We hunted quite a lot that winter, Clementina and Sim and I. I tore her away from Miss Milston whenever there was a meet conveniently near Hinkleton. We had some splendid runs. The child went like a bird. I was proud of her in the hunting field for she rode well, and was so bold and fearless. Sometimes my heart rose into my throat at the sight of Clementina flying over a particularly nasty hedge on her black cob—it was a frightful responsibility for me. Supposing she came to grief, what should I do? Her father was somewhere in the wilds of Africa, lost to civilization, so the responsibility was all mine. But Clementina did not come to grief; she took one or two tosses, but she was always up again the next moment and anxious to pursue the chase. She never learned caution from her experiences.
“Miss Clem rides like the Squire,” said Sim one day. “He gives me the ’eebie-jeebies sometimes. They both ride as if they didn’t care, and it’s just the people that don’t care that never takes any ’arm. That’s my experience, Miss.”
This comforted me a little, because I knew it was true.
“Look at Lady Vera,” Sim continued (he was busy bandaging the gray’s off-fore, which was apt to fill a little after a long day). “Lady Vera’s ridden to ’ounds for more years than I’d like to say, and she’s never come to no ’arm, not to speak of—a broken bone or two she may ’ave ’ad, but what’s a broken bone, Miss?”
“Is Lady Vera very reckless?” I asked. It amused me to talk to Sim and watch his capable hands at work.
“Reckless!” Sim exclaimed. “Why the Squire’s timid compared to Lady Vera. You’ve seen ’er ’aven’t you, Miss? A thin lady with a brownish face. She’s bin huntin’ a chestnut most of the winter.”
“Oh, that’s Lady Vera, is it?” I said. “Yes, I’ve spoken to her once or twice. She certainly seems a thruster.”
“Yes, that’s her—she breeds horses, you know, Miss. We get quite a lot of our horses from Lady Vera. But what I wanted to say is don’t you worry about Miss Clem. She’ll be all right. Lady Vera doesn’t come to no ’arm and Miss Clem won’t neither.”
It was easy for Sim to say “Don’t worry,” but I found the advice difficult to take. I was watching Clementina one day. She was flying down a steep field toward a bank with a thick-set hedge on the top. I had decided that the hedge was impracticable and was casting about for a convenient gate, but nothing was impracticable to Clementina in the heat of the chase. The black cob was a marvelous jumper, and his mistress made good use of his skill. I saw Clementina gather the animal together with her competent hands, and the next moment they were over the obstacle and away.
I sighed with relief and found a gentleman at my elbow looking at me with whimsical sympathy.
“You find the young Diana something of a responsibility,” he suggested, raising his hat. He was a man of about fifty, a real hunting man, with a lean, red face and iron-gray hair. His eyes, set about with creases and shaded by rather bushy eyebrows, were friendly and humorous.
“She terrifies me,” I admitted. “You see I am entirely responsible for her.”
“Wisdon is in Africa, isn’t he? By the way, my name is Felstead and I know Wisdon quite well. You are Miss Dean, of course.”
We walked our horses down the field toward a gate. The hunt had swept on over a hill and left us behind. I was not sorry to draw out of the hunt, for it had been a long and tiring day. Brown Betty was tired too.
“I’m ridin’ a green beast,” Mr. Felstead said. “He’s had enough for today and so have I. He’s had me off twice, and I’m getting too old for that sort of thing. We may see something of the hunt if we bear left for Borland Corner. What do you say?”
I was quite pleased to accept Mr. Felstead’s guidance; he was pleasant and kind and he knew Garth. Until now, nobody had spoken to me, except in the casual manner of hunting folk. I had exchanged civilities with various people over gates, and had chatted about the scent and the weather conditions, but this was different. This man knew who I was, knew Garth and asked about him—I found it unexpectedly pleasant. I had not missed friendly neighbors until now. I had been too busy trying to master the various intricacies of my new job. But it suddenly occurred to me, as I walked down the hill beside Mr. Felstead, that it was really rather peculiar how few friends Garth and Kitty seemed to have—in fact, as far as I knew, they had none. Nobody had called; nobody ever stopped Clementina in the village or spoke to her when we came out of church.
“May my wife call?” Mr. Felstead inquired, when I had answered his questions about Garth’s whereabouts to the best of my ability. “We are quite near neighbors, you know. Ten miles is nothing in these days. We live at Oldgarden. I have a girl just Clem’s age.”
I said it would be nice.
