"I"m not likely to fall in love with him."
"It occurred to me this afternoon that he showed some slight inclination to fall in love with you. There was a sort of concentrated heaviness on him whenever he was with you. I suppose he"d sparkle if he could, under emotion, but as he can"t, he"s got to be duller than usual. Perhaps there"s nothing in it. But I shouldn"t blame him if he did fall in love with you. In fact, I should think it rather cheek, in a way, if he didn"t. He"s not likely to meet anybody more worth falling in love with. But it isn"t good enough, Pam."
"Well, I shouldn"t worry about it, if I were you. Jim isn"t my ideal, though he"s a nice old thing, and I think you"re too superior about him altogether. Did you know Fred Comfrey had come home?"
"Fred Comfrey!" Norman frowned. "I shouldn"t think you"re likely to fall in love with _him_," he said.
"Oh, bother falling in love! I"m leaving that to you at present. But there aren"t many people to play with about here just now. He makes another one. He"s much improved."
"Oh, Pam, he"s an awful creature. Surely, you"re not going to have anything to do with him!"
"I used to hate him; but he"s quite different now. I should never have known him. You know he went out to China, before you came to live here, and he never came home until he joined up for the war. He did very well in the war--got his Commission quite soon, and the Military Cross. He was badly wounded too, and isn"t fit yet. I"m sorry for him; and really, Norman, he"s quite nice. Anyhow, we couldn"t _not_ have him to play with us, because of Mr. and Mrs. Comfrey. I expect Auntie Eleanor will ask him here too. He only came yesterday."
"Well, I suppose you"ve got to give everybody his chance. He was an unmitigated beast as a boy, but perhaps he"s improved. He couldn"t very well have got any worse. Still, it does rather stick in my gizzard that he should be making friends with you, as I suppose he"ll want to. I should be a bit cautious if I were you, Pam. After all, one does know something of what a man is, when one has known him as a boy. I should say that Mr. Fred Comfrey was a nasty specimen, even if he has succeeded in disguising it, as he used not to. How long is he staying here?"
"I think he may stay in England altogether. He has done very well in business in China, and thinks he may be able to carry on in London."
"I wish he"d stayed in China. But how long is he staying in Hayslope?"
"For some time, I think. He had to go back to China, directly he was demobbed, and hasn"t had a holiday since the war. You ought to be nice to him, Norman. Poor Hugo liked him. He talked to me very nicely about Hugo this morning."
"When did you see him?"
"After church. Mother asked him to lunch, but he thought he"d better go home."
"He wasn"t at all a good friend for Hugo, you know."
"Perhaps not; but that"s so long ago. Hugo improved too, afterwards."
Norman acquiesced perfunctorily. He knew that Hugo had not at all improved, afterwards, but also that Pamela didn"t. "Well, I"ll try to forget what he used to be like," he said. "But don"t let"s talk about him any more. Let"s talk about Margaret."
CHAPTER V
THE FAMILY
Colonel Eldridge rode into his stable-yard and delivered up his horse to Timbs, who came hobbling out to receive it with a cheerful morning air and a general appearance of satisfaction with himself and his circ.u.mstances. Yet there were those who would have said that Timbs had no particular reason to be pleased with the way things had gone for him.
He had come to Hayslope Hall as groom ten years before, and had succeeded the old coachman four years later. He might have considered himself lucky then, for he was only twenty-six years of age. He had half a dozen horses in his stables and two grooms under him. There was also a chauffeur for the big car and the little runabout. Timbs had a young wife and a new baby, and comfortable quarters in which to keep them. In fact there seemed nothing left for him to desire, unless it was another baby of a s.e.x complementary to the first one.
