HE MEETS HIS COUSIN
“Captain Einon-Thomas,” the parlour-maid announced, opening the door in front of Dick. She wore a grey alpaca uniform with a tight fitting bodice. Nice, old-fashioned servant, he thought, and then: Mother used to dress in grey. He remembered shrinking behind her skirts at children’s parties, ashamed of his suit, afraid lest some big boy in an Eton jacket might ask him if he rode a pony. There had been a great house, belonging to a friend of his father’s, to which he had been invited when he was a child—a house as chill and marbled as a town hall. The journey to it from Streatham had been full of terrors. For a week before their going, his mother had been nervously critical of his manners, and in the train her searching eye had keyed him to his ordeal. When he went to school at Dulwich, the yearly invitation to Carlton House Terrace had ceased. He would have been glad, but that his mother was sorry. “I wonder,” she used to sigh, “if you did anything to give offence.”
At these recollections, his hand went up to his tie. Was it straight and correct? He jerked his hand down and tugged at a button of his waistcoat. To hell with this nonsense, he thought. Couldn’t he be done with it now? Wasn’t he Einon-Thomas of Plâs Einon? But that had been the name of the poor devils into whose inheritance he was come! It seemed indecent to be announced to their relatives by the title of the dead. A sense of his own inadequacy caused Dick to look down at his feet; a shoe-lace was dangling; he stooped to tuck it in. Two Sealyham terriers came sniffing and waggling at him, their claws scuttering on the parquet floor. A warm tongue licked the tip of his nose. How easy it was to get on well with dogs! Then he stood up, threw back his shoulders as on parade, and strode past the shielding grey skirt. To leave it behind was like taking a plunge into cold water.
Three ladies rose to meet him. All were in mourning for his predecessors.
“I—I hope you don’t mind,” he stuttered, and shook hands rigidly with the widow.
She wore the usual little white collar and cuffs on a black gown, and an expression of decorous melancholy. Her large blue eyes were pretty but unprovocative. She seemed to have been very tired for a number of years.
“My calling, I mean,” he hurried on, “I was awfully afraid, perhaps, that, that you’d think it rather soon after—” His voice trailed into silence.
Hot with shame, he gripped the next hand extended to him. It returned his clutch with a warm pressure. Some women’s hands felt kind, he thought, particularly if they were broad and firm. But when he glanced up, encouraged, he was met by a frankly amused smile, which disconcerted him. He took the third hand. It was cold and glossy, and narrow, like a serpent.
“My sister-in-law, Mrs. Blake,” the widow was murmuring. “ And my other sister-in-law, Miss Einon-Thomas. She lives with us—that is, I mean— she—has always made her home here.” There was a dangerous pause until she added with forced brightness, “I am trying to persuade her to pay me a visit at Cannes next winter. I mean to share a small villa with an old friend there.”
“Oh, do you?” said Dick. And after a moment’s travail he brought forth, “Jolly nice spot, I believe.” “Oh very,” she said, and began to speak in a flat voice, as though to gain time, about English clubs, and of how, by living abroad for half the year, one might escape Income Tax. But from that topic she shied away, not wishing to reproach him with her future poverty. Nice, feeling little woman, he told himself; and felt the more guilty in robbing her of her husband’s estate.
She turned to her married sister-in-law.
“Mrs. Blake is only here on a visit…Won’t you sit down? I’m sure I don’t know why we are all standing.…Her husband is in the Navy. At least he is actually resigning this week, isn’t he, Frances?” “Yes,” answered the lady with the large friendly hand. She dropped into an easy chair and crossed her legs. “He’s going to give up the service and try his luck in Fleet Street. Unless I manage to get a job, too, I expect the children will starve.”
That’s a bit stiff! Dick thought, but the speaker seemed cheerfully unaware of having embarrassed him. She talked about employment, and the problems of the new rich and the new poor, as though she were alluding to a game of chess, and not to matters which touched them all closely. At length the widow intervened, bringing the conversation back to safe, dull ground: the weather, the state of the roads.
“They are terribly cut up,” she said. “So much timber-hauling during the war, you know.”
“Oh, of course,” he agreed.
