The Wax Fruit Trilogy Page 13

  Phœbe moved to give Miss Ruanthorpe her chair, and herself took the wooden one that Jean had pushed forward.

  “So this is the little sister I’ve been hearing about. A Merry Christmas, my dear. My father has sent you this bottle of Napoleon brandy, Mr. Moorhouse—more than sixty years old—and here are some sweets that cook has been making. We mustn’t forget our invalids, must we?”

  She settled herself and beamed all around her. She was a queer lady, with her booming voice and her “English” accent, but nice, Phœbe decided, as she opened the package of sweets.

  “You see, Sir Charles is English, Phœbe, so that gives us an excuse to hold Christmas, and my mother is Scotch, and so we have to hold New Year too.” She laughed amiably.

  Queer, reserved little thing, Margaret Ruanthorpe thought, looking at Phœbe. Was she shy? Or was she merely undemonstrative? That she had character and courage, she already knew: for Mungo Moorhouse had told her.

  She sat looking about her, laughing and chatting in the glowing friendly kitchen. This only child of the laird and his lady had left a house full of guests because she could not help herself. Christmas Day was merely an excuse to come across and visit the man who sat there with his crutches beside him. She could not keep away. She looked at him now, his face lit up by the firelight. His accident had taken some of the robustness out of it; it was paler than usual, a little thinner and more distinguished. She had heard the legend of the Moorhouse family’s beginnings. She could well believe it. Mungo Moorhouse’s natural breeding and dignity came from somewhere. He was an honest Ayrshire farmer, but he was neither obsequious nor arrogant; his poise seemed a part of himself.

  From time to time, since he had been left alone, he had helped her with her dogs and her ponies. Their friendship had ripened, mostly in and around her father’s stables. At first, she had determined to regard him as an agreeable and obliging tenant. But growing feelings would not hide, and she had come to realise that she had started up more than a casual friendship. She had spent many a sleepless night wondering what to do about this handsome forty-year-old bachelor farmer. She kept inventing endless excuses to bring him to her or to come and see him herself. His accident had been a godsend. She was assailed now by the full passions of a woman in her middle thirties desperately in love. His respectful politeness maddened her. Her situation and his made it more difficult. Could there be no way out? If only she had been the man!

  Now she was inviting Phœbe to come and spend the day at Duntrafford. But Phœbe looked troubled, and Mungo excused her on account of her illness. It was always the same. Things conspired to baffle her.

  “Well, perhaps you’ll both come when our guests have gone and we’re by ourselves again.” She got up. “No, don’t, please, Mr. Moorhouse.”

  But Mungo struggled to his feet, saw her to the door, then hobbled off to talk to his men.

  IV

  From the kitchen window Phœbe watched Miss Ruanthorpe and her spaniel go out through the back gate. She caught herself wondering vaguely what the smile that had passed between the two farm-women had meant. She must ask them. What was the joke about Miss Ruanthorpe? It couldn’t be that she was in love with Mungo, she decided complacently, nor Mungo with her, for she was much too different. Phœbe was still too much of a child and a provincial to realise that even people who had strange, foreign ways might have feelings just like herself.

  She gave up thinking about the visitor, and came back to the fire. On the ledge of Mungo’s pipe-rack was the case containing her gold watch. Mungo had left it there, forgotten, when he had gone out. She must give it to him to lock up when he came back.

  Now that she was alone she could examine it unself-consciously. She took it out, dangled it, looked at its inscription, put the chain about her neck and slipped the watch, where it should be, beneath her belt. She stood up on a chair to examine the effect in a small square of mirror that hung by the window. Having done this she jumped down, and put it carefully back into its case. She looked at it long and thoughtfully before she closed the lid.

  So they had considered it worth while to give her that, because of what she had done for Arthur? Even though she had run away to get him without their permission? She tried now, for the first time, deliberately to cast her memory back into the terrors of that night. She had not understood all, but she had understood enough. And her sensibilities, poised between girlhood and woman-hood, had received a bewildering shock. But in these quiet weeks at the farm, her firm will, like her strong little body, had already in great measure come to her rescue. Already the pictures of Hughie’s Yeard, the yard itself, the terrible fighting women, the nightmare room where Arthur had been, were becoming unreal—were beginning to haunt her less and less as she lay at night in the darkness. And perhaps in time the strange, unexplained sense of shame would leave her too.

