The Rutherfurd Saga. Anna Buchan
I didn’t commit myself in any way, I said you’d have to see it first. . . . Will we say Thursday?”
Mr. Jackson grunted, and, rising from the table, went off without a word to his study.
Andrew followed his mother out of the room, but instead of crossing the hall to the parlour, which was her favourite sitting-room, she began to mount the stairs.
“Why, Mother, is it not to be the parlour to-night?”
Mrs. Jackson gave a sigh. “No, Andy, I told them to light the fire in the drawing-room and we’ll sit there. If I’m to take up my position at Rutherfurd, the sooner I begin to practise the better.”
CHAPTER IV
“. . . In a kingdom by the sea.”
Edgar Allan Poe.
When Mr. Jackson went with his wife to see Rutherfurd the place conquered him. It was not, he complained, the sort of place he wanted at all; it was far too big, too far from Glasgow, too expensive to keep up, in fact, all wrong in every way. Nevertheless he entered into negotiation with the lawyer, and before October was well begun Rutherfurd had passed from the family who had held it through centuries into the hands of the hard-headed little business man from Glasgow.
“Mind you,” Mrs. Jackson said to Lady Jane, “there’s not the slightest hurry about your leaving the house. Though you stay here over Christmas we won’t mind. Indeed, I’d like fine to have another Christmas at Deneholm, and there is so much to arrange before we leave Pollokshields that I don’t believe we’ll flit till spring. It’s a nice heartsome time to flit anyway—so mind you take things easy.”
This was the more unselfish of Mrs. Jackson as she was secretly longing to get the workmen into Rutherfurd to start operations for central heating, and to see the paper-hangers make the bedrooms as she wanted them. But, as she told her husband, she had “both her manners and her mense,” for the Rutherfurds, realising that when a thing has to be done it were better it were done quickly, decided to leave as soon as they could find a roof to cover themselves and their belongings.
What they wanted to find was a smallish house in a pleasant village or country town, which they could furnish with the things they did not wish to part from, and keep as a pied-à-terre. They might decide to travel for a time, or pay visits, but there would always be this place of their own to come back to.
It seemed in the abstract a very simple thing, but when they set out to find the house the difficulties began. To begin with, they wanted to go somewhere quite out of reach of their present home. As Nicole pointed out, “We don’t want to decline into a small house in our own neighbourhood and have all sorts of casual acquaintances feeling that they have to be kind to us. ‘These poor dear Rutherfurds, we must ask them to dinner’—can’t you hear them? Of course, our own friends wouldn’t be like that, but we’d better go where we’ll be on nobody’s conscience.”
But there seemed to be some insuperable objection to every place they tried. If they liked a little town, there was no suitable house; if a suitable house was found, the locality was disappointing, and the house-agents’ advertisements were so misleading. An attractive description of a house—old-fashioned, well-built, with good rooms, and garden—suppressed the fact that a railway line ran not many yards from the drawing-room window, and that a row of jerry-built villas obtruded themselves almost into the rose-garden.
Day after day the two girls came home discouraged from their house-hunting. “If ever,” said Barbara, “I valued Rutherfurd it is now. Let’s give up this quixotic search for a habitable house, store our furniture, and set off on our travels. Thank goodness, there are still hotels!”
They had almost decided to do this when one day by the evening post came a letter from the helpful Mr. Haynes, enclosing a card to see a house which he thought they might consider worth looking at. It was in the town of Kirkmeikle, in Fife, and was called the Harbour House.
“Far enough away, anyway,” was Barbara’s comment.
“Fife,” said Nicole, and, wrinkling her nose, she quoted: “I never lik’it the Kingdom o’ Fife.”
“Still,” Barbara said, “we might go and see the place. What d’you think, Aunt Jane? Have you any objection to Fife?”
Lady Jane looked up from the book of old photographs she was poring over.
“Fife,” she said. “Your uncle and I once paid a very pleasant visit to people who lived, I think, near Falkland. . . . Oh no, dear, I’ve no objection. . . . There are no hills to speak of in Fife, and I seem to remember that it smelt rather oddly—linoleum, is it? But otherwise, I’m sure it would be a pleasant place to live.”
“Dear contented one,” said Nicole, “the smell is confined to big towns with factories. Kirkmeikle is a little town in the East Neuk, wherever that may be. I grant the lack of hills, but if we find we can’t live without them I daresay we could always let the house. People love to spend their holidays near golf-links. I must say the name rather appeals to me—the Harbour House.”
Barbara was studying the lawyer’s letter.
“We may have a chance of it,” she said, “for evidently Mr. Haynes thinks it’s a house that will not appeal to every one. It belonged to an old Mrs. Swinton who died in it a few months ago. Swinton’s a good name: probably she was connected with the Berwickshire Swintons. . . . Well, shall we start off to-morrow morning? It’ll mean leaving by the first train, and we may have to stay the night in Edinburgh. . . . I’ll see how the trains go from the Waverley——”
It was a bright autumn morning with a touch of frost when Barbara and Nicole crossed the Forth Bridge and looked down at the ships, and saw the sun on the red-tiled houses, the woods, the cleaned harvest-fields, and the long stretch of shining water.
“It’s pretty,” said Barbara, almost grudgingly “Living inland I had forgotten the magic of the sea. There’s such a feeling of space, and a sort of breath-taking freshness!”
“Oh yes,” Nicole agreed, gazing down into the sparkling depths, “the East Coast is fresh and caller, and beautiful in its way. The funny thing is, I never have been fond of the sea, perhaps because I’m such a wretched sailor. But, anyway, I prefer the East Coast sea to the West Highland lochs.” She leaned back in her seat and smiled at her cousin. “Shall I ever forget going out with Morag MacLeod on that awful loch of theirs? The old boatman warned us not to go for the weather was most uncertain, and it’s a dangerous place, full of currents and things, and Morag is one of the most reckless of God’s creatures. I felt perfectly certain I was going to be drowned, and the thought filled me with fury, for I can’t imagine a less desirable death than to go down in a horrible black West Highland loch, with sea-birds calling drearily above one. Morag, I knew, would save herself, and I could see her bearing my death so nobly, quoting a lot of stuff with a sob in it. I almost wept with self-pity as I clutched my coat round me with one hand, and held on with the other to some part of that frail craft. How I sighed for my own solid Border glens with no wretched lochs!”
“What about St. Mary’s? And the Loch o’ the Lowes?”
“Oh, but they’re clear and sunny and comparatively shallow, with no towering black mountains round them.”
“Loch Skene is dark enough.”
“Yes, but small. You wouldn’t think of yachting on it. . . . I’ve never stayed again with Morag, she’s too comfortless. I like being in the open air as well as any one, and there’s nothing nicer than a whole day tramping or fishing or climbing, but in the house I expect comfort. When I come home I want great fires, and abundance of hot water, and large soft chairs, and the best of food. One day—have I told you this before?—No. Well, one day she made me start off with her at nine in the morning, after a wretched breakfast, half cold, eaten in