The Rutherfurd Saga. Anna Buchan
had risen to go, but at Mrs. Lambert’s question she sat down on the arm of her chair and said:
“Yes; don’t you? I like contrasts. If I’m having a tremendously gay time in London I read dull memoirs to recall to myself my latter end! In India I used to like to sit at the end of the long Indian day and listen to the monkey-people, and watch the kites swoop down, and hear the conches from the temple, and read Barrie—all about Jess and Leeby and the intimate details of the Thrums kitchen. It was like seeing a minutely painted Dutch interior against the background of the Matterhorn!”
“And tell me,” said Mrs. Lambert, “what d’you read when life is terribly ordinary, and everything seems to smell of boiled cabbage?”
Miss Symington looked in a surprised way at her minister’s wife, but Nicole laughed and said, “I know—‘when nothing is left remarkable.’ Why then, I read of glowing places like the Taj Mahal, and of people like Shah Jehan. Shah Jehan with his elephants and his peacocks, his queens and his palaces . . .”
She stopped. The minister’s wife was enthralled, but Miss Symington wore a doubtful expression as if she feared that this young woman was not going to prove a very uplifting influence in Kirkmeikle.
“I must go,” said Nicole, “for I’m talking far too much. Good-bye, Miss Symington.” She smiled at the Lamberts. “I shan’t forget the books,” she promised, and was gone.
Mrs. Lambert gave a sigh as the door shut behind her, and said. “I never met any one like her. Her voice . . . and her eyes. She’s like warmth and light. I seem to feel chilly now she’s gone.”
Her husband shook his head at her. “You’re a born worshipper, Jeanie. I suppose now you’ll go home and dote on this Miss Rutherfurd. And she hasn’t wanted for worship, that young woman.”
Nicole went home so silent and thoughtful that her mother, in some alarm, asked her if she felt quite well.
“Oh yes, thanks. . . . I’ve been to see Miss Symington.”
“What,” cried Barbara, “again? You seem to have a morbid desire for that woman’s society.”
“No. I met her at her own gate and she asked me to come in, and she’s one of those sincere people who would never think of asking you unless they really wanted you. We talked—— Do you know”—very solemnly—“I don’t believe any man has ever said anything more intimate to Miss Symington than, ‘A bright day, but rather chilly.’ ”
“And do you propose to introduce passion into her life?” Barbara asked drily.
Nicole laughed. “You do make me sound a fool, Babs. You’re the best bubble-pricker that I know—— But don’t you think it is very sad for Miss Symington to have all that money—didn’t Mrs. Heggie say she was very rich?—and get no good out of it?”
“But she does good with it,” Lady Jane reminded her.
“Oh, but in such a dull way, just giving large impersonal sums. She doesn’t know how to give, and she doesn’t know how to live, and she doesn’t know how to love—— Rather neat that, what? No, but really, I can’t bear to see waste. I looked at that woman to-day and I just longed to spend some money on her. The house is awful—I shouldn’t think there is one single beautiful thing in it. She sits in the dining-room, Mums, with a green plush cloth on the table and an aspidistra in a pot—and if there is a soul-destroying thing on earth it’s an aspidistra! She entertains preachers for the week-ends. I can see her sitting talking so painstakingly to them, telling them what she has read in the Scotsman. . . . D’you know, she doesn’t even realise what a treasure she has got in Alastair: he’s just another thing for her to be conscientious about. I tell you she doesn’t know how to enjoy.”
Barbara yawned. “Oh, do let’s talk about something else. I’m frankly bored with the whole population of Kirkmeikle. . . . I’m tired of solid worth. Is there anything really wicked in the house that I could read?”
Her aunt laughed. “Poor Babs! But you’ve found a way of escape to-day.” She turned to Nicole. “Aunt Constance’s friends the Erskines called to-day when you were out. Very friendly people they seem. We are all invited to Queensbarns next Wednesday.”
“Oh, are we?” said Nicole.
CHAPTER XIV
“It is a rule with me, that a person who can write a long letter with ease cannot write ill.”
Jane Austen.
A week or two later Nicole wrote to her friend Jean Douglas at Kingshouse:
You blame me for not writing, and ask what I can possibly have to do except write, but you’d be surprised how full the days are and how quickly they pass. Anyway, for me. Barbara still kicks against the pricks. Mother smiles her absent smile and accepts things as they are, but I think perhaps she hasn’t been quite so “absent” lately—you know what I mean, present in the body but her thoughts not of this world. She is sometimes quite like her old self when she is talking to Alastair. I told you—did I?—about him. He is a small boy, the nephew of Miss Symington who lives in the biggest of the red villas, six years of age, plain of face, superficially quite unattractive. You know how my heart always did melt to small boys, and there is something about Alastair that appeals to me mightily. He reminds me in the strangest way of Ronnie and Archie, and I think Mums must feel the same, for I’ve seldom seen her so absorbed in any one as she is in this child. He is old enough to begin lessons, but there is nobody available in this place to teach him, and his aunt doesn’t want a resident governess, and—actually—mother offered to give him lessons for two hours every morning! So punctually at ten o’clock he arrives with his nurse—a large Fife girl, quite young and full of common-sense—we call her Gentle Annie, because of her liking for a song of that name—whom he admires exceedingly. (When we read to him about a beautiful princess, he asks, “As beautiful as Annie?”).
Alastair sits at a table with an exercise book and a pencil and learns to recognise and make letters and read little words. So far his progress is not striking. I heard Mums going over with him a n, an, with great patience, then she said: “Now, Alastair, tell me what is that word?” and Alastair with the most charmingly helpful air said, “I’d tell you in a minute if I knew.”
You say you want to know all about the people here. Barbara says they are the dullest crowd she ever struck, and indeed they are utterly ordinary—what are we ourselves?—and very far from exciting, but I like them.
Mrs. Heggie, who can’t see any one without offering hospitality, came to tea with her daughter the other day. The daughter was calm and collected and condescended to us a good deal, but her mother was absolutely simmering with excitement. It seems she has always had an intense desire to be inside the Harbour House, and she was like a child at her first pantomime. I escorted her through every nook and cranny of it—we even visited the coal-cellar—and she gasped out admiration at everything she beheld. She was so interested in the few photographs she saw in the bedrooms, that we raked out boxes of them, and I believe she would have sat entranced till bedtime listening to the life-histories of people she had never known existed. The daughter, Joan by name, dragged her away in the end, evidently ashamed of her exuberance. She writes, this girl, but I can’t quite gather what. She is rather plain, with a long nose and chin, and an ugly laugh.
Miss Symington, Alastair’s aunt, is a woman of about forty-seven, quite good-looking if she knew how to make the best of herself; rich, free to do what she likes; and here she stays all the year round in a hideous house, eating badly cooked food, wearing ugly clothes, seeing nothing beautiful, hearing nothing beautiful, hardly, I think, aware that there is such a thing as beauty. What could one do to wake her up?
Her minister and his wife are so different. The Lamberts live in a plain little grey stone house in the middle of a walled garden; you