Peter and Jane, Sarah Macnaughtan [read ebook pdf .txt] 📗

to stay and amuse Toffy!' said Jane, with compunction. There was a tired white look on Mrs. Ogilvie's face, and an appearance of fatigue in her movements which neither her supreme art of dressing nor the careful manipulation of light in the room wholly concealed.

'Ah, now you are beginning to repent!' said Mrs. Ogilvie. Only her good manners prevented her remark having a sneer in it. 'That will spoil your evening, you foolish child, and it will not make mine more amusing.'

'But I am thinking of you,' said Jane.

'Do not think of me,' said Mrs. Ogilvie, laying her hand for a moment lightly upon the girl's shoulder.

Jane walked down the hillside and stopped at the edge of the wood to see the young pheasants, and then went on again, swinging a crooked walking-stick and singing in a voice clear and sweet, but somewhat out of tune, snatches of songs which she had picked up from Peter, humming the ridiculous words in a sort of unconscious happiness. She walked with a raking grace which became her as wings become a bird or a long swinging stride a racer. The twilit woods held no fears for her: imagination never peopled Jane's world with bogies. The perfect poise of her figure showed a latent energy and physical strength in spite of her slender build, and her clear complexion and abundant brown hair and white, even teeth lent an appearance of something essentially wholesome to a face that at all times looked handsome and well-bred.

She called good night to the lodge-keeper as she passed through the gates and found her way back to the high road, until, by a short-cut down the hill, she reached her aunt's charming gardens, and the wide, low house with its air of repose and comfort, and the long French windows opening on to the quiet, smooth-shaven lawns.

Peter was waiting for her on the doorstep and was endeavouring not to fuss; if only he had known by which path Jane would return he would have liked to go and meet her, and the fact of having missed a walk with her made him impatient. 'I thought you must be lost,' he said; 'what kept you, Jane? Why did you stay so long?'

When Jane Erskine was away people were apt to ask on her return why she had stayed so long. Miss Abingdon and General Erskine, who divided her time between them, were jealous if even a day of their fair share of Jane was deducted by one or the other. There had been times when Miss Abingdon had unscrupulously pleaded illness as a means of keeping the girl a little longer with her, and she would doubtless have continued her deceptions had not General Erskine adopted the plan of faithfully paying himself back all the days that were owed to him by his niece.

'My mother says she is going to give a ball,' announced Peter at dinner.

'When?' said Jane, breathless with interest. 'Peter, we 'll have both houses as full as they can be, and I 'll ask Aunt Mary to stay here, and you shall ask your mother to stay at Bowshott for it.'

'Jane,' said Miss Abingdon, 'you are very absurd, and just at present you are making the most extraordinary grimaces.'

'I got caught in the rain to-day,' said Jane, 'and had to walk with it in my face. I 'm quite sure rain must be a skin-tightener like those things you see in advertisements.'

'It's given you an awfully jolly colour,' said Peter.

'Has it?' said Jane.

Perhaps a compliment had been given and received, Miss Abingdon did not know. Beauty itself was almost at a discount nowadays. Even feminine vanity, so long accepted as the mainspring of feminine action, had lost its force. Pale cheeks were not in vogue, and frankness had superseded sentiment.

'What souvenir would they give each other if they had to part?' thought Miss Abingdon—'a terrier dog, or a gun, or a walking-stick, most likely!' Faded flowers were quite out of the fashion, and old letters no longer had the scent of dried rose leaves about them. Was perfect healthiness ever very interesting, and must sentiment always be connected with an embroidery frame, a narrow chest, and round shoulders?

Jane obliterated the menu from the porcelain tablet in front of her by rubbing it with a damask table-napkin, and, having moistened a pencil, she began to write a list of names of those people who were to be asked to stay for the dance. 'Kitty Sherard certainly,' she said, and put the name down on the tablet.

'She 's some one's niece, isn't she?' said Peter.

'She 's every one's niece, I think,' replied Jane.

'Rather rough luck on Miss Sherard,' said Peter.

'It's a fact, though,' Jane went on. 'Really and truly, Aunt Mary, each of her relations married about ten times, and then the next generation married each other. And they send problems to the puzzle column of newspapers to find out how they are related to each other. Kitty's father is his own great-grandmother, or something complicated of that sort!'

'It must give one an immense respect for oneself,' said Peter, 'to discover such a relationship. One would always be taking care of oneself, and not allowing one's feet to get wet, and thinking what one owed to one's position, and whether one were being treated with respect.'

'There are fillets of beef coming, and ducks,' interpolated Miss Abingdon. 'I let you know this, Peter, as Jane seems to have erased our only menu. What will Sir Nigel have, do you think?' she went on. 'I don't think he is at all well; he was reading his Bible in bed, and I 'm not sure that we ought not to send for some of his people.'

