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RICH RELATIVES
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
THE PASSIONATE ELOPEMENT
CARNIVAL
SINISTER STREET: VOL. I
SINISTER STREET: VOL. II
GUY AND PAULINE
SYLVIA SCARLETT
SYLVIA AND MICHAEL
POOR RELATIONS
THE VANITY GIRL
[Copyright: Martin Secker]
RICH RELATIVES
_By COMPTON MACKENZIE_
LONDON: MARTIN SECKER
NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI MCMXXI
TO ALICE AND CHRISTOPHER STONE THIS THEME IN A MINOR
NOVEMBER 15TH, 1920
_Chapter One_
It may have been that the porter at York railway station was irritated
by Sunday duty, or it may have been that the outward signs of wealth in
his client were not conspicuous; whatever the cause, he spoke rudely to
her.
Yet Jasmine Grant was not a figure that ought to have aroused the
insolence of a porter, even if he _was_ on Sunday duty. To be sure, her
black clothes were not fashionable; and a journey from the South of
Italy to the North of England, having obliterated what slight
pretensions to cut they might once have possessed, had left her
definitely draggled. Although the news of having to wait nearly five
hours for the train to Spaborough had brought tears of disappointment
into her eyes, and although the appeal of tears had been spoilt by their
being rubbed off with the back of a dusty glove, Jasmine's beauty was
there all the time--a dark, Southern beauty of jetty lashes curling away
from brown eyes starry-hearted; a slim Southern charm of sunburnt,
boyish hands. Something she had of a young cypress in moonlight,
something of a violoncello, with that voice as deep as her eyes. But for
the porter she was only something of a nuisance, and when she began to
lament again the long wait he broke in as rudely as before:
"Now it's not a bit of good you nagging at me, miss. If the 4.42 goes at
4.42, I can't make it go before 4.42, can I?"
Then perhaps the thought of his own daughters at home, or perhaps the
comforting intuition that there would be shrimps for tea at the close of
this weary day, stirred his better nature.
"Why don't you take a little mouch round the walls? That's what people
mostly does who get stuck in York. They mouch round the walls if it's
fine, like it is, and if it's raining they mouch round the Minster. And
I've known people, I have, who've actually come to York to mouch round
the walls, so you needn't be so aggravated at having to see them whether
you like it or not, as you might say. And now," he concluded, "I suppose
the next thing is you'll want to put your luggage in the cloak-room!"
He spoke with a sense of sacrilege, as if Jasmine had suggested laying
her luggage on the high altar of the Minster.
"Well, that means me having to go and get a truck," he grumbled,
"because the cloak-room's at the other end of the station from what we
are here."
The poor girl was already well aware of the vastness of York railway
station, a vastness that was accentuated by its emptiness on this fine
Sunday afternoon. Fresh tears brimmed over her lids; and as in mighty
limestone caverns stalagmites drop upon the explorer, so now from the
remote roof of glass and iron a smutty drop descended upon Jasmine's
nose.
"Come far, have you?" asked the porter, with this display of kindly
interest apologizing as it were for the behaviour of the station's roof.
"Italy."
"Organland, eh?"
The thought of Italy turned his mind toward music, and he went whistling
off to fetch a truck, leaving his client beside a heap of luggage that
seemed an intrusion on the Sabbath peace of the railway station.
From anyone except porters or touring actors accustomed all their lives
to the infinite variations of human luggage, Jasmine's collection, which
alternately in the eyes of its owner appeared much too large and much
too small, too pretentious and too insignificant, too defiant and too
pathetic, might have won more than a passing regard. But since the
sparse frequenters of the station were all either porters or actors,
nobody looked twice at the leather portmanteau stamped SHOLTO GRANT, at
the hold-all of carpet-bagging worked in a design of the Paschal Lamb,
at the two narrow wooden crates labelled with permits to export modern
works of art from Italy, or at a decrepit basket of fruit covered with
vine leaves and tied up with bunches of tricoloured ribbon; and as for
the owner, she was by this time so hopelessly bedraggled by the effort
of bringing this luggage from the island of Sirene to the city of York
only to find that there was no train on to Spaborough for five hours
that nobody looked twice at her.
Somewhere outside in the sheepish sunlight of England an engine screamed
with delight at having escaped from the station; somewhere deep in the
dust-eclipsed station a retriever howled each time he managed to wind
his chain round the pillar to which it was attached. Then a luggage
train ran down a dulcimer scale of jolts until it finally rumbled away
into silence like the inside of a hungry giant before he falls asleep;
after which there was no sound of anything except the dripping of
condensed steam from the roof to the platform. Jasmine began to wonder
if there would ever be another train to anywhere this Sunday, and if the
porter intended to leave her alone with her luggage on the platform
until to-morrow morning. Everything in England was so different from
what she had been accustomed to all her life; people behaved here with
such rudeness and such evident dislike of being troubled that perhaps
... but her apprehensions were interrupted by the whining of the
porter's truck, which he pushed before him like a truant child being
thumped homeward by its mother. The luggage was put on the truck, and
the porter, cheered by the noise he was making, broke into a vivacious
narrative, of which Jasmine did not understand a single word until he
stopped before the door of the cloak-room and was able to enunciate this
last sentence without the accompaniment of unoiled wheels:
"...and which, of course, made it very uncomfortable for her through
her being related to them."
