Charity Child

by Sara Seale

  “The lambs?”

  “Yes. There are new-born lambs on the downs. How will they survive? How will they find their mothers?”

  There was suddenly such anguish in her voice that he placed gentle hands on her shoulders and turned her round to face him.

  “The farmers and shepherds will see to them,” he said. “What a strange child you are, Charity—does suffering move you so much?”

  “Of course,” she said simply, but her grave eyes told him that she could not expect him to share her compassion.

  He let her go and drew the curtains across the window again.

  “Will you do something for me?” he asked “Will you play Au clair de la lune for me again?”

  She did not refuse, although she was made wary by his request, but went at once to the piano and began to play. The gentle melody was almost drowned by the force of the wind and when she had finished she asked:

  “Why did you ask for that?”

  He lay back in his chair, his eyes still intent upon her.

  “Perhaps because it describes you,” he replied lazily.

  “But the first time you thought I’d chosen it on purpose—to play up to your aunt,” she said baldly, and he got up impatiently and stood with his back to the fire, looking down at her.

  “Are you always going to hark back to my possible misconception of your motives?” he demanded irascibly.

  “You made it difficult for me to forget,” she replied, her hands still resting idly on the keyboard. “I think, perhaps, you’ve become too used to bullying defenceless witnesses.”

  His expression was a little grim.

  “All right,” he said. “If you want to quarrel with me, you shall. You’re like all your sex; you never can let a thing alone. If I harbored suspicions of you it was for a very good reason, and I’m not sure now that you aren’t being just a shade more subtle than your predecessors. You’re intelligent enough to have summed up my aunt’s character and your own chances at the very first meeting. You hardly expected someone like myself to throw a wrench into the works, did you?”

  “Oh!” she cried, springing to her feet. “You’re disgusting and—and unbearable! I’ll go away ... I’ll go this minute!”

  She was across the room and out of the door before he could speak. A moment later he heard the front door slam, and with a muttered profanity, he went after her.

  The icy wind lashed at him, and at first he could see nothing in the blinding snow. He shouted, but his voice was carried away by the wind and he began to stagger with difficulty down the drive. He found her very quickly, shivering and crying in the snowdrift into which she had fallen. He picked her up and carried her back to the house and set her urgently on her feet in front of the fire.

  “Well!” he observed grimly. “How far did you imagine you’d get on a night like this, without even stopping for a coat, let alone your luggage?”

  “I don’t know ... I didn’t think ... I just had to get away from you ...” She spoke incoherently and a little wildly, the self-possession which had annoyed him completely gone. She stood before him wet and weeping, and the snowflakes melted in small rivulets on her hair and frock.

  He knelt beside her and began to chafe her cold hands, experiencing that old, irrational impulse to shake or kiss her. But the anger had gone from him and something very like tenderness took its place.

  “You foolish child!” he said gently. “Don’t you realize you sometimes goad me into these unkind speeches?”

  “No?” she said. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps I’m not used to such coolness in the average witness.”

  “But why do you treat me like a witness at all? I—I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “No, I don’t think you have. Well, shall we try to forget this unfortunate start to our friendship?”

  “Friendship?”

  “I’d like to think so. Indeed there is a great deal I’d like to discover about you, Charity Child.”

  She politely released her hands from his and began to rub away the tears.

  “I’ll try to forget it, Mr. Gentle—Marc, I mean,” she said shyly. “I told you I don’t bear malice.”

  “No, I don’t think you would,” he said, getting to his feet. “Now, we’d both better dry out by the fire and get acquainted. If your worst fears are realized and we find ourselves snowbound tomorrow, we can’t spend the days bickering, can we?”

  For the first time she began to like him. His disordered hair gave him a faintly raffish appearance and the legs of his trousers, wet from the deep snow he had walked through, had lost their immaculate crease.

  “I’m sorry for giving you trouble,” she said, and added with a slow, unexpected grin: “You almost look disreputable—I like it much better.”

  They were not, however, snowbound. By the morning the blizzard had blown itself out. Snow had piled up in great drifts during the night, but the snow ploughs were out on the roads and although the tradesmen’s vans could not reach Cleat on account of the icy hill, a thaw was forecast for Sunday.

  Marc surprised Charity by dealing efficiently and knowledgeably with frozen pipes and blocked plumbing and, assisted by Charity, cleared a path from the house to the drive gates.

  He seemed to be enjoying himself, and Charity, shovelling away beside him until her back ached, experienced the first sense of pleasure she had known in his company.

  Every so often, she would lean on her shovel and gaze a little wistfully at the curving line of the downs, and Marc said, with unexpected perception:

  “Still thinking of those lambs?”

  “Yes,” she said, “they worry me.”

  “Don’t let them. There are very few losses these days. Do you know that poem of Robert Bridges that begins:

  “I never shall love the now again

  Since Maurice died?”

  “No. Is it about lambs?”

