“He’s come!” Billy excitedly told the guests, as he met them in the
hall at Quintmere. “Came all the way without a break.”
“Where’s the flying-machine?” said Jennie, as excitedly.
“In the Four Acres field--I told him most carefully exactly where to
land, and he made a glorious descent.”
“Oh, why didn’t I see it! Can’t we go and look at it after dinner?”
“All covered up with tarpaulin and stuff for the night. Two of the men
are going to watch it, in turns, all night. Fancy, Jennie, the pilot’s
here, too--he’s having supper in the housekeeper’s room!”
The two young things looked at one another with glowing eyes, and Lydia
involuntarily smiled in sympathy, incomprehensible to her though their
enthusiasm was.
Her smile died away when, to Jennie’s agitated whisper at the
drawing-room door, “Oh, I feel as if I was being introduced to
Royalty!” Billy replied reassuringly, “You needn’t be nervous.
Grandmama’s been telling him about you pulling the hurdles off that kid
this afternoon, and he was fearfully interested.”
Really, Lady Lucy spoilt both her grandchildren, Lydia reflected. Here
was Mr. Roland Valentine treated as an honoured guest, staying in the
old house to which so few visitors were ever invited, just because
Billy had known him at Oxford, and had gone mad about his experiments
in aviation. He struck Lydia as rather a common young man, good-looking
in a bold, well-set-up fashion, and with a faint, unfamiliar twang in
his speech.
And grandmama was just as indulgent of Jennie as she was of Billy.
She inquired with solicitude if the girl were tired, or had felt any
strain from her exertions, and she recapitulated, with the iteration of
old age, the story of Jennie’s prowess in the afternoon.
“I wish I’d seen you--it sounds as though you’d been a regular
heroine,” said Mr. Roland Valentine, rather too familiarly, Lydia
thought.
“It wasn’t anything. I’ve _heaps_ of muscle.”
Jennie thrust out a white, solid forearm, pushing the black net sleeve
away from her elbow.
“By Jove!” said Mr. Valentine admiringly.
All through dinner they talked about aeroplanes, and Jennie asked
questions that elicited long, technical-sounding replies from
Valentine, who kept his eyes fixed upon hers across the table.
“I say, you’ve been reading all this up,” he challenged her at last.
“No, I haven’t,” cried Jennie, unresentful of the assumption, but
eager to display her credentials. “I’ve been keen on machinery, and
especially on flying, for ages--haven’t I, Billy?”
“Rather,” said Billy heartily.
“_Can’t_ we go out and look at the machine to-night?”
“It’s all covered up--you won’t see much.”
“I don’t care--just the _shape_ would be something. Mayn’t we,
grandmama?”
“If Mr. Valentine will take you,” said Lady Lucy placidly. “But why not
wait till to-morrow morning?”
“I’m afraid I have to be off good and early,” said the young airman.
“But I hope you’ll all come and see the start.”
The naïve egotism of the invitation almost made Lydia laugh.
But she was vaguely glad that Mr. Valentine was to leave next day.
She altered the trend of the conversation by asking him whether he had
always lived in America. Something in his intonation, though scarcely
to be called an accent, prompted the suggestion.
“I’ve spent my life in Vancouver, but I don’t know the States.”
“Vancouver!” cried Jennie. “Oh, mama, perhaps he knows Cousin Bob!”
Jennie did not herself know any of the Senthovens excepting Aunt
Evelyn and Olive, and her sense of clan-ship was a continual source of
vexation to Lydia, by whom it was not shared in any degree.
“Canada is a large place,” she said, laughing a little. “Your Cousin
Bob is on Vancouver Island, not on the mainland at all.”
“What’s Cousin Bob’s name, anyway?” said Mr. Valentine encouragingly.
“It’s Senthoven, not a bit a common name,” said Jennie eagerly. “Oh, do
say you know him.”
“Well, I’m afraid I just don’t--but I tell you what, Miss Damerel, I’ll
make a point of looking him up as soon as I get back, and telling him
he’s got a very charming relative in England who’s anxious for news of
him.”