At the moment the difficulty of persuading a surly cloak-room clerk,
even more indignant than the porter at being made to work on Sunday
afternoon, that the two crates were lawful luggage for passengers,
prevented Jasmine's attempting to trace the origin of the porter's last
remark; but when she was blinking in the sunlight outside the station
preparatory to her promenade of the walls of York, it recurred to her,
and its appropriateness to her own situation made her regret that she
had not heard more about _Her_ and _Them_. Was not she herself feeling
so uncomfortable on account of her relationship to _Them_, so miserable
rather that if another obstacle arose in her path she would turn back
and ... yes, wicked though the thought undoubtedly was, and imperil
though it might her soul should she die before it was absolved ... yes,
indeed she really would turn back and drown herself in that _puzzo nero_
they called the English Channel. Here she was searching for a wall in a
city that looked as large as Naples. Well, if she did not find it, she
would accept her failure as an omen that fate desired her withdrawal
from life. But no sooner had Jasmine walked a short way from the station
than she found that the wall was ubiquitous, and that she would
apparently be unable to proceed anywhere in York without walking on it;
so she turned aside down a narrow passage, climbed a short flight of
steps, and without thinking any more of suicide she achieved that
prospect of the city which had been so highly recommended by the porter.
It was the midday Sabbath hour, when the bells at last were silent; and
since it was fine August weather, the sky had achieved a watery and
pious blue like a nun's eyes. Before her and behind her the river of the
wall flowed through a champaign of roofs from which towers and spires
rose like trees; but more interesting to Jasmine's lonely mood were the
small back gardens immediately below the parapet on either side, from
which the faintly acrid perfume of late summer flowers came up mingled
with beefy smells from the various windows of the small houses beyond,
where the shadowy inmates were eating their Sunday dinners. She felt
that if this were Italy a friendly hand would be beckoning to her from
one of those windows an invitation to join the party, and it was with
another grudge against England that she sat down alone on a municipal
bench to eat from a triangular cardboard box six triangular ham
sandwiches. The restless alchemy of nature had set to work to change the
essences of the container and the contents, so that the sandwiches
tasted more like cardboard and the cardboard felt more like sandwiches;
no doubt it would even have tasted more like sandwiches if Jasmine had
eaten the box, which she might easily have done, for her taste had been
blunted by the long journey, and she would have chewed ambrosia as
mechanically had ambrosia been offered to her. The sandwiches finished,
she ate half a dozen plums, the stones of which dropped on the path and
joined the stones of other plums eaten by other people on the same bench
that morning. Jasmine's mind went swooping back over the journey, past
the bright azure lakes of Savoy, past the stiff and splendid
_carabinieri_ at the frontier, pausing for a moment to play
hide-and-seek with olives and sea through the tunnels of the _riviera di
levante_ ... and then swooped down, down more swiftly until it reached
the island of Sirene, from which it had been torn not yet four full days
ago; the while Jasmine's foot was arranging the plum stones and a few
loose pebbles into first an S and then an I and then a decrepit R, until
they exhausted themselves over an absurdly elongated E.
The weathercock of the nearest church steeple found enough wind on this
hot afternoon to indicate waveringly that what wind there was blew from
the South. Some lines of Christina Rossetti often quoted by her father
expressed, as only remembered poetry and remembered scents can, the
inexpressible:
_To see no more the country half my own,_
_Nor hear the half-familiar speech,_
_Amen, I say; I turn to that bleak North_
_Whence I came forth--_
_The South lies out of reach._
_But when our swallows fly back to the South,_
_To the sweet South, to the sweet South,_
_The tears may come again into my eyes,_
_On the old wise,_
_And the sweet name to my mouth._
She evoked the last occasion at which she had heard her father murmur
these lines. They had been dining on the terrace until the last rays of
a crimson sunset had faded into a deep starry dusk. Mr. Cazenove had
been dining with them, and from the street below a mandolin had
decorated with some simple tune memories of bygone years. The two old
friends had talked of the lovely peasant girls that haunted the Sirene
of their youth, a Sirene not yet spoiled by tourists; an island that in
such reminiscence became fabulous like the island of Prospero.
"But the loveliest of them all was Gelsomina," Mr. Cazenove had
declared. Jasmine was thrilled when she could listen to such tales about
her mother's beauty, that mother who lived for herself only as a figure
in one of her father's landscapes, whose image for herself was merged in
a bunch of red roses, so that even to this day, by dwelling on that
elusive recollection of childhood, the touch of a red rose was the touch
of a human cheek, and she could never see one without a thought of
kisses.
"Yes, indeed she was! The loveliest of them all," Mr. Cazenove had
repeated.
Her father had responded with these lines of Christina Rossetti, and she
knew that he was thinking of a fatal journey to England, when the
unparagoned Gelsomina had caught cold and died in Paris of pneumonia on
the way North to attend the death of Grandfather Grant.
And now her father was dead too.
