Miss Barrington, when she came, was most helpful. There was a very fine edition of Dante, she said. Hubert’s face fell, and she hastened to add that there were several translations, including Carlyle. There were also Boccaccio’s Commentaries, Il Duca di Sermoneta, and several other heavy-looking tomes. The lecturer regarded them dubiously.
‘Let me see,’ he said. ‘My lecture is at six this evening. I haven’t got very long. And to tell you the truth, I’ve written absolutely nothing yet. I know nothing about the fellow, you see. Really nothing! You haven’t by any chance some quite small handbook which epitomizes the whole thing?’
Agatha had seated herself in a tall, straight-backed chair. She looked at him with severity.
‘Oh, no,’ she protested.
‘I’m afraid it will have to be.’
‘But not from you!’
‘The second-rate at second-hand? Dear lady, what else am I to do in the time? I put it to you! I didn’t ask to give this lecture, did I? The whole thing is abhorrent to me.’
‘I have a little book,’ suggested Miss Barrington doubtfully. ‘An Oxford Extension book. It’s called The Florentine and His Age. It’s about two hundred pages. Would that be any use?’
‘The very thing,’ cried Hubert in relief. ‘Will you lend it to me, Miss Barrington?’
‘I lent it to Kell, one of the housemaids, who is going to the lecture. She told me she knew nothing about Dante. Kell! Have you finished that book I lent you?’
Kell was on her knees lighting the fire. She now rose to her feet and approached them. She was a pretty girl with a round freckled face, apricot-coloured hair and tawny eyes. Her neck was as white as milk. She surveyed Miss Barrington with sedate respect.
‘I beg your pardon, ma’am?’
‘Have you finished that book on Dante?’
‘Not quite, ma’am.’
‘Will you bring it here? Mr Ervine wants to look at it.’
If this demand surprised Kell she did not show it. She departed and Miss Barrington explained:
‘You see, Mr Ervine, all the Lyndon servants belong to the Reading Union. Lady Clewer likes it.’
This was a new aspect of Agatha and Hubert gaped. But she laughed and set him right:
‘Not me. John’s stepmother. She is down here so much that she supervises parish work and all that sort of thing. She really likes it and it’s a great relief to me, for I would hate it.’
‘Of course,’ said Miss Barrington, ‘all the maids cannot go to all the meetings. They take it in turns. This time it happened to be Kell who is going, so I lent her the book. She is a very intelligent girl.’
‘She is the friend of James’s youth that he was looking for yesterday,’ added Agatha. ‘I’d like to know what she thinks of Dante.’
Kell returned with the book, which she had neatly wrapped in a cover of brown paper. The fire was lighted and Hubert was left to himself.
The hall was full of Marian superintending the disposition of some flowers in pots. She was rather annoyed with a gardener, and was so occupied in scolding him that Agatha was able to carry on a significant conversation almost at her elbow.
‘Lois! Will you tie my veil for me?’
Lois, who had been reading the Tatler with a very disconsolate expression, came sulkily to her side and helped to dispose of the masses of grey tulle which were to protect her head in the landaulette.
‘I can’t think, Agatha, what you want to wear a veil in a closed car for.’
Agatha’s voice grew softer.
‘Poor Mr Ervine is in the library. I’m afraid he’s rather stuck in his lecture. He might like help … books and things. I wish you would look in some time this morning and see if he has all he wants.’
Lois bloomed once more. She had begun to think that he must have gone for a walk.
‘Oh, all right. I certainly will if you want me to.’
On these occasions one remembered with pleasure that Agatha was really the mistress of Lyndon.
Hubert listened to the departing landaulette with a hopeless heart. He had not written a word. He sat with his head buried in his hands while the rain beat a tattoo upon the window-pane. Presently Lois put her head timidly round the door.
‘How are you getting on?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Oh, dear! I am sorry!’ She came nearer. ‘Have you got all the books you want?’
‘Far too many. That’s the trouble.’
He pointed to the pile of library books on the table and waved the little atrocity in his hand.
