“Were you actually offered the leadership of the Liberal party?” asked his wife.
“No, that must be done by vote. But the matter of our future leadership and my place in it was discussed. As Balfour’s power diminishes, the likelihood of another Liberal government grows. So we must make plans.”
“Who else is in contention?”
“It is clearly a contest between myself and Campbell-Bannerman.”
“And how does it look?”
“Henry is sixty-eight. Notwithstanding his vast experience, there is concern about his age. If a vote were taken today, I would no doubt be elected.”
“But, Charles, that means—” She paused and glanced sideways up into her husband’s face.
Charles nodded knowingly.
“—it means,” Jocelyn continued, “that within two years . . . you could be the prime minister of England!”
Husband and wife sat in silence, neither knowing quite what to say in light of the enormity of the words that had just fallen from Jocelyn’s lips. Outside the library windows, darkness continued its gradual descent, although a three-quarter moon came out to add a bright luster to the evening and prolong yet a while longer the lingering brightness of day.
“Life is full of such paradoxical twists of fate, is it not, Jocie?” said Charles at length. “What ambitious man in all the empire wouldn’t trade his soul to achieve such heights? Imagine it, Jocelyn—your husband . . . one of the most important men in all the world, the leader of the British Empire, more influential than the king himself!”
“I am so proud of you, Charles,” said Jocelyn softly.
“But don’t you see?—there’s the rub. It’s all changed now. I’ve changed. The socialists and the Fabians and the Labourites have become more vocal and influential. They all look to me as a spokesman for the new progressivism. Yet I actually find myself growing gradually more in tune with the conservatism I used to despise. How much of the Liberal program—half of which I helped write—can I still in good conscience endorse? It is a significant question I must face.”
He paused, then laughed lightly. “What am I going to do, change parties just when the Tories are going under and the Liberals are on the rise! Young Churchill deserted the Tories for our Liberal party last year. He’s now one of us. Perhaps I shall be making the opposite switch and leaving the future Liberal leadership to young Winston. He has considerable more political savvy, in my opinion, than did his father, Lord Randolph.”
He continued to chuckle at the thought.
“If I did that, the whole country would call me the political dunce of the decade!”
“No one would call you that.”
“Oh, wouldn’t they! Men are called a hundred equivalents of that in the House daily—in the most civilized of terms, of course. We are Englishmen, you know! We must behave with decorum even when we lambaste the foe. I would be called the honorable gentleman dunce.”
Jocelyn laughed at her husband’s comic representation of the parliamentary double standard.
“It’s really not even a question of the politics involved,” Charles went on, “—conservatism versus liberalism and all that. Rising to the heights of the political world no longer even represents what I want. I stopped seeking that level of acclaim seven years ago. And yet—there’s the irony again!—now here it is staring me in the face!”
“What do you want, Charles?”
“You know the answer to that question—I want to be God’s man.”
“But can’t you be both?”
“God’s man and the world’s?”
Jocelyn nodded.
“I hope I can be . . . I hope I am. But the question insofar as politics is concerned is—what does he want me to do? It ceased being a matter of what I myself wanted seven years ago. And now I begin to wonder whether he wants me in politics.”
“Then what will you do?”
Charles shook his head. “I must find out what the Lord wants,” he said. “At this point, I am not sure it is from Number Ten Downing Street that he wants me attempting to change the world.”
“You still want to change it?”
“Of course. What man doesn’t?”
“How, then?”
“Perhaps in more subtle ways. By methods not as easily seen by men.”
“Subtle . . . like the heather?”
“Like the heather,” he repeated.
71
Surprise Discovery
As it fell silent between them, both Charles and Jocelyn Rutherford opened their books again and began to read.
The silence in the library, however, did not last for long.
“What is that noise?” asked Charles, looking up. “Did you hear it?—listen.”
Jocelyn now listened. A dull tapping sound met their ears. Charles set down his book, rose, and began to wander about the library.
“It’s nearby,” he said. Slowly he approached the wall where he thought he heard the sound most loudly. He leaned the side of his head between a row of books.
“It sounds as if it is coming from behind the walls,” he said, “but—”
Suddenly, without warning, the bookcase against which he had been standing moved slightly.
“What!” he exclaimed, jumping back.
With slow, jerky motion the bookcase continued swinging out from the wall on some kind of hidden pivoting device.
“George!” Charles cried. There stood his son inside a darkened cavity behind the library wall. He held a candle, which flickered rapidly from the influx of warm air from the library. The expression on George’s face showed astonishment equal to his father’s.
“Look what I discovered, Father—a passageway leading to the library!”
“I can see that, my boy! Where in the world did you come from?”
“The north wing.”
“But . . . I knew nothing of this! Come, George—show me what you’ve found!”
George turned and led his father back the way he had come. Suddenly Charles was a schoolboy again and could hardly contain his own enthusiasm. Father and son disappeared, leaving Jocelyn staring incredulously after them into a yawning hole in the library wall. She continued to hear faint echoes through it for some time. Gradually the muffled voices gave way to silence.
