too hard on Carnaby!" pleaded Lavendar. "He would not touch the money
that was to come from the sale of Mrs. Prettyman's cottage under the
circumstances, so it seemed best to him that the sale should not take
place, and he prevented it in the directest and simplest way that
occurred to him. It's like some of the things that men have done to
please God, Mrs. Robin," Mark added, smiling, "and thought they were
doing it, too! But Carnaby only wanted to please you!"
"To _please_ me!" exclaimed Robinette, looking round her at the ruin
before them. "Oh dear!" she sighed, "how confusing the world is, at
times! I am just going to take this snowy branch and lay it on Nurse's
pillow. She so loved her tree! See; it's quite fresh and beautiful,
and the dew still upon it, just like tears!"
"That seemed just right," said Robinette softly as she came out into
the sunshine again, a few minutes later. "I laid the blossoms in her
kind old tired hands, the hands that have known so much work and so
many pains. It is over, and after all, her new home is better than any
I could have found for her!"
The two walked slowly down the little garden on their way to the gate.
As they passed, old Mr. Darke, who had hobbled around again to have
another look at the fallen tree, addressed Lavendar solemnly.
"Best tree in Wittisham 'e was, sir," touching the ruin of the
branches as he spoke. "'Ooever could ha' thought o' sich a piece of
wickedness as to cut 'im down? Murder, I calls it! 'Tis well as Mrs.
Prettyman be gone to 'er rest wi'out knowledge of it; 'twould 'ave
broken her old 'eart, for certain sure!"
"It nearly breaks mine to see it now, Mr. Darke!" said Robinette in a
trembling voice. But the old labourer bent down, moving his creaking
joints with difficulty and steadying himself upon his sticks till he
could touch the stump of the tree with his rough but skilful hands. He
pushed away the long grass that grew about the roots and looked up at
Robinette with a wise old smile.
"'Tisn't dead and done for yet, Missy, never fear!" he said. "Give 'im
time; give 'im time! 'E's cut above the graft--see! 'E'll grow and
shoot and bear blossom and fruit same as ever 'e did, given time. See
to the fine stock of 'im; firm as a rock in the good ground! And the
roots, they be sound and fresh. 'E'll grow again, Missy; never you
cry!"
Robinette looked so beautiful as she lifted her luminous eyes and
parted lips to old Darke, and then turned to him with a gesture of
hope and joy, that again Lavendar could hardly keep from avowing his
love; but the remembrance of the old nurse's still shape in the little
cottage hushed the words that trembled on his lips.
XXIV
GRANDMOTHER AND GRANDSON
The disagreeable duty of announcing Mrs. Prettyman's death to the lady
of the Manor now lay before Lavendar and his companion, and the
thought of it weighed upon their spirits as they crossed the river.
Carnaby also must be told. How would he take it? Robinette, still
under the shock of the plum tree's undoing, expected perhaps some
further exhibition of youthful callousness, but Lavendar knew better.
In their concern and sorrow, the young couple had forgotten all minor
matters such as meals, and luncheon had long been over when they
reached the house. They could see Mrs. de Tracy's figure in the
drawing room as they passed the windows, occupying exactly her usual
seat in her usual attitude. It was her hour for reading and
disapproving of the daily paper.
Robinette and Lavendar entered quietly, but nothing in the gravity of
their faces struck Mrs. de Tracy as strange.
"I have a disturbing piece of news to give you," Mark began, clearing
his throat. "Mrs. Prettyman died last night in her cottage at
Wittisham."
The erect figure in the widow's weeds remained motionless. Perhaps the
old hand that lowered the newspaper trembled somewhat, so that its
diamonds quivered a little more than usual.
"So Mrs. Prettyman is dead?" she said. Then, as the young people stood
looking at her with an air of some expectancy, she added with a sour
glance, "Do you expect me to be very much agitated by the news?"
"The death was unexpected," began Lavendar lamely.
