The Rutherfurd Saga. Anna Buchan
can not manage ourselves”; and in her despair poor Mrs. Jackson nearly burst into tears. “A bonnie-like mess of things I’d make with no one beside me to tell me what to do! You know quite well that if I can put my foot in it I do it, and I can’t talk. And, oh! the dance! the orchestra and the purveyors. . . . Oh dear, dear, what made me think of trying to entertain? It was you, Andy, that said we should give a dinner to pay back, but the dance was a bit of show-off on my part.”
“Wouldn’t Mrs. Douglas help us?”
Mrs. Jackson dismissed the suggestion with an impatient shake of her head.
“It wouldn’t be the same. With Nicole Rutherfurd beside me playing the daughter of the house I could have faced anything. Andy, could we not send wires to every one that we’ve got something? Influenza or a nervous breakdown. . . . I’m sure I’ve got that right enough.”
Andy thought for a minute. “Isn’t there another Miss Rutherfurd, a cousin? Wouldn’t she come?”
“She’s called Miss Burt, and she’s a stand-offish thing; not a bit like my girl. Besides, she wouldn’t come.”
“You could ask her.”
As a drowning man clutches at a straw, so Mrs. Jackson clutched at this possibility. “You send a wire then, Andy, an urgent wire so that they’ll see things are desperate.—Or mebbe I’d better write. . . . She’d be a lot better than nobody.”
* * * * *
It was now the 9th of March, and Miss Barbara Burt might arrive any minute. Andrew had gone to meet her in the car, much against his own inclination, but spurred thereto by his mother’s eagerness.
“It would never do to let her arrive and find no one but a chauffeur. Besides, you know Father’ll not let Renwick leave the car for a minute, so it would be very awkward. I’d go myself, but I dread the thought of having to talk to her all the way back. It’s nothing to you to talk. I’ve often watched you chattering away like anything.”
Andrew looked slightly dashed at this description of his conversational powers, but he only said, “Well, I don’t expect to ‘chatter’ much to Miss Burt. When does the train come in? All right. I’ll be there.”
When Barbara got out of the train and stood looking about her for a porter to take her luggage to the car which she had been told would be waiting, a voice said, “Pardon me, but are you Miss Burt?” and she saw before her a young man in a light tweed suit, with pleasant grey eyes, and a smile that revealed very white, even teeth. She smiled and nodded. “And you are——?”
“I’m Andrew Jackson. We’re most awfully grateful to you for coming. How is your cousin?”
“Better, thanks, though not fit to travel. She is greatly disappointed, for she had been looking forward to this visit. . . . The cane trunk and the hat-box, and the case. Yes. That’s all.”
Andrew turned to the porter. “Bring ’em along, will you? The car’s outside. I’ll take the dressing-bag.”
They went out of the station, Andrew explaining that his father did not like the chauffeur to leave the car, in case the little wanton boys that abound round a station did it an injury.
“It seems a pity to worry,” said Andrew, “but there it is.”
“What about the luggage? Doesn’t Mr. Jackson object to that?”
“He does, if there’s a lot,” Andrew confessed, “but yours is modest. . . . Is that all right, Renwick? Now, we’re off.”
Barbara had looked forward with much distaste to this enforced visit to her old home, but she had made up her mind that, so far as in her lay, she would do her best to make it a success. She would try never to think about herself and her own feelings, but to enter into the feelings of others. She set Nicole before her as an example, for nobody knew better than Barbara herself that she was not always a social success.
Now, carried swiftly along the well-remembered road, she told herself that things had begun well. She liked this young man with his kind simple manner and his honest eyes, and she felt flattered that he wasted no time on the preliminaries of friendship, but plunged at once into what interested him.
Some remark was made about the countryside, and Andrew said, “I wish you’d tell me something about your uncle and cousins. . . .”
Barbara turned to him with a very charming smile.
She said, “You’ve chosen the subject I like best.”
“Everywhere I go,” Andrew went on, “I hear about them, and every one I meet has some story to tell me about them. It is rather remarkable, you know, the affection they seem to have inspired. Sir Walter Rutherfurd is still a name to conjure with in these parts, and I would very much like to know wherein lay the secret of his influence. You see, it’s frightfully interesting to me, who, in a way, must follow him. I hope you don’t think this is cheek, but I’m very keen to carry on the tradition. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, for we’ve everything against us—we’re strangers, city folk. . . .”
“The Rutherfurds were deep-rooted in the soil,” Barbara said, leaning forward to see some familiar landmark.
Andrew nodded. “That’s it. . . . They grew up with all the people round, their fathers had been friends, their grandfathers, away back . . .”
“Uncle Walter was the best of all the Rutherfurds,” Barbara said. “The others, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, and further back were all fine men, but some of them were eccentric and queer; but he was the sanest, most reliable of men. There was something about him so big and kind and simple. He was austere too, in a way, and absolutely unshakable about what he thought was right and wrong. And Ronnie and Archie promised to be very much the same.”
“They died young?”
“Twenty and twenty-two. Do you wonder their parents’ hearts were broken? I sometimes think the War killed more fathers than mothers. Perhaps women’s hearts are made to stand more, or perhaps it’s because it is easier for them to speak out what they feel, but I’ve known several cases where the mother was able to go on, but the father, saying very little, just slipped out of life. Uncle Walter did that. It was as if something had broken that we couldn’t mend. We tried to hold him back, but something far stronger drew him away. . . . Oh, it hasn’t been easy these last years.”
“And giving up Rutherfurd must have been very bad,” Andrew said gently.
Barbara had a sudden and almost overpowering inclination to burst there and then into a flood of tears. She turned and stared unseeingly out of the window . . . and they had reached the gates of Rutherfurd before she felt sure of keeping her voice steady.
When the car drew up at the door Mrs. Jackson stood waiting to receive them. She wore a smart gown, a hat with ospreys, and an ermine stole, determined to do full honour to her guest. Enormous fires blazed everywhere, and hot-house flowers scented the air. “Not a word till you’ve had tea,” was her greeting, “you must need it badly after such a long journey. Come right into the drawing-room. There now, sit there. Is that cushion quite comfortable? Would you like a footstool?”
Barbara, feeling like seventy and decrepit at that, refused a footstool, but gladly accepted tea, while her hostess poured into her ears details about the arrangements. . . .
“The dinner I could cope with—we’ve given dinners before—but it’s the dance. They keep telling me that the men’ll do everything, prepare the floor and put everything right, but I don’t know. The question is can you trust them? Wouldn’t it be awful if there wasn’t enough to eat, or if something went wrong with the orchestra? That orchestra! It fair weighs on my mind. I never had anything to do with them except just listening, of course, but I’ve often heard how difficult choirs are to manage, and I doubt orchestras will be worse. . . . It’s a big undertaking, look at it any way you like.”
Barbara soothed her, and assured