid their hands on her in any case, made a barely perceptible movement, so that his hand fell away.
“I don’t do either shorthand or typewriting,” she told him shortly. “At least, not well enough to apply for a job as secretary.”
Rosaleen, who had grown tired of pretending an interest in various examples of rare pottery, turned almost impulsively to her host and reminded him that he had promised to show her some art treasures that he kept locked up in one of the rooms before dinner, and he was quite obviously glad of the opportunity to escape with her from the room. But before he left it he addressed a curt remark to Frederica.
“If you don’t want to stay down here you can go to bed. I shan’t want you tonight, so you’re perfectly free to do as you please.”
“I should hope so!” Rawlinson exclaimed, with an air of outrage, when the door had closed upon his host.
Frederica had no intention of playing the part of gooseberry in the same room with her mother and her old admirer, so despite the outrage on Rawlinson’s face she very soon made an excuse to leave the two of them alone, and went back to her own room. It was one of the pleasantest parts of the job she had taken on at Farthing Hall, and Lucille had done a great deal to make it feminine for her since it became clear that she would not be moving in with her mother and sister to the chauffeur’s cottage.
Though not one of the finest rooms in the house, it had a charming outlook over the garden, and before she went to bed Frederica drew a chair to the window and sat there watching the moon rise behind a group of tall pines that guarded one corner of the grounds. It was a perfect summer night, and if the thought crossed her mind that it would be nice outside on one of the lawns breathing in the freshness of the air and the warm summer scents, while the moonlight cast a track across the ornamental lake that had been badly shut in by astonishingly tall rank growth when the house was first taken over, but was now beginning to form one of the main attractions of the grounds, it was not an unnatural wish, since she was still in her early twenties, and conscious of a strange restlessness.
But there was not much point in roaming about night-enshrouded gardens by herself, and her common sense warned her that it could even prove dangerous since a large area of the grounds was still overgrown, and her fancy would almost certainly have led her to the wilder parts.
Besides, there was the gardener’s dog, rather an uncertain-tempered Alsatian, who prowled the grounds at dusk ... and she didn’t want to run into him.
So she sat beside the window and watched the blackness of the shadows falling across the grass, and the infinite blackness of the bushes that formed the shrubbery before the moon climbed high enough to banish them altogether. Then the shrubbery was a silver wonderland, and the lawn was a sheet of magical silver. The terrace under her window echoed to the tread of two pairs of footsteps—a girl’
s and a man’s. The girl, as soon as she bent closer to the window to have a good look, she had no difficulty in recognising instantly as her sister, and the man, of course, was Humphrey Lestrode.
The two figures paused a while beneath her window, and it struck her that they were talking very earnestly, while Rosaleen, in a light dress of summer blue, with moonlight in her hair and an entrancingly pure profile as she turned it up to her host, posed herself gracefully against a huge stone lion that decorated the terrace.
The contrast between the solidity of the lion and the fairylike grace of the girl struck the watcher from above with something like a pang, for Rosaleen was exceptionally lovely, and he would be an insensitive man indeed who did not appreciate the rare quality of her loveliness on such a night, and in such a setting as the gardens of a beautiful Elizabethan manor like Farthing Hall.
The two were talking in very low tones, and it seemed to Frederica that Lestrode was holding her sister’s hand. And then, when he dropped her hand, she moved closer and lightly patted his arm.
Her slim white fingers were clutching possessively the sleeve of his dinner-jacket, and Frederica pushed the window open wider, with great caution, and put her head out without feeling any pangs of conscience, or any unease because she was an eavesdropper, and attempted to get a clearer view of what was going on below her.