“Nonsense,” said Lydia, laughing. “My daughter doesn’t even know this
cousin. I don’t know what this sudden interest in poor Cousin Bob is
about, Jennie.”
Jennie coloured. For all her schoolgirl forwardness, it was always easy
to make her blush, and Lydia was not sorry for it.
“Jennie is just like her father,” said Joyce Damerel. “Clement always
took an interest in anybody belonging to him, however distant, don’t
you remember?”
“I’ve heard heaps about Cousin Bob from Aunt Beryl and Aunt Evelyn, and
seen his photograph when he was a little boy,” said Jennie, casting an
openly resentful glance at Lydia.
The young airman was looking from one to another with unabashed, almost
openly amused interest and curiosity.
Joyce Damerel turned the conversation to Mr. Valentine’s exploits with
his machine, and he dilated upon them with a sort of simplicity that
just saved him from blatancy, until the end of dinner.
Then Jennie said, “Oh, may I?” and without waiting for any permission,
rushed into the hall in search of the old carriage lantern.
As the expedition started Lydia heard her eager voice begin again:
“But if the shaft of the propeller was at _that_ angle----”
“Shall you go with them, my dear?” said Lady Lucy to Lydia. “Do, if you
want to, though there is very little to see now. Joyce and I watched
the machine come down--a most wonderful sight.”
“No, thank you,” said Lydia. “Perhaps I shall see the start, and they
don’t really want anyone with them. They’re still talking machinery.”
“The young people of to-day are able to dispense with chaperonage,”
said grandmama calmly. “They are all so impersonal.”
“Well,” said Joyce Damerel, with the curt, matter-of-factness that
Lydia so much disliked, “I shouldn’t dispense with it too much in
Jennie’s case, if I were Lydia, for, to my mind, she’s extraordinarily
attractive.”
Lydia felt an odd mingling of annoyance and gratification.
They sat in the lamp-lit drawing-room, just as they always did at
Quintmere after dinner, and the placid routine that Lydia knew so well
took its accustomed course.
Coffee was brought in, and Lady Lucy lamented that the careless
children had taken Mr. Valentine out before he could have had any.
“Are Solomon’s biscuits there, Joyce?”
The old Aberdeen terrier’s biscuits were always there, in a little
silver box with a chased lid.
“Solly--Solly--come along, then!”
As the small and aged dog shuffled slowly up, an old recollection
stirred in Lydia, and she gave a fleeting thought to the memory of
Grandpapa’s Shamrock.
There had been a great deal of talk about getting rid of the
obstreperous Shamrock after Grandpapa’s death, but after all Aunt Beryl
had kept him, and for weeks he had faithfully shadowed Mr. Monteagle
Almond, the solitary paying guest of the Regency Terrace house, and
a notorious hater of dogs. Lydia could smile a little at the memory
of prim Mr. Monteagle Almond, disgraced in the town where he was so
well known, by the antics of his companion, by Shamrock’s raids upon
perambulators, and butchers’ shops and nervous girls on bicycles.
Shamrock’s fate at the end had remained uncertain, for, after a severe
and much-overdue thrashing at last bestowed by a righteously incensed
Uncle George, the Sealyham had rushed out of the house with every
appearance of being still entirely unsubdued, and had never come back
again.
“I don’t believe that dog could ever die,” Aunt Beryl had remarked
simply. “Honest to goodness, Lydia, I believe he was possessed.”
They had all of them left it at that.
“Poor Solomon is getting very blind, I’m afraid,” said Lady Lucy.
She said it every evening.
Joyce Damerel sat, very upright, by the open window, and knitted
something silken. She was not a needlewoman, but Lydia knew that she
would have thought it waste of time equally to sit unoccupied, or to
read a book.
Lydia herself picked up an _Illustrated London News_, and Lady Lucy
softly rustled the sheets of the _Times_.
