none the worse. It would have killed Mr. Jackson and me to lose Andy.”
Mrs. Jackson laid down her cup, arranged her veil, and prepared to depart.
“Well,” she said, standing solidly on the rug before Lady Jane, “I don’t know, of course—Mr. Jackson’ll have to see the place himself—but I’ve a kind of feeling that it’s here we’ll settle.” She looked round the room again. “I mebbe shouldn’t ask, but will you be taking all the furniture away with you? That picture above the fire-place, now? You see, I could never get the room to look the same, and I know Mr. Jackson would like it like this.”
She held out her hand, saying rather wistfully, “He has such high ideals, you know what I mean. . . . Well, thank you for that nice tea. It’s been a treat to me seeing you. D’you know what it all reminds me of? One of Stephen McKenna’s novels. He’s an awful high-class writer, isn’t he? There’s hardly one of his characters but what has a title and a butler.”
CHAPTER II
“The last sad squires ride slowly towards the sea,
And a new people take the land. . . .”
G. K. Chesterton.
Nicole went out to the hall to see the visitor depart. When she came back to the drawing-room, “Well?” she said.
“Well,” said Barbara, and added, “I must say!”
Her cousin laughed. “Yes, ‘smooth Jacob still robs homely Esau’ or words to that effect. All the same I like Mrs. Jackson, though I admit at first I was appalled. The tight figure, the large red face crowned by the ospreyed hat! I thought ‘That woman at Rutherfurd!’ But in a little I realised that she wasn’t ‘that woman’ at all. She’s a dear, and simple, and above all a comic. I do love a comic.”
Nicole put a log on the fire.
“Wasn’t she funny about Mary Carstairs? ‘A frozen sort of woman’ so exactly describes her when she is standing at bay, so to speak, before the advances of the populace. I think myself that it’s silly of her. Her life would be enormously more interesting if, instead of standing aloof and looking ‘frozen,’ she would try to like and understand these kindly people. After all, it’s a case of Canute and the waves. They’re coming in like a tide, the new people, and the 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
