which had the effect of a stare on her cousin.
"No, I've never played golf."
It was Pamela's turn to stare now in frank horror at this revelation.
"Never played golf?" she repeated. "What did you do at home then?"
"I played picquet sometimes with father."
This was too much for Pamela, who could think of nothing more to say
than that this was a chest of drawers and that that was a wardrobe,
after which, with a hope for the success of her ablutions, she left
Jasmine to herself.
Presently a maid tapped at the door.
"Please, miss, her ladyship would like to know where you would prefer
the packing-cases put."
"Oh, couldn't you bring them up here?" Jasmine asked eagerly. "That is,
of course," she added, "if it isn't too much trouble."
The maid protested that it would be no trouble at all; but her looks
belied her speech.
"And if you could bring them up at once," added Jasmine quickly, "I
should be very much obliged."
She had a plan in her head for softening her relatives, the successful
carrying out of which involved having the crates in her room. After a
few minutes they arrived.
"I'm afraid I can't open them with my umbrella," she said. She was not
being facetious, for in her impetuousness she had tried, and broken the
umbrella. "I wonder if you could find me a screw-driver?"
"Oh yes, miss, I daresay I could find a screw-driver."
"And a hammer," shouted Jasmine, rushing out of her room to the landing
and calling down the stairs to the housemaid.
"I think I shall change my frock all the same," she decided. "Or at any
rate I shall unpack; because if I don't unpack now, I shall never
unpack."
In order not to lose the inspiration, Jasmine began to unpack with such
rapidity that presently the room looked like the inside of a
clothes-basket. Then she undressed with equal rapidity, mixing up washed
clothes with unwashed clothes in her efforts to find a clean chemise.
She found several chemises, but by this time it was impossible to say
which or if any of them were clean, and when the housemaid came back
with the screw-driver and the hammer, she spoke to her with Southern
politeness:
"I say, I wonder if you could lend me a chemise. And, I say, what is
your name?"
The housemaid winced at the request; but the traditions of service were
too strong for her, and with no more than the last vibrations of a
tremor in her voice, she replied:
"Oh yes, miss, I daresay I could find you a chemise. And, please, I'm
called Hopkins, miss."
"Yes, but what's your other name?"
"Amanda, miss."
"What a pretty name!"
"Yes, miss," the housemaid agreed after a moment's hesitation. "But it's
not considered a suitable name for service, and her ladyship gave orders
when I came that I was to be called Hopkins."
"Well, I shall call you Amanda," said Jasmine decidedly. No doubt
Hopkins thought that a young lady who was capable of borrowing a chemise
from a housemaid was capable of calling her by her Christian name, and
since she did not wish to encourage her ladyship's niece to thwart her
ladyship's express wishes, she hurried away without replying.
While Hopkins was out of the room Jasmine attacked the crates, tearing
them to pieces with her slim, brown, boyish hands as a monkey sheds a
coconut. Then she took out the pictures and set them up round the room
in coigns of vantage, two or three on the bed, one leaning against the
looking-glass, one supported between the jug and the basin, and several
more on chairs. This happened in the days before the Germans bombarded
Spaborough and destroyed its tonic reputation; but between that date and
this no room in Spaborough could have conveyed so completely the
illusion of having been bombarded. Yet, as often happens with really
untidy people, it is only when they have reduced their surroundings to
the extreme of disorder that they begin to know where they are, and as
soon as the room was littered with pictures, packing-case wood, and
clothes, all jumbled and confused together, Jasmine was able to find not
only the clean chemise she required, but all the other requisite
articles of attire, so that when Hopkins came back Jasmine was able to
wave at her in triumph one of her own chemises.
"Never mind, Amanda; I've found one."
"Oh yes, miss, but please, miss, with your permission I'd prefer you
called me Hopkins. I wouldn't like it to be said I was going against her
ladyship's wishes in private."
"Well, I like Amanda," persisted Jasmine obstinately.
"Yes, miss, and it's very kind of you to say so, I'm sure, and it would
have pleased my mother very much. But her ladyship particularly passed
the remark that she had a norrer of fancy names, so perhaps you'd be
kind enough to call me Hopkins."
"All right," agreed Jasmine, who, having only just arrived at Strathspey
House, found it hard to sympathize with such servility. "But look here,
the washing-stand's all covered with chips and nails. What shall I do?"