“Have you heard how that poor woman is, at the hospital, Joyce, my
dear?”
There was always some poor woman or other to be inquired after.
“Oh, dear, these Suffragettes again!”
That was Lady Lucy’s contribution to the agitating problem of the day.
The clock on the mantelpiece chiming ten startled them all in the
drowsy silence.
“Where are those children? They must have come in, and gone to the
billiard-room.”
Then the footman brought in a tray with glasses, and a decanter and
syphon, and a large jug of cold water.
“Are the young gentlemen in the billiard-room, Charles?”
“No, my lady, talking with the pilot person.”
“And where is Miss Jennie?” said Lydia quickly.
“I don’t think Miss Jennie ’as come in from the Four Acres field,
madam.”
“It’s too late for her without a cloak or anything, silly child! I
shall go and see,” said Joyce Damerel.
She rose with her decisive movement, and left the room.
Lydia was left again to the drowsy silence of the drawing-room and old
Lady Lucy.
She knew that Joyce had only gone out because she did not want Jennie
to be scolded by her mother for the indiscretion of her escapade. Did
they all think her such a tyrant, then? Lydia smiled rather bitterly,
realizing vividly at the moment that she did not at all feel herself to
be amongst the Olympians, the law-givers, and lookers-on at the game of
life.
Rather was she unable to feel her place to be anywhere but in the arena
itself, in the very forefront.
But since the tragically early death of Clement, and the evanescence
of the momentary lustre of pathos surrounding his widow, it seemed to
her that she had been relegated into the background--a background,
moreover, that was merely expected to throw into relief other and
younger personalities.
Joyce Damerel might accept a place in that background--Lydia herself
could not do so.
She felt herself to be far more alive, far more real, than was little
Jennie, and it angered her that other people did not seem so to feel
her.
The door opened, and Billy came in.
“Hallo, aren’t the other two in? I thought they were just behind me. I
say, Aunt Lydia, we’ve a great plan. Can’t Jennie stay the night here,
so as to see Valentine start to-morrow morning? He’s got to be off
early.”
Lydia looked at Lady Lucy.
“Delighted to have dear little Jennie,” said the old lady placidly.
“It really is an opportunity not to be missed, and she has always been
so interested in these strange machines. I was struck by her knowledge
to-night.”
“So was Valentine,” said Billy, in an awed voice. “You should have
heard them in the field, jawing away. Why, she knew nearly as much
about it as he did!”
“Wonderful!” said Lady Lucy. “Ring the bell, my dear boy, and tell them
to get the little blue room ready at once.”
“And may I have the carriage, grandmama? It’s later than usual,” said
Lydia.
“Certainly, my dear.”
“I’ll put the child’s things together, just for to-night and to-morrow
morning, and send them back in the carriage. I won’t keep it waiting.”
“You are always so thoughtful, my dear,” declared Lady Lucy
affectionately.
She was very fond of Lydia nowadays.
“Good night, grandmama. If I don’t see Jennie, tell her that I shall
expect her home in time for lunch to-morrow.”
But Lydia did see Jennie.
Joyce Damerel and the young airman, and Jennie herself, were coming
into the hall just as she left the drawing-room, politely escorted by
Billy.
“Grandmama has suggested that you should stay the night, Jennie, and
then you’ll be able to see the start to-morrow morning,” said Lydia.
“Oh--your shoes!”
She looked down in dismay at the satin slippers, soaked with dew.
“They’re very old,” said Jennie perversely. “I don’t suppose it’ll hurt
them.”
“I’m thinking of your catching cold,” began Lydia severely, and stooped
to feel the damp edges of Jennie’s black evening-frock.
In her usual ungracious fashion the girl twitched herself away, as she
always did at such demonstrations of her mother’s solicitude.
Lydia almost involuntarily looked up to see the impression that might
be produced by her daughter’s ungrateful reception of the maternal
thoughtfulness.
Roland Valentine was gazing at Jennie, and there was more than a
suspicion of laughter in his bold eyes--laughter that, as Lydia quickly
felt, was wholly sympathetic of her youthful ingratitude.