  “No, but I suppose you started a connection for me between snow and sadness ... “They brought him home, ‘twas two days late For Christmas Day.” It seemed strange to hear him quoting poetry as if he loved it. She had not thought that he would have found time for the solitary delights of verse.

  “Do you read much poetry?” she enquired.

  “Oh, yes. But I come of an older generation than yours,” he replied.

  “But I read poetry, too,” she said shyly. “My father used to read aloud to me.”

  “You speak as though you still miss him. Tell me about yourself, Charity.”

  “There’s nothing much to tell. My father and I were very close to one another. He was, I suppose, rather a failure in life, for he never made much money with his music, but we didn’t mind.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She died when I was very small. I don’t remember her.”

  “I see,” he said gently, and began shovelling again. “And your father died after you had left school?”

  “During my last term.”

  The scrape of Marc’s shovel suddenly reminded her vividly of the tiny, unrewarding garden her father had tended so hopefully in the last home they had shared, and she cried, with unfamiliar resentment:

  “It was so unfair! I’d been counting the days till I could come home and keep house for him, and I never had the chance. I don’t think he really got enough to eat, except in the holidays. I only realized afterwards how he must have scrimped and saved in order to educate me.”

  “Had you no other relatives?”

  “No. Father was an only child, like me, and my mother’s family emigrated to New Zealand years and years ago. I don’t even know if they are still alive.”

  “We have something in common, after all,” he said prosaically. “Astrea is my only living relative, and when my mother died, I missed her as much as you have missed your father.”

  “Did you?” she said softly, and watched him shovelling the snow with a fresh perception.

  He looked up and saw her watching him. Her eyes seemed sol
emn and faintly troubled, like the grave eyes of a puzzled child. She was, he realized with amused surprise, weighing him up and assessing what she found.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asked. “Not those lambs again, I hope.”

  “No,” she answered politely. “But my thoughts were private.”

  He suddenly threw down his shovel, and scooping up handfuls of snow, began to pelt her with it. For a moment she was too surprised to do anything but stand and stare, then as a well-aimed snowball caught her full on the chest, she began to retaliate. They pelted each other like a couple of children until Charity fell down and had to be pulled, laughing, from a snowdrift; then they looked towards the house at the sound of a peremptory tapping, to see Astrea standing at the window of her room with Minnie’s little wizened, face peering over her shoulder. Astrea clasped her hands and nodded and made extravagant gestures of approval, but Minnie, when they went indoors to change their wet clothes, remarked:

  “Really, Mr. Marc — at your age!”

  Astrea joined them later in the day, tired of her self-imposed solitude. She was draped in an ancient tea-gown and several layers of shawls, and her hair badly needed retouching. “I’m missing all the fun,” she said, adding, as she saw her nephew’s glance at her hair: “I know, I know, dear boy—you needn’t look down your long nose. My roots are terrible, and so grey! Charity must do them, for I won’t be able to get to my hairdresser in this weather. Charity, dear child, we will have a session with the hair-dye tomorrow. I always keep some handy.”

  “Oh, Astrea, I wouldn’t dare!” exclaimed Charity, thoroughly alarmed. “I’ve no experience of tinting hair, I might do something awful!”

  “Nonsense!” Astrea cried, dismissing the matter. “You just mix and dab and mix and dab. Minnie often does it.”

  “Why don’t you let it grow grey?” Marc enquired with lazy amusement.

  “Because, as you know very well, it expresses my personality,” snapped his aunt. “Red—gold—yellow—all the colors of the Star-maiden. I was famed for my hair as well as my voice, you know—now, my hair is all that is left to me.”

  It was one of her unconscious moments of pathos, and Charity looked at her fondly. She had often wondered how much aching nostalgia lay under the histrionics and pose of eccentricity; another lonely person, perhaps, shut up in an ivory tower.

  “You have your records, Astrea,” she said gently. “Your voice will never die.”

  “Yes; yes, that’s true. Singers of today have lost what we had—the grand presence, the temperament—royal personages following one around incognito.”

  “No royal how-d’-you-dos followed you around, duck, to my certain knowledge,” observed Minnie, entering that moment with the tea. It still surprised Charity when the old dresser lapsed into the familiar speech of the theatre.“How do you know, if they were travelling incognito?” demanded Astrea reasonably.

  Marc, used to these altercations, smiled his enjoyment, and Minnie set the tray down before Charity, whose duty it was to pour out, and retorted flatly:

  “If that’s your way of saying they wasn’t there, then you’re right. Now, keep those shawls fastened your first day downstairs. You aren’t no chicken anymore.”

  “Really, Minnie is becoming impossible!” Astrea exclaimed as the door closed again. “Now, tell me about yourselves, my dears. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw you snowballing this morning—so uninhibited, so healthy! You have called a truce, yes?”

  Marc’s eyes twinkled.

  “My offers of a truce weren’t very kindly received last night,” he said, and Charity picked up the teapot quickly, spilling the tea in her haste to avoid his glance.