Watching her hands, small and white, which played with an antique mourning brooch of black enamel, he began to think of the family jewels which his wife might wear—when he had chosen her. It would be chivalrous to take over the widow with the estate and to let her wear the heirlooms to which she was accustomed. But the idea made him want to laugh. He would marry a dazzler, a real fresh pretty girl! This Mrs. Einon-Thomas was old enough to be his mother. Not quite, perhaps, but nearing forty. Still, she was the best of the three, the most womanly; though the others had appeared more striking in the flurry of his first encounter. He began now, furtively, to study them.
They were much alike, tall and dark. No doubt they were considered handsome a few years ago. But they weren’t his style—too foreign, too much what you expected of the Welsh. It was odd that they should be his first cousins. Those boldly marked, level eyebrows, those almost Italian features with so little flesh upon them, suggested bad temper, or worse, fanaticism. He shouldn’t wonder if they were rabid teetotallers, or religious, or something of the kind. The married one looked cheerful enough, and she was the younger, but she displeased him by being untidy. His mother and the Army had taught him to revere neatness in dress and to disapprove of those who were indifferent to it. Frances Blake’s abundance of black hair, with its natural, unruly wave, seemed to have been tossed up in a hurry, and her dress was without precision. Dick turned away to her sister and tried to draw her into the conversation. Last night, in the bar of the Green Dragon, he had talked with a man in the Timber Supply Department. Now he quoted what he hoped was a well-informed remark on the supply of pit-props to the collieries of South Wales. Miss Einon-Thomas looked at him in silent disdain. Had the timber fellow been pulling his leg? he wondered; and he recalled hotly that Flash Frank had laid traps for his ignorance when first he joined the regiment. What was his cousin thinking of him as she sat there, not troubling to answer? At least she was not laughing at him, as they had so often laughed in the Mess. She was staring out of the French windows at the lawns and the tall trees beyond. Her profile would look well on a coin.
She was dressed, though plainly, with the care for exact order that he had been bred to admire. An uneasy interest in her stirred within him, not because she was a woman, for she was hard and dry, like well-seasoned wood, but because he guessed, by the stiffening of her body and the compression of her well-shaped lips, that, of these three, it was she who suffered most. I suppose, he decided, being un-married and a daughter at home and all that, she was wrapped up in her brothers, and he was sorry for her.
“I dare say you notice the difference,” he observed, still relying on timber to keep the conversation from collapse, “but I’ve never seen this country before, you know, and to me the valleys look jolly well wooded. It’s awfully pretty, anyway”
That would please her, he thought.
But Gwenllian’s dark eyes flashed on him, large and beautiful as an angry cat’s. He was startled.
“It’s ruined,” she said. “There’s almost nothing left.”
Was she thinking of men as well as of trees? His face burned as though she had slapped it; but an instant later she had risen, and he watched her go down the long room with the quiet assurance of movement that he had always envied. A faint glow of satisfaction at being in the intimate company of a gentlewoman whose dignity none could dispute warmed his being. How different she was in voice and carriage and manner from the girls he had taken on the river at Maidenhead before he was Einon-Thomas of Plâs Einon! As he studied her, he became aware for the first time that the large drawing-room at Plâs Einon fitted her as a frame its picture.
There were many portraits in oils of dark, handsome folk, evidently her ancestors, and beside the hearth was a case of miniatures mounted on black velvet. Several of the Persian rugs were threadbare, and the striped wall-paper was stained by damp. There was no means of lighting but by candles in mirrored sconces or by oil-lamps with shades of puckered silk flounced with lace—such shades as reminded him of ladies’ hats in his childhood. There were people, Dick knew, who wouldn’t like the room as he did, but even they wouldn’t dare to call it dowdy. It was full of the flower-like gaiety of old china. Out of the darkness of walnut cabinets sprang the brilliance of apple-green, the bouquets and birds of Nantgarw, the rich gold of Crown Derby. “Pretty they are,” he said, boldly picking up from the mantelshelf one of the many figures that posed there—arch little ladies and gentlemen of Chelsea and Bow. What a mixture! But he liked it. He was proud of being able to recognise so much—the harp of the Regency with its drooping strings, the Jacobean chairs with tapestried seats of faded blue and green, the fat bunch of wax fruit under glass, which, he guessed, dated from the ’sixties. Nothing here was out of place, for even the chintz covers on the chubby armchairs of King Edward’s latter days were washed so dim that they also belonged naturally to this family museum. His mother had wistfully studied books on the applied arts, borrowed from the free library, and the habit of her early profession as a teacher had survived her marriage. What she knew, she imparted. Lucky, Dick thought; some fellows would be all at sea in a room like this. He would drop a remark about these treasures presently—perhaps about the fluted, handleless cups which, he’d bet, were old Worcester.