“I fancy you’re a pretty strong girl, aren’t you? It’s rather waste of
anxiety to fuss around you, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is, as I’m always telling mama. I’ve never been ill yet,”
boasted Jennie.
“I’d rather _be_ ill and have done with it, than have to be always
thinking of taking care, the way some girls do--and fellows too, if
they’re mollies,” affirmed the airman.
“Or having someone else taking care for one,” murmured Jennie under her
breath, casting a half-deprecating, half-impudent glance at her mother.
“You ungrateful little cat!” cried Joyce Damerel. But she laughed as
she said it, and put her arm round the shoulders of her recalcitrant
niece.
Lydia, with an angry, insurgent feeling that they were all against her,
compressed her lips slightly and said nothing for a moment.
“Here’s the carriage,” Billy announced.
“Good night, mama,” Jennie murmured, in accents that sounded rather
contrite.
She came forward into the restricted circle of light cast by the
old-fashioned standard lamp, and Lydia saw that her face was flushed
and her eyes shining like stars. An untidy bunch of heavily-scented
syringa was thrust into her belt.
The syringa had not come from the Four Acres field, where the aeroplane
was. The great, blossom-laden bushes stood at the furthest and darkest
end of the lower drive at Quintmere.
Lydia looked at the syringa and glanced at Jennie, but Jennie’s gaze
remained unembarrassed, only curiously dilated and unusually brilliant.
Lydia could read nothing there.
“Good night, Joyce--good-bye, Mr. Valentine--and _bon voyage_.”
They clustered at the hall-door as Billy ran down the steps and spoke
to the old coachman. All the servants at Quintmere were old.
“Lunch-time to-morrow I shall expect you,” said Lydia to her daughter.
“I am going to put your night things together as soon as I get in, and
send them back in the carriage.”
The softness vanished in an instant out of Jennie’s eyes.
“Do let Susan do it, mama. She’ll know quite well what I want. I hate
you to tire yourself fussing about my beastly things.”
Never had Jennie been quite so outspokenly defiant of Lydia’s
tenderness. Was it the presence of that rather common young Colonial,
with his too-evident enjoyment of her revolt, that gave such assurance
to her display of bad taste?
Lydia drew the child towards her, and kissed her with calm decision.
“Don’t be a silly little thing. You know I like to do things for you
myself--then I know they’re properly done. Besides,” said Lydia very
clearly, “you know very well that I always pack for you.”
She got into the carriage as she spoke, but she had seen Jennie flush
to a quick, angry scarlet, and although she could not hear what the
girl said as she flounced round, it was easy enough to guess.
“Yes, and I _hate_ mama to pack for me, and do all that sort of thing!”
Jennie had hated it, and crudely and ungraciously voiced her hatred,
ever since her fourteenth year, but she was as naturally unhandy as
Lydia was methodical, and had never been encouraged to wait upon
herself.
Lydia had always preferred to sacrifice herself, her own time and her
own strength. Jennie’s few and bungling attempts at doing her own
packing, her own mending, her own tidying, had been merely ludicrous.
No wonder that every such spasmodic effort, generally undertaken in
angry opposition to her mother’s toil on her behalf, had merely led
to a double share of work falling upon Lydia, patiently repairing the
effect of Jennie’s blunders far into the night.
But the thought of past justifications did not come to Lydia’s help now.
She leant back in the dark corner of the little closed carriage,
helpless and puzzled.
What had that impossible youth said to little Jennie under the
syringa-bushes in the dark drive--why had they taken that way
home--that was no way at all--from the Four Acres field? It must have
been at Jennie’s suggestion, for how could Mr. Valentine have known
anything about it? How long had they been alone--when had Billy, the
foolish boy, left them together?