Then the war came. Timbs joined up among the first, and was turned into a good soldier, always cheerful and reliable, and diligent in writing home to the young wife who was being taken care of at Hayslope. Colonel Eldridge, who had gone back to soldiering himself, had exercised pressure, where it was required, as it was not in the case of Timbs, upon the able-bodied bodied men on his estate to join the army, but had done his utmost to ensure their leaving their homes free of anxiety to those dependent upon them. So Mrs. Timbs and the baby prospered, while Timbs fought for his country; but Mrs. Timbs always wished that the war would end and Timbs would come home again, in which she differed from many wives in similar circ.u.mstances.
Timbs did come home at last, and she did not have to wait for him until quite the end. His left leg was shattered, and he had been for a long time in a hospital before she was allowed to have him. About the time the armistice was signed he was ready for work again. But it was not in his master"s power to give him the work he had done before the war.
Hayslope Hall could no longer support a coachman, two or three grooms and a chauffeur. Timbs took the place of all of them. One horse was kept and both the cars, but the bigger one was seldom used because of the price of petrol and tires. Timbs turned himself into an efficient chauffeur, and liked the change in his duties. He had higher wages than before, but perhaps not quite so high as he could have got elsewhere if he hadn"t preferred to stick to his old master. His quarters were the same, his wife was as devoted to him as ever, and his baby had grown into a pretty little girl of seven, who was the apple of his eye, and made a pet of by the young ladies. Timbs thought himself well off, even with his crooked leg; and perhaps he was, as things go nowadays.
Timbs knew when the Colonel was in the mood for a little chat, and when it was wise to render quick service with a silent tongue. In the good old days the Colonel had seldom come in from his morning ride without a cheery word or two to this favourite servant of his. He loved his horses and found plenty to say about them, though most of it might have been said many times before. And he would have something to say to Timbs about what he might have seen in the course of his inspection of farms and fields, which he liked to undertake before breakfast in the summer.
In the autumn there were early starts for cubbing, and then of course there was plenty to talk about on the return.
The good days did not seem to have disappeared entirely when the war was over, though Hugo"s death had made him more silent than before, and the reduction in stables and outdoor upkeep generally had already begun. But there was a season"s hunting, and Pamela had made her first appearance in the field. Timbs, with one groom to help him, had been kept busy enough, but his first winter at home had seemed to him very good. This was what the Colonel and he had always looked forward to--the time when the young ladies would hunt regularly, one after the other. Miss Pamela was good company for her father. He would soon pick up his spirits, and everything would be as it had been again.
But by the next season the economies had increased. There was no more hunting from Hayslope Hall. The Colonel kept one horse to get about on, and there was an old pony for pottering work on the place, which the younger children sometimes rode. That was what the war had brought to Colonel Eldridge in return for his services, which had included a year in the field, and after that four years of routine work in various provincial centres of industry. As a soldier he made no complaints. At his age he expected no reward other than the conviction of having done his duty where he could be made most useful. As a landowner he had many complaints to make, but kept them mostly to himself. He had pa.s.sed for a rich man before the war; now he was a poor one. But one did not flaunt one"s poverty before the world. That was why he had dropped hunting altogether; his old Caesar would have carried him well enough for a day or so a week, if he had cared to go on.
The morning chats with Timbs were getting rarer. There would certainly be none this morning. After a look at his master"s face Timbs led Caesar away without a word, and the Colonel went into the house. Something happened to put him out. Timbs"s own face was overcast, and it was fully two minutes before he began to whistle at his work.
It was a quarter past eight. Breakfast was at half-past, and as Colonel Eldridge would ride no more that day, he went upstairs to change his clothes. He came down as the gong sounded, and his expression had somewhat cleared. He held strong opinions about keeping an even temper before his family.
An English family a.s.sembled for breakfast in an old-established country house--the nations of the earth may be invited to contemplation of it.
Here at Hayslope Hall was an example that could have been multiplied by thousands at that hour, or at one a little later; for as a nation we are not early risers except on compulsion.
