The Rutherfurd Saga. Anna Buchan
. . .’ I always think of that when it comes to discarding a razor-blade, and laugh! What is your funniest thing?”
“I was trying to think,” Nicole said, hugging her knees, “but everything has gone out of my mind. There’s one story that always cheers me about Braxfield, the hanging judge; I think it was Braxfield, but it doesn’t matter anyway. He was crossing a burn in spate, and by some mischance his wig fell off. His servant fished it out and handed it to him, but the judge refused it, petulantly remarking that it wasn’t his. ‘A weel,’ said his servant, ‘there’s nae wale o’ wigs in this burn.’ Don’t you think that’s a good story?”
“Very,” said Simon, collecting the coffee cups and putting them on a table. “What does ‘wale’ mean?”
Nicole dropped her head in her hands. “To think that I’ve been trying to tell a Scot’s story to a Sassenach! ‘Wale’ means choice. It’s the cold sense of the answer that makes the story seem so good to me. I thought you looked a little blank. Like the Englishmen dining at some inn and waited on by a new recruit of a waiter. They were waiting for the sweets, when he rushed in and said: ‘The pudden’s scail’t. It was curds, and it played jap ower the dish and syne skited doon the stairs.’ The poor dears realised that they were to get no pudding, but they never fathomed why.”
“I don’t suppose,” Lady Jane said to her guest, “that you understood a word of that? I know it was Greek to me when I came first to Scotland. . . . I wish you’d tell me about your writing. How, exactly, do you proceed?”
“Oh, well,” Simon said, lighting a cigarette, “my job would be the merest child’s play to some people. I haven’t to invent anything, only to put down facts. . . . I thought it would be the easiest thing to write a simple account, but I’m beginning to think that simplicity is the most difficult thing you can try for. You’d laugh at the struggle I have sometimes!”
“But,” said Nicole, “it must be great fun when things do go right. Don’t tell me you haven’t successful moments when you say to yourself, ‘Well, that’s jolly good, anyway.’ ”
Simon shook his head. “Those moments hardly ever occur. Now and again when I get past a nasty snag I seize my hat, and walk five miles over the head of it! No wonder my work doesn’t make rapid progress.”
“How long does it take to write a book?” Barbara asked. “I mean, of course, an ordinary-sized book, not a Decline and Fall.”
Simon laughed. “I daresay an expert could do it in a few weeks, but it’s taken me months to write the first rough draft—doing nothing else either, except golf a bit and motor a bit, and walk a good deal. But what I’m thankful for every day of my life is that my lecturing is over. However I stood up and jabbered to all those people I don’t know.”
“It is dreadful,” said Lady Jane. “Mine have only been small things like opening bazaars and flowershows, but I made myself quite ill dreading the day. But when once I was on my feet and realised that my audience was not made up of ravening wolves waiting to devour me, but of friendly people who wished me well, then I was quite all right.”
“Women are less self-conscious than men,” Simon said. “I felt such a fool!”
“I wish I’d been there to see you,” Nicole told him unfeelingly. “But, you know, one should always make a point of doing things one simply hates doing, it’s such a lovely feeling afterwards. Besides, it’s nice to look back on heart-diseasy moments; long uneventful days are jolly at the time, but it’s the heart-diseasy moments that really count, as you know, much better than I do. What a nice old age you’ll have!”
“I like that from you, Nikky,” her cousin said. “What kind of old age you’ll have I don’t know, for at present you live like an old lady, visiting in the day, and in the evening reading dull books by the fire. . . . Well, aren’t we going to do anything?”
“Won’t you sing, please?” Simon suggested.
“Oh, do, Babs. Sing what you sang this afternoon—‘On Christmas night when it was cold.’ D’you know it, Mr. Beckett? Such an old carol.”
Barbara went to the piano and struck a few chords softly. Lady Jane, as if drawn by the music, moved close to her.
“For his love that bought us all dear,
Listen lordings, that be here
And I will tell you in fere
Whereof came the flower delice . . .
On Christmas night, when it was cold,
Our Lady lay among beasts bold. . . .”
Barbara sang the words as if she loved them.
Nicole, in her white frock and her scarlet berries, sat looking into the fire; her lips were parted and her eyes bright as if she were seeing pictures in the flames, lovely pictures.
Simon sat forward with his hands clasped between his knees watching Nicole’s face as she dreamed——
“Whereof came the flower delice . . .” sang Barbara.
CHAPTER XVIII
“Two lads that thought there was no more behind
But such a day to-morrow as to-day,
And to be boy eternal.”
The Winter’s Tale.
Two days after Christmas, breakfast at the Harbour House was a somewhat prolonged meal, for the post, arriving in the middle, brought a letter which needed immediate discussion.
“Mums,” said Nicole, “here’s a letter from Bice saying that Jane and Barnabas have taken scarlet fever. Happily, Arthur has been in the country with Aunt Constance, so he isn’t in quarantine, and he can’t go home, of course, so this is an S.O.S. from Bice asking if she may send him here for the rest of his holidays. She is very worried, poor dear. See what she says.”
“What a sad thing to happen in the holidays,” Lady Jane lamented, taking the letter, while Barbara, coming back from the sideboard with her tea-cup, stood staring gloomily out of the window. Nicole, who was watching her cousin’s face, said:
“Quite so, Babs. We’re for it, I fear. We’ll have to take the child for at least a fortnight, and cart him back to school at the end of it. . . . Personally, I don’t mind; boys are always a delight to me, only I don’t quite see what the poor little chap will do in Kirkmeikle.”
“How old is he?” Barbara asked moodily. “Twelve, isn’t he? If we had been at Rutherfurd it wouldn’t have mattered. He’d have gone out with the keeper, and there would always have been something to amuse him, but a boy cooped up here. . . .”
“At an age, too, when women are a bore and a nuisance.”
“And,” said Barbara, “we haven’t seen him for ages. He’s probably one of those frightfully superior schoolboys who despise more or less everything. I met one at Langlands once and I never felt so shy in my life. I hardly dared address him, and he only just condescended to answer me. . . .”
“Ah! not Bice’s boy—he wouldn’t be like that. Bice herself is such a simple creature. . . . Well, Mums, what do you think?”
Lady Jane laid down the letter and began to butter a bit of toast. “Of course he must come here, poor boy, but I am so sorry for Bice missing his holidays. When I last heard from her she was planning all sorts of treats for Arthur’s Christmas holidays, and Barnabas, who adores his big brother, was going back with him to school. Now, I suppose, he will be weeks late, and spoil his first term . . . we must wire at once. If they put him in charge of the guard of the night train we can meet him in Edinburgh to-morrow morning. Which of you will go?”
“I’d