Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  “I wish you’d answer me one question first,” said Fanny.

  “Yes. What is it?”

  “Why are you so awfully anxious to stand up for Mr. Brinsley? You’re not in love with him, are you?”

  Cordelia started very perceptibly, and turned her face away. Then, all at once, she laughed a little hysterically.

  “In love? At my age?”

  And she laughed again, and laughed, strange to say, till she cried, clinging all the time to the young girl’s strong arm. Fanny did not ask any more questions as they walked slowly back to the house.

  CHAPTER VII.

  “COME WITH ME into the village, and help me to do errands,” said Fanny on the following morning, just as Lawrence was feeling for his pipe in his pocket after breakfast. “You can smoke till we get there. It wouldn’t hurt you to smoke less, anyway.”

  They went down through the garden, fresh and dewy still from the short, cool night, towards the sea. The path to the village lies along a low sea-wall, just high enough and strong enough to keep the tide from the lawns. But the tide was beginning to run out at that hour, and was singing and rocking itself away from the shore, leaving the big loose stones and the chocolate-coloured rocks all wet and shining in the morning sun. The breeze was springing up in the offing and would reach the land before long, kissing each island as it passed softly by, and gently breaking with dark blue the smoothly undulating-water.

  The sun was almost behind the pair as they walked along the sands, and shone full upon the harbour as it came into view, lighting up the deep green of the islands between which passes the channel, and bringing up the warm brown of the soil through thick weaving spruces. The graceful yachts caught the sunshine, too, their hulls gleaming darkly, or dazzlingly white, their slender masts pencilled in light, against the trees, and standing out like threaded needles when they showed against the pale, clear sky. In the bright northern air, the artist would have complained that there was no atmosphere — no ‘depth,’ nor ‘distance,’ but only the distinct farness of the objects a long way off — nothing at all like atmospheric perspective.

  “Isn’t it a glorious day!” exclaimed Fanny, looking seaward at a white-sailed fishing-schooner, which scarcely moved in the morning air.

  “It’s a little bit too swept and garnished,” answered Lawrence. “That is — for a picture, you know. It’s better to feel than to look at, if you understand what I mean. It feels so northern, that when you look at it, it seems bare and unfinished without a little snow.”

  “But you like it, don’t you?” asked the young girl, in prompt protest.

  “Of course I do. What a question! I thought I’d been showing how much I liked it, ever since I got here.”

  “I’m not sure that you show what you like and don’t like,” said Fanny, in a tone of reflexion. “Perhaps it’s better not to.”

  “You don’t, at all events. At least — aren’t you rather an inscrutable person? Of course I don’t know,” he added rather foolishly, pulling his woollen cap over his eyes and glancing at her sideways.

  “Inscrutable! What a big word! The ‘inscrutable ways of Providence’ — that’s what they always say, don’t they? Still — if you mean that I don’t ‘tell,’ you’re quite right. I don’t — when I can keep my countenance. Do you? It’s always far better not to tell. Besides, if you commit yourself to an opinion, you’re committing yourself to gaol.”

  “What a way of putting it! But it’s really true. I should so much like to ask you a question about one of your opinions.”

  “Why don’t you?” asked Fanny, turning her eyes to his.

  “Oh lots of reasons: I’m afraid, in the first place; and then, I’m not sure you have one, and then—”

  “Say it all — I hate people who hesitate!”

  “Well — no. There’s a great deal more to say than I want to say. Let’s talk about the landscape.”

  “No. I want to know what the question is which you wished you might ask,” insisted Fanny.

  “It’s about Mr. Brinsley,” said Lawrence, plunging.

  “Well, what about him?” Fanny’s tone changed perceptibly, and her expression grew cold and forbidding.

  “Nothing particular — unless it’s impertinent — so I won’t ask it.”

  “You won’t?” asked Fanny, slackening her pace and looking hard at him. “Not if I ask you to?”