And suddenly, flattered by his kinship with the room and with his cousin Gwenllian, he imagined himself walking into a smart restaurant in London with her at his side. Flash Frank would be there. “Hello!” he’d say, trying to stare a fellow out of countenance, “What the deuce are you doin’ here, Scrub?” Then, seeing the lady, he’d rise. His whole manner would change, conveying, as it always did, the precise measure of respect to which a woman was entitled. He would know Gwenllian for what she was. Dick saw his eyebrows go up a little, at the introduction: “My cousin, Miss Einon-Thomas.” It would, of course, be very casually spoken.
The pleasing vision faded. Dick rubbed his small blond moustache. She had turned round, her hand on the bell rope, and was looking over his head as though he did not exist.
“Shall I ring for tea, Cecily?” and she had rung before the mistress of the house replied.
When tea was brought, it was to her that the parlourmaid turned for orders.
“Do pour out, dear,” said the widow, as if this were a regular formula. “We always have an old-fashioned sit-down tea. Draw up your chair—Captain Einon-Thomas.” She hesitated at his name.
“This is absurd,” Mrs. Blake said. “We’re all relations. What d’you answer to—Richard?”
“Dick,” he answered, feeling that it had a foolish sound; but it was better than Scrub.
“Right,” she said. “I shall start at once. And I am Frances. No-one asked you if you’d have preferred a whiskey and soda?”
He gave her a confused glance, and took a cup of tea from Gwenllian’s hand. “Oh no, thanks,” he said. “I’d rather this.”
Frances’s broad smile expressed her disbelief. “I’m used to Service tastes,” she announced.
He struggled in difficult conversation with the widow on bee-keeping, gardening and poultry while Gwenllian remained silent, her fine brows drawn together. When tea was over, Frances again came to the rescue.
“What are your politics?” she demanded.
“Oh, Unionist, of course.”
“Why ’of course’? I keep on changing mine with youthful optimism. I’m a good deal older than you are, but I still hope to find a party that combines a bit of honesty with a gleam of intelligence.”
“Oh, I say,” he laughed, “you don’t really mean to use your vote, now you’ve got one, first one way and then another?”
“ I mean to keep an open mind.”
“But people who keep on changing look such asses.”
“They’re alive at any rate. When you can’t change, you’re dead.”
Dick thought that annoyingly clever; and she made it worse.
“My husband’s going to stand as a Labour candidate, if they’ll give him a show.”
“You don’t really expect me to believe that,” Dick retorted with a smile which turned to blankness on his face. Too late he perceived in the mild distress of her sister-in-law’s look and the undisguised contempt of Gwenllian’s, that Frances had been serious.
She began to talk subversive politics, like the young fools from Oxford and Cambridge who had no studs to their shirts and wore their hair long; and he grew so angry, recalling the discipline of his subaltern days and contrasting it with the licence permitted to civilian cubs, that he forgot his shyness and flatly contradicted her.
“ Frances doesn’t mean half she says,” put in the widow in a non-committal tone.
“Does anyone?” Frances laughed, and she began to mock at the Prime Minister whom in the spring of 1919 it was still the fashion to applaud. She even derided the coming Peace Treaty.
Dick quoted the defence of Lloyd George that he had so often heard on his Colonel’s lips. “If one can forgive him his Limehouse past, the little devil’s done pretty well.”
Frances shrugged her shoulders. “The verdict of history may prefer Limehouse.”
Such perversity was too much. Dick made a gesture of impatience, and at once became aware that Gwenllian’s eyes were on him. And how she had changed! Her resentful scorn had given place to eager speculation. He had caught her studying him from head to foot as though he were an object of supreme interest and curiosity. Deeply surprised, he tried to return her gaze. She stooped at once and began to pat one of the Sealyhams.
“You’re a Unionist like myself, I take it?” he ventured.
