People Like Ourselves (Scottish Historical Novels). Anna Buchan
hear through the open window the sound of Tweed rushing between its banks. On the dressing-table lay a new novel with a vivid paper cover. Jean gave it a little disgusted push. Someone had lent it to her, and she had been reading it between Christmas preparations, reading it with deep distaste. It was about a duel for a man between a woman of forty-five and a girl of eighteen. The girl was called Noel, and was "pale, languid, passionate." The older woman gave up before the end, and said Time had "done her in." There were pages describing how she looked in the mirror "studying with a fearful interest the little hard lines and markings there beneath their light coating of powder, fingered and smoothed the slight looseness and fullness of the skin below her chin," and how she saw herself going down the years, "powdering a little more, painting a little more, touching up her hair till it was all artifice, holding on by every little device…."
A man had written that. What a trade for a man, Jean thought.
She was glad she lived among people who had the decency to go on caring for each other in spite of lines and wrinkles—comfortable couples whose affection for each other was a shelter in the time of storm, a shelter built of common joys, of "fireside talks and counsels in the dawn," cemented by tears shed over common sorrows.
She smiled to herself as she remembered a little woman who had told her with great pride that, to celebrate their silver wedding, her husband was giving her a complete set of artificial teeth. "And," she had finished impressively, "you know what teeth cost now."
And why not? It was as much a token of love as a pearl necklace, and, looked at in the right way, quite as romantic.
"I'd better see how it finishes," Jean said to herself opening the book a few pages from the end.
Oh yes, there they were at it. Noel, "pale, languid passionate," and the man "moved beyond control." "He drew her so close that he could feel the throbbing of her heart …" And the other poor woman with the hard lines and marking beneath the light coating of powder, where had she gone?
Jean pushed the book away, and stood leaning on the dressing-table studying her face in the glass. This was no heroine, "pale, languid, passionate." She saw a fresh-coloured face with a pointed chin, wide-apart eyes as frank and sunny as a moorland burn, an innocent mouth. It seemed to Jean a very uninteresting face. She was young, certainly, but that was all—not beautiful, or brilliant and witty. Lord Bidborough must see scores of lovely girls. Jean seemed to see them walking past her in a procession—girls who had maids to do their hair in the most approved fashion, constantly renewed girls whose clothes were a dream of daintiness all charming, all witty, all fitted to be wife to a man like Lord Bidborough. What was he doing now, Jean wondered. Perhaps dancing, or sitting out with someone. Jean could see him so clearly, listening, smiling, with lazy, amused eyes. By now he must be thankful that the penny-plain girl at Priorsford had not snatched at the offer he had made her, but had had the sense to send him away. It must have been a sudden madness on his part. He had never said a word of love to her—then suddenly in the rain and mud, when she was looking her very plainest, muffled up in a thick coat, clogged by goloshes, to ask her to marry him!
Jean nodded at the girl in the glass.
"What you've got to do is to put him out of your head, and be thankful that you have lots to do, and a house to keep, and boys to make happy, and aren't a heroine writhing about in a novel."
But she sighed as she turned away. Doing one's duty is a dreary business for three-and-twenty. It goes on for such a long time.
CHAPTER XVIII
"It was told me I should be rich by the fairies."—A Winter's Tale.
January is always a long, flat month: the Christmas festivities are over, the bills are waiting to be paid, the weather is very often of the dreariest, spring is yet far distant. With February, hope and the snowdrops begin to spring, but January is a month to be warstled through as best we can.
This January of which I write Jean felt to be a peculiarly long, dull month. She could not understand why, for David was at home, and she had always thought that to have the three boys with her made up the sum of her happiness. She told herself that it was Pamela she missed. It made such a difference knowing that the door would not open to admit that tall figure; the want of the embroidery frame seemed to take a brightness from the room, and the lack of that little gay laugh of Pamela's left a dullness that the loudest voices did nothing to dispel.
Pamela wrote that the visit to Champertoun had been a signal success. The hitherto unknown cousins were delightful people, and she and her brother were prolonging their stay till the middle of January. Then, she said, she hoped to come back to Priorsford for a little, while Biddy went on to London.
How easy it all sounded, Jean thought. Historic houses full of all things lovely, leisured, delightful people, the money, and the freedom to go where one listed: no pinching, no striving, no sordid cares.
David's vacation was slipping past; and Jean was deep in preparations for his departure. She longed vehemently for some money to spend. There were so many things that David really needed and was doing without, so many of the things he had were so woefully shabby. Jean understood better now what a young man wanted; she had studied Lord Bidborough's clothes. Not that the young man was anything of a dandy, but he had always looked right for every occasion. And Jean thought that probably all the young men at Oxford looked like that—poor David! David himself never grumbled. He meant to make money by his pen in spare moments, and his mind was too full of plans to worry much about his shabby clothes. He sometimes worried about his sister, and thought it hard that she should have the cares of a household on her shoulders at an age when other girls were having the time of their lives, but he solaced himself with the thought that some day he would make it up to Jean, that some day she should have everything that now she was missing, full measure pressed down and running over. It never occurred to the boy that Jean's youth would pass, and whatever he might be able to give her later, he could never give her that back.
Pamela returned to Hillview in the middle of the month, just before David left.
Bella Bathgate owned that she was glad to have her back. That indomitable spinster had actually missed her lodger. She was surprised at her own pleasure in seeing the boxes carried upstairs again, in hearing the soft voice talking to Mawson, in sniffing the faint sweet scent that seemed to hang about the house when Miss Reston was in it, conquering the grimmer odour of naphtha and boiled cabbage which generally held sway.
Bella had missed Mawson too. It was fine to have her back again in her cosy kitchen, enjoying her supper and full of tales of the glories of Champertoun. Bella's face grew even longer than it was naturally as she heard of the magnificence of that ancient house, of the chapel, of the ballroom, of the number of bedrooms, of the man-servants and maid-servants, of the motors and horses.
"Forty bedrooms!" she said, in scandalised tones. "The thing's rideeclous. Mair like an institution than a private hoose."
"Oh, it's a gentleman's 'ouse," said Mawson proudly—"the sort of thing Miss Reston's accustomed to. At Bidborough, I'm told, there's bedrooms to 'old a regiment, and the same at Mintern Abbas, but I've never been there yet. It was all the talk in the servants' 'all at Champertoun 'oo would be Lady Bidborough. There were several likely young ladies there, but 'e didn't seem partial to any of them."
"Whaur's he awa to the noo?"
"Back to London for a bit, I 'eard, and later on we're joining 'im at Bidborough. Beller, I was thinking to myself when they were h'all talking, what if Lady B. should be a Priorsford lady? His lordship did seem h'attentive in at The Rigs. Wouldn't it be a fine thing for Miss Jean?"
Miss Bathgate suddenly had a recollection of Jean as she had seen her pass that morning—a wistful face under a shabby hat.
"Hut," she said, tossing her head and lying glibly. "It's ma opeenion that the Lord askit Miss Jean when he was in Priorsford, and she simply sent him to the right about."
She