These Delights (9 page)

“Scales,” said Lou gloomily.

“Scales?” This, at least, sounded harmless. “Ah, yes, of course. You play the piano, don’t you? Diana told me. But when I was your age, dear child, I certainly never wanted to play scales, and I don’t suppose you care for them, either.”

Lou suddenly became very foreign.

“To play scales is the only way to become a gr-reat pianist,” he said, gesturing violently. “Me, I practise scales until my fingers ache, and one day I make the artiste—yes?”

“Dear me!” murmured Lady Sale, and glanced at her daughter with a comprehending eye. “Well, I expect you are quite right, only I shouldn’t count your chickens before they are hatched, if I were you.”

“Count chickens? What has that to do with a pianist?” asked Lou, bewildered.

“It means, Lo
u
, you should not count on being a great artiste until you are one,” explained Vicky, tossing back the heavy lo
ck
of hair that would fall into her eyes. “But, Lady Sale, Lou is very good. Our cousin, Luke, will tell you. Is he not exceptional, Luke?”

“Yes,” said Luke, breaking off his conversation with Diana. “You should certainly hear Lou play, Lady Sale, his ability is rather remarkable.”

“Really?” said Lady Sale, while Diana moved impatiently.

“Perhaps the little boy would play at one of the village concerts,” suggested Mrs. Walker archly. “A child performer is always popular, you know.”

Vicky shook her head vehemently, her eyes very green. “Oh, no, no, no, that would not do at all,” she said. “Lou is not ready for a public appearance. It would be very bad for him. Louis Dalcroix would not approve at all.”

Mrs. Walker looked offended, but Lady Sale nodded approval.

“Very sensible,” she said. “We don’t want to give our budding Paderewski too big ideas, do we?”

“That is not what I meant,” began Vicky, but Sir Harry gave her hair a pull and told her she was neglecting him.

“After tea,” he said, “I’m going to show you my roses. We’ll just give them all the slip, eh?”

Lady Sale turned to speak to Hester, but all the time she talked, she watched the two girls. In their brief cotton frocks they looked fresh, and English enough, if it had not been for their odd, Slavonic faces. Pauline, with her braided hair, looked nearly as old as Vicky, she thought, and out of the tail of her eye she saw the older girl lean forward to say something to Luke, placing an eager hand on his knee, and watched the warmth of his smile as he replied.

Tea was
cl
eared away, and Sir Harry took Vicky off to see his roses. Mrs. Walker said she must be going, and Lady Sale suggested that Lou and Pauline should explore the water-garden at the bottom of the lawn. Having disposed of everyone satisfactorily, she settled down to talk to the Merrits.

“Your little cousins are quite unusual, Luke,” she said. “But how you’ve sprung them on us! We knew nothing about any foreign relations until they had practically arrived.”

“They aren’t foreign at all, Lady Sale,” replied Luke, smiling. “Both their parents were English, and they’ve lived abroad so long, principally because their father was an artist who prefe
r
red to live in a sunny land.”

“Really? They have a foreign turn of phrase sometimes, but I suppose that would be natural. The elder girl, now? What is she going to do?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Luke vaguely. “I imagine Vicky will have to work eventually, as there isn’t much money, but she’s very young yet.”

“Nineteen? Ah, well, I dare say this holiday will do them a lot of good. When do they go back to France?”

Luke was getting a little tired of the cross-examination. “That depends on their father’s health,” he replied gravely. “He’s in a sanatorium for T.B. you know.”

“Really? How sad. But of course, these days they nearly all get cured, don’t they? It isn’t the scourge it once was. The children are healthy enough, I suppose.”

“I think so.” Luke looked a little startled.

“I should be a shade anxious about the little boy,” she said carelessly. “Such an
odd
child, and all this concentration on scales—not normal.”

Luke’s face relaxed in a smile.

“Oh, Lou’s normal enough,” he said. “He just happens to have been blessed with an exceptional talent.”

