“Here we are!” declared Mrs. Tregaskis thankfully, as the train slowed
down at Porthlew. “I declare it’s good to be alive, in such weather and
a country like this one.”
She descended lightly on to the astonishingly bleak little platform,
empty and swept by a north wind.
“Now for bags and baggage! Frances--umbrellas, dressing-bag,
papers--that’s all right. Rosamund? Come along, darlings, you must
get out everything while I see to the luggage. Porter! Ah, Trewin,
good-afternoon. Is the trap outside? Just show these young ladies the
way, and then come back for the trunks. How’s the wife?”
“Better, thank you, Mrs. Tregaskis,” said the man, touching his cap
with a grin.
“That’s right. Tell her I’ll be round to see her in a day or two.”
Kind, competent Mrs. Tregaskis hurried along, beaming and exchanging
greetings with one or two porters and a newspaper-boy.
“How pleased they all are to see her,” said Frances wistfully. “Isn’t
it cold, Rosamund?”
“It’s much colder than at home. Turn up your collar, Francie. Do you
think we shall go to the house in a cab?”
“No--she said the old man would drive down in a trap. I suppose it’s
the coachman.”
“I think she meant Cousin Frederick. She said ‘_my_ old man.’”
“Oh! Is he very old?” asked Frances in rather awe-struck tones.
“I suppose he must be.”
But when they presently went outside the station and climbed into the
tall dog-cart, driven by Cousin Frederick, they did not think him very
old after all.
He was small and brown and clean-shaven, with a thin, deeply lined
face and a curious twist at the corner of his mouth that gave him the
appearance of always wearing a rather sardonic smile. But his little
grey eyes were inscrutable, and never smiled. No one had ever called
him Freddy, or even Fred.
He lifted his cap to Rosamund and Frances and said:
“I’m afraid I can’t get down. The mare won’t stand. Do you mind sitting
at the back?”
They climbed up obediently, and from an elevation which both secretly
felt to be perilous, watched the arrival of Mrs. Tregaskis and sundry
minor articles of luggage.
“Here we are,” she announced gaily to her husband, after the universal
but obvious fashion of the newly arrived. “How are you, dear? and how’s
Hazel? All well at home? That’s right, thank you, Trewin. You’ll see to
the boxes, won’t you. I suppose the luggage cart is here?”
Frederick pointed silently with the whip.
“Oh yes, that’s all right. Well, I’ll pop in, and we can be off.”
She patted the mare vehemently.
“Jenny needs clipping,” she observed in parenthesis. “Well”--she got in
beside her husband.
As they drove through the steep town of Porthlew Mrs. Tregaskis
exchanged cheery salutations in her hearty, ringing voice with a number
of people. Frederick slanted the whip slightly in the direction of his
cap, straightened it again, and said nothing.
Neither did he say anything throughout the three-mile drive, nor when
they stopped before the square stone house, and Mrs. Tregaskis kissed
first Rosamund and then Frances, on the steps of the porch, and said:
“Welcome home, darlings.”
Then she shouted aloud:
“Hazel, my poppet! Hazel! Come and say how d’ye do to the cousins.”
Hazel Tregaskis, aged fourteen, came into the hall. She was small
and brown like her father, with something of the same twist at the
corner of her mouth, but rendered charming by rippling tawny hair, and
beautiful eyes where an elfin spirit of mockery seemed eternally to
dance. She held herself very erect, and moved with remarkable grace and
lightness.
They had tea in the hall, and Hazel sat beside her father and chattered
freely to the new arrivals.
“Where is Minnie?” suddenly demanded Mrs. Tregaskis. “Frederick, we’ve
forgotten Minnie. Where is Minnie? Hazel, where is Minnie--where is
Miss Blandflower, darling?”
“I don’t know,” said Hazel calmly.
“Go and find her at once, my pet. Poor Miss Blandflower! You know
this isn’t quite like her own home, and we never want to let her feel
herself forgotten, or unwanted. Now run, Hazel.”
Hazel rose from her place with no appearance of haste, and went slowly
in search of the missing one.
