NORMAN CROWNE and his misfortunes were soon forgotten. He fled, immediately after his acquittal, from a world which had turned against him. And the rest of his life, that broken and shattered thing which had been flung back to him, was spent in a shamed obscurity. Nobody quite knew where he had gone and when, two years later, he died in South America, his friends had got into the habit already of referring to him in the past tense.
But though the man himself was forgotten, his case was remembered. The Crowne scandal still attracted a good deal of attention: it lived on and acquired, with continual canvassing, an extraordinary romantic patina. A new generation, less susceptible of shock than its forebears, discussed the points at issue with new zest. The poems were more read than ever. Their reputation abroad was tremendous, for it is generally believed in Europe that no English poet can be worth reading unless he has been ostracised by his countrymen. The reverberations of the affair were to be encountered in many parts of the world.
They were least felt perhaps at Water Hythe, for Norman Crowne was never mentioned there. The Frobishers did not discuss him, nor did they read the volumes of personal memoirs and reminiscences, published from time to time, in which the Crowne case always got a chapter to itself. The children, growing up under Catherine’s care, were scarcely aware of anything amiss. They learnt in time the story of the trial, and they took it for granted, as children will. But Trevor and Charlotte were far more conscious of a mystery than were the little Crownes.
“I believe,” said Trevor, at last, some six years after the trial, “… I’m almost sure, Car, that Uncle Norman really did do that murder. Why did he go away at once? Why mayn’t we talk about him? If he didn’t do it I daresay he did something worse.”
Charlotte pointed out that there was nothing worse than murder.
“Well, but what is all this mystery? Why is he one of those wait-till-you’re-older-dear things?”
“I read something in the paper once,” said Charlotte, “that said he was one of the greatest tragedies of the age.”
“There you are, then!”
They both felt that such a father was wasted on the twins, who never made capital out of a personal advantage. Trevor said sourly:
“I wish my father had been a murderer!”
“Trevor!”
“Well, I do. Then perhaps we shouldn’t have quite so much ancestor-worship going on in this house. I believe our father was a fearful old bore, as a matter of fact.”
Charlotte was inclined to believe it too, but she thought fit to look a little shocked.
“We ought to be sorry for the twins,” she said primly.
“Why? They’re so stupid. They don’t appreciate it. And, for another thing, I’m getting tired of this idea that we’re all so fond of each other. It’s all humbug. Mother will keep telling everybody that we love each other just like brothers and sisters. Even if we did, it wouldn’t be anything very much. Most brothers and sisters hate each other. It’s humbug to talk as if they didn’t.”
“But we are fond of William and Emily, in a sort of way.”
“Yes. In a sort of way. We don’t hit them or jump on them or pull their hair.”
“And we always find it dull when they’re away. We’ve said over and over again, these holidays, how dull it’s been.”
The twins had spent the greater part of the summer on a visit to a Crowne great-aunt who felt forced sometimes to take a little notice of them, and Trevor had to admit that things had been very slow.
“But that’s simply because four are more fun than two, for games and things. They aren’t particularly amusing in themselves. The best thing about them is that they have good tempers, and do what we tell them.”
“They have good ideas sometimes. They invented some of our best games.”
“Yes, they can invent things. They can make plans. But they never get anything done. They aren’t sensible. We use all their ideas.”
“Still, I’m glad they’re coming back to-day.”
“So am I. But I’ll tell you what, Car. I won’t go this time and meet them at the station. I’m sick of this idea that I’m so impatient to see young William that I have to rush to the station when he comes. I see too much of him as it is. If he’s put into my dorm at Bassets next term, I shall see a lot too much of him.”
“I shouldn’t have thought he’d be much trouble.”
“He says his prayers too quickly,” complained Trevor. “It’s disgraceful. He’s no sooner down on his knees than he’s up again. I’ve told him he’s jolly well got to stay down till I tell him he can get up. Everybody in my dorm has to stay down for two minutes and seventeen seconds.”
“That’s only because you want to work your stop-watch.”
“Well, what’s a stop-watch for?”
“If mother says you’re to go to the station, you’ll go.”
“It’s soft enough to even like one’s cousins …”
“Trevor, you’re disgusting!”
“I will split my infinitives if I want to. I shall say to mother that it’s soft enough to even like one’s cousins, but that meeting them at stations is a work of … of supererogation.”
“And mother will tell you not to show off.”
“’Tisn’t showing off to read the Thirty-Nine Articles. I always do in sermon-time: it’s much more interesting than listening to old Philip.”
“It’s showing off to say things out of them.”
“To tactfully show off,” he stated, “is the way to get on. You and I both show off, Car, but you do it badly and are ashamed of it, while I do it well and take a pride in it. At Bassetts they call me clever Trevor. William and Emily never show off, and they’ll never get on. Nobody pays the slightest attention to them.”
He was in a perverse mood and he even began to split his infinitives at lunch. But his mother seemed to find this simply amusing, so he gave it up. Evidently she thought that he really knew no better, a disconcerting idea. She had a direct method of dealing with his moods which could only have been devised by a person with a large sense of humour or with none. Unintentionally she would take the wind out of his sails and leave him feeling silly. There was no spirit in him when she asked, in the tone of one proffering a treat:
“And which of you is coming with me into Ratchet?”
He merely mumbled that it was his sister’s turn. But the base Charlotte would not let him off.
“Trevor doesn’t want to go,” she said.
“I think family scenes at railway stations are very trying,” he explained warily.
“How silly you are!” was Catherine’s comment. “But you can’t come in any case, for I remember that I’ve arranged with Mr. Stryde to take you for Latin this afternoon.”
That was the end of Trevor, and a very poor end too. He hated these coachings with Mr. Stryde, an old retired pedagogue at Ratchet. He agreed with his mother that he ought to get a scholarship at his father’s old school, but he expected to be able to do this without any extra tuition. The September sunshine was inviting, and he did not want to stay indoors.
He looked very glum as, from the dining-room window, he watched his mother and sister setting off in the dog-cart. Charlotte, just before they got out of sight, looked back and put out her tongue at him. But she was ashamed, almost immediately afterwards, of having descended to so childish a piece of vulgarity. She drew herself very upright and tried to seem as mature as possible as they bowled along the dusty high road to Ratchet.
Between them the mother and daughter contrived, in their shabby dog-cart, to look infinitely more important than the chance travellers who were whirled past them in expensive cars. They might have owned the country. And in Catherine there was actually a certain fundamental resemblance to the land where her fathers had lived for so many centuries. A good many objects in the landscape had a look of her. She was like the hens, as they scurried into safety by the hedges, and she was like the large, untidy hay-stacks, leaning confidentially together in the rick-yards.
The years had turned her into a large, grey woman, ungainly in movement, short-sighted, and perpetually entangled in the chain of her eyeglasses. Her clothes were always black and shapeless, and she had never in her life walked on high heels. On great occasions she wore round hats with little black ostrich feathers moored firmly to the crown, or, in the evening, an extra quantity of valuable lace, sewn bunchily on to her velvet because she would never cut it. Her hands were rough with gardening and a little gnarled by rheumatism, but she always wore several beautiful rings These, and a kind of subtle, innate dignity, prevented the pilgrims to Water Hythe from ever mistaking her for the housekeeper.
Charlotte was like her. She, too, would be large and plain, and her mouth, moreover, was made hideous by that badge of her race, age and class, a wire contrivance to keep her teeth straight. This glittering horror was a great torment to the poor girl, and she often stopped herself from smiling for fear that people might notice it.
Catherine, raking the countryside with a possessive eye, said that they were very late with the harvest. She scattered abrupt, condescending greetings among acquaintances upon the road, and when they happened to pass Philip Luttrell, she called out to him a command that he should come to tea with her at Water Hythe.
“Wait there for me! Don’t go till I come back!” she cried as they left him behind.
He shouted something inaudible, but she merely waved her whip at him and drove on, remarking to Charlotte:
“I must ask him about Trevor’s coaching. I don’t think poor old Mr. Stryde gets him on nearly fast enough. Perhaps Philip would take him himself, for a bit.”