In a flood of woeful recollections the incidents of that fatal day last
month overwhelmed her. She felt her heart quicken again with terror; she
saw again the countenance of the fisherman who came with Mr. Cazenove to
tell her that a squall had capsized the little cutter in the Bay of
Salerno, and that the only one drowned was her father. Everybody in
Sirene had been sympathetic, and everybody had bewailed her being alone
in the world until letters had arrived from uncles and aunts in England
to assure her that she should be looked after by them; and then nearly
everybody had insisted that she must leave the island as soon as
possible and take advantage of their offers. Yet here she was, more
utterly alone than ever in this remote city of the North, with only a
few letters from people whom she had never seen and for whom she felt
that she should never have the least affection. She was penitent as soon
as this confession had been wrung from her soul, and penitently she felt
in her bag for the letters from the various relatives who had written to
assure her that she was not as much alone in the world as this Sunday in
York was making her believe.
Among these envelopes there was one that by its size and stiffness and
sharp edges always insisted on being read first. There was a crest on
the flap and a crest above the address on the blue notepaper.
317 Harley Street, W.,
_July 29th._
_My dear Jasmine,_
_Your Uncle Hector and I have decided that it would be best for you
to leave Italy at once. Even if your father's finances had left you
independent, we should never have consented to your staying on by
yourself in such a place as Sirene. Your uncle was astonished that
you should even contemplate such a course of action, but as it is,
without a penny, you yourself must surely see the impossibility of
remaining there. Your plan of teaching English to the natives
sounds to me ridiculous, and your plan of teaching Italian to
English visitors equally ridiculous. I once had an Italian woman of
excellent family to read Dante with Lettice and Pamela during some
Easter holidays we once spent in Florence, and I distinctly
remember that her bill after three weeks was something under a
sovereign. At the time I remember it struck me as extremely
moderate, but I did not then suppose that a niece of mine would one
day seriously contemplate earning a living by such teaching. No,
the proper course for you is to come to England at once. Your uncle
has received a letter from the lawyer (written, by the way, in most
excellent English, a proof that if the local residents wish to
learn English they can do so already) to say that when the
furniture, books, and clothes belonging to your father have been
sold, there will probably be enough to pay his debts, and I know it
will be a great satisfaction to you to feel that. The cost of your
journey to England your Uncle Hector is anxious to pay himself, and
the lawyer has been instructed to make the necessary arrangement
about your ticket. You will travel second class as far as London,
and from London to Spaborough, where we shall be spending August,
you had better travel third. The lawyer will be sent enough money
to telegraph what day we may expect you. Grant, Strathspey House,
Spaborough, is sufficient address. We have had a great family
council about your future, and I know you will be touched to hear
how anxious all your uncles and aunts have been to help you. But
your Uncle Hector has decided that for the present at any rate you
had better remain with us. How lucky it is that you should be
arriving just when we shall be in a bracing seaside place like
Spaborough, for after all these years in the South you must be
sadly in need of a little really good air. Besides, you will find
us all in holiday mood, just what you require after the sad times
through which you have passed. Later on, when we go back to town, I
daresay I shall be able to find many little ways in which you can
be useful to me, for naturally we do not wish you to feel that we
are encouraging you to be lazy, merely because we do not happen to
approve of your setting up for yourself as a teacher of languages.
By the way, your uncle is not_ Dr. _Grant any longer._ _Indeed he
hasn't been Dr. Grant for a long time._ _Didn't your father tell
you even when he was knighted?_ _But he is now a baronet, and you
should write to him as Sir Hector Grant, Bt._ _Not Bart._ _Your
uncle dislikes the abbreviation Bart._ _And to me, of course, as
Lady Grant, not Mrs. Grant._
_Love from us all,_
_Your affectionate_
_Aunt May._
The few tears that Jasmine let fall upon the blue notepaper were
swallowed up in the rivulets of the watermark. Although she was on her
way to meet this uncle and aunt and to be received by them as one of the
family, she felt more lonely than ever, and hurriedly laying the
envelope beside her on the bench, she dipped into the bag for another
letter.
The Cedars,
North End Road,
Hampstead,
_July 22nd_.
_Dear Jasmine,_
_I had intended to write you before on the part of Uncle Eneas and
myself to say how shocked we were at the thought of your being left
all alone in the world._ _Your Aunt May writes to me that for the
present at any rate you will be with her, which will be very nice
for you, because the honour which has just been paid to the family
by making your Uncle Hector a baronet will naturally entail a
certain amount of extra entertaining._ _I am only afraid that after
such a merry household The Cedars will seem very dull, but Uncle
Eneas has a lot of interesting stories about the Near East, and if
you are fond of cats you will have plenty to do._ _We are great cat
people, and I shall be glad to have someone with me who is really
fond of them, as I hope you are._ _It is quite the country where we
live in Hampstead, and the air is most bracing, as no doubt you
know._ _I wonder if you ever studied massage?_
_Love from us both,_
_Your affectionate_
_Aunt Cuckoo._
Jasmine tried to remember what her father had said at different times
about his second brother, but she could only recall that once in the
middle of a conversation about Persian rugs he had said to Mr. Cazenove,
"I have a brother in the East, poor chap," and that when Mr. Cazenove
had asked him where, he had replied, "Constantinople or Jerusalem--some
well-known place. He's in the consular service. Or he was." He had not
seemed to be much interested in his brother's whereabouts or career. And
then he had added meditatively, "He married a woman with a ridiculous
name, poor creature. She was the daughter of somebody or other somewhere
in the East." But her father was always vague like that about
everything, and he always said "poor chap" about every man and "poor
creature" about every woman. He had a kind and generous disposition, and
therefore he felt everybody was to be pitied. Jasmine wished now that
she had asked more about Uncle Eneas and Aunt Cuckoo. Cuckoo! Yes, it
was a ridiculous name. Such a ridiculous name that it sounded as remote
from reality as Rumplestiltzkin. No girl, however large the quantity of
flax she must spin into gold before sunrise, could have guessed Aunt
Cuckoo.