Mrs. Tregaskis remarked rather elaborately:
“Miss Blandflower is a very old friend of ours, though she is a great
deal younger than I am. She will give you your lessons, I hope, with
Hazel.”
“Is she Hazel’s governess?” inquired Frances gently.
Frederick Tregaskis nodded, but his wife said with an air of slight
repression: “She lives with us, Frances dear, as I told you, and we do
our very best to make her feel that this is her home. You see, Miss
Blandflower is extremely poor, and has nowhere else to live.”
“Like us,” returned Frances with mournful matter-of-factness.
“Not at all like you,” said her cousin Frederick, suddenly looking at
her. “Neither you nor Rosamund need think that you have nowhere to go.
You will have money of your father’s some day, in fact it belongs to
you now, and will be used for your education and any other expenses.
You can go to school, if you would like that, or live with anybody----”
“Come, come, Frederick, we needn’t go into these sordid details,” said
Bertha, with an extremely annoyed laugh.
Frances looked bewildered, as though she felt herself to have received
a rebuke, but Rosamund’s grey eyes met those of Frederick Tregaskis
with a sudden lightening of their sombre gloom.
“I disagree with you, Bertha,” he observed, with a look of dislike at
his wife. “These things are much better clearly defined. It is quite
conceivable that Rosamund and Frances may dislike the position of
refugees under our hospitable roof, and in that case they may as well
know that I shall further any reasonable scheme they may entertain for
existence elsewhere.”
“Frederick, how impossible you are, dear. The children will think you
don’t want them. Cousin Frederick is only joking, darling,” she added,
laying her hand on Frances’ reassuringly.
“I never joke,” said Cousin Frederick with an acid expression that did
much to confirm his statement. “Another cup of tea, if you please.”
“Here is Minnie,” cried Mrs. Tregaskis in tones of relief not wholly
attributable to the appearance of Miss Blandflower.
“Here I am, last but not least,” agitatedly murmured the late-comer,
while her hostess cordially embraced her, and presented Rosamund and
Frances.
Miss Blandflower belonged to that numerous and mistaken class of
person which supposes the art of witty conversation to lie in the
frequent quotation of well-known tags and the humorously-intended
mispronunciation of the more ordinary words in the English language.
She said, “Not lost, but gone before,” with a slightly nervous laugh,
when Bertha deplored her lateness for tea, and explained that this
was due to a mistaken impression that tea was to be at five o’clock.
However, live and learn. And it was almost mechanically that she
murmured, on being invited to eat saffron cake: “Once more unto the
breach, dear friends, once more, well, perhaps I will----”
“Minnie,” said Mrs. Tregaskis, shaking a playfully admonishing finger
at her, “how, now _how_, is the dairy? Have you been in once since I’ve
been away?”
“Dear Mrs. Tregaskis, how can you? Of course I have. I’ve tried to see
to everything, though of course no one could take your place. I needn’t
tell you that.”
“Rubbish, my dear, rubbish. How’s the new dairy-maid? I was very vexed
at having to leave without settling her, I must confess. Will she do?”
“‘I doubt it, said the carpenter,’” returned Minnie, shaking her head.
Her voice never gave any hint of inverted commas, and Frances looked at
her with large, surprised eyes.
Miss Blandflower was thin and sandy, with eyeglasses, and might have
been of any age between thirty-four and forty. She several times
glanced affectionately at Mrs. Tregaskis, and said, “A sight for sore
eyes, as they say,” and then flung a nervous look at Frederick, who
remained silent.
After tea Rosamund and Frances were shown the garden, where Cousin
Bertha had turned a piece of rough ground into a tennis court, and made
a herbaceous border and two rockeries, and the stables, where Cousin
Bertha proposed personally to conduct the clipping of the mare Jenny,
on the morrow, and where she slapped Jenny’s hind-quarters with a
heartiness that violently disconcerted both children, unused to animals
of any description.
They were also taken over the little dairy, where Cousin Bertha
superintended the making of cheese and butter and cream which, she
assured them, to their utter bewilderment, “paid,” and where she also
weekly instructed a class of girls from the neighbouring farms. They
were shown the chickens, bred and kept and fed, and, Frances supposed
in her utter ignorance of the expert language employed by her cousin,
doubtless hatched by Cousin Bertha, and the little orchard where Cousin
Bertha had planted a variety of small apple-trees, most of which she
indicated by name.
