Let Him Lie (2 page)

Foolish Jeanie found quite a haze in front of her eyes. She firmly reminded herself that Yew Tree Cottage was an adorable little cottage, that the Cotswold country was just what she had always wanted to paint, and that there were plenty of other people in the world she could be friends with, besides Agnes Molyneux.

In Cole Harbour Wood, that lay off the road to Jeanie's left, a man was cutting down trees. She heard the sharp thudding of the axe strokes, and paused at a gate to see if she could catch a glimpse of the woodman. All country labours had a charm for her. She stood a moment or two watching the labourer at his work on the edge of the wood some distance away, enjoying the rhythmic swing of the axe, the powerful easy lift of arms and shoulders, watching the white chips fly out, noting how late the hard thud of impact came to her ears, as if it were the echo of the impact-sound, and not the sound itself. Down came the axe, and an instant later, almost as it rose again, thud! came the sound. Jeanie hoped that Cole Harbour Wood was not going to be entirely cut down, for she was looking forward to exploring in the spring under its tall larches and silvery oaks.

The sudden stir and gallop of a pony at grass the other side of the hedge took Jeanie's enchanted eye as she walked on, and she watched the endearing rough-maned creature kick up his hoofs and gallop off towards Grim's Grave, that great bell-barrow crowned with firs which stood up so steep and round among the irregular contours of the fields.

“Suppose Agnes had lived when that tumulus was made,” thought Jeanie, “what would she have done then, with only a bit of fur and a string of clay beads to make herself lovely with?”

Jeanie was, she was aware, shockingly ignorant of archaeology, as that queer Mr. Fone, who lived at Cole Harbour House, had informed her at dinner at Cleedons not very long ago. She had horrified him by supposing that the men of the Neolithic Age were skin-clad savages who spent their time lurking in caves and cracking one another's skulls. He had informed her sternly that they were as civilised as herself and in some ways more so. A queer, rather alarming man, Neighbour Fone. But Jeanie liked him. And she liked his house, Cole Harbour House, whose roof she saw above the surrounding trees ahead of her. A comfortable house, a light, pleasant house, made to take a painter's eye, with its plum-coloured bricks and lavish creepers and the arch-shaped windows of its low, built-out library.

“And here's the great Neolith himself,” said Jeanie, as a man emerged from a shed near Cole Harbour gate, carrying a sheet of heavy lead. But she was mistaken, for this man walked upright without the sticks that helped poor William Fone along. It was Hugh Barchard, Mr. Fone's secretary, nurse, companion, general factotum. Jeanie called to him as she approached the gate.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Barchard.”

He propped his piece of sheet lead against the gate.

“Afternoon, Miss Halliday. Nasty wet night it was.”

“Yes, outdoors and in,” agreed Jeanie. “The rain's been coming down my parlour chimney, and the smoke's simply awful. The builder's there to-day, bricking the ingle-nook in. Pity to brick in an ingle-nook, but I'm not a haddock. I'm having a new hob-grate. Very Adamy and recherché.”

“It's the chimney wants a new cowl on it. I wouldn't go spending a lot of money till you've had that seen to.”

“The builder says the chimney's incurable, except by putting in a high grate and bricking it round.”

Barchard stuck out a dubious under-lip. He was a wiry colonial with an agreeable lack of the English countryman's usual self-consciousness.

“Well, Miss Halliday, if you put a high grate and have a coal fire in it just under the cross-beam of the chimney-breast you may be having the place burnt down one of these days.”

“Oh Heaven, don't say that! The builder's going to put asbestos sheeting over the beam.”

“I wouldn't risk it, even so.”

“But what am I to do?” cried Jeanie in despair. “Is there anything in life worse than a smoking chimney?”

Barchard grinned faintly, as though he could think of many worse things.

“It used to smoke a bit in my day, I admit. We used to sit in the kitchen, mostly. I used to live at Yew Tree myself, I dare say you've heard.”

“I know,” said Jeanie, as casually as possible, for she had also heard that Hugh Barchard had lived at Yew Tree Cottage to the great scandal of the countryside, with a lady to whom he had not been married. “Did the roof leak in your day?”

“Only after snow. I expect one or two of the tiles had slid off.”