  “No,” answered Lawrence. “I’d oblige you by asking a different question, but not that one. You wouldn’t know the difference.”

  “That’s ingenuous, at all events.” She looked away again and laughed.

  “I never fight when I can help it, and you looked dangerous just now. You always are, in one way or another.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Only that when you don’t happen to be frightening me out of my wits, you are charming me into a perfect idiot.”

  “Something between an express train and the Lorelei,” laughed Fanny.

  But the quick, girlish blood had sprung to her sunny cheeks and lingered a moment, as though it loved the light. They were now in the village — in the broad street where the shops are. At that hour there were many people moving about on foot and in every sort of vehicle, short of brougham and landaus. There was the smart couple in a high buckboard, just out for a morning drive; there was the elderly farmer with his buggy or his hooded cart — his wife seated beside him, with her queer, sad, winter-blighted face, and her decent, but dusty black frock; — there was the young farmer ‘sport’ driving his favourite trotting horse in a sulky. And of pedestrians there was no end. A smart party bent on a day’s excursion by sea came down the board walk, brilliant in perfectly new blue and white serge, with bits of splendid orange and red here and there, fresh faces, light hearts, great appetites, and the most trifling of cares — the care for trifles themselves. Fanny nodded and smiled, and was smiled at, while Lawrence attempted to lift his soft woollen cap from his head with some sort of grace — a thing impossible, as men who wear soft woollen caps well know. But the air seemed lighter and brighter for so much youth laughing in it.

  Fanny dived into one shop after another, Lawrence following her, rather awkwardly, as a man always does under the circumstances, until he is old enough to find out that there is a time for watching as well as a time for talking, and that more may be learned of a woman’s character from the way she treats shopkeepers than is generally supposed. Fanny showed surprising alternations of firmness and condescension, for she had the gift of managing people and of getting what she wanted, which is a rare gift and one not to be despised. She asked very kindly after the fishmonger’s baby, but she did not hesitate to tell the grocer the hardest of truths about the butter.

  “I always do my own marketing,” she said to Lawrence, in answer to his look of surprise. “It amuses me, and I get much better things. My poor dear cousins don’t understand marketing a bit — though they ought to. That’s the reason why they never get on, somehow. I believe marketing is the best school in the world for learning what’s worth having and what isn’t. Don’t you?”

  “I never had a chance to learn,” laughed Lawrence. “I wish you’d teach me how to get on, as you call it.”

  “Oh — it’s very easy! You only need know exactly what you want, and then try to get it as hard as you can. Most people don’t know, and don’t try.”

  “For that matter I know perfectly well what I want.”

  “Then why don’t you try and get it?” asked Fanny, pausing at the door of another shop as though interested in his answer.

  “I’m not sure that it’s in the market,” answered the young man, his eyes in hers.

  “Have you enquired?” Fanny’s mouth twitched with the coming smile.

  “No — not exactly. I’m trying to find out by inspection.”

  “If you don’t think it’s likely to be too dear, you’d better ask — whatever it is.”

  “Money couldn’t buy it. Besides, I’ve got none,” added Lawrence
.

  “You might get it on credit,” said Fanny. “But I think it’s very doubtful.”

  Thereupon she entered the shop, and Lawrence followed her, meditating deeply upon his chances, and asking himself whether he should run the great risk at once, or wait and watch Brinsley. To tell the truth, he thought his own chances very small; for he underestimated all his advantages by looking at them in the light of his present poverty, not seeing that in so doing he might be underestimating Fanny Trehearne as well. A somewhat excessive caution, which sometimes goes with timidity, though not at all of the sort which produces cowardice, is often the result of an education which has not brought a man closely into competition with other men. No one in common sense, save the Miss Miners and Lawrence himself, could have imagined that Brinsley had a chance against him. For anything that people knew, Brinsley might turn out to be an adventurer of the worst kind, whereas Lawrence was of good birth, a man of whom many knew who he was, and whence he came, and that he had as good a right to ask for Fanny’s hand as any man. He was poor just now, but no one believed that his rich uncle, a childless widower of fifty-five, would marry again, and Lawrence was sure to have money in the end, though he might wait thirty years for it.

