"What's the matter?" asked Mr. Dashwood.
"Botherations!" replied Miss Grimshaw. "Look at this."
She handed him a neatly-printed card, folded in the middle. It looked
like a ball programme. Nearly four months had passed. The Frenches had
settled down at The Martens. The whole neighbourhood had called; there
had been several small dinner parties at the bungalow, and Garryowen was
turning out a dream. Training a horse is just like painting a picture;
the thing grows in spirit and in form; it has some of you in it; the
pride of the artist is not unallied to the pride of the trainer. When
you see swiftness coming out, and strength, endurance, and pluck, you
feel just as the artist feels when, of a morning, he uncovers his canvas
and says to himself: "Ah! yes, I put some good stuff into that
yesterday."
On the dull, clear winter mornings, in the bracing air of the Downs,
French knew something of the joy of life as he watched Garryowen and The
Cat taking exercise. Sometimes young ladies from Crowsnest would appear
on the edge of the Downs to watch Mr. French's "dear horses." They
little knew how apt that expression was.
* * * * *
Mr. Dashwood examined the card.
It contained the programme and the rules of a small poetical club
presided over by a Miss Slimon. Each member was supposed to invent or
create a poem on a given subject each month and to send the result to
Miss Slimon, who would read it. But the matter did not end there. Miss
Slimon, by virtue of her self-constituted office, would send in due
course each member's poem to each of the other members for criticism,
and the results would be made known and published in a small pamphlet at
the end of the year. The subscription was a guinea, and to this society
for the circulation of rubbish Miss Grimshaw had been invited to
subscribe. Hence the trouble.
"She asked me if I liked poetry, and I said I did, like a fool, and then
she asked me to join, and I agreed. I can't back out now. She never told
me the subscription was a guinea."
"It's beastly bad luck," said Mr. Dashwood, who by this time knew the
financial affairs of the Frenches thoroughly to their innermost
convolutions, and who was at the moment himself in the most horrible
condition of penury, a condition that made the purchase of his week-end
ticket to Crowsnest (he came down every week-end) a matter of
consequence.
"And that's not all," went on the girl. "Here's a bazaar coming on, and,
of course, we'll have to subscribe to that in some way. They want me to
take a stall. You haven't any aunts or anyone who would do embroidery
for it, have you? It's to be on April 5."
"No," said Mr. Dashwood, "I don't think I have any female relatives any
good in the fancy needlework line. I've got a charitably-disposed
elderly female cousin I might land for a subscription, though."
"I wouldn't trust myself with the money. No matter. I daresay we will
manage somehow. I want to go down to Crowsnest and post these letters.
Will you walk with me?"
"Rather," replied Mr. Dashwood, and, taking his hat, he followed her out
on the verandah.
It was a clear March morning, without a trace of cloud in the sky, and
with just a trace of frost in the air. The country, still half wrapped
in the sleep of winter, had that charm which a perfect English early
spring day can alone disclose, and there was something--something in the
air, something in the sky, some indefinable thrill at the heart of
things that said, spirit fashion, to whoever could hear, "All this is
drawing to a close. Even now, in the woods, here and there, you will
find primroses. In a week or two you will find a million. My doors are
just about to open, the cuckoo is just preening for flight, the swallows
at Luxor and Carnac are dreaming of the pine trees and the north. I am
Spring."
Mr. Dashwood was not given to poetical interpretations of Nature's
moods, but there was that in the air to-day which raised to an acute
stage the chronic disease he had been suffering from for months. He had
seen a lot of his companion during the last ten weeks or so, but he had
played the game like a man. Not a word had he said of his mortal malady
to the author of it.
But there are limits to endurance. This could not go on any longer; yet
how was he to end it? French had said nothing since that interview in
the Shelbourne Hotel, and a subject like that, once dropped between two
men, is horribly difficult to take up again.