“One or two! Great Heavens, the roof of Yew Tree Cottage has the secret of perpetual motion!”

“Ah, those old roofs can't be depended on. We've got the same trouble here, only ours is rotted leads—worse in a way. This flat roof here's always giving trouble. I've been up there most of the morning laying new lead, but there's no end to the repairing once the leads start going.”

“You could have a roof-garden up there,” said Jeanie, glancing at the long room built out by some early nineteenth-century owner from the side of the square Queen Anne house, and admiring the pleasant “gothick” glazing bars of its tall windows and the swelling balusters of the stone parapet that ran round the flat roof.

“Mr. Fone does spend quite a lot of his time up there, though there isn't anything in the garden line,” said Barchard. “You get a splendid view down over the hills from up there. You see a lot of burial mounds.”

Jeanie laughed.

“Burial mounds! Is that Mr. Fone's idea of a splendid view?”

Hugh Barchard smiled, taking up his heavy sheet of lead. He had a pleasant smile that wrinkled the skin about his eyes.

“Mr. Fone's interested in the lay-out of the mounds. He thinks there used to be roadways in Neolithic times running from one to another of them all over the country.”

“Rather third-class roads by now, I should imagine,” said Jeanie cheerfully. “Mr. Fone ought to go up in a balloon. They say you can see all sorts of extraordinary things buried under the earth if you only go high enough up in the air.”

They parted, and Jeanie turned towards the farmyard, where thirteen-year-old Sarah Molyneux came running to meet her.

“Oh Jeanie!” cried the child tragically as they met. “Your kitten!”

“Oh darling, don't say you've discovered it isn't house-trained!”

“Worse than that!” Sarah's rather pale narrow little face which made so piquant a contrast with the living springing gold of her hair, wore quite a tragic expression. “He's dead!”

“Dead! What, the kitten you've been saving up for me? Oh dear! Oh well,” said Jeanie hastily, as she saw that there were tears in Sarah's eyes, “never mind, my pet! Poor little chap! I expect it ate something.”

“It didn't. It got shot.”

“Shot! Oh, poor wee thing!”

Sarah's full underlip stuck out and trembled.

“I'd like to know who did it. The beast. The brute. The foul damned cad.”

“Langwidge! Langwidge!” said Jeanie in half-affected horror. Sarah had had a queer upbringing before her Uncle Robert took charge of her, Jeanie knew. Her father, Robert Molyneux's younger brother, had died, leaving her in the charge of a queer, neurotic, unhappy mother who had dragged the child with her round Europe in the course of two more ill-starred marriages and one or two less regular alliances. Three years ago, Robert had at last persuaded his sister-in-law to hand over to him the responsibility of his brothers little daughter. She had been well pleased, then, to be rid of her child. But Jeanie had heard from Agnes that she had latterly altered her mind, and now nourished a maternal sentiment in her bosom, and wrote every week or so passionate but ill-spelt letters to her brother-in-law demanding the immediate return of her child, and had even threatened to swoop down on Cleedons and abduct the unwilling Sarah, “who, after all, is the only creature in the world I have to love!”

“Whoever did it,” said Jeanie reasonably, stroking the child's damp cheek, “probably thought the poor kit was a rabbit.”

“A
white
rabbit, how could they? You could see him from miles away, my darling little white kitten! He used to go hunting beetles in the orchard! He used to jump up after butterflies! And now he's dead! Oh, Jeanie!”

“Don't cry, my pet, but tell me all about it. I'll have one of the tabby ones. I don't mind.”

“There isn't anything to tell,” said the child dejectedly, raising red eyes from Jeanie's chest and allowing herself to be led towards the gate. “I couldn't find him anywhere this morning. And I went to look for him in the orchard. And I found him, shot.”

She searched around her knees for the handkerchief that was absent from the legs of her knickers. Jeanie proffered her own and they went in through the barnyard gate. Jeanie paused a moment as Sarah led the way towards the stables, forgetting both the poor dead kitten and Sarah's sorrow in the scene before her. In the damp air of this sunny November afternoon, the grey mossy roofs of the barns and milking sheds, the cooler grey of their stone walls, the watery ground that reflected here and there in puddles the wistful blue of the autumn sky, the pale gold of the ricks in the yard to her left, the dark gold of the lingering leaves on the tall trees, made a picture in low muted tender tones sweet as a scene by Corot. Men were carting litter into the barn. Through the tall barn doors she saw the wagon piled high with rusty bracken. A man in a bright blue shirt wielded a pitch-fork upon that rusty brown, and the orchard behind supplied a note of rich damp green. The westering sun made that wagon framed in the dark doorway, that blue, that green, the centre of a picture.

