“Who’s Beatrice Normandy?” asked my aunt. “I’ve not heard of her
before.”
“She the young woman?”
“Yes. Says she knows you. I’m no hand at old etiquette, George, but her
line is a bit unusual. Practically she says she’s going to make her
mother—”
“Eh? Step-mother, isn’t it?”
“You seem to know a lot about her. She says ‘mother’—Lady Osprey.
They’re to call on me, anyhow, next Wednesday week at four, and there’s
got to be you for tea.”
“Eh?”
“You—for tea.
“H’m. She had rather—force of character. When I knew her before.”
I became aware of my aunt’s head sticking out obliquely from behind the
coffee-machine and regarding me with wide blue curiosity. I met her
gaze for a moment, flinched, coloured, and laughed.
“I’ve known her longer than I’ve known you,” I said, and explained at
length.
My aunt kept her eye on me over and round the coffee-machine as I did
so. She was greatly interested, and asked several elucidatory
questions.
“Why didn’t you tell me the day you saw her? You’ve had her on your
mind for a week,” she said.
“It IS odd I didn’t tell you,” I admitted.
“You thought I’d get a Down on her,” said my aunt conclusively. “That’s
what you thought” and opened the rest of her letters.
The two ladies came in a pony-carriage with conspicuous punctuality,
and I had the unusual experience of seeing my aunt entertaining
callers. We had tea upon the terrace under the cedar, but old Lady
Osprey, being an embittered Protestant, had never before seen the
inside of the house, and we made a sort of tour of inspection that
reminded me of my first visit to the place. In spite of my
preoccupation with Beatrice, I stored a queer little memory of the
contrast between the two other women; my aunt, tall, slender and
awkward, in a simple blue homekeeping dress, an omnivorous reader and a
very authentic wit, and the lady of pedigree, short and plump, dressed
with Victorian fussiness, living at the intellectual level of palmistry
and genteel fiction, pink in the face and generally flustered by a
sense of my aunt’s social strangeness and disposed under the
circumstances to behave rather like an imitation of the more queenly
moments of her own cook. The one seemed made of whalebone, the other of
dough. My aunt was nervous, partly through the intrinsic difficulty of
handling the lady and partly because of her passionate desire to watch
Beatrice and me, and her nervousness took a common form with her, a
wider clumsiness of gesture and an exacerbation of her habitual oddity
of phrase which did much to deepen the pink perplexity of the lady of
title. For instance, I heard my aunt admit that one of the Stuart
Durgan ladies did look a bit “balmy on the crumpet”; she described the
knights of the age of chivalry as “korvorting about on the off-chance
of a dragon”; she explained she was “always old mucking about the
garden,” and instead of offering me a Garibaldi biscuit, she asked me
with that faint lisp of hers, to “have some squashed flies, George.” I
felt convinced Lady Osprey would describe her as “a most eccentric
person” on the very first opportunity;—“a most eccentric person.” One
could see her, as people say, “shaping” for that.
Beatrice was dressed very quietly in brown, with a simple but
courageous broad-brimmed hat, and an unexpected quality of being
grown-up and responsible. She guided her step-mother through the first
encounter, scrutinised my aunt, and got us all well in movement through
the house, and then she turned her attention to me with a quick and
half-confident smile.
“We haven’t met,” she said, “since—”
“It was in the Warren.”
“Of course,” she said, “the Warren! I remembered it all except just the
name.... I was eight.”
Her smiling eyes insisted on my memories being thorough. I looked up
and met them squarely, a little at a loss for what I should say.
“I gave you away pretty completely,” she said, meditating upon my face.
“And afterwards I gave way Archie.”
She turned her face away from the others, and her voice fell ever so
little.
“They gave him a licking for telling lies!” she said, as though that
was a pleasant memory. “And when it was all over I went to our wigwam.
You remember the wigwam?”
“Out in the West Wood?”