_To-day I brew, to-morrow I bake,_
_And to-morrow the King's daughter I shall take,_
_For no one from wheresoever she came_
_Could guess that Aunt Cuckoo was my name._
Jasmine was feeling that she ought not to be laughing at her father's
relatives like this so soon after he had died, when suddenly she woke up
to the fact that they were just as much, even more, her relatives too.
It was like waking up on Monday morning during the year in which she was
sent to school with the Sisters of the Seven Dolours in Naples and could
only come back to Sirene for the week-ends. With a shudder she placed
Aunt Cuckoo on the bench and picked up Aunt Mildred.
23 The Crescent,
Curtain Wells,
_July 20th.:
_My dear Jasmine,_
_Uncle Alec and I were terribly shocked to hear of your father's
accident. Only a few weeks before I was suggesting a little visit
to Rome, a place which Uncle Alec knows very well indeed, for he
was military attache there for six months in 1904, and was rather
surprised that your father never took the trouble to come and visit
him. Unfortunately, however, His Serene Highness was not well
enough to make the journey this spring. Of course you know that for
some time now Prince Adalbert of Pomerania has been living with us.
You will like him so much when you pay us your visit. He is as
simple as a child. We thought at first that he might be difficult
to manage, but he has been no trouble and when the Grand Duke
graciously entrusted his son to our keeping without an A.D.C., it
was quite easy, because it left us a spare room. Baron Miltzen,
the Chamberlain, runs over occasionally to see how the Prince is
getting on, but the Grand Duchess, who never forgets that she was
an English princess, prefers to make her younger son as English as
possible, and will not allow any German doctors to interfere with
the treatment prescribed by your Uncle Hector. Of course the poor
boy will never be well enough to take an active part in the affairs
of his country, and as he is not the heir, there is not much
opposition in Pomerania to his being educated abroad. Indeed Baron
Miltzen said to me only the last time he ran over that he thought
an English education was probably the best in the world for anyone
as simple as the dear Prince. If we cannot get away to the Riviera
this winter you will have to pay us a visit and help to keep the
Prince amused. We have dispensed with ceremony almost entirely,
because we found that it excited the Prince too much. In fact it
was finally decided to entrust him to us, because after the first
levee he attended the poor fellow always wanted to walk backwards,
and it took us quite a little time to cure him of this habit_.
_Love from us both,_
_Your affectionate_
_Aunt Mildred._
Indeed Jasmine had heard about the Prince, because her father always
told everybody he met that one of his brothers had been fool enough to
take charge of a royal lunatic. She remembered thinking that he seemed
proud of the fact, and she could never understand why, particularly as
he spoke so contemptuously of his brother's part in the association.
"Here's pleasant news," her father used to say, "my brother the Colonel
has turned himself into a court flunkey. That's a pretty position for a
Grant! Yes, yes.... He's taken charge of Prince Adalbert of Pomerania,
the second son of the Grand Duke of Pomerania. You remember, who married
Princess Caroline, the Duke of Gloucester's third daughter? I'm ashamed
of my brother. I suppose he had to accept, though; I know it's hard to
get out of these things when you mix yourself up with royalty. I really
believe that I'm the only independent member of the family--the only one
who can call his life his own."
Jasmine quickly took out Aunt Ellen's letter, lest she should seem to be
criticizing her dead father by thinking any more about Prince Adalbert.
The Deanery,
Silchester,
_July 21 st._
_My dear Jasmine,_
_When your Uncle Arnold, wrote to you about your father's sad
death, he forgot to add an invitation to come and stay with us
later on. Now your Aunt May writes to me that it is definitely
decided that you should come to England, and your six boy cousins
are most eager to make your acquaintance. I say "boy" cousins, but
alas! some of them are very much young men these days. I fear we
are all growing old, though your poor father might have expected to
live many more years if he had not been so imprudent. But even as a
boy he was always catching cold through standing about sailing
boats in the Round Pond when your grandfather was Vicar of St.
