Kissing Kin (12 page)

Soon after that with a final burst of applause the show ended and the ballroom began to be cleared so that the carol
procession
could assemble and start from there. He accompanied Camilla into the main hall where convalescents and other people were lingering to see it pass on its way to the wards. Already the early winter twilight had blued the windows, and at a signal the few lights which had been turned on winked out
and the ballroom doors opened. The chorus of untrained women’s voices rose softly, gained confidence, swelled into ardour—

They walked single file in their starched white aprons and high-collared blue dresses, with the misty white coif haloing their heads. Each one carried over her shoulder a pole on the end of which was a lighted Japanese lantern. They moved forward, slowly, like a wedding procession, singing as they came. Most of them were young, some of them were pretty, all of them were worn fine by anxiety or grief or sheer
weariness
. None of them were crying, but the eyes of the people who saw them spilled over, and the men who lay in the long rows of beds looking up at them as they passed up each aisle and down the next, so that no one but could have reached out and touched their crisp skirts—and many did—those men wept unashamedly.

Raymond stood beside Camilla, unable to move, unable to speak, gazing after them, and felt her hand creep inside the elbow of his good arm and rest there, friendly and firm and understanding. They waited till the procession had wound its gracious way through Ward G and again passed in front of them on its way to the staircase. He glanced down once and saw that her cheeks were shining in the soft coloured light from the lanterns. Without thinking, he pressed his elbow a little against his side, cherishing her hand which lay there. Her eyes came up to him dazzled with tears. She tried to smile, and they both looked away.

The tune had changed as the lanterns bobbed daintily up the
ornate staircase towards the rooms above, a Jacob’s ladder of song.

It was a long time before either of them found words, and the last lantern had passed the landing out of sight from below. Then Raymond said in his quiet voice, “Wasn’t that pretty. I never saw anything like that in my life before.”

“You couldn’t see it outside England,” said Camilla, and blew her nose.

“Who are they?” he asked. “Where did they come from?”

“They’re just the girls who work here day after day.”

“They weren’t trained to sing like that?”

“Oh, dear, no, they’re just singing the songs they’ve all sung every Christmas since they were children. There isn’t a
professional
singer among them. There was a duke’s daughter, though, and the sister of an earl—one of them was my cousin, and one was Virginia’s sister-in-law.”

“The little one that came third—with the yellow lantern,” he said gently. “I noticed her both times. Wasn’t she cute?”

“That’s Jenny,” said Camilla with satisfaction. “She’s coming to the party to-night.”

“She is?” He slammed shut the breach. “Don’t you tell her I said anything.”

“Why not?”

“She might not like it. It was pretty fresh, I guess.”

“You be nice to Jenny, if you get the chance,” Camilla told him. “She’s had a beastly time, and she works harder than
anybody. I wouldn’t dare be sorry for her, but she almost breaks my heart.”

“Did somebody get killed?” he asked sympathetically.

“Better if he had, I think! Somebody jilted her for another girl!”

“Somebody what?”

“She was engaged. He asked to break it off because he had fallen in love with another girl. Maybe you don’t realize what that kind of thing would do to Jenny.”

“I expect she’d feel like she’d been kicked in the teeth.”

“That’s about it,” said Camilla. “She’s got over it now, of course. But this is the first party she’s been to in months, and it’s time she had some fun.”

The men’s tea was going in and there was a cheerful clatter of cups from the wards when Jenny joined Raymond and Camilla at the foot of the stairs a short time later, carrying a dressing-case with her evening clothes in it. She had changed out of her uniform into a blue wool frock. Her small white face was framed by the sable collar on her coat and her pale hair curved loosely against her jaw under a little fur hat. When Camilla introduced them Jenny held out her hand and Raymond took it in his left, and said, “How do you do?” with the same grave courtesy which to Camilla had suggested the old-fashioned formality of a court bow.