  She put the watch-case back where she had found it, and settled down once more with her canvas and her wools. Anyone looking through the window would have seen a rather prim little girl of fourteen sewing as though her life depended upon it, a girl who had seen nothing more than other children of her age.

  Phœbe was well on the way to recovery. Now for the first time she dared to return to her habit of detachment—to view herself as the leading figure in what had been a very unpleasant experience—to prod, indeed, her wounds a little, to see just how sensitive they still might be. And as she sat there examining her feelings coolly, a conviction began to form itself. Hughie’s Yeard had scared and terrified her. It had sickened and revolted her with named and unnamed horrors. But it had not driven her from her purpose. It had not broken her passionate will. She, Phœbe Moorhouse, had, even at the most terrible moments, managed to be strong.

  Chapter Twelve

  THERE was little that Margaret Ruanthorpe did not know of the doings at the Laigh Farm. Since, in the middle of January, she had heard that Phœbe was not yet gone back to Glasgow, she determined that Mungo and she should pay their visit to Duntrafford. She announced her intention in a roundabout way to her father and mother as they sat at breakfast.

  “Now we’ve got everybody away, I’m thinking of sending someone over to the Laigh Farm to fetch Mungo Moorhouse to see Jupiter. He’s not right yet. He ought to be by now, but he isn’t.”

  Sir Charles looked at his daughter. He was an abrupt old man of seventy-five. “What does Johnstone say?”

  His daughter shrugged. “Oh, Johnstone! You know what kind of a vet he is.”

  Her father reflected. He had an excellent idea of what was in her mind. As a family the Ruanthorpes prided themselves on their lack of subtlety. You said what you thought. You did what you liked. You showed what you felt. And Margaret had shown what she felt about Mungo Moorhouse. He didn’t object. When she had been younger he and his wife had thought of her in terms of good marriages and likely young men. And Margaret, not lacking looks, had had such a young man at one time, but he had been killed in a skirmish somewhere out East. And after that she, too, had become a little loud-voiced and abrupt. And she had become louder and more abrupt after her only brother was killed in the hunting-field; an event that had nearly broken the heart of the handsome, tight-lipped woman of seventy sitting at the other end of the table. But they were all tough. Charlie’s death had turned poor Lady Ruanthorpe into an austere woman, interested in social conditions. Thus had she managed to go on with life.

  “Johnstone isn’t bad,” she was saying now as she plunged a knife into the corner of an envelope. “He was very good with Pansy when she had distemper. I wish he wouldn’t drink so much.” Having made this contribution to the breakfast-table conversation, she withdrew the contents of the envelope, flicked it open, and began studying what proved to be a fresh call upon her philanthropy.

  Her husband drank his coffee thoughtfully, supporting the cup in his hands, both elbows on the table. No. If his daughter could bring off this strange affair of hers, let her. After all, she was getting on. It didn’t matter a curse what the count
y thought. Damn it, she was a Ruanthorpe, and Ruanthorpes did what they liked. Moorhouse was a fine young man (forty is young to seventy-five), and as straight as you make ’em. She might do much worse. She couldn’t have looked anywhere for better, cleaner blood. He was a countryman, and they were country people. Her interests were passionately for the land, and so were his. Good luck to her. But she had better hurry up if she wanted to produce a brood of Ruanthorpe-Moorhouses. And, besides, he didn’t want to be too senile to enjoy them. Indeed, the thought of all this warmed you vastly. You wouldn’t feel so old and dried up, so discontinuous. If Charlie had lived, of course—still, that was milk spilt long ago now. Sir Charles laid down his cup and looked out of the window. For a moment he saw a young man’s set, white face with a streak of crimson oozing slowly over his brow from underneath thick dark hair. For a moment he felt again the agony of trying to tell himself that those eyes that stared up at him were not turning lifeless and glassy, as he held the boy, kneeling there, regardless of the mud in that new-ploughed field. Yes. A brood of children to run about and make a noise before you were too old to care who did what.