What did French propose to do? Was he waiting till Garryowen won or lost
the City and Suburban before he "asked" Miss Grimshaw. No time limit had
been imposed. "I'm giving you a fair field and no favour," Mr. French
had said. "If she likes you better than me, well and good. If she likes
me better than you, all the better for me."
That was all very well, but which did she like best? This question was
now calling imperatively for an answer. Miss Grimshaw alone could answer
it; but who was to ask her? No third person could put the proposition
before her. Only one of the two rivals could do so, and to do so would
be to propose, and to propose would be dishonest.
Of course, a seemingly easy solution of the difficulty would be to go to
French and say: "See here. I can't stand this any longer. I'm so much in
love with this girl I must speak. What do you propose to do?"
Seemingly easy, yet most immensely difficult. In the Shelbourne, when
the young man had spoken, he had spoken in one of those outbursts of
confidence which men rarely give way to. To reopen the question in cold
blood was appallingly hard. Not only had he got to know the girl better
in the last few months, but he had also got an entirely different view
of French. The good, easy-going French had turned for Mr. Dashwood from
another man who was a friend into a friend who was a sort of fatherly
relation. The difference in years between them showed up stronger and
stronger as acquaintanceship strengthened, and French had taken on an
avuncular manner.
The benevolent and paternal in his nature had unconsciously developed;
he was constantly giving Bobby good advice, warning him of the evils of
getting into debt, holding himself up as an awful example, etc. French,
in the last ten weeks, had shown no symptoms of special feeling with
regard to the lady. Was he, too, playing the game, or had he forgotten
all about his intentions towards her? Or was his mind taken up so
completely with the horse and his money troubles that he had no time at
the moment to think of anything else?
"Isn't it delightful?" said Miss Grimshaw.
"Which?" asked Bobby, coming back from perplexed meditations to reality.
"This! The air! The country! Look! there's a primrose."
They were taking the downhill path from The Martens. A pale yellow
primrose growing in a coign of the Down side had attracted her
attention, and she stooped to pick it.
"Now, I wish I hadn't. What beasts we are! We never see a flower but we
must pick it, or a bird but we want to shoot it. This might have lived
days if I had left it alone, and now it will wither in a few hours.
Here."
She stopped and fixed the primrose in Mr. Dashwood's buttonhole. She
was so close, touching him, and her felt hat almost brushed his face.
There was no one on the path. It was the psychological moment, yet he
had to let it go.
"Thanks," he said.
Miss Grimshaw looked at the flower critically for a second, with her
pretty head slightly on one side.
"It will stick in without a pin," she said. "Come on, or I'll miss the
post. No, thanks, I can carry the letters all right. I like to have
something in my hand. Why is it that persons always feel lost without
something in their hands? Look, that's Miss Slimon's house, The Ranch.
She's immensely rich and awfully mean, and lives there alone with three
servants. She's always dismissing them. I don't know why unless they
steal the poetry. There's nothing else much to steal, for she's a
vegetarian and lives on a shilling a day, and keeps the servants on
board wages. And I have to give her a guinea out of my hard-earned
savings for that poetical club. I'm going to make Effie write the
poetry. It will give the child something to do. That's Colonel Creep's
house, The Roost. They were the first people to call on us. Sort of
spies sent out by the others to see how the land lay. Do you know, I've
never thanked you for something?"
"No? What's that?"
"Do you remember your forethought in making me a niece to Mr. French?
Well, I never felt the benefit of your benevolent intention so much as
the day when the Creeps called on us, and when they crept into the
drawing-room, three girls like white snails, followed by an old
gentleman like a white cockatoo. It was so pleasant to think they
thought I was on a social and mental equality with them, and so pleasant
to think they were wrong!"
"Wrong!" cried Dashwood, flying out. "I should think they were wrong!
Not fit to black your boots."
"Perhaps that's what I meant, from my point of view," said Miss Grimshaw
modestly, "and perhaps it wasn't. Anyhow, the situation was not without
humour. Our relationship with the Crowsnest people has been a long
comedy of a sort. You know all our affairs, but you don't know the ins
and outs, and how the wild Irish on the hillside----"
"Yes?"