A moral struggle took place in Hopkins' breast, a struggle between the
consciousness that dinner must inevitably be ready in five minutes and
the consciousness that she ought to show Miss Grant where the bathroom
was. In the end cleanliness defeated godliness--for punctuality was the
god of Strathspey House--and she proposed a bath.
"Oh, can I have a bath?" cried Jasmine. "How splendid! But you are sure
that you can spare the water? Oh, of course, I forgot. This isn't
Sirene, is it?"
"No, miss," the housemaid agreed doubtfully. After seeing Jasmine's room
security of location had somehow come to mean less to Hopkins; in fact
she said, when she got back to the kitchen: "I give you my word, cook, I
didn't know where I was."
It was a wonderful bath, and while Sir Hector downstairs kept taking his
watch out of his pocket--with every passing minute it slid out more
easily--Jasmine spent a quarter of an hour in delicious oblivion. At the
end of it, Pamela came tapping at the door to tell her that dinner was
ready, if she was. Jasmine was so full of water-warmed feelings that she
leaped out of the bath, flung open the door, and all dripping wet and
naked as she was assured her cousin that she herself was just ready.
"Is the island of Sirene inhabited by savages?" asked Pamela
superciliously when she brought back news to the anxious dining-room.
This was considered a witty remark. Even Lettice smiled, for she already
despised her cousin more than she hated her sister.
"And now," said Jasmine to herself when another quarter of an hour had
gone by and she was dressed, "and now which picture shall I give them?"
She pulled down the cord of the electric light to illuminate better her
choice, pulled it down so far that it would not go up again, but stayed
hovering above the billowy floor like a sea-bird about to alight upon a
wave. It was easy, or difficult, to choose for presentation one of
Sholto Grant's pictures, because in subject and treatment they were all
much alike. In every foreground there was a peasant girl among olive
trees, in every middle distance olive groves, and in every background
the rocks and sea of Sirene. The choice resolved itself into whether you
wanted a bunch of anemones, a bunch of poppies, an armful of broom, or a
basket of cherries; it was really more like shopping at a greengrocer's
than choosing a picture. In the end Jasmine, who by now was herself
beginning to feel hungry, chose fruit rather than flowers, and went
downstairs with a four-foot square canvas.
"I ought to have warned you that in the country we always dine at
half-past seven. It was my fault," said Lady Grant.
Penitence is usually as unconvincing as gratitude, and certainly nobody
in the room, from Jasmine to Hargreaves the parlourmaid waiting to
announce dinner, supposed for a moment that her ladyship was really
assuming responsibility for the long wait.
"I thought perhaps you might like one of father's pictures," Jasmine
began.
"Oh dear me ... oh yes," hemmed Lady Grant, who, to do her justice, did
not want to hurt her niece's feelings, but who felt that the
lusciousness of the scene presented might be too much for her husband's
appetite. Sir Hector, craning at the picture, asked what the principal
figure was holding in her basket.
"Cherries, aren't they?" suggested Lettice.
"Ah, yes, so they are," her father agreed. "Cherries.... Precisely....
Come, come, we mustn't let the soup get cold. The dessert can wait."
On the wings of a dreary little titter they moved toward the
dining-room; Sir Hector, leading the way like a turkey-cock in a
farmyard, murmured, whether in pity for the dead brother who could no
longer feel hungry or in compassion for his art:
"Poor old Sholto. We must get it framed."
_Chapter Three_
Jasmine woke up next morning to a vivid acceptance of the fact that from
now onward her life would not be her own. She had been too weary the
night before to grasp fully what this meant. Now, while she lay watching
the sun streaming in through the blind, the value of the long fine day
before her was suddenly depreciated. On an impulse to defeat misgiving
she jumped out of bed, sent up the blind with a jerk that admitted
Monday morning to her room like a jack-in-the-box, stared out over the
wide expanse of pale blue winking sea, sniffed the English seaside
odour, clambered up on her dressing-table to disentangle the blind,
failed to do so, descended again, and began to wonder how she should
occupy herself from six o'clock to nine. And after the long morning,
what a day stretched before her! A little talk with Uncle Hector about
her father, a little talk with Aunt May on the same subject, a lesson in
golf from her cousins, and, worst of all, the heavy foundation stones of
the threatened intimacy between her and Miss Crossfield to be placed in
position.