“I?” she answered, her head still bent over the dog so that the light shone on the rich mass of her hair and the whiteness of its parting. “Oh, yes. Like yourself—more than a Unionist, a staunch Conservative, a Tory in all things.”
He thought how pleasant it was to see a woman again with abundant and well-kept hair.
“Good,” he said, “you and I’ll agree better than I shall with your sister, Cousin——” but he could not for the life of him remember her outlandish name.
“Gwenllian,” she said, raising her head, and at last according him a softening of the lips that was almost a smile. “Until you’re used to our Welsh names, you’d better call me Gwen.”
“Oh, thanks awfully,” he said.
The ormolu clock struck half-past five. Afraid that he had stayed too long, he stumbled into apologies.
“Oh, but you have not seen the house yet,” the widow said.
“We can go into all that later,” he stammered with a return of his former distress. “You mustn’t feel under any obligation, you know.”
“But really you’ve been much too kind to us already—hasn’t he, Gwenllian?—letting us stay on so long.”
“Not at all. Not at all. I couldn’t have got home from Mespot any sooner, or got clear of the Army. And if it’s any convenience to you—”
“Much too generous,” she sighed. “But my plans are all made—really—thank you so much. I shall be starting on a round of visits the end of next week. And Gwenllian too. Frances, of course, will be rejoining her husband.”
“In that case,” he said, much relieved, “you’d like to go over things with that lawyer chap and myself pretty soon?”
“Well yes,” she agreed wearily. “Perhaps if you would both come to lunch on Thursday? We have everything in order, I think, haven’t we, Gwenllian? There’s the inventory, and the cellar book, and the keys and so forth. You’ll be taking your time, later, over the gardens and the home farm and the estate. The agent, Mr. Lloyd, will present all the tenants to you—won’t he, Gwenllian? We shall just have to tell you a few things about the indoor servants.”
“Quite,” he said, “quite.”
“May I make a suggestion?” said a voice of quiet authority at his elbow.
“Yes, rather.”
“Wouldn’t it be pleasanter,” Gwenllian continued, “if we showed you round first—just a family party? There are Einon-Thomas jokes and histories we shouldn’t care to tell in front of little Price the solicitor.”
Dick warmed to her instantly. “Capital,” he said, more flattered than he cared to admit, and he turned with eagerness to the widow to confirm the invitation.
Her faded, pretty face wore a look of surprise. “If you really think it worth your while,” she replied with hesitation.
“Come to lunch alone at one o’clock on Wednesday,” Gwenllian said, “and again on Thursday, bringing Mr. Price with you. Will you ring up his office to-night from the Green Dragon? We aren’t on the telephone here.”
“Delighted,” said Dick.
But still the widow murmured something about going over the same ground twice. “And then I promised to motor Frances over to luncheon with her godmother.”
“That was on Tuesday, dear,” Gwenllian told her.
“Are you quite sure, dear?”
“Quite. It is in the engagement calendar.”
“Very well,” the widow said, giving Dick her limp hand, “we shall have the pleasure of seeing you by yourself on Wednesday?” The arrangement still seemed to surprise her. Really, he thought, Cousin Gwen, who had been so standoffish at first, turned out to be the more considerate of the two! An Einon-Thomas family party—a capital idea!
Frances rose and stretched herself. “I think you ought to see the crocuses now, whatever you may see on Wednesday and Thursday,” she said. “This house is full of the worst art of every age. But the crocuses look gorgeous to-day—all their little faces open to the sun. It’s sure to be pelting again by then. I suppose you’ve been warned that it rains here nine days out of ten, have you, Dick? Come on, everybody, for a stroll before the heavens descend.”
Dick opened the door for them and the married ladies passed through. But when Gwenllian came abreast of him she stopped abruptly as though stayed by some new idea. “I’ll say au revoir to you here.”
“Oh come on,” called Frances from the hall. “You were shut up with accounts all the morning.” “It’s not accounts,” Gwenllian answered. “I’ve just remembered I ought to visit Ifor Cobbler. While you’re taking Cousin Dick round the garden, I’ll go down to the village…till Wednesday then, Dick.’’
“Till Wednesday,” he said, and heartily shook her hand. But he felt too awkward to add, “Gwen.” She was, after all, so much older than himself.