“They used to see a good deal of each other, the girls,” he added, rather diffidently. “In fact they were tremendous pals, but recently—the last year or so—er—my wife—”
He leaned over to open the gate, and I saw that his red face had grown quite scarlet with embarrassment, and suddenly I understood him—or thought that I understood him—perfectly. Mrs. Felstead had been unwilling to let her girl come to a house which was the subject of so much talk and gossip in the neighborhood. One could hardly blame her. The divorce case must have caused a considerable stir—it was foolish of me not to have realized this before—here was the explanation of our isolation at Hinkleton Manor. How dreadful it must have been for Garth, how humbling to his pride to find himself ostracized by the County. (Humbling was the wrong word, he was embittered, not humbled by the experience.) No wonder he had left the place and gone to Africa—Garth’s pride came into this again. Garth’s pride of race which made him feel himself the equal of any man in England and the superior of most. I had heard no talk, of course, no gossip of any kind had reached my ears, but I was the last person who would be likely to hear anything—the whole County might still be discussing Garth and Kitty and their lamentable affairs for all I knew.
These disjointed thoughts flashed through my head as I watched Mr. Felstead open the gate, and in a few moments I made up my mind what to say.
“It would be kind if you would allow your little girl to come to tea with Clementina,” I told him frankly. “She is a solitary child and needs the companionship of children of her own age.”
“I will speak to my wife about it,” he promised. “She likes Clem—we all like Clem—and Violet will be delighted to see her again. My wife and daughter are away from home just now, but when they come back—”
There was a good deal left unsaid in the conversation, but I felt that we understood each other. I sensed Mr. Felstead’s friendliness and was glad of it. Glad to feel that Clementina and I had one friend.
We had not gone far when we saw the hunt streaming across a field at right angles to our course and less than a quarter of a mile away. I looked at Mr. Felstead and smiled.
“Yes,” he said laughing, “I’m an old hand at this game—Yoicks tally-ho.”
He clapped his knees to his green horse and cantered down the field—I followed him. We skirted a ploughed field, crossed a cart-road and emerged into the ruck of the hunt. Clementina was well in front, still going strong. Sim, on the lean gray, was close to her. We swept across a stubble field and over a low fence into a large square meadow. Before us was a small wood, hounds were already disappearing into it.
“We shall kill now, if the earths have been stopped,” said Mr. Felstead at my elbow.
Some of the hunt servants were skirting the wood and taking up positions to watch for the fox in case he should give the hounds the slip, but it was unnecessary. There was a burst of music followed by the unmistakable snarling of a kill.
“Do you want to see the end of Mr. Reynard?” inquired my companion. “I’m afraid we’re too late.”
I shook my head. “It’s the only bit I don’t like,” I told him.
“Paula doesn’t like it either,” he said, smiling. “My wife, you know. She goes like the devil, but she looks the other way when the end comes. You’re rather like Paula in some ways.”
We waited for a little at the edge of the wood, walking slowly up and down to cool off the horses. There was, perhaps, about a score of others like ourselves, who had chosen not to see the end. The women were eating biscuits, and the men regaling themselves from pocket flasks. The wind was very cold, and the sun was sinking behind the hills like a round red ball.
“Looks like frost,” somebody said.
Just at that moment a tall man on a bay mare approached me and raised his hat. He had a pleasant, open face, very brown and weather-beaten, and his eyes were intensely blue.
“You won’t remember me,” he said, smiling. “Geoff Howard is my name. My brother was up at Oxford with Garth Wisdon and we came down to Hinkleton for Garth’s coming-of-age ball. It was just before the war.”
I shook hands with him and said, “How stupid of me to forget!”
“My people have taken Fairways for two years,” he said and looked at me inquiringly.
“I am staying at Hinkleton Manor looking after my small niece—or rather trying to look after her,” I told him. “Garth has gone to Africa with the Fraser expedition.”
He looked at me with a puzzled frown. “Your niece? I thought—”
“Garth married my sister,” I explained.
“You are very like your sister,” he replied.
“Am I?” I inquired feebly. Nobody had ever told me such a thing before. He couldn’t really think that I was like Kitty—we were totally different in every way—I felt that we were at cross purposes, but I didn’t see how.
“No wonder you didn’t remember me,” laughed Mr. Howard. “It was your sister that I met at the dance of course. Wisdon was crazy about her that night. We were all crazy about her, but she had eyes for nobody else. We teased Wisdon like anything about her because he was such an innocent, wouldn’t look at a girl, couldn’t be bothered with girls, hadn’t time for them, and then quite suddenly he was completely sunk. You know how it is with fellows like that—or perhaps you don’t know.”