‘If Miss Barrington hadn’t taken it upon herself to prime my audience with this little handbook, I could have copied out a chunk of it and given it as my lecture. But the third housemaid has heard it all already. She’d spot it if I tried.’
‘Would it be any easier if you dictated to me?’
Hubert thought that it would. He might manage to sparkle a little for her; her admiration for everything he said was rather stimulating. She seized a pad and a pen, expectantly. After a moment’s creative abstraction he began:
‘The advent of a great poet….’
He caught the eye of Voltaire.
‘Come away,’ it said. ‘You and your great poets!’
Hubert coughed and tried again in another vein.
‘“The man who has seen Hell!” That is what they called him, those thirteenth-century citizens of wherever it was (leave a blank space, we can look it up in a minute), as they watched that sinister figure shouldering its way through their crowded market-places. “The man who has seen Hell!” Not, mark you, the man who has seen Heaven, although the Divine Comedy includes a book called the Paradiso. Why is this? Why is it that in both contemporary and subsequent opinion the Inferno is incomparably the greatest book of the three? For us in these latter days it has, of course, lost something of its piquancy. We have forgotten what a Chronique Scandaleuse it was. But if a man of genius were to arise in our midst today and versify, say the eternal tortures of Manning and Gladstone, were he to limn for us a picture of Parnell and Mrs O’Shea, a second Paolo and Francesca, blown upon the gales of Hell, we might recapture the old thrill….’
He paused to draw breath and Lois diffidently protested: ‘I don’t know if this is quite what Mother wants. It’s for poor people, you know. I don’t think she wants anything amusing.’
‘Oh, all right. Tear it up.’
‘You don’t mind my saying so, do you?’
‘Oh, no. Indeed not. I’m most anxious to please your mother. You can have no idea how anxious.’
Lois flushed and fidgeted with the ring at the end of her pencil. Hubert began again:
‘Lasciate ogni speranza. …’
‘They won’t understand Italian. You must translate it.’
‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here,’ said the lecturer peevishly, adding, a moment later, ‘no, don’t put it. I don’t think I will begin that way. I was going to say that this was the artist’s comment on the condition of the mind prior to creation. But I forget why.’
‘Really nobody very clever is coming,’ she assured him. ‘It’s a much simpler affair than you think. Why can’t you just say where he was born, and all that; and then say what he wrote. That is the sort of thing Mother wants.’
‘Dante,’ dictated Hubert…. ‘No … put Dante Alighieri … was born in … in … I say … was he born in Florence, or did he go there after he was born? Would you mind looking it up in that little book?’
Lois studied The Florentine and His Age.
‘It doesn’t put,’ she said at last.
‘Oh, Lord! What’s a book like that for, if it doesn’t give you the facts?’
‘That’s the gong for lunch.’
Hubert jumped up with alacrity.
‘Shall we go on after lunch?’ he said. ‘I may feel brighter after food.’
‘Of course we will,’ said the obliging Lois, ‘if you feel it’s any use to you.’
Marian’s face was greatly trouble
d when she joined them at lunch.
‘This rain is terrible,’ she complained. ‘It’s so awkward, Mr Ervine. They’ve just sent in to say that the big station car is out of order and can’t possibly be put right before Monday. It’s most tiresome. Because, of course, we all meant to drive to your lecture in it. The Village Room is quite two miles off, across the park, and if this rain goes on it will be much too wet to walk.’
‘It’s extraordinary how these things are always happening,’ said Lois. ‘We have four cars, and yet I do believe that we are more often held up for want of transport than many people who have only a motor bicycle and a sidecar.’
‘Well, you see, John and Thomas have the limousine, and Agatha the landaulette. There is the little two-seater, of course, which will take you down to the village, Mr Ervine. But I’m very much afraid that the rest of us will be deprived of hearing your lecture unless it clears up. I’m so sorry! But it’s really too wet to walk. I catch cold so easily, and so do the girls.’
‘Perhaps, as it’s such a bad day, I might postpone it,’ suggested Hubert hopefully.