They were gone perhaps fifteen minutes. Suddenly Charles reappeared, this time alone.
“It is absolutely amazing what George has discovered, Jocelyn,” he said. “It’s a positive labyrinth of hidden corridors!”
He sat down, shaking his head. “This is going to take some major exploration.” He began chuckling to himself. “George is in positive heaven!”
It took five or ten minutes for him to settle his spinning brain.
“You’ll never believe what I had just been reading when George interrupted us,” said Charles, at length settling back into his chair and opening again his copy of the Scottish title Robert Falconer by George MacDonald, the volume the queen had given him on the occasion of his knighting. In the seven years that had passed since that day, it had become one of his favorites.
Jocelyn, of course, had read it as well. “Judging from where you are in the book,” she now said, “I would say it must be the passage where they find the secret door between the two houses.”
“Exactly—I see you know the spot.”
Charles turned several more pages, found his place, then began reading aloud.
It is perhaps necessary to explain Robert’s vision. The angel was the owner of the boxes at the Boar’s Head. Looking around her room before going to bed, she had seen a trap in the floor near the wall, and, raising it, had discovered a few steps of a stair leading down to a door. Curiosity naturally led her to examine it. The key was in the lock. It opened outwards, and there she found herself, to her surprise, in the heart of another dwelling, of lowlier aspect. She never saw Robert; for while he approached with shoeless feet, she had been glancing through the open door of the gable-room, and when he knelt, the light whic
h she held in her hand had, I presume, hidden him from her. He, on his part, had not observed that the moveless door stood open at last.
I have already said that the house adjoining had been built by Robert’s father. The lady’s room was that which he had occupied with his wife, and in it Robert had been born. The door, with its trap-stairs, was a natural invention for uniting the levels of the two houses, and a desirable one in not a few of the forms which the weather assumed in that region. When the larger house passed into other hands, it had never entered the minds of the simple people who occupied the contiguous dwellings to build up the door-way between.
He glanced up. “I am extraordinarily fond of this book,” he mused. “I wonder if the good queen’s grandchildren have benefited from it as much as I have.”
“Do you suppose our own George has made such a discovery in our old Hall?” said Jocelyn.
“Quite obviously he has,” laughed Charles. “Ancient places like this usually contain more mysteries than any single one of their residents knows. I’m certain many such died with my grandfather, who was never one for passing on his secrets. After this evening’s discovery, my brain is full of old stories I faintly recall from my boyhood, about which I never paid much attention . . . until now.”
“You sound as excited about the prospects as George,” laughed Jocelyn.
“I am!” replied Charles. “Perhaps there is more to some of the old tales than I realized. I think it’s time I tried dusting off my memory.”
“What do you mean?”
“Old Henry Rutherford,” said Charles. “I was afraid of my grandfather. There were strange tales told of him. I think that’s where the ghost stories began.”
72
In the Stables
Amanda’s face was hot as she walked outside in no particular direction.
It was not the out-of-doors that drew her so much as the fact that sometimes she just had to escape the confining walls of the house.
In a few minutes she found herself approaching the stables. She had not planned to do so, but she wandered inside. The cool, still, dark atmosphere felt good against her skin and suited her mood. She wanted to be alone, and did not consider the three or four horses who were present an intrusion upon that desire. They shuffled about as she entered. One or two stretched their long necks over the doors of their stalls to see whose footsteps sounded softly against the hard-packed dirt floor.
A strange sensation pricked at Amanda’s conscience. She didn’t like it. It was comfortable for her to nurse an irritation. But having to share the feeling with a gnawing sense that perhaps she might have done something wrong—that definitely detracted from the pleasure.
Her annoyance only increased as the incident played itself out again in her memory. It had only happened ten minutes ago.
————
Jocelyn Rutherford walked along the first floor corridor of the east wing toward her daughter’s room. She heard a loud and distinctly unkind tone ahead.
“These are all wrinkled! What were you thinking, bringing them to me like this?”
There could be no mistaking Amanda’s voice.
Jocelyn increased her pace but was still too far away to hear anything but the last portion of a reply through the partially opened door.
“ . . . as I always do, miss. I am sorry, Miss Amanda.”
“Do you call this ironing?” retorted Amanda. “Look at these tucks and pleats—they’ve hardly been touched! Now take them back downstairs. I want you to do them all again. And bring them back the minute you are finished!”
As Jocelyn approached, the door to Amanda’s room opened further, and a young maid of eighteen hurried out carrying three dresses and two white shirtwaists. Her face was flushed, and she was clearly struggling not to cry.
The girl glanced up when she saw Jocelyn and tried in vain to stretch the muscles of her face into an embarrassed smile. She nodded to her mistress, then continued on along the corridor, wiping at her eyes once or twice with her hand.
Her own face now flushed, though not from embarrassment, Jocelyn continued straight through the open door.