Mary's, Kensington. However, we must not repine. God's wisdom is
often hidden from us, and we must trust in His fatherly love. I
wonder if you have learnt any typewriting? Uncle Arnold so dislikes
continuous changes in his secretaries, and his work seems to
increase every year. He only intended to do a short history of
England before the Norman Conquest, but the more he goes on, the
further he goes back, and if you were at all interested in Saxon
life I do think it would be worth your while to see if you liked
typewriting. Ethelred has been learning it in the morning instead
of practising the piano, but he does not seem to want to make a
great deal of progress. It's so difficult to understand what
children want sometimes. I suppose our Heavenly Father feels the
same about all of us. When I am tempted to blame Ethelred I
remember this. Of course as a Roman Catholic you have not been
taught a very great deal about God, but we are all His children,
and you must not grieve too much over your loss. "Not lost but gone
before," you must say to yourself. I remember you every night in my
prayers._
_Your loving_
_Aunt Ellen._
Jasmine was asking herself how to set about learning to typewrite, and
making resolutions to check a faint inclination to regret that she had
so many rich relatives anxious to help her, when the languid puffs of
air from the South swelled suddenly into a real wind and blew all the
paper on the bench up into the air and down again into one of the little
back gardens below the parapet--all the paper, that is, except Lady
Grant's blue envelope, which even a gale could scarcely have disturbed.
Jasmine, brought up in Sirene, was not accustomed to conceal her
feelings in the way that a well-educated English girl would have known
how to conceal them. The loss of the letters dismayed her, and she
showed as much by climbing on the parapet of the wall and gazing down
into the garden below.
At that moment a much freckled young man with what is called sandy hair
came along, and without looking to see if he was observed immediately
scrambled up beside her. Even a Sunday school teacher on his way to
class might have been forgiven for doing as much; but this young man was
evidently nothing of the kind. Indeed, with his grey flannel trousers
and Norfolk jacket, he imparted to the atmosphere of Sunday a distinct
whiff of the previous afternoon; standing up there beside Jasmine, he
looked like a golfer who had lost his ball.
"What have you dropped? A hairpin?" he asked.
Jasmine could not help laughing at the notion of bothering about a
hairpin, and she pointed to Mrs. Eneas Grant's letter nestling among the
branches of a sunflower; to where Mrs. Alexander Grant's invitation to
amuse Prince Adalbert of Pomerania twitched nervously on the neat gravel
path; and to where Mrs. Lightbody's suggestions, ghostly and practical,
clung for a moment to a drain-pipe, before they collapsed into what was
left on a broken plate of the cat's dinner.
The twelve-foot drop into the garden below was nothing: the young man
accomplished it with an enthusiastic absence of hesitation. To gather up
the letters was the labour of a minute. But to get back again was
impossible, because the owner of the house, disgusted by the untidiness
of Roman and mediaeval masonry, had repaired and pointed that portion of
the wall which bounded his garden.
"There isn't one niche for your foot," murmured Jasmine, almost tenderly
solicitous.
"I must ring the bell and borrow a ladder," said the stranger. After a
moment's search he announced in an indignant voice that the house
apparently did not possess a bell.
A man in shirt sleeves, interrupted at the second or third of his forty
Sabbath winks, leaned out of an upper window and asked Jasmine what she
thought she was doing jibbering and jabbering on his garden wall; before
she had time to explain, he perceived the young man in the garden, and
asked him what he thought he was doing havering and hovering about among
his flowers.
"I was looking for the bell."
"Bell! You long-legged fool! What d'you think I should keep a bell in my
back garden for, when the children won't let the bells in front have a
moment's peace?" Then he made a noise like a dog shut in a door. "Ough!
Take your great feet out of my petunias, can't you! If I want my flowers
trampled on, I can get a steam-roller to do it. I don't want your help."
"This lady dropped something in your garden," the young man explained,
and the owner smiled bitterly.
"Aye," he went on, "that's what they all say. Please, mister, our Amy's
dropped her damned doll in your garden, can she come round and fetch it
back? It's like living in a dustbin. A scandal, that's what I say it is.
A public scandal."
Then began one of those long arguments in which people roused from sleep
seem to delight, provided always that they have been sufficiently roused
to feel that it is not worth while going to sleep again. What occurred
to lead up to the trespass was swept away as having occurred while the
owner was still asleep; no amount of explanation as to why the young man
was in his back garden was of any avail; no suggestions as to how he was
to get out of it had any effect; and the argument might have continued
until the 4.42 train from York to Spaborough had left the station, if in
some inner room a child's voice had not begun to sing to the
accompaniment of a harmonium:
_There is a green hill far away_
_Without a city wall_
"Aye, you silly little fool, that's right! Sing that now! It's a pity
your dad doesn't live on a green hill without a city wall, and not in
York."
The young man, who by this time had been rendered as argumentative as
the owner, remarked that 'without' meant 'outside.'
"What's it matter what it means, if there wasn't a city wall?" retorted
the owner, and vanished from the window before the young man could
reply. From inside one of the rooms there was a fresh murmur of
argument, which lasted until a noise between a moan and a thud was
followed by a silence faintly broken by sobs. The slamming down of the
lid of the harmonium had evidently relieved the feelings of the man in
shirt sleeves, for when presently he came out into the garden and found
himself at close quarters with the intruder, he became genial and
talkative, and began to point out the superiority of his dahlias.
"I reckon they're grand, I do," he said. "Like cauliflowers. Only, of
course, cauliflowers wouldn't have the colour, would they?"
"Not if they were fresh," the young man agreed.