“Trevor wouldn’t like that,” said Charlotte.
She knew that this was treachery, but she did so love to be treated as the eldest and to discuss the other children with her mother.
“Won’t like it? Won’t like it? Why not?”
“He doesn’t like Mr. Luttrell. He calls him Parson Bumpkin.”
“Trevor talks a great deal of nonsense. I know he thinks he’s being clever, but he merely gets silly and above himself.”
“But, mother, do you think that people ought to be clergymen unless they’re really religious?”
“Of course not. But Philip Luttrell is a perfectly good Churchman.”
“He preaches very dull sermons.”
“He has no gift for it. Many good men have not. I never knew before that Trevor attached any great importance to sermons.”
“He says that people shouldn’t go into the Church unless they have a … a vocation.”
“That’s nonsense,” cried Catherine with energy. “The Church is a profession, like any other. Philip’s father had the living in his gift and he very naturally provided for his younger son in that way. You must remember that it was before the elder brother died. And even when Philip eventually came into the property, he couldn’t have afforded to give up the living. There were all his brother’s debts to pay. I think he did very wisely.”
“I know. I told Trevor all that. But he says he’s a Socialist. He says that people oughn’t to be able to give livings to their sons. He says the landed gentry ought to be abolished. Isn’t it dreadful, don’t you think?”
“He’ll get over it, my dear. He only talks in that way for effect. He’s picked it up from some newspaper.”
“No. He says he’s come to that conclusion because of having the awful example of Uncle Bobbie before his eyes.”
“What do you mean, Charlotte?”
There was an ice in Catherine’s tone which told Charlotte that she had gone too far. She wriggled in her seat, and said at last, half defiantly:
“I suppose he means the way Uncle Bobbie just sticks at Monk’s Hall, and … and never does anything. I mean … if he’d stayed in the army …”
She ran aground and could say no more. An insatiable curiosity had emboldened her to start upon this topic, but her courage failed her when it came to the point. For her Uncle Bobbie, like her Uncle Norman, was never mentioned at Water Hythe. And this was the more embarrassing because he lived at Monk’s Hall, less than a mile away. He had left the army five years before, but he never came to their house, nor did they go to his. All enquiries from the children were snubbed.
But they had seen, in church, the cause of the trouble—a yellow-haired lady called Mrs. Grainger who lived at Monk’s Hall too, and went everywhere with their uncle. They were aware that this lady was an evildoer long before they had guessed at her sin. But the day eventually came when Trevor, who had been learning his catechism, communicated his conclusions to his sister in private. He was certain, he said, that Mrs. Grainger must have broken the Seventh Commandment; but the twins had better not be told, since they were so young. Everything bore out his theory, especially his mother’s flurried severity, when questioned, which was a sure sign that sex was in the air. She put on the same manner over the meaning of strange words in Shakespeare, or when one of the dogs had to be shut up. For all these things lived in the same pigeon-hole in Catherine’s mind.
It did not occur to Trevor until later that his uncle was of necessity implicated. For some time the children believed that Mrs. Grainger was the only offender; but at last they were forced to suppose that Uncle Bobbie had committed adultery too. The idea was however almost fantastic, and Charlotte longed to get direct confirmation of it. But she feared that she had been too bold. She stole a frightened, sidelong look at her mother.
Catherine appeared to be thoughtful rather than angry. As it happened, she had been wondering lately whether Charlotte was not old enough to be “told.” She now saw an opportunity, and after a short pause she began, very solemnly:
“You are right, Charlotte. Your uncle’s life has been a very sad one. And you must have guessed why, haven’t you?”
Charlotte took the precaution of looking as doltish as possible. She mumbled:
“I know we don’t go to Monk’s Hall.”
“No.” Catherine looked stern and sad. “I’ve not been there for years, and it is my old home.”
She sighed. Charlotte was afraid that she might not, after all, come to the point, and helped her a little.
“Is it,” she suggested, with a blush, “is it because of that Mrs. Grainger?”
“Yes, dear. I don’t feel I can go to Monk’s Hall when that woman is there. And I think, Charlotte, that it is time, that you are old enough, to know a little how we all feel about it. Your … your uncle got entangled with this woman in India. It’s ruined his career. She was the wife of his colonel, and he had to leave the service. It’s spoilt his life, and cut him off from the position that he ought to have here. For, of course, nobody will call on her. And I understand that he goes nowhere unless she is received too. It’s a very bad example to the village. For he can’t marry her, I believe. Her husband … won’t divorce her.”
Catherine dropped her voice at these words, as though the hedges might hear and be scandalised. And Charlotte, in spite of a certain angry embarrassment, felt excited and important. These confidences were a mark of maturity, like the new stays to which she had lately been promoted, which had one bone in them and fastened with clips, while Emily still wore the old buttoned sort.
“Is that why he keeps pigs?” she asked.
“Not necessarily,” said Catherine, rather crossly. “But he must have some hobby, I suppose, poor man. Nobody goes there.”
“Some people do,” said the tactless child. “Milly’s sister was in service there, and she said they give quite big dinner-parties sometimes.”
“Men go there, I believe.”
Catherine’s voice was like the East wind. It sounded awful. Charlotte shuddered at the frightful immorality of it. Then she recollected another piece of gossip.
“Mr. Luttrell goes there.”
“He has to,” said Catherine quickly. “He is their rector.”
But he went much too often, as everybody knew. His old friendship with Bobbie could not justify him in going nearly so often. In fact, he had at one time got himself unduly talked about with this Mrs. Grainger. Catherine had even heard that he called the person by her Christian name, but she hoped that this was not true. For in most things she was satisfied with Philip.
“You must understand,” she said, without further comment on the situation, “you must realise what a grief all this has been to me. Bobbie is my only brother and we are cut off from each other.”
“But wouldn’t he make it up if …?”
“If I would call on Mrs. Grainger? I daresay he would. But I can’t do that. I don’t regard her as his wife, and I never shall. One has one’s principles.”
She had said this for five years. But principles are awkward things. Perhaps if she had known at the outset that this situation was likely to last so long she might have taken up a different stand. Naturally she had thought, everyone had thought, that the Grainger would soon tire of Bobbie and his pigs. She would need gayer company. For Bobbie had always been reckoned a dull dog, even by his family, and since the untimely indiscretion which wrecked his career, he had grown duller. Only the Grainger had not, apparently, grown tired of him, and it really began to look as though she might be established at Monk’s Hall for ever.
“Of course I trust you, Charlotte, to say nothing of this to the others. I have only talked to you because you are the eldest.”
“Yes, mother.”
Charlotte looked forward to teasing Trevor. Of course she would not tell him, but she would let him know that she had been told. They drove on through Ratchet, stopping at one or two shops to give orders. Respectful tradesmen stood bareheaded in the sun and listened to Catherine. And then the dog-cart turned into the white-railed station-yard. Upon the small platform they found themselves face to face with Bobbie Trevor, who was also waiting for the train.
This sort of thing was always happening. There never seemed to be a time when Ratchet platform was safe. If Water Hythe did but call for a parcel, Monk’s Hall was sure to be calling for one too. It was the penalty which they all paid for Catherine’s principles, and nobody ever knew what was the right thing to say or do. Fortunately, Mrs. Grainger was not in sight at the moment, so that a word or two might be exchanged between the brother and sister for the sake of appearances, though, as a matter of fact, the two porters and the station-master all knew how things stood between the two houses. Catherine repented her confidential mood during the drive when she saw the round eyes that Charlotte was making at her peccant uncle. Sharply she bade the child go out into the yard again and hold the horse.
“Well, Bobbie,” she greeted him, “where are you off to?”
Bobbie left off staring at his boots and smiled sadly. He was a handsome creature, with a soldier’s head upon a farmer’s shoulders, a narrow skull and very long arms.
