The Rutherfurd Saga. Anna Buchan
want to know everybody there is to know, butcher and baker and candlestick-maker. Yes, even the people who live in the smart villas. The Erskines would be exactly like all the people we have always known. Now that we are different I want to know different sort of people.”
“How are we different?” Barbara asked sharply.
“We’ve come down in the world,” her cousin told her solemnly.
“Ridiculous! Aunt Jane, isn’t she horrid? Surely you don’t want me to make friends with all and sundry?”
Lady Jane laughed. “I certainly think with you that we should get to know the Erskines, but it’s pleasant to live on good terms with all our neighbours.”
“Of course it is,” Barbara agreed, “if we stop there, but Nicole never knows where to draw the line. She gets so disgustingly familiar with every one—I sometimes think she’s a born Radical.”
“What a thing to say about the Vice-President of the Tweeddale Conservative Association! Well, you make friends with these Erskines, Bab, and I’ll confine my attentions to Kirkmeikle. I know I was born expansive. I can’t help it, and really it makes life much better fun. And, Mums, you will sit here and watch the game, and entertain first Bab’s friends then mine. It will be as entertaining as a circus.”
“I wonder,” said Lady Jane. “I wonder!”
CHAPTER IX
“Young fresh folkes, he and she.”
Chaucer.
Barbara had once said of Nicole, and said it rather bitterly, that she might start on a journey to London, alone in a first-class carriage, but before her destination was reached she would have made the acquaintance of half the people in the train. An exaggerated statement, but with a grain of truth in it. There was something about Nicole that made people offer her their confidence. Perhaps they saw sympathy and understanding in her eyes, perhaps they recognised in her what Mr. Chesterton calls “that thirst for things as humble, as human, as laughable, as that daily bread for which we cry to God.”
Certainly she found entertainment in whatever she heard or saw, and never came in, even from a walk on the moors round Rutherfurd, without something to relate. An excellent mimic, she made people live when she repeated their sayings, and “Nikky’s turns,” had been very popular with her father and brothers. Nowadays her recitals were not quite so gay: her mother and Barbara laughed, to be sure, but there was something wanting. However, as Nicole often told herself, the world was still not without its merits.
It was not likely that in such a small community as Kirkmeikle the Rutherfurds would be neglected, and, indeed, every one had called at once: the minister and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Lambert; the doctor and his sister—Kilgour was their name; Mrs. Heggie dragging her unwilling daughter; Mr. and Mrs. Buckler, and Miss Symington. But they all called very correctly between three and four, and found no one in, for the new inmates of the Harbour House took long walks every afternoon to explore the neighbourhood.
Barbara took up the cards that were lying one day and read aloud the names:
“Mrs. Heggie, Knebworth.
“Miss Symington, Ravenscraig.
“Mr. and Mrs. Buckler, Lucknow.”
Then, flicking the cards aside, she said: “How ghastly they sound! we’d better not return the calls for ages; we don’t want to land ourselves in a morass of invitations.”
“A morass of invitations,” Nicole repeated. “ ‘Morass’ is good. Each step taken, that is, each invitation accepted, leading you on until you get stuck deeper and deeper in the society of Kirkmeikle. . . . But what makes you think they would want to entertain us so extensively? It would only be tea—and that’s soon over.”
“Luncheon,” said Barbara gloomily; “perhaps dinner.”
“Well, even if they did! There are so few of them, we’d soon get through with it.”
“Yes, but we’d have to ask them back.”
“Why not?” Nicole asked. “Mrs. Martin would give them a very good dinner, and Mother would entertain them with her justly famous charm of manner; and you and I are not without a certain pleasing . . . I can’t think what word I want.”
Barbara shrugged her shoulders. “Personally, I have no desire to impress the natives. The names of their houses are enough for me. . . . Aunt Jane, have you fixed on the pattern of chintz you want? I’d better write before the post goes.”
The next day came a breath of winter. The quiet dry weather that had prevailed for some time vanished, hail spattered like shot against the long windows, a wild wind tore down the narrow street and whistled in the chimneys, while white horses raced up the beach and threw spray high over the wall.
After luncheon Nicole came into the drawing-room with a waterproof hat pulled well down over her face, and a burberry buttoned up round her throat, and announced that she was going out.
“My dear, on such a day!” her mother expostulated.
“I’m ‘dressed for drowning,’ ” Nicole assured her. “I only want to clamber about a bit and watch the waves. They’ll be gorgeous along at the Red Rocks. . . . Won’t you come, Babs?”
But Barbara, looking at the tumult of water through the streaming panes, shook her head. “It’s a day for the fireside, and some quite good books have come from the Times, and I’ve work to finish—Do you mind?”
“Not a bit. I rather like to walk by my wild lone. . . . No, Mums, I will not take Harris, she’s particularly busy to-day tidying clothes. No, nor Christina, nor Beenie—not even Mrs. Martin. They would tell us with truth that they had been engaged as domestic servants, not as props in a storm. I assure you I’ll come to no harm. Don’t worry. I’ll be home for tea.”
In spite of her daughter’s reassuring words Lady Jane spent most of the afternoon looking out of the window, nor was Barbara at all comfortable with her new novel and her work, and when the early darkness began to fall and her aunt asked if she thought anything could have happened to Nicole, she became distinctly cross and said that it was extremely selfish of people to make other people uneasy with their whims and fancies. “So like Nicole,” she added, “to want to go out and watch waves. I’m sure we can see more than we want of them from these windows. I don’t know why we ever came to live by the sea. . . . But I suppose I’d better go and look for her—restless creature that she is!”
But even as she got up to go, the door opened and the wanderer appeared, her wet hair whipped against her face, her eyes bright with battling against the wind.
“Nicole,” cried Barbara, relief in her voice, “you look like the east wind incarnate! The very sight of you makes me feel cold and blown about.”
“Such fun!” Nicole gasped. “Yes, rather wet, Mums, and more than a little battered. Give me ten minutes to change. Here’s Christina with the tea——”
They demanded to know, when she came down dry and tidy, where she had spent two and a half hours on such a day.
“We got so anxious about you that Babs was just starting to look for you when you came in,” her mother told her. “And we had no idea where you had gone.”
Nicole patted her mother’s hand and Barbara’s knee to show her penitence, and took a bite of buttered toast.
“It was wretched of me to worry you, but, you see, I’ve been making the acquaintance of some of our neighbours.”
“On such a day!” cried Lady Jane.
Nicole laughed aloud. “You may say it, Mums, on such a day! . . . Give me my tea over here, will you, Babs? Having sat