Lonesome Road (6 page)

Rachel got back to find that she had missed Mrs. Barber by a comfortable margin. Ella, meeting her in the hall, remarked on how unfortunate this was.

“Away yesterday, out today. I only hope, Rachel, that she won’t think you want to avoid her. Of course quite ridiculous, because she is such an exceptionally interesting and charming person, and I know she particularly wanted to talk to you about slum clearance.”

Cosmo Frith, emerging from the study, demanded why any human being should imagine that any other human being should want to talk about slums. He slipped his arm through Rachel’s and kissed her on the cheek.

“Well, my dear, I needn’t ask how you are. You look fine. And who was the cavalier? Wouldn’t he stay to lunch—or didn’t you ask him? I thought he looked pretty well pleased with himself as he drove away.”

Rachel laughed. Her color was bright.

“Oh, I asked him, but he had to get back. It was Mr. Brandon, the American who has taken the Halketts’ house for the winter. I thought you had met.”

“No. Fancies himself, doesn’t he?”

Rachel laughed again.

“I think he fancies everything, and that includes himself. I’ve never met anyone who enjoys things so much. We’ve been shopping Christmas presents.”

Cosmo looked exactly like a child who hears another child praised. He was a handsome man of forty-five. His gray hair set off a fresh complexion and a pair of fine dark eyes with well marked brows. His waist measurement was rather larger than it had been a year or two ago, and there were moments when he feared a double chin. He withdrew his arm and said with a lift of the eyebrows,

“Christmas presents—in November? What a nauseating idea!”

“And why nauseating?” inquired Ella Comperton. “I think this modern fashion of laughing at Christmas is a terrible sign of the times. My dear mother always used to say, ‘Ah, it isn’t the gift—it’s the loving preparation that counts,’ and we used to be set down to our Christmas presents as soon as the summer holidays were over.”

“Horrible!” said Cosmo. “But I suppose that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children hadn’t been invented then.” He turned to Rachel. “And what were you and Mr. Brandon lovingly preparing?”

“Chocolates, and toys, and gloves, and handbags and stockings for a lot of young people. He didn’t really need me at all. He knew exactly what he wanted.”

They went in to lunch. Cosmo as usual monopolized the conversation, a good deal to the annoyance of the Wadlows and Miss Comperton. Maurice and Cherry having departed, their parents wished to talk about them. Ella wished to talk about slums. She had come primed from Mrs. Barber, and she wished to pose as an expert. But there was no talking against Cosmo. He told anecdotes, and laughed at them heartily in a deep, rollicking voice. He narrated the inner history of the Guffington divorce. He gave them the reasons which had led the ultra-particular Lady Walbrook to give her consent to her daughter’s marriage to a very notorious gentleman, Mr. Demosthenes Ryland. He had inside information as to the exact circumstances in which that rising star Seraphine had broken her Hollywood contract. Not that he neglected the excellent food with which he was served. He appeared to be able to eat and talk at the same time.

Rachel was quite pleased to listen. She could laugh at Cosmo, but she was very fond of him, and she was very glad to have an alternative to the Wadlows and their young, or Ella on slums.

The evil hour was, however, only postponed. As soon as lunch was over Mabel demanded an interview, and a very long, tearful and trying interview it proved to be, under such headings as a Mother’s Love, a Mother’s Anxieties, a Sister’s Heart, and, by implication, a Sister’s Purse.

Rachel did her best to endure the Mother’s Love, to soothe the Mother’s Anxieties, and to display the Sister’s Heart, whilst keeping a reasonably firm hand upon the Sister’s Purse. It was all very difficult and very, very exhausting.

When Mabel had at last been induced to lie down, there was Ernest, with a Father’s Anxieties and a Father’s Responsibilities.

Retiring to her room after this encounter, Rachel found herself pursued by her cousin Ella, tall, raw-boned, and purposeful, with a small attaché-case full of pamphlets and photographs.

“Most disappointing that you should have missed Mrs. Barber. I am a very poor substitute, but I promised her faithfully that I would do my very best to interest you.”

She was still there when Louisa Barnet came in to draw the curtains. She rose regretfully and began to pack the attaché-case.

“The time has simply flown—hasn’t it? I must go and wash my hands for tea, but I’ll leave you those pamphlets. Dear me, Rachel, you look quite tired. I hope you didn’t do too much this morning. Most inconsiderate of Mr. Brandon, I call it.” The door closed behind her.

Louisa rattled the curtain rings.

“Fair wore out is what you look, Miss Rachel, And it’s not what you did this morning that’s to blame neither.”

She got rather a wan smile as she turned.

“Well, I don’t think it is, Louie. You know what Miss Ella is. She’d got those papers on her mind, and she was bound to show them to me.”

Louisa looked angrily at the pamphlets.