And then he began flatteringly to smell one of the dahlias. He seemed to
be attributing to the flower as much importance as he would have
attributed to a baby; it was easier to deal with a dahlia, because the
dahlia did not dribble, although had it really been a baby, its mother
would have been much more annoyed at its being smelt like this than was
the man in shirt sleeves, who laughed and said:
"I wouldn't bother about the smell if I was you. Dahlia's don't have any
smell. Size is what a dahlia's for."
"No, I was thinking it was a rose," the young man explained
apologetically. The incident which had begun so rudely was ended, and
except for the unseen child practising its little hymn, was ended
harmoniously. The young man was taken through the house and conducted
along the street as far as the next ingress to the walls. When he met
Jasmine coming towards him, he felt as if he had known her for a long
time, and that they were meeting like this by appointment.
"Well, that's finished," said the young man, after Jasmine had put the
letters safely back in her bag. He eyed for a moment her black clothes.
"I suppose you're going to Sunday-school and all that?" he ventured.
"No, I'm just walking round the walls."
"Curious coincidence! So was I."
"Waiting for a train," she went on.
"Still more curious! So am I."
"Waiting for the 4.42."
"The final touch!" he cried. "So am I. Let's wait in unison."
They moved across to a circular bench set in an embrasure of the walls,
overgrown here with ivy from which the sun drew forth a faint dusty
scent. On this bench they sat down to exchange more coincidences. To
begin with, they discovered that they were both going to Spaborough;
soon afterward that they were both going to stay with uncles; and, as if
this were not enough, that both these uncles were baronets, which even
with the abnormal increase of baronets lately was, as the young man
said, the most remarkable coincidence of all.
"And what's your name?" Jasmine asked.
"Harry."
She felt like somebody who had been offered as a present an object in
which nothing but politeness had led her to express an interest.
"I meant your other name," she said quickly, rejecting as it were the
offer of the more intimate first name.
"Vibart. My uncle is Sir John Vibart."
"Of course, how stupid of me," Jasmine murmured with a blush. "My name's
Grant, of course," she hastened to add.
"Sir Hector Grant," the young man went on musingly. "Isn't he some kind
of a doctor?"
"A nerve specialist," said Jasmine.
"I know," said the young man in accents that combined wisdom with
sympathy.
The discovery of the baronets had removed the last trace of awkwardness
which, easy though his manners were, was more perceptible in Mr. Vibart
than in Jasmine, who in Sirene had never had much impressed upon her the
sacred character of the introduction.
"I shall come and call on you at Spaborough," he vowed.
"Of course," she agreed; people called with much less excuse than this
in Sirene.
"We might do some sailing."
She clapped her hands with such spontaneous pleasure of anticipation
that Mr. Vibart remarked how easy it was to see that she had lived
abroad. But almost before the echo of her pleasure had died away her
eyes had filled with tears, for she was thinking how heartless it was of
her to rejoice at the prospect of sailing when it was sailing that had
caused her father's death. Anxious not to hurt Mr. Vibart's feelings,
Jasmine began to explain breathlessly why she was looking so sad. The
young man was silent for a minute when she stopped; then, weighing his
words in solemn deliberation, he said:
"And, of course, that's why you're wearing black."
Jasmine nodded.
"I've brought with me all that were left of father's pictures. For
presents, you know." She sighed.
"I know," said the young man wisely. He had in his own valise a
cigar-holder for Sir John Vibart, the expense of procuring which he
hoped would be more than covered by a parting cheque.
"And I should like to show them to you," Jasmine went on. "Perhaps we
could get one out and look at it in the train."
"Hadn't we better wait until I come and call?" he suggested. "It's not
fair to look at things in the train. Trains wobble so, don't they?"
Conversation about Sholto Grant's pictures passed easily into
conversation about Jasmine's mother, because nearly all the pictures had
been of her.
"She was a beautiful _contadina_, you know," Jasmine shyly told him.
Mr. Vibart, who supposed that her shyness was due to an attempt to avoid
giving an impression of snobbishness in thus announcing the nobility of
her ancestry, asked of what she was _contadina_. Jasmine, delighted at his
mistake, laughed gaily.
"_Contadina_ means country girl. Her name was Gelsomina, and she was the
most beautiful girl in the island. Everybody wanted to paint her."
Mr. Vibart, struggling in the gulf between a baronet's niece and an
artist's model had nothing to say, but he made up his mind to ask his
uncle something about Italy. It was always difficult to find anything to
talk about with the old gentleman; Italy as a topic ought to last
through the better part of two bottles of Burgundy.
"And what's your name?" he asked at last.
"I was called after my mother."
"Oh, you were? Well, would you mind telling me your mother's name again,
because I lost the last dozen letters?"
"Gelsomina--only I was always called Jasmine, which is the English for
it."
As she spoke, all the bells in York began to ring at once, from the
mastiff booming in York Minster to the rusty little cur yapping in a
Methodist chapel close to where they were sitting, and with such
gathering insistence in their clamour as to destroy the pleasure of
these sunlit reminiscences.