“Amanda,” she said, “wherever did such haughtiness come from?”
Amanda looked up. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean the way you were talking to poor Eunice.”
“The clothes weren’t ironed properly.”
“That gives you no right to be rude to her.”
“Rude? I wasn’t rude,” rejoined Amanda. “I just told her to take them back and do them again.”
“I heard every word. It was indeed rude the way you spoke to her. If you can’t be gracious to your father and me, at least be kind to the servants. I don’t know where you ever learned such an attitude.”
“What attitude? Mother, you’re being completely unreasonable.”
“Eunice is older than you, besides. Does that count for nothing? How could you speak to her so!”
“What does her age have to do with it? She is still just a servant.”
“The Lord was a servant, Amanda. He said we are all supposed to be servants. To say someone is only a servant is to pay the highest compliment in the world.”
Amanda sighed. Now her mother was preaching at her again!
“I want you to apologize to her, Amanda,” Jocelyn concluded.
“What—apologize to Eunice?”
“Yes. She deserves an apology.”
“I will do no such thing!”
“I insist, Amanda. You will be mistress of your own home one day. You need to learn to express respect and compassion for those who are in your employ. I want you to apologize.”
“I will not!”
For a brief moment mother and daughter stood glaring at one another. Then Jocelyn spun around and left the room, mortified to hear this complete stranger speaking to her from out of her own daughter’s mouth. She was both angry at Amanda’s presumption and heartbroken that she had so little influence left. At just fourteen, the daughter defied any efforts her mother made to compel obedience.
Amanda had defied her and won the encounter. What was left now, thought Jocelyn, if guiding, correcting, exhorting motherhood was taken from her? How could she train and nurture a daughter who wrested that role out of her hand?
The weeping and forlorn mother hurried away from the encounter, praying with tear-filled eyes—and, if truth be told, without much faith—for the girl who had grown so proud.
But where she thought she had failed, influences beyond Jocelyn Rutherford’s awareness were at work. For her prayers—given energy in deep realms by God’s Spirit—were even now serving to poke and goad unpleasantly within the daughter for whom she was so concerned.
————
In the stables, Amanda walked about uneasily. She was thinking with less than a comfortable heart about what had happened. Without even knowing it, she began to talk softly to the gentle old mare called Celtic Star.
“I’m not really haughty and rude, am I—as Mother says?” she said. “I don’t think I am. I don’t mean to be. I want to be good, and I try to be. Sometimes I even wish I could be like George and Catharine, but I can’t. I’m not them, I’m just me. I can’t help it. Why do they always want me to be someone else? Why does Mother say such awful things to me recently? She never used to talk to me like that.”
She stopped and wiped unconsciously at her nose and eyes, both of which were beginning to run. She sniffed and tried to shake away the melancholy mood.
“I can’t help it,” she repeated, now stroking the horse’s long grey nose. “And besides, the clothes were wrinkled. What was I to do? Mother would have done the same had they been hers.”
Suddenly the face of the maid came into the eye of Amanda’s mind in a new way. She saw poor Eunice tremble and step back, shocked at the harsh words of her own rebuke, as her eyes filled with tears.
The sudden realization struck deeply into Amanda’s soul—She had herself caused Eunice’s pain! She had hurt t
he girl, wounded her.
She had never before had such a realization. A stab pierced her heart in the awareness that she had caused another human individual to suffer.
Amanda sniffed again and turned away from Celtic Star as if mere motion would take away the unpleasantness. But it could not. Her mother was right. She had been cruel.
No! Amanda told herself, trying to shake away the pang of conscience. The clothes were wrinkled and needed to be ironed again! What was it to her if Eunice was such a frail thing that she got her feelings hurt by a few insignificant words?
Try as she might, however, the unpleasantness of the memory grew.
73
Unfamiliar Ground
Amanda crept into the house through one of the seldom-used back doors. She would make her way to the servants’ quarters unseen if possible. And she would never admit to her mother what she was about to do. To obey was distasteful enough.
She would probably find Eunice in the ironing room upstairs, working on her dresses. Amanda hoped the girl was alone.
Feeling strangely like an intruder in the very house she had always ruled, Amanda stole quietly along the wide empty corridor. She was relieved to hear no sounds. She encountered no one.
She reached the ironing room.
Amanda hesitated at the door and stood several moments with her hand on the latch. As she debated within herself, the thought crossed her mind that she could turn back. No one would ever know. Why was she doing this anyway?
Oh, well, her mother was right about one thing. She would eventually have to know how to handle servants of her own.
She made up her mind to do it. And she might as well get it over with.
She drew in a deep breath, then opened the door and walked inside—not quite with determination, for this was mortifyingly unpleasant, but with a sense of stubborn resignation. It must be done. She could not shrink back now. So Amanda attempted to draw herself up, as much as she was able under the circumstances, to her full aristocratic stature.
Wild Grows the Heather in Devon Page 35