'Poor Toffy never had any people,' said Peter. 'They were all just as unlucky as he is, and most of them died violent deaths when they were young; and one of them, I know, founded some sort of queer religion, so perhaps Toffy takes after him in his Biblical researches.'

At this moment Sir Nigel Christopherson walked into the room looking as white as any ghost.

'Toffy, you lunatic!' said Peter, 'why can't you lie still?'

Sir Nigel apologized for being late and declined to have anything brought back for him.

'How are the Amalekites and Hittites and Girgashites?' said Peter, making room for his friend at the table.

'I don't like the Bible joked about,' said Miss Abingdon severely.

'Toffy should have been a parson,' said Peter; 'even at Eton he was always wondering why Cain was afraid that all men should kill him when he had only a father and mother and perhaps two or three little brothers and sisters in the world. And he used to fret himself into a fever wondering if the sun really stood still in Ajalon and what Selah meant in the Psalms.'

'I think,' said Miss Abingdon, 'that such discussions are best left for Sundays.'

'We will go on with our dance-list,' said Jane; 'Mrs. Wrottesley can let us have several rooms at the vicarage, or, if the worst comes to the worst, we might have tents in the garden.'

'The canon is always so good-natured!' said Miss Abingdon, who believed that a man's house belonged to himself, and whose mind always reverted with a sense of peaceful orthodoxy to thoughts of the vicar. She decided mentally that he must not be asked to receive any of the guests for the Bowshott ball, believing that visitors must always be more or less disturbing to a host. She accepted as part of her gentle creed that a man's writing-table must never be disturbed, that his dinner must never be kept waiting, and that his special armchair must not be appropriated by any one else. Canon Wrottesley always read the morning paper before any other person in the house had seen it, and then imparted pieces of intelligence to his relations with a certain air of self-congratulation, as though conveying news which could only possibly be known to himself; and it was in this way that Miss Abingdon loved to have the items of interest retailed to her with instructive comments upon politics.

CHAPTER V

Mrs. Wrottesley had a theory, which she never asked nor expected any one to share with her, that most men's mental development ceased at the age of twelve years. She had watched five sons grow up with, in their young boyhood, the hardly concealed conviction that each one of them was destined to be a genius, and that each one would make his mark in the world. But her sons, as they attained to the fatal age of twelve years, seemed predestined to disappoint their mother's hopes. Most of the men whom she knew, and whom her sons brought to the house, were delightful boys, whatever their ages might be. She liked them, but she wished sometimes that it were possible to meet a man with a mature mind. The male interest, she determined, after giving much study to the subject, centred almost too exclusively round playing with a ball. She had heard men extolled as grand cricketers and magnificent putters with an enthusiasm which could hardly have been greater if they had saved their country or had died for a cause. And she admitted to herself that the mind of a woman was deficient when she failed to do justice to these performances.

Her reflections on these and kindred subjects this morning had been induced by hearing of the determination of Canon Wrottesley to light the rubbish-heap in the garden. The rubbish-heap had grown high and Canon Wrottesley had determined to put a match to it. Mrs. Wrottesley had been married too long not to know that whatever at the moment engaged her husband's mind required an audience. Her sons also had expected her to watch and applaud them did they in infancy so much as jump a small ditch, and she knew that it was the maternal duty, and admitted, also, that it was the maternal pleasure to watch and applaud until such time as the several wives of her five sons should take her place.

The whole of the vicarage household was in requisition as soon as their reverend master had conceived the happy notion of firing the canonical rubbish-heap in the far corner of the kitchen garden. Canon Wrottesley engaged the attention of every one with a frank belief in his own powers as an organiser. He found himself almost regretting that he could not make the matter an occasion for a little gathering of friends. He loved society, especially ladies' society, and he purposely kept various small objects about his own room, which—to use his own expression—might make a little bit of fun. There was a mask half concealed behind a screen, which, if it did not provoke a start and a scream from some fair visitor, had attention drawn to it by the playful question, 'Who is that behind you?' There was a funny pair of spectacles on the mantelshelf, which Canon Wrottesley would playfully place upon his handsome nose, and to small visitors he would accompany the action by a frolicsome 'wowf-wowf.' He loved juvenile parties when he could wear a coloured paper cap on his head or tie a paper apron round his waist, and probably his canonry had come to him through what he himself called his social gifts rather than by his reputation as a minister of religion. Perhaps he was at his best at a christening party; he had won much affection from his parishioners by his felicitous remarks upon these occasions. When the gravity of the christening of the infant was over Canon Wrottesley always deliberately relaxed. He chaffed the proud father, told the mother that the baby was the finest in the parish, and wanted to know whose health he was to drink where every one appeared so blooming.

'Now, mamma,' the canon said busily, 'let us have plenty of nice dry wood to start the blaze, and then you must come