"I suppose we ought to have a look at the Minster," Mr. Vibart suggested
in the tone of voice in which he would have announced that he must open
the door to a pertinacious caller. "Of course I'm not exactly dressed
for Sunday afternoon service, but you're all right. Black's always all
right for Sunday."
Jasmine's conception of going to church had nothing to do with dressing
up, but it did seem to her extraordinary to go to church at this hour of
the day. However, the evidence of the bells was unmistakable, and
without a qualm she followed her companion's lead.
The strangeness of the hour for service was only matched by the
strangeness of the congregation assembled for worship and the
astonishing secularity of the interior. She could remember nothing as
solemn and gloomy since she and her father had made a mistake in the
time of the performance at the San Carlo Opera House in Naples and had
arrived an hour early. She did not recognize the smell of immemorial
respectability, and it almost choked her after the frank odours in the
Duomo of Sirene--those frank odours of candles, perspiration, garlic,
incense, and that indescribable smell which the skin of the newly peeled
potato shares with the skin of the newly washed peasant. She did not
think that the mighty organ, booming like a tempestuous midnight in
Sirene, was anything but a reminder of the terrors of hell, and as a
means of turning the mind toward heavenly contemplation she compared it
most unfavourably with the love scenes of Verdi's operas that in Sirene
provided a tremulous comment upon the mysteries being enacted at the
altar. If there had been a sound of sobbing, she could have thought that
she was attending a requiem; but, however melancholy the appearance of
the worshipping women around, they were evidently enjoying themselves,
and, what was surely the most extraordinary of all, actually taking part
in the distant business of the priests, bobbing and whispering and
mumbling as if they were priests themselves.
"I think I can smell dead bodies," said Jasmine to her companion.
Mr. Vibart was probably not a religious young man himself, but he had
already affronted the religious sense of his neighbours by presenting
himself before Almighty God in grey flannel trousers and a Norfolk
jacket, and he was not anxious positively to flout it by letting
Jasmine talk in church. People in the pews close at hand turned round to
see what irreverent voice had interrupted their devotion, and Mr. Vibart
tried to pretend that her remark had a religious bearing by offering her
a share of his Prayer Book. This was too much for Jasmine. To stand up
in front of the world holding half a book seemed to her as much an
offence against church etiquette as when once long ago at school she had
quarrelled with another little girl over the ownership of a rosary and
they had tugged against each other until the rosary broke in a shower of
tinkling shells upon the floor of the convent chapel.
The best solution of the situation was to go out, and out she went,
followed by Mr. Vibart, who looked as uncomfortable as a man would look
in leaving a stall in the middle of the row during Madame Butterfly's
last song.
"I say, you know, you oughtn't to have done that," he murmured
reproachfully.
"Done what?"
"Well, talked loudly like that, and then gone out in the middle of the
service. Everybody stared at us like anything."
"Well, why did you joke with that Prayer Book?"
"I wasn't joking with the Prayer Book," Mr. Vibart affirmed in horror.
An emotion akin to dismay invaded Jasmine's soul. If she could so
completely misunderstand this not at all alarming, this freckled and
benevolent young man, how was she ever to understand her English
relatives? She had been sufficiently depressed by England throughout the
journey, but it was only now that she grasped what a profound difference
it was going to make to be herself only half English. She was evidently
going to misunderstand everything and everybody. Serious things were
going to seem jokes, and, what was worse, real jokes would seem serious.
She should offend with and in her turn be offended by trifles.
"I'm sorry," she said to Mr. Vibart. "You see, it was quite different
from everything to which I've been accustomed all my life. Oh, do let's
go and have an ice."
"Rather, if we can find a sweet-shop open."
Incomprehensible country, where ices were found in sweet-shops, and
where sweet-shops were closed on Sunday! Jasmine gave it up. However,
they did find a sweet-shop open, where she ate what tasted like a pat of
butter frozen in an old box of soap, cost fourpence, and was called a
vanilla ice-cream. She criticized it all the time she was eating it, and
then found to her mortification that Mr. Vibart supposed that he should
pay for it.
"In Sirene," Jasmine protested, "we all go and have ices when we have
money, but we always pay for ourselves. And if I'd thought that you were
going to pay, I should have pretended I thought it was very good."
The argument lasted a long time with illustrations and comparisons taken
from life at Sirene, which were so vividly related that Mr. Vibart
announced his intention of going there as soon as possible. Jasmine was
so much gratified by her conversion of an Englishman that she
surrendered about the payment for the ice, and when they got back to the
station she allowed him to manage everything. It was certainly much
easier. The surly cloak-room clerk handled the picture crates as
tenderly as a child, and even said "upsi-daisy" when he delivered them
back into their owner's possession. As for the porter with one hand he
trundled his barrow along like a jolly hoop.
"I say, let's travel First," Mr. Vibart proposed, apparently the prey to
a sudden and irresistible temptation towards extravagance.
"My ticket is third class," Jasmine objected.
"I know, so's mine," he said mysteriously. "But they know me on this
line."
And by the way the porter and the cloak-room clerk and the guard and a
small boy selling chocolates all smiled at him, Jasmine felt sure that
he was telling the truth.