  As for Brinsley, Fanny Trehearne either could not or would not pretend that she liked him, even in the most moderate degree of distant liking, after she had satisfied herself that he was not a truthful person in those matters in which truth decides the right of a man to be considered honourable. Being, on the whole, more careful than most people about the accuracy of what she said, she was less inclined to make allowances for others than a great many of her contemporaries. Besides, Brinsley had not only told a lie, which was mean in itself, but he had allowed himself to be found out, which Fanny considered contemptible.

  Up to this time she had seemed to think him very pleasant company and not a bad addition to the society of the place.

  “He’s so good-looking!” she had often said to the approving Miss Miners. “And he has good manners, and knows how to come into a room, and how to sit down and get up — and do lots of things,” she added vaguely.

  In this opinion her three old-maid cousins fully concurred, and they were quite ready to say as much in his favour as Fanny could have heard without laughing. They were therefore greatly distressed when she changed her mind.

  “He’s handsome,” Fanny now admitted. “But he’s a little too showy. I’ve seen men like him at races, but they were not the men who were introduced to me. I don’t think they knew anybody I knew — that sort of man, don’t you know? And his English accent isn’t quite English, and I don’t like his little flat whiskers, and his hands irritate me. Besides, he said he had been in the navy, and now he admits that he never was. That’s enough.”

  “My dear Fanny,” Cordelia answered, on such occasions, “there was a misunderstanding about that, you know. He was in the navy, since he was an officer of Marines, but of course he wasn’t expected to know—”

  “The Marines!” exclaimed Fanny, contempuously. “It’s only a way of getting out of it, I’m sure!”

  Thereupon the three Miss Miners told her that she was very unjust and prejudiced, as they retired together to praise Mr. Brinsley, out of hearing of their young cousin’s tart comment. Miss Cordelia had made it all right by giving the man an opportunity of justifying himself after he had privately explained to her that the Marines were an integral part of the navy, but that they were not called upon to know anything about navigation, — a fact which must account for his ignorance.

  He had very firm friends, to say the least of it, in the three spinsters, who might have been said to worship the ground on which he walked, and who thought it a sin and a shame that Fanny should treat him as she did. As for young Lawrence, he looked on, with his observant artist’s eyes, and never mentioned Brinsley, except to Fanny herself. For he was not at all lacking in tact, however deficient he might be in the manly accomplishments.

  “Do you know,” Fanny began, one day when

  Duck Brook.

  they were walking in the woods, “I don’t half mind your being such a bad hand at things. It’s funny. I thought I should, at first — but I don’t.”

  “I’m awfully glad,” answered Lawrence, not finding anything else to say to express his gratitude.

  “Oh, you may well be!” laughed Fanny. “I don’t forgive everybody for being a duffer. And that’s what you are, you know. You don’t mind my saying so?”

  “Oh no, not at all.” The tone in which he spoke did not express much conviction, however.

  “I believe you do,” said Fanny, thoughtfully.

  They were following a narrow path which led upwards along the bank of a brook under over arching trees. Here and there the bank had fallen away, and the woodmen had laid down ‘slabs’ of the rippings first taken off by the saw mill in squaring timber. It was damp underfoot, for it had lately rained, and the wet, chocolate-coloured dead leaves of the previous year filled the chinks between the bits of wood, and sometimes lay all over them, a slippery mass. It was still and hot and damp all through the thick growth on the midsummer’s afternoon. The whispered mystery of countless living things filled the quiet air with a vibration more felt than heard, which overcame the silence, but did not break the stillness.

  The path was very narrow, and Fanny had to walk before her companion. Their voices seemed to echo back to them from very near, as they talked, for amongst the trees the rich undergrowth grew man-high. On their right, below them, the brook laughed softly to itself as a faun might laugh, drowsily, half asleep in a hollow of the deep woods.

