back! Simon! Nicole sat very still and said not a word.
Simon looked at Lady Jane gratefully. “It’s jolly nice of you to care . . . your kindness to me has been wonderful.—Of course I’m going back. I was desperately afraid I wouldn’t be fit enough, but the doctors say now I’m all right, and Kirkmeikle air has completely set me up. . . . Odd how reluctant I am to leave the little town——”
The door opened. “Mr. Lambert,” said Christina, and the little clergyman ambled in, a book under either arm.
“I’m not going to stay,” he murmured. “Good evening, good evening. I only came with these books in case you wanted to return them.” He looked at the books as if loth to part from them, and laid them on the edge of a table, from which they quickly descended to the ground accompanied by a glass of flowers. “D-dear me! what a mess. Flower vases are awkward things.”
“So they are,” said Nicole, springing to the rescue. “The books are hardly touched; we’ll rub them up and they won’t be a bit the worse. Once I put marmalade on Marius the Epicurean and it improved him vastly, gave him a lovely polish.”
“I d-daresay,” Mr. Lambert began, “that if Pater . . .” then he stopped, for Simon was on his feet saying good-bye. “Wait a moment, Beckett, and I’ll go with you. There’s something I want to talk to you about. . . .”
But Simon hurriedly apologised and left.
CHAPTER XX
“From you have I been absent in the Spring.”
Sonnets by William Shakespeare.
The days passed, short, stormy, January days melting into February with its hint of spring.
One mild day when the blackbirds were trying their notes, Nicole wrote to her friend Jean Douglas.
. . . This is the sort of day that makes me simply long for Rutherfurd. The snowdrops will be in drifts by the burn-side now. How often I’ve stood under a steel-grey sky, with a north wind blowing, and looked at the brave little advance armies of spring poking their heads through the beech-leaves of a dead October. To-day I’m positively hungry for Rutherfurd. How gladly would I turn the Jacksons out neck and crop, if only I had the fairy whistle! Everything in its proper place I would pipe, and positively laugh to see them scuttle. . . . After that outburst I shall write, I hope, in a better spirit. You see, I can only say it to you. I daren’t breathe a word of discontent here in case of rousing sleeping fires of desire in Mother and Barbara. Poor Babs does miss the old life so badly. Mother never says she misses anything, and is always cheerful and willing to be amused, only—laughter can be sadder than tears sometimes. She still, at times, has an air of sitting so loosely to the things of earth that Babs and I want to clutch at her skirts to keep her with us at all.
Things amble along as usual. I said this morning, “I do wish Mistress Jean would pay us a visit.” The others echoed the wish, only Babs was sceptical about our power to entertain you. But, I think you would be quite well amused.
What fun it would be to get the best guest-room ready for you: to find flowers for it—flowers are a great difficulty here, as the nearest florist is in Langtoun and he sells mostly vegetables!—and to choose books for your bed-table that you would like. And you would lie in bed in the morning and listen to voices underneath your windows, fisher laddies talking their Fife lilt, foreign sailor-men, fish-wives crying “Hawdies, fresh hawdies,” and smell through the lavender of the bed-linen the salt, tarry smell of the harbour.
And what else can I offer you? We would explore the East Neuk, you and I, and I wonder if you know St. Andrews? If not, there are fascinating things to see there. And, of course, you would meet all our new friends—I shouldn’t wonder if Mrs. Heggie made a dinner party for you, and you would enjoy the comedy of that good lady and Barbara. Barbara is always putting Mrs. Heggie in her place, but her efforts are quite lost on the dear soul, for she has no notion what the place is or that she has ever strayed from it. She admires Barbara immensely—licks the hand that beats her, so to speak. She tells me Mother is her idea of a grande dame, but she doesn’t quite understand where I get my democratic ways. Alas, poor Yorick!
Miss Symington you would have to go and see, though, probably, you’d find her supremely uninteresting, with her ugly clothes, and her bleak house, and her still ways. But I think you’d like Dr. Kilgour and his nice funny sister, and it would be most disappointing if you didn’t appreciate my friends the Lamberts. It does make me feel ashamed of myself when I go to the Manse of a morning to take the babies out to find Mrs. Lambert conning over her address for the Mothers’ Meeting while she stirs a milk pudding for the early dinner! Her great cross is having to speak in public, and open meetings with prayer, but she does it, the valiant little person, she does it. I now and again go with her to the Mothers’ Meeting, to help with the singing and play Sankey’s hymns on the harmonium, and to hear her read the Bible is an inspiration. It is no dusty far-away history when she reads it. She is so interested in it herself that she makes it sound like Dumas, and the women sit back with a sigh when she finishes.
She has a small transparent face like a wood-anemone, and I’m always afraid she wears herself out of existence, but you mustn’t think Mr. Lambert is idle. He helps her in a hundred ways, writes his sermons with a baby rolling on the floor at his feet—and very good sermons they are. He keeps the garden, and goes messages and does all the odd carpentering jobs about the house. The only thing his wife cannot get him to do is gush. To her most frantic appeals to be “frank” to some person he can only manage a cold hand-shake and a bald sentence. I’ve seen her turn on him a face half vexed, half amused as she said: “Oh, John, you’re a dry character!”
Odd, isn’t it, that there are one or two words that have a different meaning in Scots? English people mean by “frank” honest and open; here “frank” means free: a “frank” manner is a forthcoming, gushing manner. “Canny” is another word. It really means cunning, but in Scotland it means gentle—“Canny wee thing.”
Well! is that all I’ve got to offer you? Not quite. Barbara will want you to know her friends, the Erskines. They are a great support to her, and she goes over a good deal to their place and meets people she likes, and they come here. Mother and I like them very much, but it’s difficult taking an interest in new people, I find. Babs retorts that I manage to be interested in the Kirkmeikle people, but they are different, more human, somehow, and pitiful. The Erskines are so sure of themselves, prosperous, invulnerable.
And you might possibly be invited to lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Buckler. Their lives have been full of colour and interest—thirty years in India—but they haven’t brought much of either away with them. They are oddly interested in things like disrespectful parlour-maids . . . so after all what does it profit a man to see the world?
I wonder if you stayed a week with us consorting daily with Kirkmeikle people, would you say, like Babs, that you were sick of honest worth? She says she is driven to Mr. Michael Arlen in sheer self-defence. To forget Mrs. Heggie and Miss Janet Symington she reads of ladies reclining in slenderness on divans, playing with rosaries of black pearls and eating scented macaroons out of bowls of white jade!
This is a long letter all about nothing. Your last letter was a joy. Cannes must have been lovely. How could you tear yourselves away?—but of course I know that Colonel Douglas is never really happy anywhere except at Kingshouse. You will be home now, lucky people. Write when you have time and tell me all about everybody.
