The Rutherfurd Saga. Anna Buchan
any fish either. About four o’clock we started for home, very stiff and wet about the legs, and I thought I could just manage to live till five o’clock, and tea and a fire. A mile from home Morag suddenly had an idea—a thoroughly vicious one, I thought. ‘We’ve got some sandwiches left,’ she said, ‘let’s sit here and eat them. You don’t want to go home and eat hot scones stuffily by a fire, do you?’ Didn’t I? I positively ached to, but I’m such a naturally polite creature that, though I could have felled her where she stood, I only murmured resignation. Happily I was saved by her father. We met him at that moment of crisis, and he laughed to scorn the thought of mouldy sandwiches, and insisted on us going back to tea.”
“I should think so,” said Barbara. “Morag was always a posing donkey, and, I should think, no use as a housekeeper.”
Nicole shook her head. “None in the world. A comfortless mistress makes careless servants, and the fires were always on the point of going out, and the hot water never more than tepid. The only time I was comfortable and warm all that week was when I was in bed hugging a hot-water bottle. I was sorry for Morag’s father. It’s wretched for a man to live in a badly run house.”
She stopped and looked at her cousin. “My word, Babs, you’d be a godsend to any man as a housekeeper.”
“Only as a housekeeper?”
“My dear, no. As everything, companion, friend, counsellor, sweetheart—wife.”
They changed at Thornton, and in due course reached their destination. Kirkmeikle, they found, was a little grey town huddled on green braes, overhanging the harbour. There was one long street with shops, which meandered downhill from the station; some rows of cottages and a few large villas made up the rest of it. The villas were conspicuous and wonderfully ugly, and the two girls looked at them in dismay. Was one of those atrocities the house they had come to look at?
Barbara settled the question by stopping a small boy and demanding to know where the Harbour House was.
“Ye gang doon to the harbour an’ it’s the hoose that’s lookin’ at ye.”
“Quite so,” said Nicole, heaving a sigh of relief, and turning her back with alacrity on the red villas.
Proceeding down the winding street they came at last to the sea-front. A low wall, flat on the top, ran along the side of the road, and beyond that was the sea. At high tide the water came up to the wall, at other times there was a stretch of firm sandy beach.
A tall, white-washed house stood at the end of the street leading down to the sea. The front door was in the street, and to the harbour it presented a long front punctuated with nine small paned windows; the roof was high and pointed, and there were crow-step gables.
“What a wise child that was,” said Nicole. “It is ‘lookin’ at ye’ with nine unblinking eyes.”
“It smells very fishy down here,” was Barbara’s comment.
“Fishy, yes, but salt and clean. . . . Have you the card?”
The door was opened by a stout, middle-aged woman with a rosy face and a very white apron on which she wiped her fingers before she took the card Barbara held out to her.
“Ay, come in, please, mem. Certainly, ye can see the hoose. I’ll tak’ ye through. . . . No, it’s no been empty that lang. Ma mistress dee’d last July. There’s been a gey wheen folk lookin’ at it—kinna artist folk the maist o’ them—but I dinna think it’s let yet.”
As she spoke she led them through rather a dark hall and opened a door. “The dining-room,” she said, and stood aside to let them pass.
Nicole at once went to one of the windows to look out, but Barbara studied the room, measuring spaces with her eyes.
“Not a bad room,” she said. “The sideboard along this wall . . .”
Nicole turned from the window. “Oh, Babs, do come and look. Isn’t that low wall jolly? Fishermen will sit on it in the evenings, and talk and smoke their pipes. And the harbour! I like to think of ships coming in and unloading and setting off.”
“Yes, yes,” Barbara said absently. “I wonder if that fire-place throws out any heat. I distrust that kind.”
“Let’s see the drawing-room,” said Nicole.
“Upstairs, mem. Mebbe I’d better go first.”
The stair was stone with shallow steps, the bannisters delicate wrought iron with a thin mahogany handrail. The woman with the snowy apron pattered briskly across the landing and threw open a door.
“Ye see,” she said proudly. “It’s bigger than the dinin’-room by a’ the width o’ the lobby. Ay, an’ fower windows nae less.”
“How jolly,” sighed Nicole, “oh, how jolly!”
It was a long room, rather narrow. Each of the four deep windows looked out to the sea, and was fitted with a window seat. The fire-place at the far end of the room had a perfect Adam mantelpiece: the doors were mahogany.
“Curious shape of room,” Barbara said. “I’m not sure that I——”
“Say no more,” interrupted her cousin. “This is where I’m going to live. As soon as I saw it I knew, as you might say, that it was my spiritual home. I’ll sit curled up on one of those window seats every evening and watch the sun set over the sea. What? No, perhaps I’m not looking west, but it doesn’t matter. Don’t carp . . . I’m sure mother will love this room. She’ll hang her beloved little portraits in a line above that fire-place; the bureau will stand just here, with the miniatures above it, and her very own arm-chair beside the table. . . . We’ll be able to make it exactly like home for her.”
“My dear girl, we haven’t got it yet.”
“Sensible always, Babs dear: that’s quite true, we haven’t. But I’m absolutely sure this is to be our home. I knew the house when I saw it. It seemed to give me a nod as I came over the doorstep. There’s no doubt about it we were meant to come here, and that’s why poor Mrs. Jackson was uprooted from Pollokshields. I’m going off now to wire to Mr. Haynes to take it at once. It would be too ghastly if those ‘artist folk’ got before us—come on, Babs.”
“Nonsense,” said Barbara. “Don’t be so childish. We haven’t seen the bedrooms—much the most important part of a house to my mind. And we don’t know if there is a decent kitchen range and a good supply of hot water. It’s so like you, Nicole, to look out of a window and immediately determine to take a house.”
Nicole, instead of looking crushed, smiled into the eyes of the caretaker, who, evidently liking her enthusiasm, came to her help.
“Ay, my auld mistress aye sat in this room and lookit oot on the water. When the tide’s in if ye sit ower here ye canna see onything but water, juist as if ye were on a ship. An’ it’s a warm room; grand thick walls; nane o’ yer new rubbish, wan-brick thick. I’m vex’t that ye’ve no’ seen the room wi’ the furniture in’t. The next o’ kin took it awa’ to Edinboro’ and hed it sell’t. It was auld, ye ken, terrible ancient, and brocht a heap o’ siller. . . . The bedrooms? Ay, fine rooms. There’s two on this landin’—the mistress’s room an’ the dressin’-room aff, that the ain maid sleepit in.”
They went with her to the room. “Ye see,” she pointed out, “it hesna the sea view, it looks up the brae, but it’s a nice quait room, for the gairden’s round it. . . An’ there’s a bathroom next the dressin’-room.”
“It’s all in beautiful order,” Barbara said. “The paint and paper seem quite fresh—— What rooms are upstairs?”
“I’ll show ye. There’s fower bedrooms an’ a wee ane made into a bathroom. That was dune no’ mair nor seeven year syne (an’ its never been used, so it’s as guid as new), when the mistress’s grandson, wha should ha’ heired it, was hame frae the War. We wanted to hae things rale nice