Camilla got into the back seat with Raymond and Jenny drove, chatting over her shoulder. Raymond beheld the gay lighted façade of Farthingale without comment, and they entered on a little flurry of welcome and festivity, and Camilla said, “This is Raymond, Virginia. Don’t let’s make him shake hands all round, there are too many of us.”

“By no means,” Virginia agreed, giving him her own hand, so that Raymond again responded with his left and she kept their fingers linked in a friendly way as they went on into the bright drawing-room, which seemed to the stranger to be packed with people, a great many of them children.

His first quick, guarded glance took in the tall, glittering
tree against the dark windows at the far end of the long room, the log fire, the shining silver and white linen of the tea-table near the hearthrug, the handsome, friendly faces all turned expectantly towards the late-comers. Virginia led him forward, saying, “This is Calvert’s Raymond, everybody, and I’ll leave you all to introduce yourselves to him as he gets round to you, just don’t smother him, that’s all. This is my husband,” she added, laying her other hand on the sleeve of a slender,
fair-haired
man with a single eyeglass who came forward to meet them, and Archie said, “Awfully glad to have you here, old chap,” and Raymond said, “Thank you, sir,” to the captain’s uniform of his host, and was drawn on to the sofa beside the fire. “Cousin Sally will give you a cup of tea,” said Virginia, and Raymond found himself gazing down at that astonishing woman, seated beside the tea-table. Her hair was an artificial red, elaborately dressed, her face was painted and powdered, and she shone and sparkled with jewels which he knew were real. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen except on the stage, and her violet eyes were smiling up at him as though it was the most natural thing in the world that he should stand there before her with only one good arm, to be given a cup of tea.

“Come and sit here beside me, my child, till you are a little recovered,” she said, and touched the sofa beside her. “How do you like your tea? Just as it comes, and very strong?”

“Yes, ma’am—thank you—as strong as you like.”

“See, we will make room here on the corner of the table and you need only raise the cup—” Her ringed fingers moved deftly on the silver and china, beautiful dark tea flowed from the spout into a fragile cup.

Raymond remained on his feet beside the table, not
awkwardly
, not in the least defensively, but not in any unseemly haste to claim the privilege of seating himself beside her. And then he felt a hand laid on his shoulder from behind and Bracken’s voice said, “How about a slug of rum in the tea, old boy, just till you get used to us?”

Virginia, Archie, and Sally were facing him as he turned from them to Bracken, and the three of them witnessed the small miracle those few words wrought—the dark, rugged face of the stranger was transfigured by a smile so radiant, so trustful, so completely glorified by recognition and affection that they all felt afterwards as though their jaws must have dropped. It was just the smile that Raymond kept for his friends, but it had not been seen since Bracken had taken leave of him at the Hall several days before.

“Hul-lo!” said Raymond, without in the least raising his voice. “I’m glad to see you!”

“I’ll bet you are!” said Bracken sympathetically. “Sit down here—” He pushed Raymond gently on
to the sofa beside Sally, who placed a cup of tea on the corner nearest him, and lifted a silver-mounted glass jug from the tray and removed the stopper.

“It is a barbarous drink—rum in tea,” she murmured. “But you shall have it, all the same. Now I have made it too full.”

“No, it’s all right—it’s wonderful,” said Raymond politely, and raised the brimming cup with an absolutely steady hand, glanced over it at Bracken, and then with a little inclination of his head at the rest of them, who watched him as he drank. “Well, it
is
rum!” he remarked in pleased surprise after the first swallow, and set down the cup again. “I never saw it come out of a thing like that before,” he added, nodding at the silver-mounted jug.

“No doubt it tastes just as good out of a tin cup where you have been lately,” said Sally, and offered him a plate of thin, crustless sandwiches. The split-second’s hesitation which told them that he had never seen sandwiches like that before either was instantly covered by his ingrained composure as he accepted the nearest and bit into it.

Bracken turned a chair and sat down on it, his back to the fire.