“I’m not off anywhere,” he said. “I’m here to meet Lise. She had to go to London on business.”
“Oh. How are the pigs?”
She resented the tactless way in which he proffered information about Lise Grainger. He should not have mentioned the woman at all. A silence fell between them. Bobbie said that the train was signalled. Along the shining ribbon of line, under the bridge, they could see a black dot and a puff of smoke. Presently it enlarged itself into a train. Just before it was upon them he let loose a most petrifying piece of information.
“Grainger’s dead.”
He said it so casually that she did not immediately comprehend him. The train had slowed into the station before she took in the possible significance of it. Grainger was dead and his wife was therefore free. It was too late to make any further enquiries. Farmers and country people were crowding out on to the platform, and he had hurried forward in search of Lise. The twins were nowhere to be seen. Very probably the little scatterbrains had forgotten to change at Oxford.
If Grainger’s wife was free she might marry Bobbie. It was more than likely. And Catherine could not immediately decide whether this was a misfortune or not. She caught sight of the woman getting out of a first-class carriage, and looking most dreadfully conspicuous. Climbing out behind her were the missing twins.
Lise Grainger could never be overlooked, and on this small platform she blazed like the sun. She had an unfortunate voice, cheerful and booming like a gong, so deep as to be almost a bass. She was booming away now to the porters, who were both of them struggling with her luggage. For she still had something very Indian about her, and always managed to look as though she was travelling with a suite. The stationmaster himself was swept into her service. Golf-clubs came out of her carriage, though it seemed odd that she should have taken them to London on business, and a hat-box, and a green kid dressing-case (what a thing! thought Catherine) and last of all two modest little suit-cases belonging to William and Emily.
“Hallo, Bobbie!” boomed the cheerful voice. “How nice of you to come! Look! I’ve salvaged these two infants. They’d lost their tickets.”
She pushed the twins towards their uncle. Catherine, looking very black, bore down upon the group and claimed them.
“Why, children!” she cried. “What happened to you? Why did you travel first-class?”
William and Emily were growing up rather tall. They were thin, fair children, of a serious demeanour, very polite to everyone and as like as two peas. If Emily’s ringlets had been shorn and her petticoats put upon William it would have been impossible to tell them apart. They stood in a courteous uncertainty between Monk’s Hall and Water Hythe, waiting for orders, and William explained that Mrs. Grainger had paid for their tickets from Oxford.
“Very good of you,” said Catherine coldly to Lise. “How much do I owe you?”
“That’s my affair,” Bobbie was moved to assert.
“Oh, but really …”
“My nephew and niece …”
She saw that it was undignified to argue, and she murmured that they must settle up later. Then she scolded the twins for having no money of their own.
“We had some,” said William, “but we lost it with the tickets. It was all in Emily’s handbag.”
“Such a lovely handbag,” mourned Emily.
It was the very first handbag that she had ever owned. Only yesterday was it given to her, and now it was lost. The skies were black.
“Poor little thing!” boomed Lise, who had heard all about the handbag on the way from Oxford. “Isn’t it a shame? But we must get her another.”
“We lost it at Oxford, you see,” explained William. “And if Mrs. Grainger hadn’t bought us new tickets we should have had to walk here, begging our bread on the way. I expect it would have taken days and days.”
Emily would have liked that. They would have sung for their suppers in the villages as they passed through. Probably they would have collected quite a lot of money. And at nights they could sleep in the hay-stacks. By the time they got to Water Hythe they would have been all in rags, so that Aunt Catherine would not have recognised them. Charlotte would cry: “Oh, look, mother! Two beggar children at the gate …”
“Come, come, Emily! Don’t dawdle. Get up, child! Get into the cart quickly.”
Charlotte, perched upon the back seat of the dog-cart, was smiling a toothy welcome. Emily scrambled up, wishing that her skirts were longer or her legs shorter. She could not help showing her drawers when she climbed over things and into things. William clambered up beside his aunt and they all set off for home. The Monk’s Hall trap pursued them for a little way, but they were soon caught up and left behind. Lise waved to the children as she passed, and Catherine gave her a stiff little nod. They jogged along in the dust of the high road, and Catherine said to William:
“You shouldn’t, as a rule, accept help from strangers.”
“But Mrs. Grainger isn’t a stranger,” he pointed out. “I know her quite well.”
He pondered for a moment, and then, with a little giggle at his own waggishness, began to chant:
“Don’t be silly, William.”
“But, Aunt Catherine, if the man who fell among thieves hadn’t known the Good Samaritan, ought he …”
“You and Emily did not fall among thieves.”
“There was a person in the train who looked like a robber.”
“How did he look like a robber?”
“Well, he had a beard. I daresay he stole Emmie’s bag.”
Emily, on the back seat, sniffed. It had been a suede bag with a mirror and a memo-tablet on which she had carefully written the date of William’s birthday (also her own), and a powder-box in which she had meant to keep silk-worms. She would have enjoyed showing it to Charlotte, who was asking in a disapproving voice why her hair was done that way.
“Aunt Belle likes it.”
“Well, mother won’t. Curls are very middle class. I expect you’ll have to plait it as soon as you get in.”
“Yes,” said Emily dolefully.
She was miserable. Her handbag was lost, and she was an orphan, dragged about like a little doll, plaited by one aunt and curled by the other. She would have no redress if they took to beating her, and starving her, and shutting her up. They could murder her if they liked. Childhood, endless and dreary, stretched away before her. It was an immensely long road that she must walk before she could be grown-up and free, before she could run away to London and live in a darling little house with William. She hated being a child. She hated Water Hythe. The telegraph-posts and the dusty hedges swam together in a mist of tears.
Behind her back she felt a little poke. William, without turning, had thrust a hand backwards through the bars of the seat between them. She did the same, and very secretly they crooked their little fingers together. This they always did when they came to places, carried, as they often were, unwillingly, by a horde of kindly relations. It was a sign that the Crownes also were a family, a solid unit in the midst of a world which, for some obscure reason, was always just a little too benevolent towards them.
Philip Luttrell had been waiting at Water Hythe for over an hour in obedience to Catherine’s command that he should stay until she came. He chafed a little at being forced to spend a busy afternoon in such a manner, but a long habit of obliging good-temper kept him at his post.
This melancholy mildness of disposition had been the blessing and the bane of his life. He took the line of least resistance over everything, not so much from laziness as from a sort of inborn fatalism. He had no ambitions. His father had told him to be a clergyman and he obeyed, though he would have preferred the Bar. Like many unambitious men, he had a very lovable disposition, and a number of warm friendships was the most positive element in his life. The ladies of the neighbourhood had often tried to find a wife for him, but he showed unusual determination in resisting these attempts, and lived in great comfort at Old Ratchet Manor, a pleasant little Early Georgian box of a house, within a stone’s throw of the larger of the two churches in his cure.
The only excitement in his career had been occasioned by his loyalty to his friend, Bobbie Trevor. Some of his parishioners had objected to it. A letter had been written to the Bishop complaining of his many visits to Monk’s Hall. It was said that he disgraced his cloth by consorting with people who lived in sin. He had been beside himself with indignation. For a couple of weeks he had gone about in a black rage, almost prepared to give communion to Bobbie and Lise, should they ask for it, which was not likely. But nothing had come of the affair. The Bishop’s chaplain mislaid the letter, and so many months elapsed before the question was taken up that the attacking party lost heart. Philip went on visiting Monk’s Hall, and, in time, his parish got used to it. Excuses were found for him by everyone save Catherine, who was always a little affronted, though she disapproved of the appeal to the Bishop. Her grievance was personal; she had stifled her natural affections and broken with Bobbie, and she thought that all loyal friends ought to have followed her example. She was never able to like Philip quite so well again, but she refrained from any open remonstrance, allowing an unbroken silence to signify her disapproval. This was seemly and effective, and Philip had not the courage to defy it. He never spoke to her of Bobbie or of Monk’s Hall; inwardly he excused himself on the ground that this policy released him from the necessity of taking sides.