The journey from York to Spaborough took about two hours and a half, and
the bloom of dusk lay everywhere on the green landscape before they
arrived. For the first half Jasmine had been contented and gay, but now
toward the end she fell into a pensive twilight mood, so that when at
last Mr. Vibart broke the long silence by announcing "Next station is
Spaborough" she was very near to weeping. She did not suppose that she
should ever see again this companion of a few hours. She realized that
she had served to while away for a time the boredom of his Sunday
afternoon; but, of course, he would forget about her. Already with what
a ruthlessly cheerful air he was reaching up to the rack for his
luggage.
"What are those funny tools in that bag?" she asked.
"Those?" he laughed. "Those are golf clubs."
Jasmine looked no wiser.
"Haven't you ever played golf?"
"Is it a game?"
He nodded, and she sighed. How could a man who carried about with him on
his travels a game be expected to remember herself? But it would never
do for her to let him think that she considered his remembering her of
the least importance one way or the other. Jasmine's knowledge of human
nature was based upon the aphorisms in circulation among the young
women of Sirene, few of which did not insist on the fact that to men the
least eagerness in the opposite sex was distasteful. Jasmine had all the
Latin love of a generalization, all the Latin distrust of the exception
that tried its accuracy.
"I'll be very cold with him," she decided. But her coldness was tempered
by sweetness, and if Mr. Vibart had ever tasted a really good ice-cream,
he might have compared Jasmine with one when she said good-bye to him on
the Spaborough platform.
"But isn't there anybody to meet you?" he asked, looking round.
"It doesn't matter. Please don't bother any more about me. I'm sure I've
been enough of a bother already."
At that moment she caught sight of a chaise driven by a postilion in an
orange jacket.
"Oh, I should like to ride in that!"
"But your people have probably sent a carriage."
"No, no!" Jasmine cried. "Let me ride in that," and before Mr. Vibart
could persuade her to wait one minute while he enquired if any of the
waiting motor-cars or carriages were intended for Miss Jasmine Grant,
she had packed herself in and was waiting open-armed for the porter to
pack her trunk in opposite.
"I shall see you again," Mr. Vibart prophesied confidently.
"Perhaps," she murmured. "Thank you for helping me at York. Drive to
Strathspey House, South Parade," she told the postilion.
Then she blushed because she fancied that Mr. Vibart might suppose that
she had called out the address so loudly for his benefit. She did not
look round again, therefore, but watched the orange postilion jogging up
and down in front, and the street lamps coming out one by one as the
lamp-lighters went by with their long poles.
_Chapter Two_
The origin of the house of Grant, like that of many another Scots
family, is lost in the Scotch mists of antiquity. The particularly thick
mist that obscured the origin of that branch of the family to which
Jasmine belonged did not disperse until early in the nineteenth century,
when the figure of James Grant, who began life nebulously as an
under-gardener in the establishment of the sixth Duke of Ayr, emerged
well-defined as a florist and nursery gardener in the Royal Borough of
Kensington. The rhetorical questioning of the claims of aristocracy
implied in the couplet:
_When Adam delved, and Eve span_
_Who was then the gentleman?_
was peculiarly appropriate to this branch, for Jamie, besides being a
gardener himself, married the daughter of a Lancashire weaver called
Jukes, who later on invented a loom and, what is more, profited by his
talent. Although Jamie Grant's rapid rise was helped by the success of
old Mr. Jukes' invention, he had enough talent of his own to take full
advantage of the capital that his wife brought him on the death of her
father; in fact by the year 1837 Jamie was as reputable as any florist
in the United Kingdom. A legend in the family said that on the fine June
morning when Archbishop Howley and Lord Chamberlain Conyngham rode from
the death-bed of William IV at Windsor to announce to the little
Princess in Kensington Palace her accession, the Archbishop begged a
bunch of sweet peas for his royal mistress from old Jamie whose garden
was close to the highway. If legend lied, then so did Jamie's son
Andrew, who always declared that he was an eye-witness of the incident,
and indeed ascribed to it his own successful career. Inasmuch as Andrew
Grant died in the dignity of Lord Bishop Suffragan of Clapham, there is
no reason to suppose that he was not speaking the truth. According to
him the incident did not stop with the impulse of the loyal Archbishop
to stand well with his queen on that sunny morning in June, but a few
days later was turned into an event by Jamie's sending his son with
another bunch of sweet peas to Lambeth Palace and asking his Grace to
stand godfather to a splendid purple variety he had just raised. In
these days when sweet peas that do not resemble the underclothing of
cocottes without the scent are despised, the robust and strong-scented
magenta _Archbishop Howley_ no longer figures in catalogues; but at this
period it was the finest sweet pea on the market. The Archbishop, who
was a snob of the first water, liked the compliment; yes, and,
anti-papist though he was, he did not object to the suggestion of
episcopal violet in the dedication. He also liked young Andrew, and on
finding that young Andrew wished to cultivate the True Vine instead of
the Virginia creeper, he promised him his help and his patronage. James,
who all his life had been applying the principle of selection to
flowers, realizing that what could be done with sweet peas could be done
equally well with human beings, gave Andrew his blessing, dipped into
his wife's stocking, and contributed what was necessary to supplement
the sizarship that shortly after this his son won at Trinity College,
Cambridge.