Hazel came with them, and gazed compassionately at the obviously
bewildered pair.
“Haven’t you got a dairy and chickens and a horse at your home?” she
asked Rosamund, who replied darkly:
“No. We don’t understand about those sort of things. We had books and a
garden, and two cats with kittens, at home.”
“Well, _this_ home will give you something new!” declared her guardian
with undiminished brightness, although Rosamund’s tone had been far
indeed from expressing enthusiasm for “those sort of things.”
“We had a most beautiful piano,” said Frances to Hazel. “It was so
good that it was called the Grand Piano, and nobody ever touched it
except----”
She stopped and coloured.
Hazel nodded her head quickly.
“Except your mummy, I expect,” she said calmly, and gave Frances’ hand
a little squeeze.
Rosamund heard and saw her, and from thence onward she liked Hazel
Tregaskis.
Cousin Bertha said:
“Well, we’ve got a piano here, and you shall hear it presently. I
expect you’re fond of music, aren’t you?”
There was a silence before Frances timidly replied “Yes,” as in duty
bound. She liked tunes very much herself, and she knew that Rosamund
never would talk about music, and that mother had said she had no ear.
But Cousin Bertha evidently expected “yes” for an answer, and Frances
unconsciously felt that Cousin Bertha was one of those persons who
would always receive just exactly that answer which they expect to
receive.
When it grew dark they went indoors, and into the drawing-room. There
was some furniture, which Cousin Bertha, who knew a great deal about
furniture, said was old and very good, and an upright piano.
“Would you like me to play to you?” said Cousin Bertha. “Hazel always
comes to the drawing-room for an hour before she has her supper, and
we enjoy ourselves. There’ll be lots more games we can play now you
two have come. But I dare say you’d rather just have a little music,
to-night.”
Rosamund, the unmusical, shook her head dumbly and almost
imperceptibly. But Frances, still with that hypnotic sense of having to
reply whatever Cousin Bertha expected her to reply, said: “Yes, if you
please.”
So Mrs. Tregaskis sat down at the piano and played without any music in
front of her, some very gay and spirited tunes, and sometimes she sang
in a strong, ringing voice, and called to Hazel to join in the chorus.
Rosamund and Frances sat in the shadow and held one another’s hands.
Presently Hazel joined them and said very low indeed:
“Do you like it?”
“It is very kind of Cousin Bertha,” gravely returned Rosamund.
“I don’t much like it when mother plays. I would rather play myself,”
said Hazel. “There’s a person at Porthlew called Mrs. Severing who
plays beautifully. She has published a lot of music--songs and things.”
“Shall we ever see her?” asked Frances.
“Oh yes, she often comes here. She is mother’s greatest friend. We’ll
make her play really nice things.”
“Don’t you like Cousin Bertha’s things that she plays? I do,” said
Frances, rather shocked.
“Rosamund doesn’t,” shrewdly returned Hazel. But Rosamund remained
silent, partly from courtesy, and partly because she knew that she
would not be able to keep the tumult of misery that was choking her out
of her voice.
The memory of Wye Valley days, already remote, was gripping her
unendurably. Her emotions, infinitely stronger than her undeveloped
personality, were always strung to breaking pitch at the appeal made to
them by music. For although it was true that she had very little ear,
and that her fingers were devoid of all skill, the Slavonic tradition
and the Slavonic passion were in her blood, and to such as these, music
is a doorway better left secure.
When Mrs. Tregaskis had reiterated several times in rousing tones that
here was a health unto His Majesty, with a Fal-lal-lal-lal lah la,
Hazel said:
“Please, will you play the one I like out of that book?”
“I thought you liked them all,” her parent replied, not without a hint
of amused resentment. “Which do you mean?”
“King Charles.”
“Oh! ‘Farewell Manchester.’ Very well, darling, and then you must pop
off upstairs.”
The song she played was much slower and quieter than the others, and
she did not sing it. Neither Rosamund nor Frances had ever heard it
before, but the infinite sadness of the simple melody made its instant
appeal to a sensitiveness which was singularly developed in both.
