The Rutherfurd Saga. Anna Buchan
most dignified thing for us is to pretend we like it, and to get out of the way as quickly as possible. Anyway, I’m enormously cheered by Mrs. Jackson. I had a nightmare fear that Rutherfurd would be bought by horrible ‘smart’ people. I don’t grudge it a bit to that comic.”
Lady Jane laid her hand on her daughter’s.
“That’s so like you, Nikky,” she said. “You never expect to receive evil things, but if they come you immediately discover in them some lurking good. That’s why you’re such a comfortable person to live with.”
“I don’t believe,” said Barbara, “that we’ll hear any more of this Mrs. Jackson. It seems most improbable that people like that could even think of buying a place like Rutherfurd.”
Nicole wagged her head wisely. “Mark my words, in a few days Mr. Jackson will arrive. I’m not sure that I shall like him, I distrust his high ideals—wasn’t it pathetic the way his wife said, ‘He has such high ideels, you know what I mean’?—and he evidently has a correct mind and knows what to admire, which is so tiresome. Still, he may be a very nice man, and willing to deal justly and be decent about things. Yes, I feel it in my bones that the Jacksons are to be our successors.”
“It’s a mercy you can take it so light-heartedly,” Barbara observed drily, but Nicole did not reply.
Lady Jane sat looking at the fire, not listening to what the girls were saying. It hurt Barbara to see her. . . . She looked so wan in her black dress, so desolate. Barbara thought of her as she used to be, looking almost a girl in her pretty clothes, with her husband and Ronnie and Archie always hanging round her. Now she sat there having lost everything, her husband, her boys, her home, her position. And the worst of it was no one could do anything to help her. One could not even think, “Oh, well, in time she will begin to feel quite bright again. In time she will cease to mourn, and will become one of those contented, healthy widows that one meets everywhere.” She was not like that. It sometimes struck Barbara with a sharp pang that her aunt was merely living from habit, that the mainspring of her life was broken. She wondered if the same thing had struck Nicole.
“Mums,” said Nicole, “don’t look at nothing. Turn your head round and try to look interested in my bright conversation.”
Lady Jane smiled up at her daughter’s down-bent face.
“Why, yes, darling. I’m so sorry I was dreaming when pearls were falling from your lips. Will you repeat your valuable remarks?”
Nicole bowed with mock gravity. “My words of wisdom are so numerous that it seems almost a pity to repeat. I was only philosophising. . . . You may not realise it, you and Barbara, but we are in rather a romantic position. Mr. Chesterton would describe us as ‘the last sad squires riding slowly to the sea.’ Why to the sea, exactly? I don’t know. But, anyway, novels have been written about such as we.”
“Very dull novels they must be,” said Barbara. “I don’t know how you can laugh, Nik. It’s the most tragic thing that ever happened, that the Rutherfurds should have to leave Rutherfurd.”
“Of course it is,” Nicole agreed, “so tragic that the only thing to do is to try and laugh. Mr. Haynes says we can’t afford to live in it, and our lawyer ought to know. It’s the Jacksons’ turn now, and we must go down with the lights up and the flags flying. A Rutherfurd fell at Flodden, and the name has been respected all down the years, and not the least honourable were the three Rutherfurds that we knew best—— We’ve nothing to be ashamed of. Simply, there is no room any more for our sort. We are hustled out. We can’t compete. Rutherfurd must go to the successful man who can cope with life as it is now! We must find some other place to pass our days in. Well, I don’t mind.”
Nicole got up and went to the fire, her head held high, a certain swagger in her walk, such as one sometimes sees in small boys who are shy and homesick and wish to conceal it. Lady Jane was again looking at nothing, and did not notice the piteous touch in her daughter’s attitude, or she would have replied to that and not to the brave words she had uttered.
She said, “Youth, my dear, never minds anything, really. It’s all part of the adventure of life. Youth bounds through changes and troubles like an india-rubber ball, but middle age has ceased to bounce; middle age collapses like a pricked balloon. I’m fifty-five—more than middle-aged, getting old—and I don’t feel that there is any bounce left in me at all.”
“Oh, my poor little mother,” Nicole cried, kneeling beside her to stroke her hands, “quite deflated, are you? And I don’t wonder. Much as Babs and I love Rutherfurd, leaving it can’t be to us what it is to you.”
Lady Jane looked at the two girls in a withdrawn way and said, “I leave everything when I leave Rutherfurd. I don’t want to pity myself, or, as you would say, make a song about it, but Rutherfurd is my life. The house your father brought me to thirty-two years ago! The house in which my children were born—where Ronnie and Archie played. . . . I was always utterly content in my home, I never wanted to go away. I never felt it dull even in the dead of winter. In fact, I think I loved winter best, because nearly all the neighbours went away to Egypt or the Riviera, and we could draw in together and hug our delicious solitude. We often laughed, your father and I, at our own unsociableness, and then our consciences would prick us and we would invite a lot of people to stay, and ask people to meet them, and work hard to entertain them and enjoy it all quite immensely. But when the last guest departed what thankful sighs we heaved! Once more the place was our own. It wasn’t that we were inhospitable so much as that we were so happy alone we couldn’t bear to spoil it.”
The very thinking of past happiness, the telling of it, had changed Lady Jane. Her blue eyes, that looked as if the colour had been washed out with much weeping, deepened and brightened, a flush that was almost girlish came into her thin cheeks; she smiled tenderly.
“But, Aunt Jane, you did sometimes go away from home,” her niece reminded her. “I can remember you and Uncle Walter setting off, rather like two victims mounting the tumbril, to pay visits. We children were quite pleased to be without you for a little, for we had always a lot of nefarious schemes in our heads that needed your absence for accomplishment, but we soon got tired of it and welcomed you back with joy. Nicole, do you remember when Ronnie locked Johnson into his own pantry and lost the key? And the day when Mrs. Asprey said Archie might have one bun out of the batch she was baking if he would go out of the kitchen, and instead, he took a bite out of each!”
“And the strawberry-wine we made,” said Nicole, “and the feasts. I don’t think they ever told of us when you came home, did they, Mums?—about all our ill-done deeds?”
Lady Jane shook her head. “They wouldn’t have done anything to spoil my home-coming. . . . When we went away on a visit I always looked up the train we would come home by before we left, and that somehow seemed to make the time shorter, and anchor me to you all. Of course it was quite different when we took you all with us, our glorious holidays in Switzerland . . . and when we had the fishing in Norway. . . . Don’t let me grumble. For more than twenty years my life was altogether lovely. I’ve had far more than most people. Why, I’ve no right to complain though I should never have another happy minute. It’s as you say, Nikky, we must plan what we are to do. The sight of Mrs. Jackson has made me realise things. Do you think, Barbara dear, you could make me understand just where we stand? You have got such a much tidier mind than I have, and I get so confused when Mr. Haynes explains things, though I’m sure the poor man is most lucid.”
Barbara settled herself at her aunt’s feet and tried to make her see the situation so far as the lawyer had made it plain to her, and Lady Jane fixed her eyes on her instructor like a child anxious to please, but when Barbara stopped, she sighed.
“It sounds very complicated,” she said, “though you do explain very nicely, Babs dear. Then, what exactly have we got to live on?”
“That depends,” said Barbara, “on how things go—on Mrs. Jackson, perhaps. But you will have quite a good income, and Nicole, of course, has her own money from Grandfather. What does it bring you in, Nik? about £500 a year? And I have about the same,