"We must get to know each other very well," Miss Crossfield had murmured
when she said good night. "We must pull together."
And this had been said with such a gloating anticipation of combined
effort and with such a repressed malignity beneath it all that if Miss
Crossfield had added "the teeth of these rich relatives," Jasmine would
not have thought the phrase extravagant.
She opened her door gently and looked out into the passage. Not even
the sound of snoring was audible; nothing indeed was audible except a
bluebottle's buzz on a window of ground glass that seemed alive with
sunlight. She wandered on tiptoe along the pale green Axminster pile,
went into the bathroom, crossed herself, and turned on the tap. The
running water sounded so torrential at this hour of the morning that she
at once clapped her hand over the tap to throttle the stream until she
could cut it off; during the guilty quiet that succeeded, she hurried
back to her bedroom, which by now was extremely hot. Before Jasmine
stretched years and years of silent sunlit vacancy, in which she would
be walking about on tiptoe and throttling every gush of spontaneous
feeling just as she had throttled that bath tap.
"And I can't stand it," she said, banging her dressing-table with the
back of her hairbrush.
She stopped in dismay at the noise, half expecting to hear cries of
"Murder!" from neighbouring rooms. The pale blue sea winked below; the
sun climbed higher. Jasmine sat down before the looking-glass to brush
her hair. A milk-cart clinked; rugs were being shaken below. Jasmine
still sat brushing her hair. The voices of gossiping servants were heard
above the steady chirp of sparrows. When Jasmine's hair was more
thoroughly brushed than it ever had been, she took her bath, and when
her hair was dry she brushed it all over again.
At a quarter to nine Sir Hector found her waiting in the dining-room,
the first down. His pleasure at such unexpected punctuality almost
compensated him for the fact that she had dared to open his paper and,
like all women, even his own wife, that she had turned an ordinary
sixteen-page newspaper into a complicated puzzle.
"Well," he said pompously, "you wouldn't find better weather than this
in Italy, would you?"
He managed to suggest that the glorious morning was Uncle Hector's own
little treat, a little treat, moreover, that nobody but Uncle Hector
would have thought of providing, or at any rate been able to provide.
"Yes," he went on, "and what a crime that all this should be
vulgarized." He included the firmament in an ample gesture. "I expect
your aunt told you that this will be our last summer in Spaborough? We
didn't come here to be pestered by trippers. That boarding-house next
door is a disgrace to South Parade. They were playing a gramophone last
night--laughing and talking out there on the steps until after one
o'clock. How people expect to get any benefit from their holidays I
don't know. We'd always been free from that sort of rowdiness until they
opened that pernicious boarding-house next door, and now it's worse than
Bank Holiday. Some people seem blind to the beauty round them. I suppose
when the moon gets to the full we shall hear them jabbering out there
till dawn. What _have_ you been doing to my paper? It's utterly
disorganized!"
Jasmine diverted her uncle's attention from the newspaper to the basket
of prickly pears that she had brought from Sirene, and invited him to
try one.
Sir Hector examined his niece's unnatural fruit as the night before he
had examined his brother's unnatural fruit.
"Well, I don't know," he hemmed. "We're rather old-fashioned people
here, you know."
"I think the prickles have all been taken out," said Jasmine
encouragingly, "but you'd better be careful in case they haven't."
Sir Hector had been on the verge of prodding one of the pears, but at
his niece's warning he drew back in alarm; and just then the clock on
the mantelpiece struck nine. Before the last stroke died away the whole
family was sitting down to breakfast. Jasmine's punctuality was
evidently a great satisfaction to her relatives, and if she did look
rather like a chocolate drop that had fallen into the tray reserved for
fondants, she felt much more at home now than she had at dinner last
night. Nothing occurred to mar the amity of the breakfast-table until
Lady Grant's fat fox-terrier began to tear round the room as if
possessed by a devil, clawing from time to time at his nose with both
front paws and turning somersaults. Lady Grant, who ascribed all the
ills of dogs to picking up unlicensed scraps, rang the bell and asked
severely if Hargreaves, whose duty it was to supervise the dog's early
morning promenade, had allowed him to eat anything in the road; but it
was Jasmine who diagnosed his complaint correctly.