The room was large, but not too large for an air of domesticity when there was only the family to use it. It had three long small-paned windows, which on this summer morning were open to the wide, yet secluded garden. The walls were hung with pictures, some good, some indifferent, and all so familiar that they were never looked at. Of the portraits none were older than the middle of the eighteenth century; but five or six generations of men and women of the same blood who have lived in the same house, and, allowing for differences of era, in much the same way, is already something substantial in the way of background.
The furniture was not more than about a hundred years old, of that period of solid and dignified ugliness which was yet so much more satisfactory than the fashions succeeding it that by contrast with them it is now beginning to acquire merit. How it had come to replace the eighteenth century furniture which the periwigged gentlemen and hooped ladies on the walls had used when in the flesh was now forgotten; but it is only of late years that old furniture has been preferred to new, and there was nothing remarkable in this. The refurnishing of the dining-room might very well have been set in hand again since the last clearing out a hundred years before if it had not been thought that it would do very well as it was, and that there were more important rooms to spend money on, if money was to be spent in this way. As a setting for the family that now used it the room was eloquent of an ancestry already respectably established, and it told somehow of interests that were not markedly concerned with the decorations and appointments of a house. To the Eldridges, their dining-room was the place for the enjoyment of food and the sociability that went therewith, and it fulfilled all purposes that could be required of it. It was only in the matter of large a.s.semblies, of which the great expanse of dark mahogany and the score or so of well-padded chairs seemed to make perpetual suggestion, that any incongruity might have been felt. The time for that was not now. But with the table lessened to the needs of family use and the s.p.a.ce around it thus agreeably increased, the normal occupation of the room was sufficient for it. Here began the day with the a.s.sembling of those who would go their ways, some together and some apart, throughout its course, but all with a sense of the nearness of the rest; and here they would meet twice again before the day was done, to keep alive one of the best of the good things that English country life has cherished and made complete--the community of the family.
Colonel Eldridge, after greeting his daughters with a mixture of formality and affection, occupied himself with his breakfast and the letters which lay in a little pile beside his plate. It had not been his habit to deal thus with his correspondence in the days before the war.
He had been more ready to talk then. He would choose a few letters out of the pile and perhaps discuss them, as Mrs. Eldridge did with hers at the other end of the table, and leave the rest for afterwards. Now he went through them all, business letters as well as private, and, schooled as he was to hide his emotions, he could not always keep from his face some expression of annoyance, or even dismay. But it was only in his face that this showed, and his wife and daughters knew that it was not meant to show at all. By degrees they had learnt to ignore it.
If they addressed him he would always respond, and he would have been annoyed if they had tried to suit themselves to his moods. He liked to hear them chattering gaily among themselves, though he was not always ready to join in their chatter. They were, indeed, the reward that all his anxieties and schemings brought him. It was the happiness and freedom of their lives in the home which it behooved him to keep intact about them that sweetened it to him. But for them there would have been no anxiety, but only some reduction of opportunities which would still have left the main interests of his life untouched.
Colonel Eldridge was very neat in his suit of grey tweed, well-cut, well-brushed, but well-worn, his white stock creaseless, his figure thin and a little stiff, but not with the stiffness of age, his gold-rimmed gla.s.ses on the ridge of his thin, straight nose, his well-shaped nervous hands manipulating his papers or the implements of his meal. He was as different as possible, in outward appearance, from those ancestors of his whose pictures hung upon the walls; but probably he was very like them at root. Certainly there was not one who had been more attached to the house and acres which had been theirs and were now his. He had been a good soldier, of a limited kind, but he was above all a country gentleman, and looked thoroughly in his place in this room, which could only have been found, just as it was, in an English country house.
Mrs. Eldridge also looked thoroughly in place behind the old silver and china of her equipage. She always came down to breakfast in a state of apparent content with herself and her surroundings, cool and unruffled both in dress and demeanour. In the time that was past there had been so much to look forward to in the day of which this gathering was the inauguration. Though not, presumably, attached to the life of the country by the same ties as bound her husband, and enjoying her life equally when the periodic moves were made to London, she would have chosen the country rather than the town for permanent residence. The choice had not been hers, but it had had to be made. Much had gone that had made life agreeable to her at Hayslope, but much remained. On these summer mornings it was not so unlike what it had always been to her.