“Though I’m a craven,” he thought, as he sat cooling his heels in the hall at Water Hythe, “I ought to go about fighting people more.”
He wondered what would happen if he told her that he was going over to Monk’s Hall that evening to see if Lise had come back from London. The afternoon was too hot for such combative measures. It was drowsy and dazzling. The house dogs lay snoring on the sun-baked stones of the garden porch; the pigeons, strutting about on the grass in front of the house, were too languid even to coo. Sometimes a punt creaked lazily upstream, but the river was so low as to be invisible, and it seemed as though the summer hats and parasols and white flannels were gliding by some magic over the dry, green earth.
Philip amused himself as best he could by glancing through a little book which he found put out conspicuously on one of the tables. It was called, My Green Garden and Other Poems, by Charlotte Curtis Frobisher, and it was printed privately. In his impatience he was inclined to be a little critical of Charlotte’s verse, nor was he mollified by the unambitious childishness of her style and theme. She wrote in simple ballad stanzas about clouds and larks and all the pretty things which fall naturally within the perceptions of a sensitive child in a cultured home. He considered that far too many of her poems began with the words, “I saw,” and “I sat.” His young friend Emily, whose work he was occasionally allowed to see, was also subject to this failing. She sat and saw rather monotonously. But then she sat in strange places and saw strange sights. He had a copy of some lines of hers which began:
There were seventeen verses of this poem, all full of winding-sheets and coffin-worms. Emily had assured him that she meant to write a great many more when she had time. He wished that she and not Charlotte would publish a book. And instantly he remembered that she had better not. It would never do; for people would never forget whose daughter she was. She could never write well enough for that.
He had witnessed, some months before, a sinister demonstration of Emily’s bondage to a name. Coming one day to call at Water Hythe, he had happened upon a dancing-class. All the little girls of the neighbourhood were being taught the court courtesy by a weekly visiting instructress from Oxford. And he had sat down to watch, among the mothers and governesses, because Emily’s joyous little hop of greeting had been so attractive. He thought that her dancing was perfect. He adored her strenuous gravity, the twinkling of her long black legs, and the thumping of the pigtail on her back. When she sawed the air with her thin arms and bounded across the room in a series of artless pirouettes, he could not help whispering to his neighbour:
“Isn’t she enchanting?”
The lady, who was a stranger, agreed rather doubtfully. In a lower whisper, but with considerable relish, she said:
“That is Norman Crowne’s little girl, isn’t it? I thought so. Poor little thing!”
Whereon he perceived that Emily, despite her charm, her infantine gaiety, might never be able to escape from being a poor little thing. A sufficient amount of pity will undermine any moral constitution, and she would always find that people were anxious to be sorry for her. Ladies like this would meet her at every turn. Really it was a wonder that she had not begun already to feel the effects of this miasmic compassion. Some children, so situated, would have become quite odious. Charlotte, for instance, would have been terrible. But then, Charlotte was a minx; he called her a minx several times, as he turned the pages of her book, and then he reproached himself for intolerance. It was not the poor girl’s fault that she was so plain or that her mother kept him waiting.
His tedium was scarcely relieved by the companionship of Trevor, who came in very sulky after a profitless session with Mr. Stryde. The two shook hands without enthusiasm, and the boy, with the air of searching carefully for a topic which might interest his visitor, enquired solemnly:
“How is your horse?”
“My horse,” said Philip, “is well.”
“How nice!”
Then, seeing the book in Philip’s hand, he asked in tones of genuine and lively interest:
“What do you think of Car’s poetry?”
“Not bad for her age.”
“She asked to have it printed for her birthday, you know. She would have it, though mother said it was silly. And so do I. It’s a pity to rush into print. I shan’t.”
“No, Trevor. Don’t.”
“Not until I’ve left school.”
“But you mustn’t deprive us too long, you know.”
Trevor said nothing, for he did not like Philip’s tone of voice. Secretly he was very much annoyed by this march that Charlotte had stolen on him. He ranged round the room, fidgeting and eyeing Philip balefully, in the hope that some opening for insolence might be given to him. At last he said:
“I’ve quite made up my mind, you know, to sell all these pictures when I own this house. Don’t you think I’d better?”
Philip looked at the Leightons and the Millais and the portrait of Frobisher by Watts, and suggested that they were, after all, very interesting.
“Horribly interesting,” agreed Trevor. “This house will never be fit to live in while it’s so interesting. It’s no better than a museum.”
“I see your point. But how would you decorate the place if it was yours?”
Trevor had no idea. His young faculties had got no further than incoherent, rebellious criticism. But he climbed on to a chair and took down one of Adelaide’s water-colour sketches, in order to show Philip how much better the wall looked without it. At a scuffle in the passage he returned the picture to its place very nimbly. His mother’s voice was heard outside, giving orders.
“I think I’d better go and see if the twins have come,” he murmured wanly, as he disappeared through the garden door.
Catherine, just outside, was being peremptory about two teas, one in the drawing-room and one in the school-room. Usually they all had tea together, and Philip knew at once that he must have been kept there to discuss something private and important.
“Where’s Mr. Luttrell?” he heard her ask, as though she could entertain no doubt of his having waited.
In a moment she was greeting him:
“Ah, Philip. You haven’t waited long,” she stated. “Tea is just coming. I’m so glad I caught you, for I want your advice.”
He promised to see about better coaching for Trevor, and he gave his opinion as to the best way of mending the garden-roller. But he had an odd feeling, while they talked, that her mind was elsewhere. She gave him the impression of not having come as yet to the point. All through tea he was waiting for a clue, aware that something was on her mind, that she was most anxious to discuss it, but that she could not begin. At last she demanded, with a little laugh, his opinion of Charlotte’s poems, adding:
“She’ll regret it later on, poor child! But one has to allow them to make their own mistakes. One has to compromise with them … with life …”
He agreed, in some surprise, for he thought the sentiment unlike her. She began cautiously to develop the theme.
“One has one’s standards … one’s principles. One tries to maintain them. But it’s all very difficult. Things are so complicated. Circumstances … one goes through life … Time does make a difference, doesn’t it?”
Philip felt that all this could hardly refer to Charlotte’s book. Positively they must be getting to the root of the matter. After another difficult pause, she revealed it all in a most disturbing question:
“Er … have you been up to Monk’s Hall lately?”
He mastered his amazement and replied that he was going up there in a few minutes. Inwardly he prepared for battle.
“You’ve heard their news?” she asked.
“News? No.”
“Colonel Grainger is dead. Bobbie told me this afternoon. I saw him at the station.”
Then Lise … then Lise…. He could find nothing to say. For years he had wondered what it would be like to hear that Lise was free. He hardly knew what he felt. It was so sudden.
“Of course,” Catherine was saying, “this may mean great changes in poor Bobbie’s life.”
“He’ll marry her,” said Philip, pulling himself together.
“Will he? Are you sure of that?”
“Quite sure,” he declared, discovering with a small guilty shock that it was a definite relief to be quite sure.
“Poor Bobbie!” sighed Catherine.
“I think he’s a lucky man,” stated Philip firmly. “I have a great esteem and … and affection for Mrs. Grainger.”
Catherine had no doubt of it. But that most deplorable side of the business did not, for the moment, concern her. She had other ends in view.
“If he marries …” she began.
Philip was disappointed in himself. He had always implicitly believed in the hopeless constancy of his passion for Lise Grainger. Loyalty to Bobbie had ensured its hopelessness, for he looked upon her as Bobbie’s wife; but he could not entirely account for this sense of personal relief which descended upon him as soon as he had assured himself that the marriage was bound to take place.