"She was seventy-five; my age!" said Mrs. de Tracy with a wintry
smile. "Is death at seventy-five so unexpected an event?"
Lavendar said nothing; he had nothing to say, and Robinette for
the same reason was silent. She was gazing at her aunt, almost
unconsciously, with a wondering look. "At any rate," continued Mrs.
de Tracy, addressing her niece, "your _protégée_ has been fortunate
in two ways, Robinette. She will neither be turned out of her
cottage nor see the destruction of her plum tree. By the way--"
with a perfectly natural change of tone, dismissing at once both
Mrs. Prettyman and Death--"the plum tree _is_ down, I suppose? You
saw it?"
"Very much down!" answered Lavendar. "And certainly we saw it! Carnaby
does nothing by halves!"
A slight change, a kind of shade of softening, passed over Mrs. de
Tracy's stern features, as the shadow of a summer cloud may pass over
a rocky hill. She turned suddenly to Robinette. "Can you tell me on
your word of honour that you had nothing to do with Carnaby's action;
that you did not put it into his head to cut the plum tree down!"
"I?" exclaimed Robinette, scarlet with indignation. "_I?_ Why--do you
want to know what I think of the action? I think it was perfectly
brutal, and the boy who did it next door to a criminal! There!"
Mrs. de Tracy seemed convinced by the energy of this disclaimer. "I
have always considered yours a very candid character," she observed
with condescension. "I believe you when you say that you did not
influence Carnaby in the matter, though I strongly suspected you
before."
"Well, upon my word!" ejaculated Robinette when they had got out of
the room, too completely baffled to be more original. "What does she
mean? Has any one ever understood the workings of Aunt de Tracy's
mind?"
"Don't come to me for any more explanations! I've done my best for my
client!" cried Lavendar. "I give up my brief! I always told you Mrs.
de Tracy's character was entirely singular."
"Let us hope so!" commented Robinette with energy. "I should be sorry
for the world if it were plural!"
* * * * *
Carnaby was not in the house, and Lavendar proceeded to look for him
out of doors. He knew the boy was often to be found in a high part of
the grounds behind the garden, where he had some special resort of his
own, and he went there first. The afternoon had clouded over, and a
slight shower was falling, as Mark followed the wooded path leading up
hill. A rock-garden bordered it, where ferns and flowers were growing,
each one of which seemed to be contributing some special and delicate
fragrance to the damp, warm air. The beech trees here had low and
spreading branches which framed now and again exquisite glimpses of
the river far below and the wooded hills beyond it.
Lavendar had not gone far when he found Carnaby, Carnaby intensely
perturbed, walking up and down by himself.
"You don't need to tell me!" said the boy, with a quick and agitated
gesture of the hand. "Bates told me. Old Mrs. Prettyman's dead!" His
merry, square-set face was changed and looked actually haggard, and
his eyes searched Lavendar's with an expression oddly different from
their usual fearless and straightforward one. They seemed afraid. "Was
it my grandmother's--was it our fault?" he asked. "I, I feel like a
murderer. Upon my soul, I do!"
"Don't encourage morbid ideas, my dear fellow!" said Lavendar in a
matter-of-fact tone. "There's trouble enough in the world without
foolish exaggeration. Mrs. Prettyman was 'grave-ripe,' as she often
said to your cousin; a very feeble old woman, whose time had come. The
doctor's certificate will tell you how rheumatism had affected her
heart, and the neighbours would very soon set your mind at rest by
describing the number of times poor old Lizzie had nearly died
before."
"Think of it, though!" said Carnaby with wondering eyes. "Think of her
lying dead in the cottage while I hacked and hewed at the plum tree
just outside! By Jove! it makes a fellow feel queer!" He shuddered.
The picture he evoked was certainly a strange one enough: a strange
picture in the moonlight of a night in spring; the doomed beauty of
the blossoming tree, the blind, headstrong human energy working for
its destruction, and Death over all, stealthy and strong!
