The Rutherfurd Saga. Anna Buchan
bumptious host flew into the herdsman’s cottage—you know the story? Nicole thought of it now as she looked at the lady, who might reign in her mother’s stead at Rutherfurd.
She was a stout woman, with a broad kind face under an expensive hat, and she stood solidly beside the old wash-stand and looked consideringly before her.
“We have the twelve rooms where we are,” she told Nicole. “Deneholm’s the name of our house in Pollokshields—but, of course, that’s including maids’ rooms. Four public rooms, a conservatory off the library, and central heating. Oh, Deneholm’s a good house and easy worked for its size: I’ll be sorry to leave it.”
“And must you?” Nicole asked.
Mrs. Jackson laid a fat hand on the towel rail, shaking it slightly, as if to test its soundness, and said:
“Well, you see, it’s Mr. Jackson. He’s making money fast—you know how it is, once you get started, money makes money, you can’t help yourself—and he thinks we’ve been long enough in a villa, he wants a country-house. It’s not me, mind you, I’d rather stay on at Deneholm. . . . D’you know Glasgow at all?”
“Hardly at all,” Nicole said, and added, smiling, “but I’ve often wanted to see more of it.”
Mrs. Jackson beamed at her. “You’d like it. Sauchiehall Street on a spring morning with all the windows full of light pretty things! or Buchanan Street on a winter afternoon before Christmas! I’ve had many a happy hour, I can tell you, going in and out of the shops. It’ll be an awful change for me if Mr. Jackson carries out his plan of living always in the country. Shop windows are what I like, and this”—she waved her hand towards the window with its view of lawn and running water, and golden bracken on the hillside—“this gives me no pleasure to speak of. I haven’t the kind of figure for the country, nor the kind of feet either. Fancy me in a short tweed skirt and those kind of shoes—brogues, d’you call them? A nice fright I’d be. I need dressing.”
She looked complacently down at her tight form in its heavily embroidered coat-frock—her fur coat had been left in the hall—and said solemnly, “What I’d be like if I didn’t corset myself I know not.”
Nicole had a momentary vision of the figure of Mrs. Jackson unfettered, and said hurriedly, “It’s—it’s comfortable to be plump.”
Mrs. Jackson chuckled. “I doubt I’m more than ‘plump’—that’s just your polite way of putting it—but what I say is I repay dressing. I’m not the kind that looks their best in deshabille. See me in the morning with a jumper and a skirt and easy slippers—I’m a fright. But when I get on a dress like this over a good pair of corsets, and a hat with ospreys, and my pearls, I’m not bad, am I?”
Nicole assured her that the result left nothing to be desired, and then, anxious to break away from such a personal subject, she said, “I do hope you will begin to like the country if you have to live in it. I think you’ll find there are points about it.”
Mrs. Jackson moved towards the door shaking her head dubiously.
“Not me. I like to have neighbours and to hear the sound of the electric cars, and the telephone always ringing, and the men folk going out to business and coming back at night with all the news. You need to be born in the country to put up with it. I fair shiver when I think of the dullness. Getting up in the morning and not a sound except, mebbe, hens and cows. One post a day and no evening papers unless you send for them. Nothing to do except to take a walk in the forenoon and go out in the car in the afternoon.”
“There’s always gardening,” Nicole reminded her.
“Not for me,” said Mrs. Jackson firmly. “I like to see a place well kept, but touch it I wouldn’t. For one thing I couldn’t stoop. Now, I suppose you garden by the hour and like it? Ucha? And tramp about the hills and take an interest in all the cottages? Well, as I say, it’s all in the way you’re brought up, but it’s not my idea of pleasure.”
Nicole laughed as they left the room together. She began to feel more kindly towards this talkative and outspoken lady.
“Now I wonder if there is anything more you ought to see. You took the servants’ quarters on trust, you’ve seen all the living-rooms and most of the bedrooms. There is another room, my mother’s own room, which you haven’t seen. Would you care——?”
“Oh, I’ll not bother, thanks, just now. I’ve enough to keep in my head as it is, and the time’s getting on.”
“Tea will be in the drawing-room now,” Nicole told her. “We ordered it early that you might have some before you start on your long drive home.”
“Oh, well—thanks. A cup of tea would be nice. And I’d like to see the drawing-room again to be able to tell Mr. Jackson right about it. I must say I like the hall. It’s mebbe a wee thing dreary with all that dark oak, but there’s something noble-looking about it too. I’ve seen pictures——”
She stopped on the staircase for a minute, studying the hall with her head on one side, then went on. “Of course, if we bought it we would need to have central heating put in at once. Mr. Jackson’s great for all his comforts. I see you’ve got the electric light. Yes—That’s the library to the left, isn’t it? Then the dining-room, and the billiard-room. I’m quite getting the hang of the house now, and I must say I like it. For all it’s so big there’s a feeling of comfort about it—grand but homely, if you know what I mean? . . . Deneholm, now, is comfortable right enough, always a nice smell about it of good cooking, and hot-water pipes, and furniture kept well rubbed with polish, but when all’s said and done it’s only a villa like all the other villas in the road. In our road nobody would ever think to have a stair like this without a carpet. This’ll take some living up to.”
Nicole was standing a few steps lower down, looking back at Mrs. Jackson, and she surprised on the face of that lady an expression half-proud, half-deprecating. Her bearing, too, had subtly altered; her head was held almost arrogantly, it was as if she saw herself cut from her moorings in Pollokshields, sailing as mistress of Rutherfurd in stately fashion over the calm waters of county society.
Opening the door of the drawing-room, Nicole said, “Is tea ready, Mother? Mrs. Jackson, my mother. My cousin, Miss Burt.”
Lady Jane Rutherfurd rose from her chair by the fire and smiled at the newcomer, as she held out her hand in greeting.
Nicole knew what it meant to her mother to receive Mrs. Jackson smiling. It was necessary that Rutherfurd should be sold, and Lady Jane was brave about it and uncomplaining, but she found the preliminaries trying. She disliked exceedingly—how could she help it?—the thought of unknown people going through the house, appraising the furniture, raising eyebrows at the shabbiness, casting calculating glances round rooms that were to her sacred. Ronnie’s room with the book-shelves made by himself—they always stood a little crooked—and the cricket-bats and fishing-rods and tennis-racquets stacked in one corner, the school and college groups on the walls, everything just as he had left it. And next door Archie’s room—waiting too. And her own room, the big, airy, sunny room with its windows opening on the view she loved best; and next it the oddly-shaped Corner Room that had been a sort of sanctuary to the whole family. When the house was full of people she and her husband had, with a sort of guilty joy, escaped at times from their guests and crept to the Corner Room to play with the children and refresh their souls. In that room had been kept all the precious picture-books that were looked at only when hands were clean and records unblemished, and the toys, too good for the nursery—the lovely Manchu doll which had been sent to Nicole from China; the brass animals from India, the gaily painted wooden figures from Russia, kings and queens with robes and crowns, priests with long white beards. The pictures on the walls were all family portraits, faded water-colours of children long since grown up and gone away, many of them now finished with their pilgrimage. Four little pictures hung in a line over the fire-place, the three Rutherfurd children, each painted at the age of five—Ronnie with his serious eyes and beautiful mouth, Archie, blue-eyed and obstinate, Nicole, bright-tinted, a fire-fly of a creature. The fourth was the