HOME
It was spring, and although spring that year had not done its worst, the
two men who alighted from the train at Redhurst Station turned up the
collars of their greatcoats and shivered. One of them, a powerful,
squarely built man with a glass eye, gazed round the little country
station as if in search of someone, and at last fixed his serviceable
eye upon a richly dressed woman in a motor just outside the wicket-gate.
He thereupon turned to his companion, a red-headed man who was arguing
in broad Scotch with a porter over the alleged damage done to a very old
and dilapidated cabin trunk.
"Tell them the luggage must be sent on at once, Jones," he said.
Leaving McPhulach, _alias_ Jones, to see that his instructions were
carried out, Calamity passed through the wicket-gate. As he approached
her, the woman leaned out of the tonneau expectantly; but at that moment
the sun emerged from an obscuring cloud and shone right into her eyes.
By the time she had opened her sunshade and could see again Calamity had
reached the car. The words of honeyed welcome died on her lips and she
shrank back against the cushions as she saw him standing there with a
grim smile on his face.
"Well, Betty?" he said.
"Is--is it you?" she faltered.
"Yes, you find me changed, eh?"
"A--a little," she answered.
The flicker of a smile crossed Calamity's face again as he looked at
her.
"You are the same as ever, anyhow," he commented.
His words restored Lady Betty's self-possession. His altered appearance
had frightened her at first, and she had not recognised in him the man
she had once promised to marry. But now he had spoken in a familiar
language words which showed, as she thought, that, despite the years,
her charms had not lessened in his eyes.
"I am so glad you have come back," she said softly.
At that moment, to her annoyance, McPhulach came up accompanied by a
porter.
"He says it will be ane an' saxpence to tak' the luggage," said the
engineer indignantly.
"Pay him then," answered Calamity.
"But, mon, 'tis only a sheeling, forby----"
"Pay him," snapped Calamity, and McPhulach grumblingly paid the money in
pennies and half-pennies, counting them twice before handing them over.
"Won't you get in?" asked Lady Betty, as Calamity again turned to her.
He obeyed, at the same time calling to McPhulach, who was watching the
luggage being hoisted on to the station 'bus. As he approached--an
uncouth figure in an ill-fitting, ready-made overcoat--Lady Betty
elevated her eyebrows.
"Who is this?" she whispered quickly.
"Let me introduce him," answered the Captain.
"Lady Betty Redhurst, Mr. Jones, until recently my chief engineer.
Jones, Lady Betty Redhurst."
"I'm unco' pleased tae meet ye," said McPhulach, extending a huge red
hand with its blunt, misshapen fingers. "I'm frae Pontypreed mesel'," he
added inconsequently.
The elegant woman touched the engineer's hairy paw with the tips of her
gloved fingers and smiled sweetly.
"Better sit down there," said Calamity, indicating the seat opposite,
but Lady Betty spoke hastily.
"Wouldn't you prefer to sit in front, Mr. Jones?" she asked, with
seeming solicitude for his comfort; "you can see the country much better
there, and it's really very pretty just now."
McPhulach, only too glad of a chance to sit beside the chauffeur, where
he might smoke, obeyed with alacrity, and the Captain had to own himself
out-manoeuvred. The chauffeur then took his seat, and the car glided
noiselessly out of the station precincts.
"Does it seem strange to you to be coming home again?" asked Lady Betty
in a voice which sounded almost caressing.
"It does--very," answered Calamity.
His tone puzzled her, and she went on, curious, perhaps, to probe his
real feelings.
"You are glad?"
"Glad? I should never have returned but for one thing--the memories of
the place are too unpleasant."
A faint and delicate tinge of colour came into the woman's face, for she
did not doubt that he was thinking of her and the shattered romance of
the past. It moved her to think that, after all these years, this
memory was still fresh with him.
"Why darken your home-coming by thoughts of the unalterable past?" she
answered softly. "It is all forgotten and forgiven now."
"It is not forgotten, neither is it forgiven--I am not that sort."
A deeper colour flooded her face. He considered himself wronged, then,
that she had believed in his guilt and married his brother. At that
moment she wished passionately to justify herself in his eyes, for this
stranger who had been her lover was beginning to exercise an ascendancy
over her weaker nature that he had never possessed in the old days.
She was about to stammer out words of excuse and apology, when McPhulach
turned round and leaned over the wind-screen.
"Hae ye such a thing as a match aboot ye, skeeper?" he inquired.
Calamity tossed him a box of matches, whereupon McPhulach produced a
well-worn briar from his pocket and transferred it to his mouth.
"You must try and forget all that old story of the cheque," said Lady
Betty recovering herself. "It is so long ago that everyone is prepared
to be as nice to you as if it had never happened."
"H'm," grunted Calamity.
"You'll see," she went on hopefully. "I've got some people staying at
the Towers, and Judge Pennyfeather--Lady Di----you remember her as a
pert young flapper, I expect--the Bishop and some other people are
dining with us to-night."
"Then the story of the forgery was not kept in the family," remarked
Calamity icily. "All these people know it?"
"Well--yes," a little hesitatingly. "It was impossible to keep it
secret; you know George had a valet----"
"A fitting epitaph," said Calamity grimly.
"What----" began Lady Betty, but was interrupted once more by McPhulach,
who for some moments had been pulling at an empty pipe.