“What’s it now? She doesn’t stick to nothing, does she? Last time it was lepers, and the time before that it was naked heathen cannibals. And what I say is, if they was made that way, then it was for some good purpose, and it’s not for us nor yet for Miss Ella to go flying in the face of Providence. Interferingness—that’s what it is, and you can’t get from it!”

Rachel bit her lip.

“But, Louie, Providence didn’t make lepers or cannibals, and He certainly didn’t make slums.”

Louisa gloomed.

“That’s what you say, Miss Rachel. I’ve got my own ideas, and I’m not the only one. And it’s no good talking about lepers and cannibals to me when I see you looking as white as a sheet, and saucers under your eyes for all the world as if they were full of ink. You’ll never be going over to see Mrs. Capper tonight?”

“Oh, yes—she counts on it. And I like going, you know. She’ll be a pleasant change, because she always tells me what a nice little girl I used to be, and when we’ve finished with me we go over all the other children she nursed. I sometimes think how odd it would be if we could all meet.”

Louisa took no interest in Mrs. Capper’s charges. It annoyed her to think that there had been a time when Mrs. Capper had brushed Miss Rachel’s hair and turned down her bed. Rachel’s visits to her old nurse were a source of irritation, and she never let slip an opportunity of suggesting that it was too wet or too cold, or that Rachel was too busy or too tired.

“That Miss Silver is coming at half past five, Miss Rachel. You’ll want to be in.”

Rachel couldn’t help laughing.

“Her train gets in at half past five—she won’t be here before six. I shall be back quite soon after that. Put my torch in the hall and hang out the lantern. Barlow can drop me before he goes to the station, and I’ll come back by the cliff.”

Cosmo seemed to think it was his turn for a tête-à-tête with Rachel after tea. He had a portfolio full of sketches to show her, was quite as annoyed as Louisa had been when Rachel reminded him that it was her day for Mrs. Capper. He said “Stuff and nonsense!” several times in a loud voice, and walked up and down jingling the keys in his trouser pocket and lecturing her about running herself off her legs, and when he had finished lecturing her he started in to scold the family for allowing her to wear herself out.

“It’s all very well, my dear, but good people are scarce, and if no one else will stand up to you and tell you you’re doing too much, well I will. You’re looking fagged out. What you want is a holiday. Why don’t you go right away from telephones, and begging letters, and neighbors who want you to do their shopping for them, and the whole boiling of us? Unless—” He stopped and bent affectionately over her chair. “Unless… Come, Rachel, here’s an idea. What about letting me show you Morocco? We’ll take Caroline to chaperone us, and you shall pay all the bills.” He laughed heartily and dropped a kiss on her hair. “Think it over my dear, think it over.”

Rachel laughed too and got up.

“I think I should make a better chaperone than Caroline. And now I’m going to see Nanny, so you must look after yourselves.”

It was an astonishing relief to get away. At Whincliff Edge everyone was so busy grinding axes that the noise quite deafened her. They pressed about her, exhausting the very air she breathed, always asking, always demanding, always wanting more. And under all this surface clamor and pressure something dark and stealthy moved, and waited to pull her down. In Nanny Capper’s neat kitchen she was in another world—a simpler, kinder world where Nanny herself played Providence and nobody else was more than seven years old.

“Up in the night he got in his bare feet and nothing on over his night things, and that’s how I caught him, standing a-tiptoe in your father’s dressing-room and tugging at the little top drawer to get it open. Two in the morning it was, and the noise of the drawer that waked me. And ‘Master Sonny.’ I said, ‘for goodness gracious sake, what-ever are you doing?’ And you should have heard how he spoke up. ‘I want a handkerchief,’ he says, and ‘Oh, Master Sonny,’ I said, ‘there’s aplenty in your own drawer, and one under your pillow, for I put it there myself.’ And what do you think he said? Never flinched, but looked me straight in the eye. ‘They’re too little,’ he said. ‘They’re not men’s handkerchiefs. I want a real man’s handkerchief to blow my nose with. And please will you open the drawer, because I can’t reach it, Nanny.’ ”

“And what did you do?” asked Rachel, who knew the answer.

Nanny Capper was a very fat old woman in a white Cashmere shawl over a black Cashmere dress, and large shapeless slippers on her large shapeless feet. She never got out of her chair except to go to bed, but she enjoyed life hugely. A stout niece looked after her, and she saw her beloved Miss Rachel once a week. She asked no more. She had four chins, and they all shook when she laughed as she did now.