  “The little sister is still there. A strange kind of child.”

  “Is that the child who has been ill? Who went into the Glasgow slums?” Lady Ruanthorpe asked, suddenly pricking her ears.

  “Yes; I thought I might ask them both to lunch.”

  “Do. I shall ask her exactly what she saw.”

  “You can’t do that, Mother. It’s not allowed.”

  Lady Ruanthorpe grunted. “Ask her to lunch anyway.” She took off her steel spectacles, held them in the light, puffed at them, and rubbed them up firmly with her table napkin, much as her own butler did the spoons. Thereafter she stabbed another letter and was again lost to her family.

  II

  This time Miss Ruanthorpe persuaded Phœbe to come to Duntrafford. All her life, of course, Phœbe had heard of the people at the Big House, and she had all the awe that still lingered among the country people when they came into contact with the laird and his family. It was strange to her now to find Sir Charles’s daughter bothering to be so friendly. There was something canny in Phœbe that put her on her guard against people who were too nice. But Margaret’s habitual abruptness breaking through, now and then, her intense desire to please, had the effect, strangely enough, of reassuring her.

  The winter-morning drive to Duntrafford was everything that a fine January morning in Ayrshire can be. Farm steadings, crowning rolling hills, shone white in the brief sunshine. Old trees stood up around them, every twig and branch adding to the pattern they made against the duck-egg blue of the sky. Ploughs turning up the long purple-brown furrows, behind the sleek fat buttocks of the giant Clydesdale horses. Seagulls, flapping greedy white wings, following after. On the horizon a piled-up white cloud. Everywhere the smell of the fresh turned earth and rotting leaves—the smell of winter. As they came into the Avenue of the great house, rooks rose from high trees above them. Once there was that heavy scent of a fox.

  Miss Ruanthorpe had been wise enough to extract no promise to stay to lunch from either of them, for she knew that Mungo was shy. But when the Moorhouses were driven round to the front of Duntrafford House, unexpectedly—for Mungo thought he was being taken direct to the stables—a man was there with a tray and decanter, and Mungo, unable to refuse, had to take what was offered him, while his sister, bidden to jump down, was taken in charge by Lady Ruanthorpe and led inside to eat cake and drink milk.

  Phœbe looked about her. She felt strange, in this great padded room, dangling with tassels, hanging with pictures, and glittering with Indian brass pots filled with hothouse plants. And before her the lady she had so often seen of a Sunday, sitting in the Duntrafford pew in the Big Kirk. Indeed, the very thought of church suggested, in her mind, a musty smell of Bible, coconut matting, a hassock your short legs couldn’t comfortably reach, and Lady Ruanthorpe in the front of the gallery. Phœbe didn’t believe she was real, that she had an existence elsewhere. When Mr. McMinn the beadle dusted the pew and brushed the cushions, he must surely give Lady Ruanthorpe a dust and a brush-down too. Now here she was sitting in a room at Duntrafford, being given plum-cake and milk by the lady from the front of the gallery. Still she was not quite real to Phœbe. She seemed a creature from another world, but the child realised that in spite of her severe expression, and her formidable old-fashioned iron-grey curls and cap, Lady Ruanthorpe was trying to be kind.

  “I’m not taking you out to the stables, Phœbe, because I hear you’ve been ill,” she said.

  “I’m quite well now, thank you,” Phœbe said demurely. “The doctor said I could go out if I kept warm.”

  “You’ll keep warmer here.”

  Phœbe was disappointed. She had hoped to see the Duntrafford ponies. She said so a little timidly.

  Lady Ruanthorpe smiled. “This won’t be your last visit, I hope, my dear. Then you can run about everywhere and see everything.”

  And so, Phœbe had to stay and talk to this downright lady. She told Phœbe about the dogs and the horses, and insisted that she must come back when it was spring and see the foals and the puppies at the kennels. Phœbe, having formed anew her ideas of what one talked about from Bel, was surprised that the old lady should tell her so much about stud doings. According to her town code it was not ladylike. And yet if Lady Ruanthorpe were not ladylike, who would be?