  “Well, I’ve no doubt you confused the child with your legal twists and traps,” said Astrea calmly. “All the same, dear Charity, you must try to come to terms with my nephew. I have a little scheme which was born when I watched you this morning. I looked it all up to be quite sure. Libra and Aquarius from a perfect Harmonious Grouping.”

  Charity, who was not paying much attention, had little idea of what Astrea was hinting, but Marc evidently had. His eyes narrowed, and for a moment the indulgent amusement went out of his face, leaving it cold and shuttered.

  “Keep your little schemes in check, my dear aunt,” he said. “They can’t concern me any longer.”

  “Why not?”

  He smiled then, aware of Charity’s unblinking gaze. “You can play your hand once too often,” he said enigmatically. “Besides, you may put the poor girl off me again. I’m not entirely in her good graces yet, you know.”

  The look which Astrea bestowed on them both was so frankly arch that Charity felt uncomfortable.

  “That’s scarcely surprising, since you made no bones about it that you thought she was after my money,” she retorted, her mouth full of tea-cake. “I trust you’ve revised your opinion, dear boy?”

  “Trust —yes, that’s the crux of the matters, isn’t it, Astrea? But we’re embarrassing Charity.”

  They were, indeed, embarrassing her, talking as if she wasn’t there at all, and Marc, for all his allusions to a truce, was as ambiguous in his comments as ever.

  “Never be embarrassed, dear child,” said Astrea before she could speak. “Only the mediocre, the bourgeois are that. Me, I was able to carry off any situation—but any situation with superb aplomb.”

  “Dear Astrea, I’m sure you could,” Charity said, her embarrassment vanishing in laughter. Astrea, although given to the most devastating personalities, could also be relied upon to relieve an awkward moment with some extravagance.

  Astrea passed her cup for some more tea.

  “And now, Marc, what about the Easter Vacation? Are you coming here, or are you going to walk?” she asked.

  “Walking means a species of climbing, or rather scrambling, in the Welsh hills or the Lake District,” he explained, seeing Charity’s look of surprise. “I’d like to come here, I think, if you’ll have me, Astrea.”

  Charity was aware that he gave her a rather sardonic glance of amusement as he spoke, but his aunt clapped her hands in delight.

  “Well, isn’t that nice!” she exclaimed. “You and dear Charity can really get acquainted, and you will put your car at my disposal, will you not, dear boy?”

  “It’s always at your disposal, Astrea.”

  “Yes, of course, but sometimes you get a little bored, I think. Still, it saves Skinners’ bills, and that is most important.”

  Charity supposed that Astrea, with all her money, could well have afforded to keep a car and a chauffeur, but it was another of her eccentricities that she preferred to hire both car and driver from the village and otherwise rely on her friends for transport.

  “It seems ridiculous preparing for Easter when we are surrounded by snow and ice,” she said. “Charity, dear child, run upstairs and fetch me another shawl—the embroidered silk which the Spanish ambassador sent to the Opera House, the night I sang Tosca—I’m not sure where it is, but Minnie will know.” Charity suspected that this was one of Astrea’s transparent manoeuvres to get her out of the room and, indeed, as soon as the door had closed behind her, Astrea turned cosily to her nephew.

  “Now, Marc—what have you to tell me?” she said.

  “Why, nothing,” he replied, with raised eyebrows.

  “Oh, don’t be so irritating! I want to know what you think of my little Ganymede, now that you’ve had her to yourself. My scheme perhaps was born before today.”

  “Once and for all, Astrea, forget about your schemes,” he said quietly. “You often think up these fantasies to relieve your own boredom, I know, but Roma should have been a lesson to you.”

  “Ah, Roma! But you were in agreement with me there.”

  “Yes, and it was I who got hurt. It doesn’t do to play providence.”

  “It was a bitter hurt to me, too, dear boy. I wonder how she is wearing her widowhood. Weeds should become her.”

  “Widows don’t wear weeds, these
days,” he commented dryly. “And I’ve no doubt the Nixon dollars will help to ease her bereavement.”

  “How bitter you sound,” she said. “You have never quite got her out of your system, have you?”

  “Oh, I think so. How are you progressing with your plans for adoption?” He had switched the subject so abruptly that she had no time to dissemble with her usual skill.

  “Mr. Fenimore has everything in hand,” she answered a little sulkily. “I wonder you haven’t made it your business to find out.”

  “Oh, I have. Fenimore is no more approving than I am, as I think he’s told you. Has he drawn up a will?”

  “If he has, it’s my affair. You can only withdraw your objections now, dear boy, since you’ve altered your opinions of my spiritual daughter.”

  “Did I say I had?” he countered smoothly, and, for one moment, she looked taken aback.

  “But I thought—well, this weekend—”

  “Don’t meddle, Astrea,” he told her with sudden sternness. “Whether you carry out this hare-brained notion is, as you say, ultimately your affair, but don’t meddle in other matters.”