I saw now how we had got muddled, but it was impossible for me to explain the matter. The whole thing was too painful and intimate to expound to a strange man in the middle of a hunting field. We were surrounded by a chattering throng of people, and our horses were turning and backing every moment as new arrivals divided the crowd into fresh patterns. Could I say to the man, “Garth jilted me and married my sister, and now he has divorced her?” I hadn’t the moral courage to attempt it.
“Wisdon was as badly hit as any man I’ve seen,” continued Mr. Howard, laughing merrily. “It served him right for saying he hadn’t time for girls. I was jolly glad when I saw the marriage in the papers—after the war, wasn’t it?—I’ve been in Canada ever since the war—just got home for a bit of a holiday. I told you my people have taken Fairways, didn’t I?”
“Look out, you,” cried a gruff voice on the other side of Mr. Howard. “Can’t you manage your damned horse, sir? He’s eating my boot.”
Mr. Howard pulled up his horse’s head and raised his hat politely. “I beg your pardon, sir. She must have mistaken your foot for a banana. She dotes on bananas. Queer taste, isn’t it?”
The man grunted fiercely and turned away, leaving Mr. Howard free to resume his rather one-sided conversation with me. I had never met a man who talked so continuously as Mr. Howard without being boring or didactic. I found afterward that he had spent long months snowbound in Canada with nobody of his own stamp to converse with, and concluded that he was still busy making up for lost time.
The rest of the hunt was now emerging from the trees. Clementina rode up to me and displayed the brush. Her eyes were sparkling and her cheeks were flushed with excitement—I scarcely knew the child.
Mr. Felstead and Mr. Howard congratulated her warmly, and several other gentlemen followed suit.
“By Gad! You deserved it,” cried Mr. Howard. “I saw you sailing over fences like a cavalryman. Your father will be proud of you when he hears about it. I’d no idea you were Garth Wisdon’s daughter, thought you must be Diana at least. That’s a damn good cob you’ve got. He’s earned his feed today.”
Clementina looked up and smiled at him, then she stopped and patted Black Knight’s shoulder, but she didn’t speak.
The hunt was dispersing now, the luxurious ones dismounted and left their horses to be brought home by grooms while they themselves were whirled off in cars which had appeared in the road nearby as if by magic. Clementina and I walked slowly down the hill with Mr. Howard—our roads home lay in the same direction, for Fairways was about three miles on the other side of Hinkleton Manor. I knew the place well, it was a charming old house flanked by Georgian pillars and covered with Virginia creeper. It was occupied, in the days when I had known it, by a couple of maiden ladies, the Misses Golding; they were rather terrifying to children, for they were large and stout and had very red faces—one of them had a beard. They used to ask us to tea sometimes, and we were obliged to go because they were important parishioners, but it was always an ordeal, and we breathed sighs of relief when we were safely out of the gates again and our feet set on our homeward way. The tea they provided was a poor meal—sandwiches filled with cucumber, and fancy biscuits, which were always very soft and stale, served on an enormous silver tray, and watery tea in an immense silver teapot. Mother hated going as much as we did, but she would never own to the fact; she had a very high conception of her duties as a parson’s wife.
I came back from the past to hear Clementina talking to Mr. Howard in quite an animated manner. Her thin, light, childish voice was a strange vehicle for the mature conversation which she produced for Mr. Howard’s benefit.
“He’s by Black Boy out of Dark Lady,” she was saying. “Daddy bought him for me as a two-year-old from Lady Vera. He’s six now and I love him awfully.”
“I don’t wonder!” commented Mr. Howard.
“Horses never let you down,” continued Clementina. “I mean they never go back on you. They aren’t like people who pretend to be fond of you and turn their backs on you when troubles come. Horses love you because you’re you.”
“That’s quite true,” said Mr. Howard in some astonishment. “But I should have thought you were too young to have found it out.”
“I’m not young,” Clementina told him in her childish voice. “I’m a hundred years old, I think.”
He laughed at that, but not unkindly. “Perhaps as you grow older you may lose some of that frightful burden of years,” he suggested.
We were now at the gates of the Manor, and I could do no other than ask him to come in and have tea. He jumped at the offer and we all turned in at the gate together and trotted up the avenue.
“I haven’t been here since the dance,” he said, looking about him. “It must be twenty years ago—or very nearly. It was my first grown-up dance; I suppose that’s why I remember it so well. I was supposed to be going up to Oxford the following year, but of course I didn’t.”