Miss Grimshaw laughed. "Do you remember that little dinner party Mr.
French--my uncle, I mean--gave in January to Colonel Bingham and the
Smith-Jacksons?"
"Yes."
"You remember how Colonel Bingham praised the pheasants? Well, they were
his own pheasants."
"His own pheasants!"
"Moriarty poached them."
Mr. Dashwood exploded.
"I did not know at the time," went on Miss Grimshaw virtuously. "I
entrusted the marketing to Mrs. Driscoll. I explained to her privately
that we would have to be very economical. She quite understood. I will
say for the Irish that they are quicker in the uptake than any other
people I know. She said she could make ends meet on two pounds ten a
week, and she has done so. More, she has made them lap over. I am not
very good at the price of things. Still, pheasants at a shilling each
seemed to me very cheap. Of course, I thought most probably she was
dealing with some man who got the things in some contraband way, and I
suppose it was very wicked of me, but--the pheasants were very nice.
Then there were vegetables.
"You can't poach vegetables?"
"I think I said before," went on Miss Grimshaw, "that the Irish were
quicker than any other people I know in the uptake, and I'm very much
afraid that Moriarty has uptaken, not only all the potatoes that have
come to our table this winter, but the turnips as well."
Again Mr. Dashwood exploded.
"Of course you can't poach vegetables," she went on, "but you can poach
eggs, and, as a matter of fact, I believe our fried eggs are poached
eggs. Could such a statement ever occur out of Ireland and carry sense
with it? It's awful, isn't it?"
"I think it's a jolly lark," said Mr. Dashwood. "Gloats! To think of old
Bingham gobbling his own turkeys!"
"Pheasants, you mean. Don't talk of turkeys, for we've had three since
Christmas, and I don't know what's been going on in the kitchen in the
way of food, but I know they had jugged hare for supper last night."
"When did you find out about it?"
"Yesterday morning I began to guess. You see, I had been wondering for a
long time how Mrs. Driscoll had been managing to produce such good food
for two pounds ten a week. She pays for the groceries and everything out
of it. Well, yesterday morning she brought me six pounds that she had
'saved' out of the housekeeping money; she said it might be useful to
'the master.'
"I must say it was a perfect godsend, but I thought it more than
peculiar, and I tried to cross-question her. But it was useless. She
swore she had been saving the money for months--before we left Drumgool
even--so I could say no more.
"However, things came to a climax last night. I was lying in bed; it was
long after eleven, and the moon was very bright, and I heard a noise in
the stable-yard. My window looks on to the stable-yard. I got up and
peeped through the blind, and I saw Moriarty and Andy with a sheep
between them. They were trying to put it into one of the loose boxes,
and it didn't seem to want to go. Now, when you are trying to drive a
sheep like that against its will, it bleats, doesn't it?"
"I should think so."
"Well; this sheep didn't bleat--it was muzzled!"
They had reached the post-office by this, and Miss Grimshaw stopped to
put in her letters; then she remembered that she required stamps and a
packet of hooks and eyes, so she left Mr. Dashwood to his meditations in
the street and entered the little shop.
It was a very small shop that competed in a spirited way with the
Italian warehouse. It sold boots, too--hobnailed boots hung in banks
from the ceiling--and a small but sprightly linen-drapery business went
on behind a counter at right angles to the counter that sold tinned
salmon and tea.
Chopping, who owned this emporium, was a pale-faced man, consumptive,
and sycophantic, with a horrible habit of washing his hands with
invisible soap when any of the carriage people of Crowsnest entered his
little shop. This is a desperately bad sign in an Englishman; as a
symptom of mental and moral depravity it has almost died out. In the
early and mid Victorian age, in the era of little shops and small
hotels, it was marked; but it lingers still here and there in England,
and when one meets with it it makes one almost a convert to Socialism.