Frances cried a little quite silently with her face pressed against
her sister’s arm, and Rosamund clenched her hands together and set her
teeth.
When Mrs. Tregaskis closed the piano and came towards them, Rosamund
said: “Thank you very much, Cousin Bertha.”
It seemed to her that she had been saying just that, again and again,
for days.
“Call me ‘Cousin Bertie,’ darling. I declare I shall fine the next
person who says that dreadful ‘Cousin Bertha.’ Such a prim, horrid
name, I always think. Besides, I only know myself as Bertie. Do you
know the people down here still call me Miss Bertie. Don’t they,
Hazel?”
Rosamund did know. She had heard Mrs. Tregaskis say so already.
She went drearily up to the schoolroom supper, where Miss Blandflower
was waiting for them.
“I hope you’ve brought good appetites with you from Wales,” she said,
taking her place at the head of the table. “I see I must ‘_wrastle_’
with this large ham-bone.”
She did so, in the ineffectual manner that was characteristic of her.
“Shall I cut the bread, Miss Blandflower?” asked Hazel.
“Please, dear, if you will do,” replied her teacher of English.
The meal was a silent one.
Little Frances was fighting bravely with tears and fatigue, and
Rosamund’s thoughts were in the Wye Valley, where lights were beginning
to tremble in the cottage windows, and only the little house on the
slope of the hill would remain dark and silent. Hazel looked at them
from time to time with a sort of compassion in her great laughing
eyes, but was more engaged in a kind of silent drama conducted between
her knife and her silver mug, with which she nightly diversified the
monotony of meals eaten in Miss Blandflower’s company.
When presently she upset the mug half-full of milk, Minnie rose,
rebuked her pupil querulously, murmured something which sounded
like “Well, Allah gear cum allah gear, as they say,” applied her
table-napkin to the widening pool, and the meal came to an end.
Interminable though the day had seemed, it was finished at last, and
Rosamund and Frances were lying in the pretty bedroom which they were
to share.
“I think Hazel is going to be nice,” whispered Frances wistfully.
“Yes, so do I. But I wish we had stayed with Lady Argent and the son
who was lame.”
“Oh! so do I!”
“Nearly asleep, my darlings?” inquired Cousin Bertha at the door.
“I’ve just run up to say good-night. I always tuck Hazel up, and now I
must do the same to my two new little daughters.”
“Rosamund,” said Frances in a guilty whisper, when Mrs. Tregaskis had
rustled softly away again, “perhaps we oughtn’t to have wished that,
about having stayed with Lady Argent. Cousin Bertie is very, very kind,
isn’t she?”
If an unconscious appeal for reassurance underlay the question, neither
Frances nor Rosamund was aware of it.
“Yes,” answered Rosamund, with shamed conviction; “she is very, very
kind.”
Kind Mrs. Tregaskis was already hastening downstairs again. In the
lamp-lit library her husband was reading the newspaper. He did not stir
as she came in to the room, nor raise his eyes.
“Well!” sighed Bertha, as she moved to her writing-table, stacked with
papers in orderly pigeon-holes and bearing a goodly pile of unopened
letters. “How dreadfully work accumulates, even during a week. Here are
all those leaflets for the Mothers’ Union that ought to have gone out
last week. Minnie really is a fool. And she forwarded all the wrong
letters to me, too, and none of the right ones. I must answer half
these to-night.”
She sat down, and drew paper and ink towards her.
At the first sound which indicated that her pen was fairly started,
Frederick put down his newspaper and spoke.
“Well Bertha, as you have had your way in the matter of bringing
these children home with you, I suppose we had better come to an
understanding on the subject.”
He invariably called his wife Bertha.
“No, dear, not to-night,” said Mrs. Tregaskis with pseudo-firmness. “I
have to deal with all these letters.”
Frederick, who knew his wife, remained silent.
In a moment she resumed with spirit:
“Besides, what is there to discuss? I wrote to you when poor Rose
Grantham died and said that I wanted to take her children, and give
them a home. The alternative was either a cheap school, or the raking
up of some third-rate foreign relation who might have been paid to look
after them. I told you that it seemed to be--how shall I put it?--plus
fort que moi--the impulse simply to take and--and love them.”