Lady Sale’s expression was a little condescending. “Well, I
think
it’s most noble of
you
,
Hester, to put up with such an invasion in these difficult times. After all, the man doesn’t have the worry of domestic things, does he? If you and Diana had already been married, Luke, I don’t know how you would have managed. Is this visit likely to be an annual event, do you think?”

Luke looked her straight in the eyes.

“I shall hope to see more of my cousins, yes,” he said quietly. “I find them very refreshing, and we have a lot of
lost time to make up, having become acquainted so late.”

“Oh, quite, quite,” said Lady Sale vaguely, and tried not to catch her daughter’s frown of annoyance.

“Here come Sir Harry and Vicky.” Luke sounded relieved as he got to his feet. “I think I had better find the other two, Lady Sale. I ought to be getting back to the farm.”

“Oh, Luke!” Vicky ran to him and clasped both hands round his arm. “Sir Harry has the most wonderful roses I’ve ever seen. Look! He has given me a Caroline Testout. It was a great honor.”

“An honor indeed!” laughed Luke, touching the pink rose tucked into the bodice of her frock. “It gives you a most elegant air of distinction. Are you ready to go home, monkey?”

Lady Sale’s hard eyes watched them, Vicky with her ardent face raised laughingly to his, and Luke, looking down at her with that hint of tenderness in his smile.

“Here are the children,” she said, looking beyond them to the water-garden, “and—oh, heavens! The child must have fallen in the pond!”

It was true. T
h
ey hurried across the lawn, Pauline scolding as she ran, but L
o
u for the first time was enjoying the party. He was sopping wet.

“I fell in! I fell in!” he yelled. “And what do you think? There’s a
frog
in my pocket! I’m going to take it home for Bibi.”

“Fairly normal, I think, Lady Sale,” said Luke, his eyes twinkling. “No, you can’t take it home for Bibi, Lou. Rabbits don’t eat frogs.”

“Not to eat—to
play
with!
”
shouted Lou.

“Bibi wouldn’t like it, nor would the frog. Let it go, Lou, and then we must all say good-bye, and get you home and into some dry clothes.”

They made their farewells, and Sir Harry, having much enjoyed his afternoon, went with them to see them off. But Diana, although she kissed Luke good-bye, and accepted an invitation for Sunday supper, remained with her mother on the terrace and thoughtfully lit a
cigarette.

CHAPTER FIVE

J
une
was a lovely month without a drop of rain, and Tom Bowden’s prophecy of a hot summer looked like coming true. Already the bracken had a brittle look, and the little river, Scaw, had become a shallow stream with the cattle-crossing dry above it. Next month they would be cutting the hay which grew high and lush in Luke’s meadows, and it was here that Vicky liked to come with a book and lie in the cool grass of a summer afternoon and stare at the sky.

Often Luke found her there and would look down at her slim young body stretched at his feet, and sometimes she would hold out her arms and coax him to waste a few minutes beside her. He reflected with satisfaction how much better the three
Jordan
s looked after a month on the farm. Vicky, especially, had benefitted. Her arms were rounder, the hollows below the high cheek-bones were beginning to fill out and her skin had tanned to a warm apricot. Against it her hair looked like pale honey.

“I think you must be a lorelei, or one of the sirens who distracted poor Ulysses,” he told her once, when, yielding to persuasion, he sat down beside her and lit a cigarette.

“It’s good to relax and think about something else but work,” she told him seriously. “Diana thinks I’m very idle.”

“Diana likes her day planned for her,” he replied. “Or rather, she likes to plan it herself. She is an energetic young woman and often puts me to shame.”

“But just to have energy is not to be alive,” she said. “Sometimes too much energy, too much planning, makes one miss the important things.”

“And what would you call the important things, Miss Victoria?”

His voice was indulgent, and he ran an idle finger down her forehead and nose. She made a snap at it as it passed over her lips.

