BOOK TWO. CHAPTER TWO

‘She is a sweet pretty little thing,’ mamma remarked after they had all gone. ‘Of course everything has been done for her.’

‘Yes,’ Emmy agreed, a little sadly, ‘and she has done everything she’s wanted—I mean she has done nothing, which is just what she has wanted.’

‘When is she to be married?’ asked mamma.

‘Her father doesn’t approve of early marriages and wants her to wait until she is at least eighteen,’ replied Emmy.

‘If I were she,’ said Julia, ‘I would let Stephen do a little of the adoring—she watched every mouthful he took as though it were a miracle to see him swallow.’

‘They are all nice, the father in particular,’ mamma pronounced, veering the conversation round to what she wanted to discuss, ‘but the picnic must have tired him, for he was so quiet and flat after it compared to what he was when you all set out. You shouldn’t have allowed him to row.’

‘Nonsense, mamma,’ Emmy exclaimed heatedly, ‘that man is far more active than either of his sons. We can’t start treating him as though he were bordering on senility.’

Mamma glanced up as Julia suddenly rose and left the room.

‘You know, Emmy,’ she pursued placidly, ‘you must begin to talk more when you are in company. You left the conversation entirely with Julia.’

‘But one is much more popular, mamma,’ Emmy informed her, ‘if one does all the listening and lets one’s company do the talking, particularly if the company is male.’

‘I saw the eldest son so like his father,’ said mamma, ‘but I never tell relations they are like each other as I notice they never seem to take it as a compliment. What a pity the Martin one is so stout, for it’s not as though he had the pronounced type of features that can command stoutness.’

‘When he laughs,’ said Emmy, ‘he looks so like the Toby jar on the mantelpiece that Nannie keeps her tapers in.’

‘Did they make any arrangement when you were to meet them again?’ mamma asked with interest.

Emmy was standing at the window, her opened hand pressed against the pane. She lifted it and watched the five-fingered blur it had made contract into nothingness.

‘No,’ she said, without looking round, ‘they didn’t.’

‘They’ll write probably,’ conjectured mamma, holding her work away from her that she might see it the better.

But when Christine wrote it was to tell her dearest Emmy that they were leaving for abroad within a week and this was only the merest note to bid good-bye to her and her own dear Juley.

Mamma was upset at their premature departure. ‘It seems such a pity,’ she confided, sighing, to me, ‘when they were all agreeing so amiably together. I hope whenever a man begins to show an interest in Julia, she is not going to chill simultaneously. I was so like that,’ she said more brightly, as though warmed at the glowing memory of herself years ago. ‘I am sure I noticed your father long before he noticed me—it was at the Allardyces’, I remember. And I thought what a nice straight nose that young man has. When he grew really interested in me, I felt my interest in him cooling, until he became desperate, and then I didn’t see how I could very well refuse him. He was always asked to people’s houses, you know, for he used to be such good company and full of verve. I did really think, if I married him, he would give me all my own way. But I can remember him warning me the night before our wedding that manse mice were even poorer than their church brothers. Strange, the mistakes you make, and if you had your life to live all over again, you would make them just the same. But Julia seemed not to want to meet the Stratherns this time, just when I was beginning to wonder which was the particular one, and it’s not as though she could possibly have met any one else.’

The weeks that followed passed dully for Emmy and me, perhaps because we had been unsettled by the excitement the Stratherns always brought with them, and Julia was so bound by her own thoughts to be uncompanionable. Sometimes she would not hear us when we spoke to her, and if she answered it was as though she had had to bring herself back to us from afar. ‘Never fall in love,’ she said darkly to me, and one morning I heard her, with uncharacteristic sharpness, tell Emmy, who was making her bed, to stop singing, ‘If that one ship went down at sea, The poorest soul on earth I’d be.’

She seemed to have great difficulty in making up her mind whether or not she would accompany me when I went to have my Latin lesson, and usually she came when she had stated she would stay at home, and remained when she had said most decidedly she would be coming. After my lessons, the dominie went with us first to the end of the playground, then to the ferryman’s cottage, then to the little knoll, until finally he walked with us the two miles to the manse gate.

When we had said good-bye, Julia would take my hand and run between the trees. If a golden leaf fell on us, she would tell me that meant a happy hour, and start to sing at the top of her voice as though it had come already. When a hay-cart came towards us along the road, we would stand aside to let it pass and wish. Julia, whose desires were always so intense they were fraught with anxiety, would cover her eyes with her hands and I would see her lips moving as she wished, as though in prayer.