"What an ass I was!" said Carnaby, summing up the situation in the
only language in which he could express himself. "Sweating and stewing
and hacking away--thinking myself so awfully clever! And all the time
things ... things were being arranged in quite a different manner!"
"We are often made to feel our insignificance in ways like this,"
said Lavendar. "We are very small atoms, Carnaby, in the path of the
great forces that sweep us on."
"I should rather think so!" assented the wondering boy. "And yet, can
a fellow sit tight all the time and just wait till things happen?"
"Ask me something else!" suggested Lavendar ironically.
There was a short pause. "I'm awfully sorry old Mrs. Prettyman's
dead," Carnaby said in a very subdued tone. "I meant to do a lot for
her, to try and make up for my grandmother's being such a beast." He
stopped short, and to Lavendar's astonishment, his face worked, and
two tears squeezed themselves out of his eyes and rolled over his
round cheeks as they might have done over a baby's. "It's the j-jam I
was thinking of," he sniffed. "Once a pal of mine and I were playing
the fool in old Mrs. Prettyman's garden, pretending to steal the
plums, and giving her duck bits of bread steeped in beer to make it
s-squiffy (a duck can be just as drunk as a chap). She didn't mind a
bit. She was a regular old brick, and gave us a jolly good tea and a
pot of jam to take away.... And now she's dead and--and...." Carnaby's
feelings became too much for him again, and a handkerchief that had
seen better and much cleaner days came into play. Lavendar flung an
arm round the boy's shoulder.
"This kind of regret comes to us all, Carnaby," he said. "I don't
suppose there's a man with a heart in his breast who hasn't sometime
had to say to himself, I might have done better: I might have been
kinder: it's too late now! But it's never too late!" added Lavendar
under his breath--"not where Love is!"
The shower was over, and though the sun had not come out, a pleasant
light lay upon the river as the friends walked down; upon the river
beyond which old Lizzie Prettyman was sleeping so peacefully, the
sleep of kings and beggars, and just and unjust, and rich and poor
alike. Carnaby had dried his eyes but continued in a pensive mood.
"Cousin Robin's still angry with me about the tree," he said,
uncertainly.
"She won't be angry long!" Lavendar assured him. "You and your Cousin
Robin are going to be firm friends, friends for life."
Carnaby seemed a good deal comforted. "Mind you don't tell her I
blubbered!" he said in sudden alarm. "Swear!"
"She wouldn't think a bit the worse of you for that!" said Lavendar.
"Swear, though!" repeated Carnaby in deadly earnest.
And Lavendar swore, of course.
* * * * *
But an influence very unlike Lavendar's and a spirit very different
from Robinette's enfolded Carnaby de Tracy in his home and fought, as
it were, for his soul. That night, after the last lamp had been put
out by the careful Bates, and after Benson had bade a respectful
good-night to her mistress, a light still burned in Mrs. de Tracy's
room. Presently, carried in her hand, it flitted out along the silent
passages, past rows of doors which were closed upon empty rooms or
upon unconscious sleepers, till it came to Carnaby's door; to the
Boys' Room, as that far-away and most unluxurious apartment had always
been called. Mrs. de Tracy was making a pilgrimage to the shrine of
one of her gods. She opened the door, and closing it gently behind
her, she stood beside Carnaby's bed and looked at him, intently and
haggardly.
Mrs. de Tracy's was a singular character, as Mark Lavendar had said.
The circumstances of her widowhood with its heavy responsibilities had
perhaps hardly been fair to her. There had been little room for the
kindlier and softer feelings, though it is to be feared that they
would not have found much congenial soil in her heart. The personal
selfishness in her had long been merged in the greater and harder
selfishness of caste; she had become a mere machine for the keeping up
of Stoke Revel.