“The little things,” she said. “Larks singing, the way light strikes things, the sun on your skin and somebody whistling in the early morning. And then there are things like cocoa, when it’s so hot, to drink is exquisite agony, and the smell of wood-smoke, and tar on a hot day, and manure, though Cousin Hester says not indoors. So many things like that, but if you do not relax you miss them.”

“Yes,” he said, sighing.

“Can you not share such things with Diana?” she asked. “No, you cannot for she doesn’t notice them, but then, you cannot have everything. A marriage of convenience does not allow for the little things.”

“What on earth are you talking about, child?” he said sharply.

“You and Diana. We all understand that you make the practical marriage, and in a way you are lucky, for she is very good-looking besides being rich.”

Vicky was not looking at him as she spoke so she missed the look of horrified amazement which came into his face.

“Do the three of you think I’m marrying Diana for her money?” he asked in an odd voice.

“But of course,” she said, “we have often discussed it
.
”

He took her by the hands and pulled her up to a sitting position.

“I’ve never in all my life heard such a monstrous suggestion!” he exclaimed.

She looked at him bewildered, the fair hair tumbled over her face.

“But, Luke, why are you angry?” she said. “It is perfectly understandable. She will bring you a handsome
dot
to improve your farm—she is always talking of it
.
To us it’s quite simple. It is the French way.”

“Well, it’s not my way,” he said shortly. “So the sooner you get that idea out of your head, the better. Have you ever talked to Diana like this?”

“Oh, no, of course not
.
That would be different altogether.”

“I’m glad you think so. Now don’t let me ever hear you talk like that again, to me or anyone else.”

Tears hung on her lashes, then fell, unheeded. It was the first time she had known anger in him, and, as with most gentle people, it was the more startling.

“I didn’t mean to be impertinent,” she said. “I only thought I spoke the truth. We did not think you loved her.”

“Certainly I love her,” he said quickly. “Diana is a fine person, and if it’s any consolation to you, I should much prefer to marry her without her money.”

“If she had no money, then she would not marry
you
,”
said Vicky, pursuing her own logic even in her distress.

He gave her a little shake.

“Sometimes you talk the most complete rubbish I’ve ever heard,” he told her. “Now, we’ll forget all about this conversation—understand?”

“Yes, Luke,” she said, and sniffed.

His anger left
him
as quickly as it had come. He should have known better than to take the child seriously.

“There, Vicky, don’t cry,” he said kindly. “We all get silly ideas in our beads sometimes.”

She flung her
arms
round his neck in an agony of remorse.

“Oh, Luke, dear Luke,” she sobbed. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Forgive me. I do not understand these things at all.”

“Of course you don’t,” he said soothingly. “You’re much too young. Now dry your eyes, and blow your nose, and then come and help me mend a gate.”

Vicky soon recovered herself and happily held hammers and passed
nails
to Luke until she tired of it, then sat on an upturned box close by and returned to her book, but the conversation had left an odd little sense of disquiet in Luke. He wondered how many other people thought as Vicky had. Tom Bowden, the farm hands, all local men who knew just how
much
money Diana was proposing to spend on the
farm
—even the Sales themselves, who certainly had never troubled much with the Merrits until Diana had suddenly become engaged to him.

But the thing was absurd, he told himself irritably. Diana had passed the age when she must be guarded from fortune-hunters, and he himself was the last
man
to marry for money.

“You have nailed that piece on three times,” said Vicky from her box, watching him.

Luke surveyed his handiwork with a rueful expression.

“Never mind, it’ll make it all the stronger,” he said. “Come on. I should think it must be tea-time.”

“
Yes,” she said, shutting her book and springing up. “My stomach has been empty for a long time,” She slipped a hand through his arm in the old, friendly way, and walked with him back to the house.

It was Sunday, and Diana was coming over to supper. Hester, tidying up the living-room after Lou and Pauline had appeared to make chaos of all the cushions, wished Luke had not invited her that night. It was a long-established custom that Tom Bowden always came up to the house for Sunday supper, and although Diana was gracious to him, he was never at ease with her, and farming discussions were apt to become heated.