  But the old woman knew that Phœbe was, after all, a daughter of the land and treated her accordingly.

  Funny little thing this, with her gentilities of manner, and a slight Glasgow twang in her pleasant voice. Life had written little on her smooth childish face. And yet there was a firmness about her mouth, and her blue eyes were quick. So this was the child who had disappeared for many hours into the worst of the Glasgow slums—the worst in Europe, as she had learnt from missionary pamphlets and special commission reports—and re-emerged triumphant, late in the night, with her stolen three-year-old nephew, safe. What had she done while she was there? What did places like that look like? What had happened? Margaret had said she must not be questioned. Stuff and nonsense. She would ask the child about it now. She was interested in that sort of thing.

  It was not extraordinary, perhaps, that an old lady, who counted upon always getting her own way, should ask Phœbe the forbidden question, but it was extraordinary that Phœbe should tell her all the story of her adventure from end to end, answering and amplifying, on being questioned, all that she had already said. When she came to look back on this, as a grownup woman, she could not explain it to herself. It was not merely that she was well again and able to think of her experiences without nervous revulsion; for when she returned to Arthur and Bel and found that they made no mention of it, she did not attempt to break the taboo. Perhaps it was that Lady Ruanthorpe was nearer reality, was less a creature of her time than Bel. That, somehow, even in the short half-hour Phœbe had known her, she had created about the child an atmosphere of directness—of spades-spadishness—that naturally chimed with Phœbe’s own nature; chimed better than the rather stuffy gentility of Ure Place with its polite carefulness. But whatever the reason, there it was. And Phœbe felt much the better for the telling. This odd, over-frank old woman had the effect somehow of a confessor. And when the recital was over and when she seemed to think that what Phœbe had done was not only right but brave, the child felt that something had been washed clean again, that a puzzling inner disarrangement had been set straight. Looking back she was always grateful to Lady Ruanthorpe for inducing her to talk.

  III

  Their day out was indeed an experience for both the Moorhouses.

  Mungo, hobbling about, said his say about Margaret’s colt. He looked at the other horses and ponies. He spoke to the grooms whom, in the everyday traffic of the district, he knew well. He had a word for the keeper at the kennels. When he said he must go to find his sister and return home Miss Ruanthorpe laughed and told him that her mother was keeping Phœbe for lu
nch, and wouldn’t he stay too?

  There was nothing for it. No way out. He had been brought hither in Sir Charles’s gig and could only get back when he was taken. So Mungo and Phœbe found themselves in the large, heavy dining-room of Duntrafford House, lunching with the laird and his ladies.

  His bearing was shy, but he was direct and simple. His manner had no gentilities. The talk at the table was entirely within his range. Sir Charles was an eccentric, as many landlords were; for in these not very democratic days they were little kings and behaved accordingly—but on the whole he was a good laird. His interests went with those of his tenants. And so the meal passed for Mungo in a pleasant exchange of familiar ideas, and—although he did not define this—in an atmosphere of respect and flattery to himself.

  Phœbe sat through the meal reserved and quiet, collecting, detachedly as usual, many impressions. At last, in the early afternoon, the gig was sent for and they were allowed to think of going home. She was surprised when Miss Ruanthorpe bent down and kissed her as she said goodbye.

  Mungo had limped round to the horse’s head to have a look at him. Presently he found Margaret Ruanthorpe’s hand in his. In a way, they were, for the moment, isolated from the others.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Moorhouse.” Mungo’s strong, farmer’s hand, crushing her own, made Margaret a little reckless. She went on, “You will come again soon, won’t you? Remember, it will always give me a great deal of pleasure.” Her tanned face was scarlet, and the sober farmer’s face suddenly caught fire from it. With a little awkward laugh he said goodbye and turned to manœuvre his lameness up into the gig.

  On the drive home Mungo Moorhouse sat utterly dumbfounded. Phœbe, and the groom who drove them, wondered why they couldn’t get a word out of him. So the laird’s daughter was in love with him? There could be no mistaking her meaning! Strange though it may seem the glaring fact had just occurred to this steady, unimaginative man for the first time. He had no vanity to tell him sooner. Now he was thunderstruck!