“What are you looking at?” asked Sarah curiously.

“Oh—just things,” uttered Jeanie vaguely. “The bracken. The green grass. Things.”

“You look at things like that, and then you paint them?”

“Sometimes.”

“There's so much stuff in the world I don't see how you ever know what to paint.”

“Ah well!”

“There was an artist staying at the White Lion the summer before last. He was thin, and rather old, and had a beard.”

“Hubert Southey. I know him. He used to teach at an art school I went to.”

“I suppose you know all the artists in the world,” uttered Sarah, climbing like a spider up the worn silvery steps of the loft-ladder.

“Not quite all. Have I to go up there?”

“Aye, aye, me hearty!”

“Heave ho, then, mates!”

The loft, with its dry, warm, enticing scent of hay, its pale rafters heavily hung with cobwebs, its grey boards strewn with old faded wisps and empty husks of grain, enchanted her. She went to the large window at the end, and cleaned the smeared glass with a sack that hung beside it.

“This'd make a splendid studio, if you put a skylight in. You get a good view from here, don't you? There's your Uncle Robert going into the orchard.”

“Pruning his apple-trees. He was at it all the morning.” A sleepy tabby kitten emerged from its nest in a dark corner, exposed the elegant pink ribbings of the roof of its mouth in a yawn and then, sitting down and neatly bringing its tail around its fore-paws, made gleaming crescents of its eyes and silently mewed.

“That's a sweet one!”

Sarah swallowed.

“Timkins was the sweetest!”

“Never mind, my pet. One casualty out of four kittens isn't too bad.”

“Yes, but he was the only white one! He was rare!”

“It can't be helped now.”

“That's what Uncle Robert said,” muttered Sarah. “People seem to think a kitten doesn't want its life. How'd Uncle Robert like it if somebody went shooting at him while he was catching beetles and butterflies and playing in the sun?”

Jeanie stifled an ill-timed giggle, and Sarah looked at her with cold reproach over her lapful of assorted kittens. Jeanie said hastily:

“May I have this one? What's his name?”

The vivid image which her picture-forming mind had presented to her of the burly, tweed-clad Molyneux pouncing on beetles and leaping after butterflies among the orchard grasses, amused Jeanie a good deal.

“
Her
name is Petronella,” said Sarah pointedly.

“Her! Oh dear!”

“They make the best mousers.”

“I know, but—”

“She might not have kittens more than once a year.”

“All right. I'll risk it. But Petronella! Must I call her that?”

“She was called after Peter, you see. Peter Johnson.” Jeanie recalled to mind the dark-eyed youth who had been Molyneux's secretary when she was staying at Cleedons in the summer.

“What's happened to him?”

“He left,” said Sarah rather grimly. “About three weeks ago, all of a sudden. There was some row; I don't know what. Miss Wills said he was never coming back, and I wasn't to write to him. But I
did
write to him,” added she, flushing defiantly, “because I knew he'd want to know about the Field Club outing this afternoon, and I didn't see why he shouldn't come if he liked.”

“Oh, is the Handleston Field Club outing this afternoon?”

“Yes. I shall have to go in and wash soon. I've got to help with tea. I didn't want to, but Aunt Agnes said I must. She was cross because Uncle Robert said he must prune his trees while it was fine, and couldn't meet the Field Club at the tumulus. Sir Henry Blundell is coming,” said the child.

“I see,” said Jeanie. Sir Henry Blundell, Chief Constable of the county, a landowner in whose mansion Cleedons might be swallowed almost unnoticed, was certainly a personage of some importance. Agnes, a snob of the more simple and whole-hearted kind, as Jeanie was reluctantly coming to realise, would certainly make a special occasion of the Field Club's visit to Cleedons if Sir Henry Blundell were of the company.

“She
was
cross,” pursued the child. “And so was Miss Wills.”