“I do not like impulses,” said Frederick coldly, “but you do not
often--I might almost say ever--act on impulse, Bertha.”
She laughed angrily. “I’m very glad to hear you say so, since I’m
always trying to learn caution, but as a matter of fact you are
utterly mistaken, as you very often are where I am concerned. I’ve
been exceedingly impetuous all my life, and I haven’t outgrown it yet.
Of course I know very well that only an impetuous woman would have
suggested adopting two children like that--but, upon my word, I’d
rather trust to my love of children and take my risks.”
She drew up her fine figure as she spoke.
“Your risks, in this case, may safely be reckoned as non-existent.
On your own showing, Dick Grantham’s money will bring in about three
hundred a year to each of his children until it passes into their own
control. To feed and clothe them meanwhile will cost perhaps a hundred
a year each, and leave a handsome margin for educational and other
expenses. There is no question of risk.”
“My dear man, I’ve been into the business part of it from end to end
and understand it perfectly--a great deal better than you do, in all
probability. That’s not the point. There are other risks than monetary
ones. Good Heavens! if _that_ was all one thought of!”
“Do you mean risks to the children themselves?”
“You know very well that I don’t. Little sheltered happy things, what
risks do they run, I should like to know? But the responsibility is a
big one for me--two more to love and guard and teach, and turn into
honest, healthy, happy young women.”
“The constant society of Miss Blandflower is hardly likely to do that.”
“Poor Minnie! Why do you hate her?”
“I don’t. But she is neither honest nor healthy nor happy, and I
therefore fail to see why you should expect her to make her pupils so.”
“She is perfectly honest, Frederick. If she isn’t healthy, it’s because
she won’t take enough exercise, and that whining voice doesn’t mean
that she isn’t happy. It’s only affectation.”
“If she’s affected she isn’t honest,” remarked Frederick, scoring a
point. “However, leave Miss Blandflower out of it. I’m talking of the
Grantham children. Why don’t you send them to school?”
“Because,” said Bertha, her eyes blazing, “they are two motherless
children, and no woman with a heart worth the name would have them
anywhere but under her own wing. My heart is big enough to take in
three children, thank God--yes, and as many more as may need me.”
Quoth Frederick, utterly unmoved:
“They would be happier at school.”
“They would be miserable there. Two spoilt, uneducated, delicate
children. They’d be hopelessly out of their element.”
“Not so much so as they will be here.”
Bertha Tregaskis, her face suffused with agitation, began to pace up
and down the room.
“Of course, if you won’t keep them, you won’t. But I don’t pretend to
see your point of view.”
“You oughtn’t to have the responsibility.”
“If you’re thinking of all I have to do,” she returned in softened
tones, “I’ll manage somehow. It’s better to wear out than to rust out,
and it’s little enough one can do. But as long as there’s life in me,
my motto will always be the old one: ‘Lend a hand.’”
“That is precisely where I anticipate danger.”
“What danger?” she demanded sharply.
“Danger to Rosamund and Frances Grantham,” said Frederick acidly,
turning out his reading lamp.
Bertha Tregaskis remained long in the library after he had gone
upstairs. She knew that her husband’s opposition would find no further
expression in words, and that her authority with the children would
remain undisputed.
With a sigh she turned to the papers on her desk, and wrote steadily
for nearly two hours, directing, encouraging, organizing, and again
advising. Finally she spent some fifteen minutes on a letter to Lady
Argent, of which the final page may be quoted:
“So you see, Sybil, my dear, it’s not going to be quite all plain
sailing. But then one never expected that, and the privilege of
_giving_ is so great that one doesn’t count the cost. After all, in all
this sad old earth, the one and only thing that counts is Love, and the
realest, most sacred form of it, when all’s said and done, is that of a
mother for her children. Most of us find that out too late, but I don’t
mean my bairns to if I can help it!
“Good-night, my dear, it’s close on twelve and I’m dead to the world.
Just one look at my _three_, and then to bed.”