"I'm oot o' baccy," he said, again peering over the wind-screen. "Ye'll
no be haein' a pooch on ye'r pairson, skeeper?"
Without a word Calamity passed him a tobacco pouch, while Lady Betty bit
her lips with annoyance at this interruption of their _tête-à-tête_.
"I'm tell't that yon's ye'r ain hoose," said McPhulach, as he filled his
pipe. "It's a gey braw place, an' I wouldna mind haein' it mesel'."
He pointed with the stem of his pipe to a picturesque old mansion
standing in its own luxuriously wooded grounds at the summit of a slope
just ahead.
Calamity made no answer, but gazed thoughtfully at this home of his
childhood, the home he had never expected to see again. And thinking of
his early days there, and of the soft and sheltered lives of those who
live in such mansions, it seemed very desirable to the world-worn,
battered man. All sorts of trivial incidents of the past, forgotten
until now, flashed across his mind as the car turned into a road that
ran through a wood on the estate. In that wood, as a boy, he had seen an
adder swallow a young bird and remembered killing the reptile with a
heavy ash stick. In that piece of marshy ground, almost hidden by trees,
there used to be a pond fringed with yellow iris; he wondered if that
pond were still there, and the iris.... He made a resolution to go and
see later on, but, even as he did so, knew that he would find it the
same. Everything remained the same; Betty was the same; it was only he
who had altered.
Then his mood changed, and, while he felt a grim satisfaction at thus
returning as master to the home from which he had been thrust forth as a
criminal, he was not at all sure whether, apart from this sense of
triumph, he was glad to be back or otherwise--probably he was neither.
He wondered, too, whether the old life, with all its luxury and ease,
would appeal to him; whether he would feel at home again amidst these
remembered surroundings, or at variance with them.
And then, of course, there were the people whom he would have to meet;
people more foreign to him now than the polyglot rabble which had formed
his last crew. He had seen Lady Betty shrink from him at first sight,
and imagined that her present amiability was forced; that her words and
those soft, languishing glances she cast upon him were void of
sincerity. Others would shrink from him too, he supposed, and then hide
their feelings under a mask of well-bred composure as she was doing.
Could he meet these people on their own ground, speak their language,
lead their life? he asked himself.
Seeing Calamity deep in thought, McPhulach, who had leaned over the
wind-screen to return the tobacco-pouch, slid gently back into his seat
and absent-mindedly dropped the pouch into his own pocket.
The car was now proceeding up a broad avenue which led to the main
entrance of the Towers, and a vision came to Calamity of himself as a
small boy on horseback, cantering down this same avenue with his father.
The thought of the latter brought back to his memory the brother who
had blackened him in his father's eyes and made him what he had been;
what, in heart, he still was--an outcast and an exile.
Never had he hated his brother as he hated him at this moment.
Lady Betty, meanwhile, was taking advantage of his thoughtfulness to
examine his profile at her leisure. It was a strong face, she reflected,
stronger and harder far than that of the youth she had loved fifteen
years ago.
"A penny for your thoughts," she said lightly, to dissipate an emotion
induced by his proximity and those memories of their youth.
He turned swiftly, and the baffling, rather grim smile which played
about his mouth, together with the fixed and merciless stare of his
glass eye, embarrassed her to the point of actual nervousness.
"You shall have them at your own price when I put them up for sale," he
answered.
She coloured. Her first thought was that he intended to snub her, but
she quickly dismissed the idea. No, he must have meant that the moment
was not propitious. Perhaps he, also, had been thinking of....
"You never married in all those years?" she asked abruptly, and with a
little tremor in her voice that she could not control.
"No."
"Why?"
He smiled at her in a quizzical way and shrugged his shoulders.
"Ah, here we are," he said as the car drew up before the stately
entrance to Redhurst Towers. Springing out, he made his way round to the
other side in order to help her to alight. McPhulach, however, was
before him and stood with his arm crooked at an angle of forty-five
degrees, his body bent, and an ingratiating leer on his face.
"Hae a care o' yon step, ye'r leddyship," he remarked.
But the lady was equal to the occasion. Ignoring his arm, she sprang to
the ground.
"Will you be so kind as to bring my furs from the car?" she asked
sweetly, and to herself: "Why on earth has John brought this uncouth,
seafaring savage with him?"
The sound of the approaching motor had brought a child of about twelve
running out on to the terrace. She waited at the head of the stone
steps, colouring up shyly as she met the stranger's gaze.
"This is my little girl, Elfrida," said Lady Betty. "Elfrida, this is
your Uncle John."
The child held her hand out frankly to her grim relative, and there was
no suggestion of shrinking in her manner.
"I came out to be the first to welcome you home to Redhurst, Uncle
John," she said a trifle primly. Then, becoming all child again, she
turned to her mother. "Oh, mummy, I thought you'd never come. I'll go
and tell them you're here. We're all having tea in the hall."
As he watched the fair-haired child disappear, Calamity thought, with
something of a pang, that she might have been his own. But this feeling
lasted only a moment, and he remembered once more that she was the child
of the man who had ruined him.
"Welcome home," said Lady Betty softly.
"Thank you," he answered without enthusiasm.
"It has been home to me, and I have loved it for fourteen years," she
said, and then continued archly, obviously inviting and expecting a
denial. "And now you've come to turn me out."
Calamity fixed his disconcerting gaze upon her face.
"There's no hurry for a week or so," he said.