“Why didn’t you?” inquired Clementina interestedly.
“Because a certain grandee got himself shot by a fanatic,” replied Mr. Howard smiling. I had never heard of the man before, but he stopped me going to Oxford just the same. His death set the world on fire; I don’t suppose it would have done so if the world hadn’t been ripe for a blaze.”
“Oh, the war,” said Clementina. “I didn’t know you were as old as that.”
Mr. Howard looked slightly taken aback by this frank statement, and then he smiled. “That’s a compliment, Clementina,” he said. “I didn’t recognize it as such at first sight, but it is a compliment, and a very nice one too.”
Tea was a cheerful, pleasant meal; we were all hungry and slightly tired after our long day; the buns and cakes disappeared like melting snow. Mr. Howard chaffed Clementina over her appetite, and she replied in good part. I had never seen the child so normal and childlike. When we had finished, and Mr. Howard had got his pipe going, he told us something of his life in Canada. He was an engineer and had been engaged upon an electric power scheme to supply electricity to a large and growing town. He told us some of his difficulties and disappointments and then launched out into an extremely funny but wholly incredible account of his adventures in the mountains with grizzly bears.
“Baron Munchausen,” I said at last, softly, under my breath.
He looked at me and smiled wickedly. “You believed quite a lot of it,” he said. “I saw the moment when a wavering doubt of my veracity dawned upon your mind.”
“I am in the habit of believing my friends,” I told him severely.
“Rats!” he exclaimed, and rose stiffly out of his chair. “Yes, I really must go. Mother will wonder where on earth I’ve got to. I said I would be home at five.”
Clementina and I saw him off at the door. He wouldn’t let me call Sim to bring his mare round.
“I’ll find her at the stables,” he said. “Au revoir, you’ll be out on Thursday, I suppose.”
“Unless it freezes,” I said, shivering a little as the cold wind swept round the corner of the house.
He waved to us, and disappeared in the darkness.
“A nice man,” I said to Clementina, “I liked him, didn’t you?” She didn’t answer, and suddenly I saw that her eyes were full of tears. “My darling girl, what is the matter?”
“Nothing,” she said roughly, pulling herself away from my arm which had gone round her shoulders. “Nothing except—he won’t come here again—not when he knows—not when he hears about—about us. He doesn’t know—that’s why he’s friendly and nice.”
I held on to her arm. “Clementina, a man like Mr. Howard wouldn’t care. He has traveled, knocked about the world. He was friendly and kind because he liked us.”
“Because he didn’t know,” she said, dragging her arm away. “When he knows he’ll be quite different—you’ll see. You don’t understand what it’s like because you haven’t seen it happen. He’ll be polite—and—and in a hurry—he’ll be in a hurry to get home—you’ll see.”
She fled away, upstairs. I called to her twice, but she did not answer nor come back.
I went into the library and stood looking at the fire. It was difficult to know what to do with Clementina, what to say. I had not realized that Clementina knew so much. I wondered just how much she did know. It was dreadful to feel that she was suffering this misery alone, had been suffering it for months without saying a word. I remembered—looking back with newly found knowledge—that Clementina had always avoided meeting people when she could. “We’ll go down by the fields,” she would say, if there was an errand to do in the village. When we went to church she led me out by the side door, remarking, “There’s such a crowd at the front door, it’s shorter this way.” When we hunted, Clementina took her own line; she avoided gates where she might find herself squeezed up against somebody she knew—gates were unnecessary to Clementina when she was mounted on Black Knight. I saw all this now, though I had not seen it at the time. Clementina took enormous pains to avoid everybody she knew. It was a dreadful position for a child, far worse for a child than for a grown-up person—I saw that clearly. She could not understand what had happened, nobody discussed things with her, nobody explained things to her. Any knowledge that she possessed was picked up through hearing conversations—or parts of conversations—which were not meant for her ears, or through the servants. She put the pieces together and brooded over them. What could she know about her parents’ affairs? She knew that something shameful had happened; she knew that the house—once so proud and respected—was shunned by the County. She knew that her mother’s name was never mentioned.
I sat down by the fire and thought about it for a long, long time, but I could see no way of helping the child. Save by guarding her as well as I could and showing her that I understood and was her friend, I could do nothing for her. Perhaps you could have helped her, Clare—I wonder if you could. Would you have tackled the thing boldly, or would you have shirked the issue as I did?