. .
she sang as she left the kitchen, very pleased with her firm handling of Alice.
Oh, Alice was wild. She wasn’t one to mind being told, but there was something in the way Miss Beryl had of speaking to her that she couldn’t stand. Oh, that she couldn’t. It made her curl up inside, as you might say, and she fair trembled. But what Alice really hated Miss Beryl for was that she made her feel low. She talked to Alice in a special voice as though she wasn’t quite all there; and she never lost her temper with her—never. Even when Alice dropped anything or forgot anything important Miss Beryl seemed to have expected it to happen.
“If you please, Mrs. Burnell,” said an imaginary Alice, as she buttered the scones, “I’d rather not take my orders from Miss Beryl. I may be only a common servant girl as doesn’t know how to play the guitar, but . . .”
This last thrust pleased her so much that she quite recovered her temper.
“The only thing to do,” she heard, as she opened the dining-room door, “is to cut the sleeves out entirely and just have a broad band of black velvet over the shoulders instead. . . .”
11
THE white duck did not look as if it had ever had a head when Alice placed it in front of Stanley Burnell that night. It lay, in beautifully basted resignation, on a blue dish—its legs tied together with a piece of string and a wreath of little balls of stuffing round it.
It was hard to say which of the two, Alice or the duck, looked the better basted; they were both such a rich colour and they both had the same air of gloss and strain. But Alice was fiery red and the duck a Spanish mahogany.
Burnell ran his eye along the edge of the carving knife. He prided himself very much upon his carving, upon making a first-class job of it. He hated seeing a woman carve; they were always too slow and they never seemed to care what the meat looked like afterwards. Now he did; he took a real pride in cutting delicate shaves of cold beef, little wads of mutton, just the right thickness, and in dividing a chicken or a duck with nice precision. . . .
“Is this the first of the home products?” he asked, knowing perfectly well that it was.
“Yes, the butcher did not come. We have found out that he only calls twice a week.”
But there was no need to apologise. It was a superb bird. It wasn’t meat at all, but a kind of very superior jelly. “My father would say,” said Burnell, “this must have been one of those birds whose mother played to it in infancy upon the German flute. And the sweet strains of the dulcet instrument acted with such effect upon the infant mind. . . . Have some more, Beryl? You and I are the only ones in this house with a real feeling for food. I’m perfectly willing to state, in a court of law, if necessary, that I love good food.”
Tea was served in the drawing-room, and Beryl, who for some reason had been very charming to Stanley ever since he came home, suggested a game of crib. They sat at a little table near one of the open windows. Mrs. Fairfield disappeared, and Linda lay in a rocking-chair, her arms above her head, rocking to and fro.
“You don’t want the light—do you, Linda?” said Beryl. She moved the tall lamp so that she sat under its soft light.
How remote they looked, those two, from where Linda sat and rocked. The green table, the polished cards, Stanley’s big hands and Beryl’s tiny ones, all seemed to be part of one mysterious movement. Stanley himself, big and solid, in his dark suit, took his ease, and Beryl tossed her bright head and pouted. Round her throat she wore an unfamiliar velvet ribbon. It changed her, somehow—altered the shape of her face—but it was charming, Linda decided. The room smelled of lilies; there were two big jars of arums in the fire-place.
“Fifteen two—fifteen four—and a pair is six and a run of three is nine,” said Stanley, so deliberately, he might have been counting sheep.
“I’ve nothing but two pairs,” said Beryl, exaggerating her woe because she knew how he loved winning.
The cribbage pegs were like two little people going up the road together, turning round the sharp corner, and coming down the road again. They were pursuing each other. They did not so much want to get ahead as to keep near enough to talk—to keep near, perhaps that was all.
But no, there was always one who was impatient and hopped away as the other came up, and would not listen. Perhaps the white peg was frightened of the red one, or perhaps he was cruel and would not give the red one a chance to speak. . . .
In the front of her dress Beryl wore a bunch of pansies, and once when the little pegs were side by side, she bent over and the pansies dropped out and covered them.
“What a shame,” said she, picking up the pansies. “Just as they had a chance to fly into each other’s arms.”
“Farewell, my girl,” laughed Stanley, and away the red peg hopped.
The drawing-room was long and narrow with glass doors that gave on to the verandah. It had a cream paper with a pattern of gilt roses, and the furniture, which had belonged to old Mrs. Fairfield, was dark and plain. A little piano stood against the wall with yellow pleated silk let into the carved front. Above it hung an oil painting by Beryl of a large cluster of surprised looking clematis. Each flower was the size of a small saucer, with a centre like an astonished eye fringed in black. But the room was not finished yet. Stanley had set his heart on a Chesterfield and two decent chairs. Linda liked it best as it was. . . .
Two big moths flew in through the window and round and round the circle of lamplight.
“Fly away before it is too late. Fly out again.”
Round and round they flew; they seemed to bring the silence and the moonlight in with them on their silent wings. . . .
“I’ve two kings,” said Stanley. “Any good?”
“Quite good,” said Beryl.
Linda stopped rocking and got up. Stanley looked across. “Anything the matter, darling?”
“No, nothing. I’m going to find mother.”
She went out of the room and standing at the foot of the stairs she called, but her mother’s voice answered her from the verandah.
The moon that Lottie and Kezia had seen from the storeman’s wagon was full, and the house, the garden, the old woman and Linda—all were bathed in dazzling light.
“I have been looking at the aloe,” said Mrs. Fairfield. “I believe it is going to flower this year. Look at the top there. Are those buds, or is it only an effect of light?”
As they stood on the steps, the high grassy bank on which the aloe rested rose up like a wave, and the aloe seemed to ride upon it like a ship with the oars lifted. Bright moonlight hung upon the lifted oars like water, and on the green wave glittered the dew.
“Do you feel it, too,” said Linda, and she spoke to her mother with the special voice that women use at night to each other as though they spoke in their sleep or from some hollow cave—“Don’t you feel that it is coming towards us?”
She dreamed that she was caught