If this news had come five years ago it would have upset him very much. He thought of a thousand foolish things which he had once said and done for her sake, of all the excuses he had invented to be near her and to see her, of all the nights that he had lain awake, just thinking of her. He must have changed since then; but perhaps she had also changed. She was not very young when first she came to Monk’s Hall: she was older than either Bobbie or Philip. But she had been, somehow, more exciting than she was now, more golden and joyous, a more vital contrast to the slow-moving English landscape round her. She had been so gay under bleak skies, so generously disposed towards a world which had not treated her very kindly. It was no wonder that they loved her. And she was, surely, all these things still. It was he who had changed. His love had lost its intensity, but it had waned so slowly that he was only now aware of it
Catherine was still talking about standards and principles and compromises.
“Of course, I’ve never been there. Nor have I received her here, while the whole thing was so irregular. But if he marries her … one will be in a difficult position. It was largely for the children’s sake that I felt I ought to be firm. One can’t be too careful, with growing girls. But now … I don’t know. Naturally they begin to notice, and it might be easier, especially if he marries her … Charlotte was asking about it all, only this afternoon.”
“Charlotte must surely have suspected something,” he suggested. “They see her in church every Sunday, and they must have wondered who she was.”
“It’s such bad taste on her part to come to church at all,” complained Catherine. “I mean, to Water Hythe church. Especially with the Monk’s Hall pew just behind ours. In the old days it used to be so nice, the two families practically sitting together. But now it’s very disagreeable. Why can’t she go over to Lyndon, where she’s not known?”
Water Hythe church was very small; indeed, it was more like a private chapel than a church, for it could only be reached through the Manor House garden. Philip read Mattins and Evensong there on alternate Sundays, to a tiny congregation of cottagers who could not get as far as Ratchet. He knew that Lise went there simply to annoy Catherine. He had himself expostulated with her for bawling Lord have mercy upon us quite so loudly down the back of Catherine’s neck when the Seventh Commandment was read.
“But don’t you see,” Catherine had got to her point now, “don’t you think it might really be much better, under the circumstances, if some sort of understanding … if there is really going to be a marriage it would make such a difference … I was wondering if you could tell me how they stand.”
He saw it now. She wished him to understand that compromise was not impossible, but it was a bitter task, since she took a pride in the inflexibility of her principles. If a marriage took place she would force herself into a little civility towards Lise, for the sake of appearances. But she wanted to be sure of her ground before she committed herself.
“I’m sure he will marry her,” said Philip, “and I think I see your point. But I’m not certain, you know, that she will be as anxious for a reconciliation as you are.”
“I’m not in the least anxious,” put in Catherine quickly. “It’s only that I’m thinking of the children and Bobbie. And I don’t want to do anything in a hurry. I’m not at all sure, even if he does marry her, that I could bring myself to receive her here. It’s the thin end of the wedge, you know. If once one lets those sort of people into the house … it is supposed that one has no standards. Personally, I’ve not the slightest desire to know her any better. Not the slightest. I don’t suppose we would have anything in common.”
“Yes, and I expect she feels that too. I daresay she may feel that nothing is to be gained by a reconciliation.”
Catherine could not believe this. She became voluble and indignant:
“You don’t mean to say that, having wrecked poor Bobbie’s life (and you must admit, Philip, that she has wrecked his life, though I know that you have found something to like in her which I don’t see, and I daresay she has a great many good points), even now, when he’s marrying her (which I can’t see that he’s absolutely bound to do; I suppose he must, but I do think he is behaving very well by her), she’s going to go on, for the sake of a petty grudge, cutting him off from all his friends? Will the woman never consider his interests?”
“She has never cut him off from his friends, Catherine. That has been their doing, entirely. If she now meets the advances they may make, I’m certain that it will be because she does consider his interests. She’s the most good-natured, generous creature alive.”
Catherine ignored this. She considered that Lise ought to be only too grateful for the recognition of honest women. But she did not say so, as she wished to placate Philip and to make him her go-between in the first advances.
“I daresay you’ll find,” she said drily, “that Mrs. Grainger is more amenable than you expect. But I should be very glad if you could find out for me if and when the marriage is to take place.”
He would make no promises, and after a little more fencing he took his leave. For his own part, he was far from approving of such a reconciliation. It was likely to be more uncomfortable than the old feud. The two ladies would never really forgive each other, and he would always be the buffer between them. It was a prospect which filled him with profound depression and uneasiness.
He walked slowly across the foot-bridge at the bottom of the garden and through the fields. He was not in a hurry to get to Monk’s Hall and he wanted time to think things over. His first excitement, his mysterious relief, had been succeeded by an equally mysterious melancholy. It stole over him and through him like a cold and clinging fog. He could not find out where it came from, since he had just assured himself that nothing was going to be changed, and that Catherine’s news had no real significance at all. He had always thought of Lise as Bobbie’s wife, and now she would be Bobbie’s wife. He would continue to be the devoted friend of both of them. And yet a sense of finality had closed in on him, as though something very important had come to an end.
For Lise had been the love of his youth, the great emotional adventure of his life. There had been a time when he had hardly known how he was to get on without her; but as years passed he had got used to his trouble and at last, by infinitely small, slow degrees, he had got over it. Now it was finished. Nothing was left of all that he had so passionately felt save a vague warmth of kindliness. The love of his youth had been barren; it had borne no fruit either of the body or of the spirit, and he did not suppose that he would ever feel anything so much again. This regret which now invaded him was for the young man who had once possessed so great a power to suffer and who existed no longer. It was the first time that he had ever scanned the face of the past with any sense of envy or remorse.
“This,” he thought, “is growing old.”
He climbed over a stile which led out of the sunny fields into the woods enclosing Monk’s Hall. These, even on a bright afternoon, were dark and mysterious. They were very silent. Not a bird rustled in the shady thickets, and his feet pressed noiselessly on a soft mass of last year’s beech-nuts and dead leaves. Twice he swung round, almost imagining that he heard footsteps padding behind him. But in the long green rides he could perceive no followers.
He could remember that wood in a spring five years ago, when it was drenched in a sea of bluebells, and tufts of primroses, like little yellow cushions, grew along the path. During those weeks he had often gone over this same ground with a heart on fire because he should so soon be seeing Lise. He had been violently unhappy; he could not candidly say that he wanted to go through such agitations again.
“I ought to be thankful,” he told himself. “I’ve been through it. And the chances are that I’ve now got a peaceful old age in front of me.”
For he was still young enough to entertain extravagant hopes.
The path wound through the wood and brought him at last within sight of the house. It was a gloomy building, but not without dignity. Its grey stones belonged to an ancient monastery which had been burnt down some two centuries earlier. The farm buildings which huddled behind it were much older than the house and had a decidedly ecclesiastical look. Trees hemmed it in on every side, but the ground in front had been cleared a little where an imposing flight of steps led down from a terrace on to a circular lawn. But there was no real view from any of the windows and the whole place had a northern aspect. Bobbie himself, wandering round the lawn with his dogs at his heels, and gouging up occasional dandelions with an old clasp-knife, had just such a melancholy, overgrown look as his house. He cheered up, however, when he saw Philip, and responded affably to an enquiry about the pigs.
“I’ve just built some new sties,” he said. “Come and see.”
They picked their way over the middens in the kitchen-yard, while he told Philip tha the had planned these sties himself and practically built them single-handed, with a little help from old Beazeley, the village carpenter.
“There you are,” he finished triumphantly. “You see!”
Philip looked and exclaimed:
“Why! They’re in two storeys!”
“That was my idea. They sleep up above.”
Philip choked back his laughter at the idea of the pigs going upstairs to bed, and gravely praised the masonry.
“I’ve got these yards to drain properly, you see. And that’s a thing I’ve never done before.”
Bobbie leant on the low wall of the sty and surveyed his handiwork with modest pride. Then he said:
“Grainger’s dead. Did you know?”
“I had heard … yes …”
“Goin’ to get married,” mumbled Bobbie.
“That’s good,” said Philip, trying to be hearty and feeling foolish. “Where’s Lise? In the house?”
“Think so. Want to see her? Had tea?”
“Thanks, yes. But I’d like to see her.”
“Well, I think she’s in the drawing-room. You go in. You’ll excuse me. I’ve got to see about boiling this mash. Go in the back way, won’t you? It saves time.”