There was the pleasant meal with her husband and her children, whom she loved; the appointments of the table, in which she never failed to take pleasure, though she had used them regularly for over twenty years; the sense of being newly and becomingly dressed; the birds singing in the garden, which was so fresh and inviting, and with the windows open so much a part, as it were, of the room itself. Her letters never brought her worries, as her husband"s sometimes brought him--only occasionally a mild regret for opportunities of which she could no longer take advantage. But at this time of the day she was not much inclined to want more than she had. Her domestic duties were immediately in front of her, and she enjoyed them. She enjoyed them even more than before, for with fewer servants more depended on her. Only half of her desired the distractions due to wealth; the rest of her was pure domesticity. She had never been happier than during the first few years of married life, before her husband had succeeded his father as Squire of Hayslope. She was happy now in much the same responsibilities as had then devolved upon her, had she but known it. In these early hours of the day the consciousness of what she had lost did not trouble her. Besides, something might always happen in the long hours before her. She was not so old as to have lost that sense of the unexpected.
Pamela was happy too. She might grumble sometimes--to Norman--about the restrictions that had come to spoil the life of Hayslope Hall; but she loved it. And all the future was before her, golden and glamorous. It wrapped her in a sort of happy aura, which contained no definite point of desire. Anything might happen to her, in any one of these summer days, which began with the family meeting at breakfast. Something was bound to happen some day, and in the meantime life was sweet, and the shadow that had come to lie over her home hardly darkened at all the radiance in which she walked.
Judith was as pretty as Pamela in her way, which was an entirely different way. She was the only dark member of the family, now that Hugo was dead. Some forgotten ancestress had bequeathed her her l.u.s.trous hair, of which the shadows were almost visibly blue, and her large, deep, solemn eyes, her very skin was dark, but with the bloom of youth on it, and the healthy blood that flowed beneath its soft surface, it was rich and delicate. At the age of eighteen she had not yet come into the full heritage of her beauty, which did not depend so much as Pamela"s upon youth. She hardly even seemed aware of it, and clothes were not yet a matter of much interest to her. She had alternations of childish high spirits and brooding reflection. Out of doors she was still something of a tomboy, in her young and restless energy; but she would sit for hours over a book, and in those moods she was oblivious to everybody and everything around her. She seldom talked about what she read, and indeed her reading would have been a puzzle to anyone who had tried to draw inferences of literary taste from it. Pamela had once reported to Norman the books over which Judith had spent hours of a wet day. They were Grimm"s Fairy Tales, "The Wide, Wide World," and Bacon"s Essays, and she seemed to have spent about the same time over each.
Pamela held that she had no literary taste whatever; Norman was inclined to treat her preferences as a touchstone of merit. If Judith liked something, it was probably good. This theory was strengthened when she said she liked a picture of Gaugin"s, of which he submitted to her a reproduction, and weakened by her absorption in Martin Tupper"s "Proverbial Philosophy," which she had found in the library and carried up to her room with her. She was quite ready to laugh with them over her tastes, but she would never give any explanation of them. "I like it,"
or "I don"t like it," was her sole contribution to literary criticism, and she would never be moved a hair"s breadth by any consensus of opinion. Judith went her own way in everything, but her way at present was confined almost entirely to Hayslope, where she found everything that she wanted. Less than Pamela did she feel the loss of what had made the life of her home rich in interest before the war. She had grown up from childhood under the new conditions and was happy in them.
The exceptional family beauty seemed to have stopped short at Judith.