“Yes—and cried—for all the evil I had done you, I suppose.... I’ve
often thought of it since.”...
Lady Osprey stopped for us to overtake her. “My dear!” she said to
Beatrice. “Such a beautiful gallery!” Then she stared very hard at me,
puzzled in the most naked fashion to understand who I might be.
“People say the oak staircase is rather good,” said my aunt, and led
the way.
Lady Osprey, with her skirts gathered for the ascent to the gallery and
her hand on the newel, turned and addressed a look full of meaning
overflowing indeed with meanings—at her charge. The chief meaning no
doubt was caution about myself, but much of it was just meaning at
large. I chanced to catch the response in a mirror and detected
Beatrice with her nose wrinkled into a swift and entirely diabolical
grimace. Lady Osprey became a deeper shade of pink and speechless with
indignation—it was evident she disavowed all further responsibility, as
she followed my aunt upstairs.
“It’s dark, but there’s a sort of dignity,” said Beatrice very
distinctly, regarding the hall with serene tranquillity, and allowing
the unwilling feet on the stairs to widen their distance from us. She
stood a step up, so that she looked down a little upon me and over me
at the old hall.
She turned upon me abruptly when she thought her step-mother was beyond
ear-shot.
“But how did you get here?” she asked.
“Here?”
“All this.” She indicated space and leisure by a wave of the hand at
hall and tall windows and sunlit terrace. “Weren’t you the
housekeeper’s son?”
“I’ve adventured. My uncle has become—a great financier. He used to be
a little chemist about twenty miles from Bladesover. We’re promoters
now, amalgamators, big people on the new model.”
“I understand.” She regarded me with interested eyes, visibly thinking
me out.
“And you recognised me?” I asked.
“After a second or so. I saw you recognised me. I couldn’t place you,
but I knew I knew you. Then Archie being there helped me to remember.”
“I’m glad to meet again,” I ventured. “I’d never forgotten you.”
“One doesn’t forget those childish things.”
We regarded one another for a moment with a curiously easy and
confident satisfaction in coming together again. I can’t explain our
ready zest in one another. The thing was so. We pleased each other, we
had no doubt in our minds that we pleased each other. From the first we
were at our ease with one another. “So picturesque, so very
picturesque,” came a voice from above, and then: “Bee-atrice!”
“I’ve a hundred things I want to know about you,” she said with an easy
intimacy, as we went up the winding steps....
As the four of us sat at tea together under the cedar on the terrace
she asked questions about my aeronautics. My aunt helped with a word or
so about my broken ribs. Lady Osprey evidently regarded flying as a
most indesirable and improper topic—a blasphemous intrusion upon the
angels. “It isn’t flying,” I explained. “We don’t fly yet.”
“You never will,” she said compactly. “You never will.”
“Well,” I said, “we do what we can.”
The little lady lifted a small gloved hand and indicated a height of
about four feet from the ground. “Thus far,” she said, “thus far—_and
no farther!_ No!”
She became emphatically pink. “_No_,” she said again quite
conclusively, and coughed shortly. “Thank you,” she said to her ninth
or tenth cake. Beatrice burst into cheerful laughter with her eye on
me. I was lying on the turf, and this perhaps caused a slight confusion
about the primordial curse in Lady Osprey’s mind.
“Upon his belly shall he go,” she said with quiet distinctness, “all
the days of his life.”
After which we talked no more of aeronautics.
Beatrice sat bunched together in a chair and regarded me with exactly
the same scrutiny, I thought, the same adventurous aggression, that I
had faced long ago at the tea-table in my mother’s room. She was
amazingly like that little Princess of my Bladesover memories, the
wilful misbehaviours of her hair seemed the same—her voice; things one
would have expected to be changed altogether. She formed her plans in
the same quick way, and acted with the same irresponsible decision.
She stood up abruptly.
“What is there beyond the terrace?” she said, and found me promptly
beside her.