Mr. Chopping washed his hands before Miss Grimshaw, for, though the
Frenches were not carriage people, they owned horses and were part of
the social state of Crowsnest; and Miss Grimshaw wondered if Mr.
Chopping would have washed his hands so vigorously if he had known all.
There was a big notice of the forthcoming bazaar hanging behind the
drapery counter.
This bazaar had become a bugbear to the girl. Amid her other
distractions she was working a table-cover for it, and Effie, who was
clever with her needle, was embroidering a tea-cosy. If the thing were a
failure, and the sum necessary for reconstructing the choir stalls in
the church were not forthcoming, there was sure to be a subscription,
and money was horribly tight, and growing tighter every day.
Things had managed themselves marvellously well up to this, thanks to
French's luck. The unfortunate gentleman, whose pocket-money under the
strict hand of Miss Grimshaw did not exceed ten shillings a week, had
managed to make that sum do. More than that, he wore the cloak of his
poverty in such a way that it seemed the garment of affluence. The ready
laugh, the bright eye, and the jovial face of Mr. French made the few
halfpence he jingled in his pocket sound like sovereigns. He played
bridge with so much success that he just managed to keep things even;
and the rare charm of his genial personality made him a general
favourite.
"Shall we go back, or go for a little walk down the road?" asked Miss
Grimshaw, as she left the post-office and rejoined her cavalier.
"A walk, by all means," replied Mr. Dashwood. "Let's go this way. Well,
go on, and tell me about the sheep."
"Oh, the sheep! Yes, there it was, struggling in the moonlight; they
were trying to get it into the loose box next the one The Cat's in; and
they did, Andy jostling it behind and Moriarty pulling it by the head.
Then they shut the door."
"Yes?"
"That's all. I saw the light of a lantern gleaming through the cracks of
the door, and I felt as if I had been accessory before the fact--isn't
that what they call it?--to a murder. Of course, I saw Mrs. Driscoll
this morning, and I taxed her right out, and she swore she knew nothing
about it. At all events, I told her it mustn't occur again and I think I
frightened her."
"That chap Moriarty must be an expert poacher," said Mr. Dashwood.
"Expert is no name for it, if he's done all I suspect him of doing. It's
a most strange position, for I believe they don't see any harm in it.
You see, they seem to look upon the people about here as enemies and
Sussex as an enemy's country, and really, you know, they have still a
good deal of the original savage clinging to them. I found a notched
stick in the kitchen the other day, and I found it belonged to Norah.
Every notch on it stood for a week that she had been here."
"They used to do that at cricket matches long ago to score the runs.
I've seen an old rustic Johnny--they said he was 104--doing it."
"Let's stop here for a moment," said the girl.
Miss Grimshaw and Mr. Dashwood had reached the little bridge on the
Roman road at the foot of the hill. The river, wimpling and sparkling in
the sunlight, was alive as in summer, but all else was dead--or asleep.
Dead leaves had blown in the river bed and floated on the water, or were
mossed in the crevices of the stones here and there. They found a brown
carpet amid the trees of the wood. You could see far in amid the trees,
whose leafless branches formed a brown network against the blue winter
sky.
From amid the tree, from here, from there, came occasionally the twitter
of a bird. Not a breath of wind stirred the branches, and the place had
the stillness of a stereoscopic picture. This spot, so haunted by poetry
and beauty in summer, in winter was not entirely deserted. On a day
like this it had a strange beauty of its own.
Temptation comes in waves. The all but overmastering temptation to seize
the girl in his arms and kiss her, which had assailed Mr. Dashwood on
the hillside, was now returning gradually. She was leaning with her
elbows on the balustrade of the bridge; her clear-cut profile,
delicately outlined against the winter trees, held him, as one is held
by the graceful curves of a cameo.
Down here, to-day, everything was preternaturally still. The essential
and age-old silence of the Roman road seemed to have flooded over the
country as a river floods over its banks; the warbling and muttering of
the water running beneath the bridge served only to accentuate this
silence and point out its intensity.