"I think he has been sniffing the prickly pears," she said.
"But what dangerous things to leave about!" exclaimed her aunt.
"Hargreaves, take the basket out into the kitchen and tell cook to empty
them carefully--carefully, mind, or she may hurt herself--into the
pineapple dish. She had better wear gloves. And if she can't manage
them," Lady Grant called after the parlourmaid, who was gingerly
carrying out the basket at arm's length, "if she can't manage them, they
must be burnt. On no account must they be thrown into the dustbin. I'm
sorry that we don't appreciate your Italian fruit," she added, turning
to her niece, "I'm afraid you'll find us very stay-at-home people, and
you know English servants hate anything in the least unusual."
"How they must hate me!" Jasmine thought.
"And what is the programme for to-day?" asked Sir Hector suddenly,
flinging down the paper with such a crackle that Jasmine would not have
been more startled if like a clown he had jumped clean through it into
the conversation.
"Well, we _were_ going to play golf," said Lettice disagreeably.
"Oh then, please do," said Jasmine hurriedly, for she felt that a future
had been mutilated into imperfection by the responsibility of
entertaining herself.
"Jasmine and I have a little business to talk over after breakfast," Sir
Hector announced. "So you girls had better be independent this morning,
and give Jasmine her first lesson this afternoon."
The girls looked at their father coldly.
"We've got a foursome on with Dick Onslowe and Claude Whittaker this
morning, and if George Huntingford turns up this afternoon," said
Lettice, "I've got a match with him. But if Pamela isn't engaged, I
daresay she will look after Jasmine, that is if she can find her way to
the club-house."
"But Roy Medlicott said he might get to the links this afternoon,"
protested Pamela. "And if he does, I shan't be able to look after
Jasmine."
"Well, we might get Tommy Waterall to give her a lesson," proposed
Lettice. Something in her cousin's intonation made Jasmine realize that
Tommy Waterall was the charitable institution of that golf club, and she
vowed to herself that she at any rate would not be beholden to him, even
if she were successful in finding her way to the club-house, which was
unlikely.
Jasmine's little talk with her uncle was the smallest ever known. Sir
Hector, as a consulting nerve specialist, was accustomed to ask more
questions than he answered, and since the only positive information he
had to impart to his niece was the fact that she had not a penny in the
world, the theme did not lend itself to eloquence.
"Yes, that's how your affairs stand," said Sir Hector. "But you mustn't
worry yourself." He was just going to dilate on the deleterious effects
of worry, as though Jasmine were a rich patient, when he remembered that
whether she worried or not it was of no importance to him. His
observations on worry, therefore, those very observations which had won
for him a fortune and a title, were not placed at his niece's disposal.
The little talk was over, and Sir Hector strode from the study to
proclaim the news.
"We've had our little talk," he bellowed. Lettice and Pamela,
delightfully equipped for golf in shrimp-pink jerseys, passed coldly by.
It was one of those moments which do give a nose an opportunity of
showing off, and Sir Hector, afraid of being snubbed, drew back into his
study. When he heard the front door slam, he emerged again, and shouted
louder than ever: "We have had our little talk!"
Lady Grant appeared from another door further along the hall, her hand
pressed painfully to her forehead.
"Couldn't you wait a little while, dear, until I have finished doing the
books?"
"Sorry," said Sir Hector, retreating again. He was wishing that he had
at Strathspey House his Harley Street waiting-room into which he could
have pushed Jasmine to occupy herself there with illustrated papers a
month old and not disturb him by her presence. "Perhaps you might care
to go and wait for your aunt in the drawing-room," he suggested
finally. "I know she's very anxious to say a few words to you about your
father--your poor father." The epithet was intended to be sympathetic,
not sarcastic, but Jasmine bolted from the room with her handkerchief to
her eyes.
"A leetle overwrought," murmured Sir Hector, as if he were talking to a
patient. But soon he lighted a cigar and forgot all about his niece.
There are few places in this world that cast a more profound gloom upon
the human spirit than a sunny English drawing-room at 9.45 a.m. Its
welcome is as frigid as a woman who fends off a kiss because she has
just made up her lips.
"If I feel like this now," said Jasmine to herself, "_Dio mio_, what shall
I feel like in a month's time?"