Philip knew the back way very well. When he had come over as a boy to play with Bobbie he had been far more familiar with those long stone kitchen passages than with the polite grandeurs of the rooms in front. Even now he could scarcely pass the green baize door leading from the offices to the hall without a slight sensation of awe, and a feeling that he must be careful to “behave.” But the hall, in those days, had been a good deal more impressive than it was now, for the whole place was in a bad state of repair and looked dilapidated. The staircase was very fine, springing up in a double flight on each side, with a wonderful turn of strength and grace, but several banisters were broken and the walls showed bright squares where pictures had been taken down and sold. Bobbie had no faculty for making or keeping money; he grew poorer every year. And his house palpably lacked a mistress. The curtains and hangings were dingy. Nothing was ever clean. For Lise had made no mark upon the place; she had lived there, but the uncertainty of her status and a discouraging lack of means had prevented her from attempting any renovation or improvement. Philip hoped that she might in future make more effort.
He found her in the drawing-room, half asleep on a Récamier sofa, a bright, bold intruder among the faded elegancies of the old régime.
“Why, Pip!” She reared up her shapely bulk and took both his hands. “Have you heard the news? I’m going to make an honest man of Bobbie.”
“What luck for Bobbie!” said Philip, still trying to be hearty. “Tell me; what do you want for a wedding-present?”
“What don’t we want! A few suites of furniture would suit us nicely. There’s scarcely a chair left that’s safe to sit on. And we can’t refurnish on the hire-purchase system, because we’d never be able to meet the monthly payments. We’re ruined, you know. On the verge of the poor-house.”
“You’ve been that, my dear Lise, ever since I can remember.”
“Oh, but we really are now. Bobbie mortgaged the last acre the day before yesterday.”
“The pigs’ll pull you round.”
“Not they. We put more into those pigs than we’ll ever get out of them. They’re Bobbie’s only vice. In every other way he’s very nearly perfect. I wonder what would have become of me, Pip, if he’d turned me off instead of marrying me.”
Philip murmured something about its being a pity to talk nonsense. He supposed that if Bobbie had turned her off he would have married her himself, for old times’ sake. It was not easy to imagine what would otherwise have become of her. She was not so beautiful as she had been when she first came to Monk’s Hall. England had tarnished her, poverty had battered her. She had the sort of showy magnificence which requires an opulent setting, and which quickly becomes a little tawdry in shabby surroundings. A stranger, meeting her now for the first time, might have marvelled at Bobbie’s taste. By some standards he was certainly treating her well.
“Poor Bobbie!” began Philip.
But she flushed and interrupted him.
“Please don’t call him that. I can’t bear it.”
She looked, in a moment, ten years younger. And Philip remembered that she adored poor Bobbie. It was very odd.
“I hate it when you call him poor Bobbie,” she cried. “I have a feeling that everybody does as a matter of course. And it’s my fault. He might have made something of his life if it hadn’t been for me. But then I couldn’t know that it was all going to be like this: that it would be such years before we could marry. And what have I done to him that’s so dreadful? You’ll say I’ve cut him off from his family. What if I have? I shouldn’t think that sister of his is much loss. She seems to be a very rude, disagreeable sort of woman. And her children don’t look a devastatingly attractive couple, do they? The only ones I’d like to know better are the little Crownes, poor little dears.”
But here Philip protested.
“There’s nothing in the least poor about them. As a matter of fact, they’re very rich. The surviving heirs of a large and wealthy family, you know. Every few months some old Crowne, some cousin or great-aunt, dies and leaves them another million.”
“Oh, but you know what I mean. Everyone will always remember who their father was and expect them to turn out queer. And they are a bit odd, to my mind. I travelled with them from Oxford to-day, and I thought them very old-fashioned little things. I lent them money for their fares, and small thanks I got from their aunt.”
“I think,” ventured Philip, “that you might find the atmosphere a good deal more genial in that quarter, nowadays.”
“Oh, really?” Her face hardened. “Has she said so, pray?”
“I think, for Bobbie’s sake, she’d like to climb down.”
“If he married me, you mean?”
“In any case … I think she’s weakening.”
Lise said nothing, and he added, with some hesitation:
“Of course it rests with you. You are the one who’s been badly treated. If you don’t care to forgive …”
“Oh, but I do. I shall.” She looked up, kindly and frankly. “Of course I shall. Why shouldn’t I? Bobbie would be pleased. And, after all, what does it matter?”
“That is, of course, the generous view.”
She lay back again on her sofa, looking defeated and old.
“Five years ago,” she said mustingly, “I wouldn’t have talked like this. But time’s a funny thing. It reconciles you to most things. Time’s gettin’ on, you know, Pip. We’re all of us gettin’ old.”
“Don’t let’s talk about it.”
“I was no chicken when I came here, and I’ve gone off a lot since then. I’m turning very fast into what the old gentlemen call a dam-fine-woman-still. And I’ve learnt to know what time means. It’s most extraordinary, Pip, what a difference that makes. When one is young, one simply doesn’t know that such a thing as time exists. But in the end, it’s the only thing we know anything about. We don’t know ourselves; we only know what time has done to us. We think at first that the world stands still and that we move and make something of life. But we get to learn that it’s life that moves and makes something of us.”
Her voice trailed away mournfully. Perhaps she was thinking of The Curragh, where she had rattled through her gay and thoughtless girlhood, and her marriage and the voyage out and the fun of being the prettiest woman in Simla. The clocks had ticked no slower in those days, but she had never listened to them.
Philip said nothing at all. He was wandering round the room and peering at a large, dusty old china cabinet. As long as he could remember he had been fascinated by the collection behind its glass doors. Everything was there, as it always had been: the same curious jumble of Dresden figures, shell boxes, miniatures, knick-knacks of ivory and tortoiseshell, carved chess-men and two painted fans. Poked away behind it was an ancient ruin of a harp, which had stood there for sixty years. He twanged faintly at the one unbroken string, just brushing off a faint note, a ghost of a sound. It floated through the long, dim room like a knell for lost youth. Lise started from her reverie and began to talk again, more to herself than to him:
“You might say we have no choice at all. But we have. We can let it make us wise. By not fighting against it. By taking things lightly and letting them go lightly. Only fools try to fight against time, and they always get beaten. And nobody is really sorry for them. If Bobbie’s sister is nice to me, I shall be nice to her. Because that’s the place in life that I’ve got to now.”
It seemed strange to Philip that this woman should be submitting to the years so much more simply than Catherine. For though Catherine had told him that time made a difference, she had spoken in the grudging tone of one who makes a bitter discovery. He did not believe that she would ever let it make her wise. She might be forced to compromise, but always under protest.
Anyhow, they were all getting old together, he as much as they. He had survived his love. And he would be older. He would survive much more than this. He saw as he thought the rest of his life, and how year after year he would potter about the flowery lanes, growing a little slower in sense, a little deafer, a little wiser, the spirit dwindling.
On the way home he tried to temper his melancholy by rejoicing in the beauties of the evening. But he was less successful than usual. The woods seemed strangely autumnal, and he thought he could detect a faint whiff of bonfires on the breeze. His mind turned inevitably to the falling leaves and the short twilights of winter.
The two houses of Monk’s Hall and Water Hythe were hidden from one another by a piece of rising ground called Ash Hill. It was not really a hill at all, but a low mound; the flatness of the surrounding country gave it a look of height and turned it into a landmark. From the river-bank it rose sharply on the Monk’s Hall side, and at the top there was a very tolerable view of the water meadows, the woods, and the chimney-stacks of the houses. The stream, crawling round its base, meandered away through the uneventful fields into a landscape which never changed. Always the same long, low train of clouds seemed to hang on the horizon, and the same smoke rose, year after year, from the Water Hythe chimneys, blown away over the trees by the prevailing westerly gales, or sometimes, in the stillness after rain, rising into the air in a straight, thin column.