‘Oh, no! Please don’t do that! All the folk from the village will be there, Mr Ervine. And they would be so disappointed; some of them have to walk several miles. Poor things! Their lives are so dull and it is such a treat for them! No, don’t put it off. Only it’s so disappointing for us. But perhaps you will read it to us later.’
‘Oh, no! I couldn’t inflict it on anybody twice.’
‘James will go, of course. Won’t you, James? He doesn’t mind the rain a scrap. And Miss Barrington. You mustn’t think that everyone from Lyndon is deserting you. And then Agatha will be dropping in on her way home.’
‘But will Miss Barrington walk?’ asked Hubert doubtfully. ‘Let me walk with you, Clewer, and Miss Barrington can go in the two-seater.’
‘Oh, but that’s quite unnecessary,’ protested Miss Barrington, casting a nervous glance at her employer. ‘I don’t mind the rain. I like a little turn in the fresh air.’
‘Yes, she likes it,’ asserted Marian, but was interrupted by a very tactless explosion of sneezing on the part of her secretary.
She waited in heavy patience until Miss Barrington had done.
‘I say! You have got a cold!’ observed Gerald.
‘Oh, no! Not at all. It’s nearly gone now.’
‘Do go in the car and let me walk!’ urged Hubert.
‘I think fresh air does a cold good,’ observed Marian judicially. ‘I always go out for a cold myself. And I have a few notes to be left in the village. I think Miss Barrington had better walk. Mr Blair, will you care to go? Lady Clewer would have room for you in the landaulette on the way home, I’m sure, so there would only be the walk one way.’
‘Yes, I’d like to come,’ agreed Gerald.
‘There, you see, Mr Ervine! Three people are going from Lyndon in spite of the rain. You mustn’t think we have all deserted you.’
‘Dolly Kell is going, so it’s four really,’ observed James.
‘Hush, James!’ remarked his stepmother mechanically.
A silence fell upon the lunchers while they devoured roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Hubert eyed Gerald.
‘You’d really better not come, Blair,’ he said. ‘You’ll be bored stiff, you know.’
‘But I want to come. I know nothing at all about Dante. I’ll hold an umbrella over Miss Barrington.’
Hubert sighed and wished the affair well over. But he could not quarrel with an occasion which was to secure him an afternoon alone with Lois. When they emerged from the library at tea-time the lecture was written and neatly fastened together with a paper clip.
4.
‘Sooner you than me,’ said Clara, the scullery-maid, as she peered out into the rain. ‘It’s a good thing your boots is thick.’
‘I’m glad to get the chance of a walk,’ said Dolly Kell. ‘I’m not afraid of a bit of rain.’
‘This isn’t a bit of rain; it’s a flood. It’s terrible. There won’t be many there, I shouldn’t think. I wouldn’t go, not if I was you, Dolly.’
‘Oh, I got to. Old Lady Clewer would see if I wasn’t there. She’s so sharp. Everyone from the house is going.’
‘Yes. I seen Mr James waiting by the yard gate.’ Clara popped her head out of the scullery window for a moment. ‘He’s there still. I wonder who he’s waiting for, don’t you?’
‘Not knowing, can’t say.’ Dolly was not deceived by Clara’s innocent curiosity. ‘I’ve got something better to wonder at. I’d get on with my vegetables if I was you.’
She buttoned up the last button of her mackintosh and moved down the passage.
‘Oh! Ain’t you going out through the yard?’
‘Never you mind what way I’m going out.’
A little side door at the end of the old schoolroom passage led into the shrubbery. Through this Dolly slipped, holding her skirts well away from the splashings of soaked bushes. As she picked her way into the avenue she was glad of the prudence which had prompted her to spend her last quarter’s wages on new boots and an umbrella instead of a summer costume. The drive was deep in puddles and the rain pattered everywhere. It fell in great splashes from the trees and dimpled the flowing gutters.
She thought with compunction of poor Mr James waiting in the downpour by the yard gate. Her evasion seemed to be a little heartless. It would have been kinder, after all, to have gone out by the yard. But then she must have rebuffed his offers of escort under the inquisitive eye of Clara, who would have seen it all from the scullery window. She had not the courage.