  And then, through the warm-breathing secret places, where all that was living was growing fiercely in the sudden summer, stole the heart-thrilling fragrance of all that lived, than which nothing more surely stirs young blood in the glory of the year.

  For some minutes the pair walked on in silence, Fanny leading. The young man watched the strong, lithe figure of the girl as she moved swiftly and sure-footed before him. Suddenly she stopped, without turning round, and she seemed to be listening. A low ray of sunlight ran quivering through the trees and played with a crisp ringlet of her hair, too full of life and strength to be smoothed to dull order with the rest.

  “What is it?” asked Lawrence, in a low voice, watching her.

  “I thought I heard some one in the woods,” she answered quickly, and then listened again.

  Not a sound broke the dream-like stillness.

  “I’m sure I heard something,” said Fanny. Then she laughed a little. “Besides,” she added, “it’s very likely. It’s awfully hot. “Here’s a good place to sit down.”

  It was not a particularly good place, being damp and sloping, and Lawrence planted his heels firmly amongst the wet, dead leaves to keep himself from slipping down into the path as he sat beside her.

  “There’s always something going on in the woods,” she said softly and dreamily. “The trees talk to each other all day long, and the squirrels sit and crack nuts while they listen to the conversation. I like the woods. Somehow one never feels alone when one gets where things grow — does one?”

  “I don’t mind being alone when I can’t be — I mean—” Lawrence did not finish his sentence, but bent down and picked up a twig from the ground. “Isn’t it funny!” he exclaimed, twisting it in his hands. “All the bark’s loose, and turns round.”

  “Of course — it’s an old twig, and it’s wet. When don’t you mind being alone? You were saying something— ‘when you couldn’t be with’ — something, or somebody.”

  “Oh — you know! What’s the use of my saying it?” Lawrence kept his eye on the twig.

  “I don’t know, and if I want you to say anything, that’s the use,” answered Fanny, whose prose style, so to say, was direct if it was anything.

  “Yes — but you see — I didn’t mean anything in particular.” He broke the twig in two and tossed it over the path into the brook below.

  Fanny changed her
position a little, leaning forward and clasping her gloved hands round her knees.

  Duck Brook.

  “You’re very nice, you know,” she said meditatively. “I like you.”

  “Because I don’t answer your questions?” asked Lawrence, looking at her face, which was half turned from him.

  “Yes. That’s one of the reasons.”

  “It’s a very funny one. I don’t see much reason in it, I confess.”

  “Don’t you? Don’t you know that a woman sometimes likes a man for what he doesn’t say?”

  “I never thought of it in that way. I daresay you’re right. You ought to know much better than I do. Especially if you really like me, as you say you do.”

  “Oh — I’m honest. I never said I’d been in the navy!” Fanny laughed. “Besides, if I didn’t like you, why should I say so? Just to say something civil? The way Mr. Brinsley does?”

  “Brinsley’s a horror! Don’t talk about him — especially here.”

  “I don’t mean to. I hate him. But if we were going to talk about him, this would be a good place — one’s sure that he’s not just round the corner of the verandah making one of my three cousins miserable.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Why — they all love him. Can’t you see it? I don’t mean figuratively. Not a bit. They’re in love with him, poor dears!”

  “Nonsense! not really?” Lawrence laughed incredulously.

  “Yes — really. It’s a rather dismal sort of love — they’ve kept their hearts in pickle for such an age, you know — old pickles aren’t good, either. I’ve no patience with old maids who fall in love and make fools of themselves!”

  “Perhaps they can’t help it,” suggested the young man. “Nobody can help falling in love, you know.”

  “No,” answered Fanny, rather doubtfully. “Perhaps not. I don’t know. It depends.”

  “People don’t generally try to keep themselves from falling in love,” remarked Lawrence, with the air of a philosopher. “It’s more apt to be the other way. They are generally trying to make some one else fall in love with them. That’s the hard thing.”