The sides of the hill were shaggy with rough grass and crooked thorn-trees, but on the fiat summit there was a clear space where seven very old ash-trees stood together in a group. And in the middle of this grove Bobbie’s great-grandfather had built a small, ridiculous temple, a round dome supported on six white pillars, like a marine band-stand. The erection was an eyesore for miles round; it was entirely out of keeping with its setting, afforded little shade in summer, no shelter in winter, and was raked by every wind that blew over the hill. As a pleasure-house it was useless, ugly, and dilapidated. Nevertheless, the four children regarded it as the choicest spot in the whole countryside; it was, in their eyes, most romantically beautiful. They had a picnic there every other day, and boiled their kettle under the dome on a flat stone which they hopefully suspected of having been a heathen altar.
Inside this temple, and opposite the door, there was a sort of niche which had been intended for a statue. Anyone standing in this niche could see out through the ash-trees for a long way, across the river to the south, where a blue haze of woods sheltered Ratchet Village. But nobody ever did stand there except Emily, when she had a mind to play at being Venus, a game which she much favoured, in spite of the ridicule of her cousins. She would climb up there and stand for whole minutes at a time, listening to the hymns of a devout congregation. And she would look out of her niche to see, not Ratchet, not the homely fields whence she would so soon take wing, but the blue waves of the Ægean. She would sniff the sea wind exultingly. There was a picture of Venus in her Hero Book, a white marble lady in a little temple on the rocks, dreaming alone in the bright salt airs.
One love-sick youth was bold enough to invade that wave-washed solitude and he lay for hours on the cold pavement, his forehead pressed to the feet of the goddess. And after a night and a day, he was given three golden apples.
She meant to go one day to Greece with William; but in the meanwhile this little temple did very well, if only her worshippers had been more obliging. Trevor was horrid when he had to be the youth; he always said something rude, like “Thanks for these few nuts,” when he took the apples. And even William would not pray for nearly long enough. He always wanted it to be morning so that he could go and run races with Charlotte, who was Atalanta. In fact, it was better to play this game alone, which Emily did, peopling the temple with really devout youths who made no bones about kneeling as long as they ought. She watched the punts as they came creaking round the bend of the river, and turned them into sea-craft, flashing triremes, bringing back heroes from battles and long sieges in strange lands. Swarthy sailors, bending to their oars, would send a hail to the Sea-Born One, and Catherine’s guests, taking a little turn on the river after tea, were really on their way to Troy. Emily had no use for grown-up people, unless they could be woven into the fabric of her dreams. She looked at them with unseeing eyes. The spectacle of her Aunt Catherine and the mysterious Mrs. Grainger being punted by her Uncle Bobbie did not in the least amaze her; she did not exclaim as Trevor or Charlotte would have exclaimed. She saw nothing unusual in the group. They did very well for wayworn mariners, scudding home before a storm, and she, being in a ruthless mood, determined to drown them.
“Then winds,” she cried, “blow up! Let them perish! Let the fishes gnaw their bones.”
To her immense satisfaction, a few large drops of rain began immediately to spatter among the trees. The sky turned to an inky blue, darker than the water, and a fierce, blustery gale blew all the willow leaves with their silver sides uppermost. The ash-trees creaked together. Quite obviously the wayworn mariners were going to get very wet.
They had been foolish to come out on such an afternoon, but anything was better than conversation in the Water Hythe drawing-room, on this first occasion of family compromise. They had braved the weather and now they were paying for it. Bobbie flourished his pole and both his ladies worked away with their paddles, but the wind was too strong for them and they were blown further and further away from the Water Hythe landing-stage. A great rack of rain came drifting over the country. In their efforts to get home the three were more united than they would ever be again. There was but one thought between them.
Emily, beholding their struggles, was enchanted. She fully believed that she had made this rain, and it showed that she really could control the weather if she tried hard enough. Perhaps, if she could do this, she might manage to fly, and to sing two notes at once, both of which feats had hitherto baffled her.
Charlotte, Trevor and William, who had been sprawling and scuffling on the grass outside, now came into the temple for shelter. They asked at once why Emily was making those funny noises, and recommended that she should not stand with her stomach stuck out.
“I’m trying,” she said, from the niche above them, “to sing two notes at once. I shall do it in a minute.”
“You can’t,” Trevor told her. “I’ve tried. Nobody can.”
“Ah, but I can do things that other people can’t,” she said confidently. “I can fly. I can make it rain. I made this rain really.”
“Did you?” asked Charlotte drily. “Then make it fine again.”
Emily tried. She stiffened herself in a transport of effort, but the rain continued to fall. Her cousins mocked at her They demanded to see her fly. With a frantic inward prayer to her guardian angel, she flung herself forward and outward, and fell with a crash on to the pavement just below the niche. Trevor and Charlotte, frightened, jumped up and ran across to her.
“You little idiot! What on earth did you do that for?”
“Are you hurt?”
“No.” She sat up. “Of course I’m not hurt. I was flying.”
“You’ll break your neck one of these days.”
“We never meant that you were really to fly. You don’t seem to know when a game’s a game. How can you be so stupid?”
“I was flying,” she repeated sulkily.
And William supported her. He insisted that she had gone much further than a mere jump could have taken her, and that her fall had been very slow, like a sort of glide. He even surmised that with practice she would be able to go long distances quite soon.
“After all,” he pointed out, “you fell off your bike very often when you were learning, Trevor. But you’d have been quite annoyed if people had said that you weren’t bicycling.”
“That’s perfectly different.”
“I don’t see any difference.”
“My good fool! It’s possible to bicycle, but it isn’t possible to fly.”
“You only say that because you’ve seen people bicycling, and you haven’t seen them flying.”
“Well, and that’s quite a good reason for saying it.”
“You’ve never seen people being eaten by sharks. But you believe that they are. Why do you?”
“Because books I can trust tell me they are.”
“How do you know the books don’t tell lies?”
“I use my commonsense.”
“Well, and so do we use ours. Once there were people who thought the sun went round the earth. They were people like you. And there were other people who thought the earth went round the sun. They were people like us. They were right.”
“They had some reason for thinking differently from everybody else. They had telescopes and things.”
“So have we got reasons. We’ve got secret reasons for knowing we shall fly, but we can’t explain them just yet. When you see us flying from here to Ratchet, you’ll feel pretty small.”
“When we see it, I’ll lick your boots, young William. But till then I shall go on saying you’re both complete fools.”
Trevor was getting quite angry, not at William’s obstinacy but at his confidence. For the twins were not merely arguing for fun, as anybody might have argued. They half believed in their case and a logical defeat could not shake them.
“I get tired of hearing all that William and Emmie are going to do,” he said at last to Charlotte. “I think it’s time they really did something. They’re going to fly, but at present they don’t even walk very well. They always fall over things, because they don’t look where they are going. They never have sixpence in their money-boxes, but when they grow up they are going to be very rich.”
“So we are,” said Emily, cautiously patting her bruises. “Everybody says so.”
“It’s true,” agreed Charlotte. “I asked mother once. She was very cross and said we weren’t to talk about it. But I could see that it was true.”
Catherine had indeed done her best to suppress the topic. She thought that the prospect of great wealth might be bad for the twins, who were always getting ideas into their heads. They received the same pocket-money as their cousins and their clothes were made to last quite as long. But this did not prevent them from making many fantastic plans as to the spending of their money when they grew up, and the substratum of reality, the actual fact of genuine money somewhere in the bank, put these particular romances beyond the reach of Trevor’s sarcasm. He could prove that they were silly, but he could seldom deny that they were possible.
“I say,” he persisted sourly, “that you never will be rich. You’ll lose your money. Just think how William always loses his offertory. It’s an absolute nightmare. Punctually every Sunday, as soon as the collection-hymn begins, I know it’s going to happen. I go hot and cold, waiting all through the service for the moment when the plate will come to our pew, and young William will begin to turn himself inside out.”