"What are you thinking of?" said Mr. Dashwood.
The girl started from her reverie, and glanced sideways at her
companion, one of those swallow-swift glances whose very momentariness
is filled with meaning. Mr. Dashwood had spoken. In those five words he
had let his secret escape. In the words themselves there was nothing,
but in the tone of them there was much. They were five messengers, each
bearing a message. Five volumes of prose could not have told her more. I
doubt if they could have told her as much.
She glanced away again at the river.
"I don't know. Nothing. That's the charm of this place. I often come
here and lean on the bridge and look at the water. It seems to mesmerise
one and take away the necessity for thought. Don't you feel that when
you look at it?"
"No," said Mr. Dashwood. "I wish to goodness it did."
She cast another swift side glance at him. The alteration in his tone
made her wonder. His voice had become hard and almost irritable. He
spoke as a man speaks who is vexed by some petty worry, and the words
themselves were not over complimentary.
She could not in the least understand what was the matter with him. Ever
since his return to Drumgool, while her mind had been engaged in the
intricate problem of Mr. French's affairs, her subliminal mind had been
engaged in the equally intricate problem presented by the conduct of Mr.
French and Mr. Dashwood. There were times when, alone with her
supposititious uncle, the original man in him seemed just about to speak
the old language of original man to original woman. There were times
when, alone with Mr. Dashwood, the same natural phenomenon seemed about
to happen.
Yet something always intervened. French would seem to remember
something, check himself, turn the conversation, and, with the bad grace
of a bad actor playing a repugnant part, change from warmth to
indifference. Dashwood, even a worse actor than French, would, as in the
present instance, suddenly, and for no apparent reason, become almost
rude.
Not in the least understanding the position of the two gentlemen one
towards the other, and the fact that they looked upon each other as
rivals in a game whose rules of honour had to be observed, she had
passed from amusement to vague amazement when these sudden changes of
temperature took place, and from amazement to irritation.
"Perhaps," said Miss Grimshaw, "you never feel the necessity."
"For what?"
"Want of thought."
"Being a person who never thinks, how could you?" was what her tone
implied.
"Oh, I dare say I feel it as much as other people," he said. "In a world
like this, it seems to me that the happiest people are the people who
don't think."
"How happy some people must be!" murmured she, gazing at the rippling
water and speaking as though she were taking it into cynical confidence.
"Thanks," said Mr. Dashwood.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I only said 'Thanks.'"
"What for?"
"Your remark."
"My remark?"
"Yes."
"What on earth was there in my remark to thank me for?"
"If there's one thing I hate more than another," burst out Mr. Dashwood,
"it's sarcasm misapplied."
"Why do you misapply it, then?"
"I never do. I never use it, so I couldn't misapply it. It's you."
"What's you?"
"You who are sarcastic."
"I sarcastic!" said the girl with the air of a sacristan accused of
theft. "When was I ever sarcastic?"
The linnets in the trees must have heard the raised voices; the humans
were quarrelling in good earnest then; no doubt, seeing the young man
seize the young woman, then flew away thinking tragedy had arrived on
the old Roman road with all her pomp and circumstance.
For a moment the astonished girl had a vision of being hauled over the
bridge to drown in the six-inch river, and then she lost consciousness
to everything but the embrace of the man who had seized her in his arms.
Lips, eyes, and mouth covered with burning kisses, she leaned against
the parapet, gasping for breath and--alone.
Mr. Dashwood had gone; vaulting over the low fence of the wood, he had
vanished amid the trees. No criminal ever escaped quicker after the
commission of his crime.
"Mad! Oh, he's mad!" she gasped, half laughing, gasping, and not far
from tears. It was not the outburst of fervent passion that astonished
or shocked her--it was the running away.
The deep throb of a motor-car topping the hill brought her to her
senses, and she had composed herself, and was leaning on the parapet
again, looking at the river, as it whizzed by.
Then she took her way back to The Martens, walking slowly and thinking
the situation over as she walked.