Alice and Isabelle, who were thirteen and twelve, respectively, had their abundant fair hair to recommend them, and their active youth, but nothing much else as yet in the way of looks. They were agreeable children, much alike in their eager interest in whatever went on around them, and their unerring pursuit of pleasure. They were always "the children" to the rest of the family, and what they thought was of small importance, though what they did sometimes obtruded itself upon their elders. Sitting at breakfast, one on either side of their mother, in their neat clothes, which would not be so neat later on in the day, their thick manes confined in heavy plaits, they seemed eminently _good_ children, showing a healthy appet.i.te, but no greediness, in the consumption of viands, taking a bright part in the conversation when it touched their orbit, but not obtruding themselves in such a way as to make their company noxious. Their presence at the breakfast table seemed, indeed, to heighten the effect of a family at one and at peace; for young children in a happy home have no desires outside it. Their parents, their brothers and sisters, even the servants and dependants who are also part of the family for the time being, are the chief characters in their little world. Not even their parents themselves are so bounded in their interests by the home they have made for them. And the wonderful imagination of children makes it the chief place of delight to them, even where its opportunities are small. Opportunities were not small at Hayslope Hall for these two, and they were as happy as children of their age could very well be.
If Miss Baldwin, their governess, was not completely happy--as what woman living always in other people"s houses can be?--she was as contented as the accidents of her lot in life could make her. She was a precise spinster of middle age, and sat very prim and mindful of her manners between Pamela and Alice, never speaking unless when spoken to, but then speaking with an attention to the composition of sentences and the correct enunciation of her vowels which was a lesson to everybody present, and intended to be so to at least two of them. Colonel Eldridge addressed her directly, at least once in the course of every meal at which she was present, out of politeness. Mrs. Eldridge always found it difficult to remember that she was there, but also addressed her occasionally; but her attention was apt to wander over the reply.
Miss Baldwin had been at Hayslope for two years, but was no nearer to making one of the family circle than when she arrived. She was strict in the schoolroom and a good teacher in a limited way, but without any real interest in the subjects which she taught. n.o.body would have thought, from her appearance and manner, that she was an incurable sentimentalist. She lived in a world of her own--a world of romance, of which the materials were sent her once a week in official-looking long envelopes with a typewritten address. Her time came when the children were in bed, and the life of the house, in which she had no wish to take part, was concentrated below. Then, in the large quiet schoolroom, sitting by the open window in the summer, or in winter time by the fire, she would be wafted away from the actual life about her, with all its restrictions for one of her age and cla.s.s, to live richly and freely with the heroes and heroines of her chosen world. Baldness of narrative troubled her not at all. In the novels by authors of repute which she sometimes heard people discussing, there seemed no room for the play of imagination; the novelist would have it just so and not otherwise, and the characters to which he introduced his readers were so much like the characters one might meet at any time in the dull and sterile flesh.
Those strong heroes of her favourite romances were as G.o.ds beside the emasculate earth-dwellers who stood for hero even in the best of stories bound between boards; the very virtue of their t.i.tles, if t.i.tles they had, seemed to be denied them. Nor did the heroines please her any better. She could never imagine herself one of them with any pleasure.
If stately, they were never stately enough; if blushing and timid, they were merely pa.s.sed by as of no account. Even Ouida, for whom she made an exception, having read some of her novels in early life, under a strong sense of immodesty, concerned herself with unessentials. Miss Baldwin wanted no pages of description, however poetic. She could get that in Wordsworth, duly annotated, so that there should be no mistake as to locality. If it was question of a garden in which a love scene was to be enacted, she only wanted to imagine it for herself--the most beautiful garden that ever was, not without indications of wealth on the part of its owners; or if a cottage garden, the mere mention of roses and honeysuckle would suffice. It was the people who mattered and what happened to them, and with them she smiled and wept, and felt, to the depths of her being.
So perhaps Miss Baldwin was happy after all, if not in the circ.u.mstances of her daily life, which she went through conscientiously and efficiently, in that paradise the gates of which were always open to her, where men were as G.o.ds, and women were worshipped by them, and none of them ever behaved in the way that Miss Baldwin was always impressing upon her pupils was the only possible way to behave.
CHAPTER VI
BARTON"S CLOSE