“Awful!” agreed Charlotte. “The choir and the schoolchildren all turn round and stare, and Philip Luttrell is left singing the hymn all by himself because his back’s turned and he can’t see what’s going on. Last Sunday, when he stood up there, singing: ‘Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away,’ I thought to myself, well, it always bears William’s money away.”
“I don’t like that hymn,” observed Emily dreamily. “That about Time! I think it’s horrid of it to. And we shan’t lose our money, you know, because it’s all in the bank.”
“You’ll speculate,” Trevor told her.
This was puzzling. She knew that speculation was a form of thoughtfulness, to which she and William were much addicted, but she had never heard before that it cost so much money.
“And you’ll buy stupid things,” prophesied Charlotte. “Pianolas that won’t work.”
“I shall buy Monk’s Hall,” said William with a flash.
“I won’t sell it to you,” retorted Trevor immediately.
“It won’t be yours.”
“Yes, it will. When Uncle Bobbie dies. I’m his eldest nephew.”
“I shall buy it before he dies.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Yes, I will.”
“What would you do with it, anyhow?”
“I should live there with my friends,” said William glibly. “And we shall drink out of skulls at midnight.”
This was really rather hard on Trevor, for it had been his habit to entertain the others with long stories of all that he would do with Monk’s Hall when it was his. He had originated the touch about skulls at midnight, and William had adopted it simply in order to be exasperating.
“What sort of friends do you think you’ll have?”
“Poets,” said William, obstinately faithful to tradition.
“Poets! What sort of poets?”
“All sorts. I’m going to be a poet myself.”
“You’d better hurry up and write some poetry, then.”
“I’ve written some.”
“That’s a lie. It wasn’t finished. You’ve never finished a single thing in the whole of your life. Nor has Emmie. You can only boast, and I’m tired of it. After tea we’ll go through the lists of our writings. We ought to, anyhow, before the end of every holidays. And if you can prove you’ve written more than us, perhaps we’ll believe you can fly. Now get tea for us.”
A fire was built by the Crownes under the supervision of the Frobishers, for in all practical matters the twins were entirely under the domination of their cousins. The kettle was boiled. And after tea Trevor called a meeting of the Young Authors’ Guild, a secret society which they had founded two years before. Emily, who was the secretary, was instructed to read out the complete list of works produced by the Guild. This list was kept under a loose stone in a corner of the temple, and was in consequence a little earthy and marked with snails. It was very long, for the four children had waded in ink ever since they could first hold a pen. They meant to be worthy of their fathers.
Charlotte, a little self-consciously, suggested that a separate list should in future be kept for works published by the Guild. But the others snubbed her; they regarded, “My Green Garden” as a piece of showing off.
“But when our lives come to be written …” she protested.
She had begun to prepare for her own biography ever since the publication of her father’s life in two volumes. But Emily said mulishly:
“All this won’t count a bit. It’ll go into childhood and early years, and that’s always the shortest chapter in the book.”
“Though goodness knows it seems long enough at the time,” sighed Trevor. “Never mind, Car. We’ll keep an album for press-cuttings.”
Charlotte had one press-cutting, and she doted on it, though twenty-two of its thirty words referred to her father and not to herself. At night she took it to bed with her. She grew very red under Trevor’s sarcasm, but she said nothing. Emily began to read:
“ALONZO AND THE MOORISH INFANTA, an unfinished Drama, by Emily Crowne.”
“Unfinished!” yelled the Frobishers.
This was true. Her desk was full of magnificent beginnings, but neither she nor William had much perseverance. With a sigh she rubbed out ALONZO, and continued:
“BLOODY DICK, by Trevor Hartley Frobisher.
“AN ELLEGGY, by William Crowne.
“THE HAUNTED BUTTERY-HATCH, a Tale of Mystery and Imagination, by Trevor Hartley Frobisher.
“ODE TO LIBERTY, by William Crowne.
“ISABELLA, a Novel, by Charlotte Curtis Frobisher.
“MEDIATATION ON A GRAVE, by Emily Crowne.
“MY GREEN GARDEN AND OTHER VERSES, by Charlotte Curtis Frobisher.
“THE PERJUROR, by Trevor Hartley Frobisher.
“ODE ON NAPOLEON,” by William Crowne.
“ADVICE TO PARENTS, by Trevor Hartley Frobisher.
“THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PRINCES IN THE TOWER, by Charlotte Curtis Frobisher.
“THE POLLIPANTOS, AN IMAGINARY HISTORY OF AN ISLAND, by William and Emily Crowne.”
“Not finished!”
“Oh,” she implored, “such a lot of it is written. Really, it’s very long.”
“You must finish it.”
She looked rebellious. She loved THE POLLIPANTOS, an idea which had come to her after reading Gulliver. But it was true that this imaginary history was not yet finished, nor was any sort of end in sight for it. The theme was inexhaustible. The Frobishers had never been allowed to write any of it, although they were sure that they could do it a great deal better than the twins, and had started, contemptuously, a rival HISTORY OF THE FRICASSEES.
“You must finish it,” said Trevor severely. “That’s the law in this Guild. I’m sorry, Emily. Go on reading.”
But William was in a mood for dispute.
“Who says it isn’t finished?” he began, mildly.
“I do,” Trevor told him. “Go on, Emmie.”
“Why?”
“Because it hasn’t got an end.”
“I know. It can’t. It’s history. How can it end?”
Trevor avoided this, and observed that he was the best judge, being the eldest.
“I’m the best judge,” contended William, “because I wrote it. I say it is finished.”
“Say it till you burst. It won’t go on to our list.”
“Yes, it will.”
The placable William was getting quite flushed, as the ancient feud between the Frobishers and the Crownes, which had been simmering all the afternoon, rose suddenly to boiling-point. The old hostility was in their bones, and Trevor, when he lorded it over his cousins, when he took advantage of their instability and their want of practical resource, was taking unconscious revenge for all the mockery which their father had heaped upon his.
“Why should you decide for us?” shouted William.
“Because I’m the eldest.”
“That’s nothing. I daresay Pontius Pilate was older than Jesus Christ.”
“William! How dare you!” This from Charlotte. “That’s downright irreverence.”
“Your father was older than my father. But he didn’t write such good poetry.”
“Oh, yes, he did. He wrote better. Your father, young William, couldn’t write poetry at all. If he hadn’t done a murder, nobody would ever have heard of him.”
Charlotte, with a gasp of horror, leapt to her feet. She felt quite sick. And Trevor himself was uneasy. He had been half in joke, but he knew at once that he had gone too far. With an attempt at a laugh he turned away and pretended to be looking to see if the rain had stopped. But a scream from the girls warned him of William’s attack. The two boys rolled together down the temple steps, William hitting out angrily and Trevor, good-naturedly enough, trying to push him off. But every time the smaller boy was pushed away, he came for his cousin again, with set teeth and blazing eyes, until at last he had to be knocked down.
“There!” cried Trevor. “Now do shut up. I’m sorry if I insulted your father. It was only in fun, and I didn’t mean it. You shouldn’t lose your temper like that. If you don’t take care you’ll be murdering somebody yourself, one of these days.”
But William was past reason, and his next move horrified them all. Snatching a smouldering stick from the bonfire, he waved it round his head, dancing and yelling:
“I’ll burn you! I’ll burn you!”
Trevor took to his heels, and they dodged in and out among the bushes. The rain soaked through their jackets and eventually cooled William’s torch. Then Trevor came out of cover, sat upon his stomach, and lectured him upon the ungentlemanliness of trying to burn people.
“I’d apologised for saying what I did about your father. Of course I didn’t mean it.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I didn’t, I tell you. Nobody really supposes …”
“I do,” said William, getting up from the wet grass and shaking himself like a little dog. “I’ve always believed it myself.”
“You have?”
“Yes. And I expect he was right. I hope he did do it. Your father wouldn’t have dared. He’d have been afraid of being hung.”
Emily, hopping on one leg up and down the shallow temple steps, clinched this argument by shouting: “So there!”
The Frobishers gaped. For once their cousins had completely silenced them