But to-night she was moved by the positively human sentiment which had
been stirred in her by Carnaby's startling act of cutting the plum
tree down. Ah! let fools believe if they could that she was angry with
the boy! She had never felt anger less or pride more. While others
talked and argued, shilly-shallied, made love, muddled and made
mistakes, her grandson, the man of the race that always ruled, had cut
the knot for himself, without hesitation and without compunction,
without consulting anyone or asking anyone's leave. That was the way
the de Tracys had always acted. And it seemed to Mrs. de Tracy a
crowning coincidence, a fitting kind of poetical justice, that
Carnaby's action should actually have prevented the sale of the land;
that dreaded, detestable sale of the first land that the de Tracys
had held upon the banks of the river.
So, since Carnaby was to be a man of the right kind, his grandmother
had come to look at him, not in love, as other women come to such
bedsides, but in pride of heart. The boy, after his "white night" at
Wittisham and the varied emotions of the succeeding day, lay on his
side, in the deep, recuperative sleep of youth whence its energies are
drawn and in which its vigors are renewed. His round cheek indented
the pillow, his rumpled hair stirred in the breeze that blew in at the
window, his arm and his open hand, relaxed, lay along the sheet.
Another woman would have straightened the bed-clothes above him;
another might have touched his hair or hand; another kissed his cheek.
But not even because he was like her departed husband, like the man
who five and fifty years before had courted a certain cold and proud,
handsome and penniless Miss Augusta Gallup, would Mrs. de Tracy do
these things. She had had her sensation, such as it was, her secret
moment of emotion, and was satisfied. She left the room as she had
come, the candle casting exaggerated shadows of herself upon the walls
where Carnaby's bats and fishing rods and sporting prints hung.
It is sad to be old as Mrs. de Tracy was old, but her age was of her
own making, a shrinkage of the heart, a drying up of the wells of
feeling that need not have been.
"I should be better out of the way," her bitterness said within her,
and alas! it was true. Her great, gaunt room seemed very lonely, very
full of shadows when she returned to it. Rupert, who always slept at
her bedside, awaited her. Disturbed at this unwonted hour, he stirred
in his basket, wheezed and gurgled, turned round and round and could
not get comfortable, whined, and looked up in his mistress's face. She
stood watching him with a sort of grim pity, and, strangely enough,
bestowed upon him the caress she had not found for her grandson.
"Poor Rupert! You are getting too old, like your mistress! Your
departure, like hers, will be a sorrow to no one!" Rupert seemed to
wheeze an asthmatical consent, and presently he snuggled down in his
basket and went to sleep.
XXV
THE BELLS OF STOKE REVEL
On Sunday morning Robinette and Lavendar were both ready for church,
by some strange coincidence, half an hour too soon. He was standing at
the door as she came down into the hall. Mrs. de Tracy and Miss
Smeardon were nowhere to be seen; even Carnaby was invisible, but the
shrill, infuriated yelping of the Prince Charles from the drawing room
indicated his whereabouts only too plainly.
"We're much too early," said Robinette, glancing at the clock.
"Shall we walk through the buttercup meadow, then--you and I?" asked
Lavendar. His voice was low, and Robinette answered very softly. She
wore a white dress that morning without a touch of colour.
"I couldn't wear black to-day for Nurse," she said, in answer to his
glance, "but I couldn't wear any colour, either."
"You're as white as the plum tree was!" said Lavendar. "I remember
thinking that it looked like a bride." Robinette made no reply. He
ventured to look up at her as he spoke, and she was smiling although
her lip quivered and her eyes were full of tears. Lavendar's heart
beat uncomfortably fast as they walked through the meadow towards the
stile which led into the churchyard.
"It's too soon to go in yet," he said. "The bells haven't begun."
"Let's stop here. It's cool in the shadow," said Robinette. She leaned
on the wall and looked out at the shining reaches of the river. "The
swelling of Jordan is over now," she said with a little smile and a
sigh. "The tide has come up, and how quiet everything is!"