Roland Valentine was the sort of young man who would take advantage of
Jennie’s inexperience--her ignorant, youthful daring. Because Jennie
was a hoyden, to whom flirting was unknown, because the allurements of
her youth differed absolutely from Lydia’s own, because she was not
pretty, and, most of all, because Lydia thought of her always as a
child, and never as a young woman, it had been almost impossible to her
ever to believe that Jennie could prove attractive to men.
Joyce Damerel’s insistence on the possibility had merely irritated her,
but with a mingling of gratification and dismay. She had gradually come
to admit the possibility of such a thing when Billy, and actually three
or four of Billy’s friends, had successively fallen victims to most
unmistakable attacks of calf-love for the youthful charms of Jennie
between the ages of fourteen and seventeen.
One of them, six months ago, had even proposed marriage to Jennie! And
it was not Jennie, but the disconsolate lad himself, who had confided
to Lydia Jennie’s unflattering reception of the proposal:
“It’s awfully nice of you and all that, but don’t you think love, and
proposing, and all that sort of thing, rather spoils the fun?”
“She’s simply a child,” the rejected one had informed Lydia, with all
the desperate solemnity of twenty. “She doesn’t a bit know what love
means.”
Lydia had agreed, with a sincerity to which a strong inward sense
of relief added force. Jennie was a child still, undeveloped and
uncomprehending. It would be her mother’s part to shelter and protect
her for many years yet.
In this strain Lydia had talked to Jennie’s first suitor, oddly
reassuring herself at the same time as she impressed upon him the deep
intensity of her maternal rôle.
The boy had been very young, and very easily impressed. He had accepted
the value of Lydia’s maternity just as she had offered it to his
uncritical gaze.
Had they been older, and Jennie less obviously untouched by his
innocent, clumsy love-making, Lydia could almost have wished them to
marry.
Jennie’s husband must be a man who would recognize her foolish
rebellion against her mother’s love for what it was--the ill-regulated
ebullitions of a youthfulness that was wholly unfitted for the
independence that it craved.
Lydia remembered the secret assent to all Jennie’s folly, that had been
so obvious in the eager eyes and nodded head of young Valentine, and
came back to the disagreeable consideration of the immediate past.
They ought not to have been allowed to go out alone together after
dinner, like that. Of course, it had all been an accident--Billy had
been stupid and careless of conventional proprieties, and neither
Jennie nor her escort were likely to recall him to discretion.
Mr. Roland Valentine was quite obviously the sort of man who would
always, in the phrase of Lydia’s youth, “take advantage.”
She moved uneasily in the dark corner of the carriage as she remembered
Jennie’s great grey eyes, shining like lamps, and her round, flushed
face.
Had the Colonial--Lydia so designated him to herself with contemptuous
intent--perhaps even tried to kiss her?
Although Lydia could look back upon episodes in her own youth,
unprotected as Jennie’s had never been, and feel intimately convinced
of her own powers of dealing with any awkward or even dangerous
situation, of conducting to a successful issue even such unsavoury
incidents as those in which the Greek, Margoliouth, or Mr. Codd, the
detective, had figured--it was utterly impossible for her to credit
Jennie with the like capabilities. _Jennie_ could not take care of
herself--little Jennie!
The carriage stopped, and Lydia went up into her daughter’s untidy
bedroom, and packed a small hand-bag for the return journey of the
brougham to Quintmere.
She did not feel as though she could sleep, and before seeking any
rest, she carefully put in order all the tumbled contents in the
plain chest of drawers and dressing-table. It partly assuaged her
vague sensation of anxiety to be occupied, and partly caused her to
feel a certain slight amusement at the thought of Jennie’s indignant
protests could she have seen her mother at work.
It was all unreasonable enough, too, Lydia reflected dryly, for
slatternly little Jennie was only too glad to let Susan, the maid, tidy
up after her, and brush and mend her clothes. But when it came to her
own mother, Jennie apparently could not brook to be served.
Involuntarily the remembrance flashed across Lydia’s mind of the
defiant unthankfulness that had found vent in Jennie’s exclamation of
the previous evening:
“I do hate people to know that you make my things.... It sounds as
though you were always working yourself to death for me, and I let you
do it--and it isn’t true.”