This affair of Mr James was very worrying to Dolly. It was worse than any of the ‘social puzzles’ in Home Words. She did not know how she ought to act. They had been, of course, playmates and equals, but that was a long time ago. On her return to Lyndon as third housemaid she knew that things ought to be very different. He was a young gentleman now, and it was her business to remind him of the fact should he show signs of forgetting it.
She had grown up in the creed that Mr James was ‘put upon.’ Her aunt, Mrs Job Kell, had never liked the second Lady Clewer and her interfering ways. The dislike was mutual, for Marian had been quick to divine the element of contempt which lay behind the old housekeeper’s civility. She had pensioned her off at the first opportunity, feeling that old retainers are sometimes better at a distance.
Their hottest battles had been fought over James. Mrs Kell, who had mothered him from birth, was enraged by Marian’s unfavourable comments on his person and intelligence.
‘Soft-headed,’ she would say to Dolly. ‘She’s soft-headed herself. You mark my words, if anything ails that boy it’s too much brains, not too little. Didn’t I rear him from a babby? I ought to know. He was always as sharp as they’re made. A regular old-fashioned child if ever there was one; ever so knowing. You remember him yourself. The funny little dear!’
Dolly remembered a sturdy, ugly child some months older than herself. A lonely, secretive boy he had been, but excellent company when he had got over his shyness. They had played endless, mysterious games in the gardens at Lyndon. They had kept house in the old brick potting shed, cooking elaborate meals in Dolly’s little saucepans and rearing a large family of dolls. With these, James, as a father, was allowed very little say though he sometimes took the stick to them when they got beyond petticoat government. The household reflected Clewer luxuries and the artless simplicity of the four-room cottage. Dolly, having despatched the children to school, would scrub out the ‘liberry’ and announce:
‘Now I’ll have a good cup of tea and a lay down.’
These memories made her feel very kindly towards him. She was a good-natured girl, in spite of her sharp tongue, and hated giving real pain. She soon perceived that she was wounding him deeply; he would stare at her, when she snubbed him, with a startled grief in his eyes. As she grew to know the household better, and saw the scorn and derision in which he was held, she became very sorry for him and longed to unbend t
o his wistful advances. But this would have been to carry on with a gentleman of the house, a lapse unpardonable. Of course, he was quite different from any other gentleman she had ever met; he always had been. She had once said as much to her aunt, whereupon Mrs Kell had become very mysterious and refused to discuss the subject. She said she didn’t know but what it mightn’t be accounted for.
The road across the park led through an iron gate into the wet village street. The postman, one of Dolly’s admirers, was clearing the box at the corner.
‘Hullo, Dolly!’ he greeted her cheerfully. ‘Rainwater’s good for the complexion, so they say.’
She passed him with her round chin in the air.
‘You’ll catch plenty of it in your mouth that way, if you’re thirsty,’ he called after her.
She stalked on, her head held so high that she failed to perceive the approach of the grocer’s young man and almost collided with him. The postman guffawed rudely in the distance, but young Mr Hopkins, nothing daunted, fell into step beside her.
‘Good afternoon, Miss Kell,’ he ventured. ‘It’s a wet day.’
‘It is,’ she agreed.
‘You going a walk?’
‘No.’
‘Well, it’s a wet day for a walk, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps you’ll be going a walk after chapel, Sunday?’
‘I may and I mayn’t. What of it?’
‘I was wondering,’ he said diffidently, ‘if you’ve not fixed up with any other chap, that is …’
‘Oh, I haven’t fixed up with anybody, thanks. And I’m not going to. I’d sooner walk by myself.’
‘Really now….’
‘I would. Till I can find a man that can talk sense, thank you, Mr Hopkins. I haven’t seen one yet.’
‘If you’d only let me come along I wouldn’t talk at all. Would that please you?’
‘It wouldn’t. I said a man that could talk sense, not anybody dumb!’
He looked a little dashed, but toiled by her side until they reached the Village Institute. Dolly turned in at the gate.
‘You going in there?’ he said, gaping.
Ladies of Lyndon Page 9