The water mirrored the hills and the ships and the gracious sky above
them. There was scarcely a sound in the air. At the point where they
stood, the Manor House was hidden from view, and only the squat old
tower of the church was visible, and the yew tree rising above the
wall against the golden field. A bush of briar covered with white
roses hung above them, just behind Robinette, and Lavendar looking at
her in this English setting on an English Sunday morning, wondered to
himself, as he had so often done before, if she could ever make this
country her home.
"Yet she has English blood as well as I," he thought. "Why, the very
name on the old bells of the church there, records the memory of an
ancestress of hers! We cannot be so far apart." Looking at her
standing there, he rehearsed to himself all that he meant to say, oh,
a great many things both true and eloquent, but at that moment every
word forsook him. Yet this was probably the best opportunity he would
have of telling her what was burning in his heart: telling her how she
had beguiled him at first by her quick understanding and her
frolicsome wit, because all that sort of thing was so new to him. She
had come like a mountain spring to a thirsty man. He had been groping
for inspiration and for help: now he seemed to find them all in her.
She was so much more than charming, though it was her charm that first
impressed him; so much more than pretty, though her face attracted him
at first; so much more than magnetic, though she drew him to her at
their first meeting with bonds as delicate as they were strong. These
were tangible, vital, legitimate qualities--but were they all? Could
lips part so, could eyes shine so, could voice tremble so, if there
were not something underneath; a good heart, fidelity, warmth of
nature?
"For the first time," he thought, "I long to be worthy of a woman. But
I would not tell her how I love her at this moment, unless I felt I
need not be wholly unequal to her demands. I have never desired
anything strongly enough to struggle for it, up to now; but she has
set my springs in motion, and I can work for her until I die!"
All this he thought, but never a word he said. Then the church clock
struck and the clashing bells began. They shook the air, the earth,
the ancient stones, the very nests upon the trees, and sent the rooks
flying black as ink against the yellow buttercups in the meadow.
"We must go, in a few minutes," said Robinette. "Oh, will you pull me
some of those white roses up there?"
Lavendar swung himself up and drawing down a bunch he pulled off two
white buds.
"Will you take them?" he asked, holding them out to her. Then suddenly
he said, very low and very humbly, "Oh, take me too; take me,
Robinette, though no man was ever so unworthy!"
Robinette laid the roses on the wall beside her.
"For my part," she said, turning to Lavendar with a little laugh that
was half a sob; "for my part, I like giving better than taking!" She
put both her hands in his and looked into his face. "Here is my
life," she said simply. "I want to belong to you, to help you, to live
by your side."
"I oughtn't to take you at your word," he said, his voice choked with
emotion. "You are far too good for me!"
"Hush," Robinetta answered, putting a finger on his lip; "it isn't a
question of how great you are or how wonderful: it's a question of
what we can be to each other. I'd rather have you than the Duke of
Wellington or Marcus Aurelius, and I believe you wouldn't change me
for Helen of Troy!"
"I have nothing to bring you, nothing," said Lavendar again, "nothing
but my love and my whole heart."
"If all the kingdoms of the earth were offered to me instead, I would
still take you and what you give me," Robinette answered.
Lavendar laid his cheek against her bright hair and sighed deeply. In
that sigh there passed away all former things, and behold, all things
became new. Two cuckoos answered each other from opposite banks of the
river and two hearts sang songs of joy that met and mingled and
floated upward.
Again the bells broke out overhead, filling the air with music that
had rung from them ever since just such another morning hundreds of
years before, when they rang their first peal from the church tower,
bearing the legend newly cut upon them: "Pray for the Soul of Anne de
Tracy, 1538." And Anne de Tracy's memory was forgotten--so long
forgotten--except for the bells that carried her name!
Yet in these same meadows that she must have known, spring was come
once more. The Devonshire plum trees had budded and blossomed and shed
their petals year after year, and year after year, since the bells
first swung in the air; and now Hope was born once again, and Youth,
and Love, which is immortal!
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