Lydia sighed, and went to her own room.
She had long ago grown used to the quiet of the country nights, and it
seemed almost like a dream to her now, that, as a girl, she had once
worked hard in London, and lived by herself, and counted as friends
people who had passed out of her life as completely as though they had
never existed. The impermanence of these relations troubled her not at
all. Stepping-stones, that was all.
Lydia often felt quite surprised at the fidelity with which Aunt Beryl
and Aunt Evelyn and Olive Senthoven kept their claims on her attention
alive. Olive had long ago left the sanatorium, reported cured, and
certainly not breaking down in health more than once or twice in every
few years. She had even, much against Lydia’s will, repaid a part of
the sum disbursed by the Damerels on her behalf.
She wrote Lydia slangy, uninteresting letters at regular intervals,
giving discouraging accounts of Beatrice, with a husband who drank, and
an over-large family of unhealthy children, and boasting of her own
ability to earn a meagre allowance by means of typewriting.
She seemed to take for granted Lydia’s continued interest in her
uneventful and uninteresting life of drudgery, in Aunt Evelyn’s
sciatica and increasing deafness, in the sordid struggles of Beatrice
and her indescribable Swaines; even in Bob, who had married a Canadian
woman, and wrote that he should never return to England.
Lydia commented politely on these pieces of information, that varied so
seldom, and in her replies wrote in return of the garden, and of the
First Prize taken at the Agricultural Show by Jennie’s sweet-peas, and
of the letter she herself had just received from Aunt Beryl.
The letters of Aunt Beryl came just as regularly, and even more
frequently than those of Olive, but they were less difficult to answer.
The old associations of childhood made it seem natural enough to write
to Regency Terrace, even though one felt no real interest whatever in
the deficiencies of successive “girls,” and the smashing by them of
successive household gods.
“... That’s the last of the green teacups gone, that you’ll remember
from a long way back, dear, though Grandpapa never would have them
used, only unless we’d people, if you recollect.”
Lydia might or might not remember the green teacups, but she always
responded sympathetically, and it was really no effort to write and
tell Aunt Beryl what she and Jennie were doing, while they still met
at least once a year, and Aunt Beryl had even been to stay at Lydia’s
cottage one summer when Lady Lucy and Joyce had been abroad.
But to-night Aunt Beryl seemed almost as remote and unreal as did
the strange people whom Lydia had once known at Miss Nettleship’s
boarding-house. The only living reality was Jennie.
Lydia lay awake in the semi-darkness of the summer night, and thought
intently and passionately about her child for a long while.
Clear-thinking as she had been all her life, she could not adjust the
focus of her mind to an unbiased vision of herself and Jennie. It was
as though, for the first time, a strong personal element governed her
life and strangely deflected her powers of judgment.
She waited for Jennie’s return the next day with a certain anxiety,
desirous of hearing a full account of the previous evening, and of
Jennie’s walk under the syringa-bushes, but in full possession of the
self-control which never allowed her to cross-question her child.
Cross-questioning, indeed, was unnecessary with Jennie, always ready to
talk only too freely about her own exploits.
“Miss Jennie should be here for lunch, Susan. You might make
castle-puddings--she likes those.”
“Yes, ma’am. The eldest Madge boy left a message this morning, ma’am,
to say if Miss Jennie would go and see little Jackie, he’d be so
pleased. They can’t say enough in praise of Miss Jennie, can they,
ma’am?”
Susan’s homely face beamed with simple pride.
“However she did it, pulling up those heavy hurdles--and they say she
handled the little fellow so knowingly, too--Dr. West was praising her
up at the Madges like anything, they said.”
“I hope Jackie is getting on all right,” said Lydia, rather austerely.
“I’ll go down there this afternoon myself. Miss Jennie isn’t very
famous for carefulness,--is she, Susan?--and I was rather afraid she
might have done more harm than good.”