“Oh, I gave him one—opened the drawer, and gave him the largest handkerchief I could find. I knew Mr. Treherne wouldn’t mind, seeing he was a visitor and Mr. Brent’s son that was his partner. A very nice gentleman Mr. Brent was, but they had some sort of a quarrel, him and your father, very soon after that, so Master Sonny never came back again. A couple of months we had him that time, and him and Miss Mabel sparred something dreadful. But you was only four months old, and he was mortal taken with you. You’d think he’d never seen a baby before, and I don’t suppose he had, not close to. There—I often wonder what’s come to him. He promised to be a fine man. But first there was the quarrel, and then Mr. Brent went away, and it was after that your father made all the money and we come back to England. Did you never find out anything about them?”

Rachel shook her head.

“No. Father wanted me to try, so I tried, and I’ve gone on trying, but it doesn’t seem to be any use.”

“Well, I liked Master Sonny, and if ever he does turn up, you’ll know it’s him right enough, because there was a man in the place where we were that did tattooing—and if Mr. Brent didn’t have that poor child’s name pricked out on his arm! The left arm it was, and just above the elbow. A downright shame, and so I told him. But he only laughed, and Master Sonny stuck up his chin and said, ‘I didn’t cry—did I?’ And no more he hadn’t, and it must have hurt him cruel. And how Mr. Brent could have stood by to see that poor child maltreated like that—well it passes me. And that reminds me of little Miss Rosemary March. She used to come visiting to Mr. Frith’s when I had Mr. Cosmo. Half a crown a time her mother used to give her when she had to go to the dentist, and Mrs. Frith, she was wonderful taken with the idea, and I said to her, ‘No, ma’am, if you please. If Master Cosmo don’t learn to bear pain now he never will.’ And with one thing and another that’s how I come to leave and go out to your dear mother that had Miss Mabel on her hands five years old and expecting you every minute. And I took you from the month. But Mr. Cosmo’s grown a fine man, and I’m pleased to think I had him in my nursery, if it was only six months. Often drops in he does when he’s this way. And the stories he’s got to tell, why you wouldn’t believe there was such goings on—now would you? But he ought to get himself a good wife to settle him down, for he’s not as young as he was, and so I told him last time he was here. ‘But Nanny,’ he says, ‘what can a poor fellow do if the one he wants won’t have him?’ ‘Go on asking her,’ I said. And he looks at me very solemn and says, ‘What have I got to offer her, Nanny? A parcel of debts, a tongue that wags too fast, a roomful of pictures that nobody cares to buy, and a heartful of love that she don’t want. She could have had me any time these twenty years, and she knows it.’ And I patted him on the shoulder and told him that faint heart never won fair lady.”

Rachel got up. Cosmo had been proposing to her at intervals ever since she grew up. It was a habit, and she had come to take it as no more than his rather tiresome way of expressing cousinly affection. But just at this moment to feel that a proposal from Cosmo was lurking among the watercolors which he would certainly insist on showing her either tonight or in the very near future was really the very, very last straw. And Nanny to be coming over all sentimental and trying to plead his cause! Anger put crispness into her tone as she said,

“It’s a mistake to go on when people don’t want you to, Nanny. Tell him to look for somebody else before it’s too late. And now I must go.”

“Oh, Miss Rachel, it’s early yet.”

Mrs. Capper knew when she had gone too far. Her tone was a propitiatory one. It promised, “Sit down and talk, and I won’t say another word about Mr. Cosmo.” But Rachel shook her head.

“No, I must go. I’ve got someone arriving by the five-thirty—they’ll be up at the house before I am now.”

“The clock’s fast, Miss Rachel. Did you hear about Mr. Tollage digging out his hedge, and the adders that was in it? Gave me the creeps it did to hear about them.” She kept hold of Rachel’s hand and talked fast to beguile her into staying. “I said to Ellen, ‘I don’t thank Mr. Tollage for nothing, turning all them snakes out to find new lodgings. I’m not letting any,’ I said. ‘And you keep a sharp look out that they don’t come worming themselves in.’ And what do you think she told me she’d seen with her own eyes? You’d never credit it, but those young rascals of boys was selling adders a penny apiece to anyone that was fool enough to buy. They say old Betty Martin bought a good few—and if she isn’t a witch, there’s never been no such thing. And Ellen says two of the boys spoke up and told her they’d sold a couple of lives ones—caught them in a shrimping net and tied it up with string. Though what in the world anyone ’ud want live adders for passes me.”

Rachel got her hand away, but she was no longer in a hurry to go. Her knees felt weak. She managed enough voice to say,

“What boys? Who bought the snakes?”

“They were strangers to Ellen. All they said was a lady in a green scarf had bought the two live adders, shrimping net and all. She gave them a good half-crown too. That was a funny thing, wasn’t it, when you come to think of it?”

“Yes,” said Rachel. She wondered if her voice sounded as strange to Nanny as it did to herself.

Mrs. Capper shook her head with its neatly plaited hair and its little lace cap.

“Because what would anyone want a pair of live adders for?”

“I can’t think,” said Rachel. “Goodnight, Nanny—I really must go.”