She put away the handkerchief almost at once, for even grief was frozen
in this house, and memories that yesterday would have brought tears to
her eyes were to-day so hardly imaginable that they had no power to
affect her. "I'm really just as much dead as father," she sighed to the
Japanese blinds that rustled faintly in a faint breeze from the sea. On
an impulse she rushed upstairs to her bedroom, took off her black
clothes, and came down again to the dining-room in a yellow silk jersey
and a white skirt.
"My dear Jasmine!... Already?..." ejaculated her aunt, when the
household accounts were finished and she found her niece waiting for her
in the drawing-room. "I don't know that your uncle will quite approve,
so very soon after his brother's death."
"I don't believe in mourning."
"My dear child, are you quite old enough to give such a decided opinion
on a custom which is universally followed--even by savages?"
"Father would perfectly understand my feelings."
"I daresay your father would understand, but I don't think your uncle
will understand."
And one felt that Sholto's comprehension in Paradise was a poor thing
compared with his brother's lack of it on earth.
"Anyway, I'm not going to wear black any longer," said Jasmine curtly.
"As you will," her aunt replied with grave resignation. "Oh, and before
I forget, I have told Hopkins to show you exactly how the blind is
pulled up in your room. I'm afraid you didn't keep hold of the lower
tassel this morning. They're still trying to get it down, and I am very
much afraid we shall have to send for a carpenter to mend it. If you
pull the string on the right without holding the lower tassel----"
"I know," Jasmine interrupted. "I'm rather like that blind myself."
Lady Grant hoped inwardly that her niece was not going to be difficult,
and changed the subject. "You have no doubt gathered by now exactly how
you stand," she went on. "I know you've been having a little talk with
your uncle, and I know that there is nothing more galling than a sense
of dependency. So I was going to suggest that when we went back to
Harley Street in September you should take Edith Crossfield's place and
help me with my numerous--well, really I suppose I _must_ call them
that--my numerous charities. At present Cousin Edith only answers all my
letters for me; but I daresay you will find many ways of making yourself
much more useful than that, because you are younger and more energetic
than poor Edith. Though, of course, while we are at Spaborough I want
you to consider yourself as much on a holiday as we all are. Do make up
your mind to get plenty of good fresh air and exercise. The girls are
quite horrified to hear that you have never played golf, especially as
they're so good at it themselves. Lettice is only four at the Scottish
Ladies'. Or is it five? Dear me, I've forgotten! How angry the dear
child would be!"
"I'm D--E--A--D, dead," Jasmine was saying to herself all the time her
aunt was speaking.
And perhaps it was because she looked so much like a corpse that her
aunt recommended a course of iron to bring back her roses. Lady Grant
was so much accustomed wherever she looked, even if it were in her own
glass, to see roses that Jasmine's pallor was unpleasant to her.
Besides, it might mean that she really was delicate, which would be a
nuisance.
"It's almost a pity," she said, "that your uncle did not postpone his
little talk, so that you could have gone with the girls to the links.
They have such wonderful complexions, I always think."
"Please don't worry about me," said Jasmine quickly. "I can amuse myself
perfectly well by myself."
"My dear," said Lady Grant, asserting the purity of her motives with
such a gentle air of martyrdom as Saint Agnes may have used toward
Symphronius, "you misunderstand me. You are not at all in the way; but
as I have some private letters to write, I was going to suggest that you
and Cousin Edith should take a little walk and see something of
Spaborough."
"Little walks, little talks, little talks, little walks," spun the
jingle in Jasmine's mind.
At this moment the companion proposed for Jasmine floated into the room.
Miss Crossfield was so thin, her movements and gestures were so
indeterminate, and her arms wandered so much upon the air, that indoors
she suggested a daddy-longlegs on a window-pane, and out of doors a
daddy-longlegs floating across an upland pasture in autumn. It was
perhaps this extreme attenuation that gave her subservience a kind of
spirituality; with so little flesh to clog her good will, she was almost
literally a familiar spirit. She materialized like one of those obedient
genies in the Arabian Nights whenever Lady Grant rang the bell, and she
endowed that ring with as much magic as if it had been the golden ring
of Abanazar.
"Edith," said Lady Grant magnanimously, "I am writing my own letters
this morning to give you the opportunity of taking Jasmine for a little
walk. You had better take Spot with you--on the lead, of course."