“I’ll have another cup, Cousin Sally, if I may—rum and all,”
he said easily, and reached past Raymond to the sandwich plate.

“So shall I—to keep you both company,” she said at once, busy with the cups. “
Without
rum!”

Raymond, lowering his cup again, found a small boy standing before him, gazing up.

“You’re the one who saved Cousin Calvert,” said the child solemnly, and for the first time Raymond showed
embarrassment
.

“Well, I guess you’d have done the same as I did in my place,” he said.

“This is Nigel,” said Bracken. “He belongs to Archie and Virginia.”

“Hullo,” said Raymond, who was unaccustomed to children and therefore talked to them as though they were adults, which is what they like best.

“Hullo,” said Nigel. “Can I see your wound?”

“I don’t know about that.” Raymond appeared to give it due consideration. “They won’t let me monkey with the bandages, you know.”

“Did the bullet go right
through?
”

“No, I wish it had. It was shrapnel, and they had to dig it out.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Well, I wasn’t there all the time. They gave me some chloroform.”

“Nigel, do not stare at a guest,” said Sally, and “That’ll do for you,” said Bracken, turning the child round by the seat of his breeches. “Buzz off, now, and let a man enjoy his tea.”

Nigel departed with no animus whatever to report his
findings
, and a voice over Raymond’s shoulder said, “Don’t let me interrupt—don’t move, old boy, don’t move, I just want to introduce myself—”

Raymond looked round to find a portly grey-haired
gentleman
with a luxuriant moustache leaning on the back of the sofa beside him.

“I’m Apethorpe,” said the gentleman with a fatherly smile. “Just want to say Cheerio, you know, and jolly glad to have you with us, and all that rot, you know—”

“Thank you, sir—”

“Jolly glad you could get here for Christmas, old boy, makes it a bit merrier, what?—I say, Sally, is there any more tea going?” He drifted on to the other side of the table. “Jenny says she’ll have a cup, if it’s no bother—”

Other people came and went as Raymond drank his scalding, rum-laced tea, told him their names, made him welcome, and were lost sight of again—a dark, pretty girl who looked like Virginia—a quiet French chap in civilian clothes—Calvert’s Cousin Phoebe whom he had seen at the London hospital and her husband who was a colonel, no less, and with red tabs too—and so on. Raymond gave them each his level, searching look and the grave formality of greeting which acknowledged without servility his newness to their circle and his gratitude for their hospitality. But Virginia, who had seen his
spontaneous
reaction to Bracken’s presence, was bemused. He’s
beautiful
, she heard herself thinking, to her own surprise. When he smiles like that, he’s
b-beautiful
—and so
young.
And she tried not to watch him from the fringes of things, waiting for the smile to come again, which it didn’t, because Bracken was the only one there that he had proved. At last, irresistibly drawn to him, she returned to the fireside sofa. Raymond rose at once with his instinctive good manners, and Bracken stood up too.

“I don’t really know if you’re up to all this,” she began
uncertainly
. “I was very firmly told that you were not to overdo it to-night, and I think it’s time Bracken took you along to his room for a rest and a smoke before dinner.”

“Please don’t worry about me,” said Raymond earnestly. “I feel fine, honest I do. You’ve got a—a very interesting family here.”

“No doubt you could think of a shorter and simpler word,” said Virginia lightly. “Just brush the young ones off if they’re
a nuisance, but you must realize that you’re the first hero they’ve seen and they’re very excited about you.”

Raymond gave a sort of gasp of laughter, as though for once he really was surprised, and glanced at Bracken.

“I’m afraid somebody has given them the wrong idea,” he said. “Like I told your son—anybody would have done the same as I did.”

“I’m sure of it,” Virginia agreed soothingly, and patted his sleeve. “You go along now with Bracken and have a breather. We shall be sixteen at dinner, with presents afterwards and then music and dancing. You’ll need your strength!”