Lalage's Lovers Part 1

Lalage's Lovers.

by George A. Birmingham.

CHAPTER I

I had, I suppose, some reason for calling on Canon Beresford, but I have totally forgotten what it was. In all probability my mother sent me to discuss some matter connected with the management of the parish or the maintenance of the fabric of the church. I was then, and still am, a church warden. The office is hereditary in my family. My son--Miss Pettigrew recommended my having several sons--will hold it when I am gone. My mother has always kept me up to the mark in the performance of my duties. Without her at my elbow I should, I am afraid, be inclined to neglect them. I am bored, not interested as a churchwarden should be, when the wall of the graveyard crumbles unexpectedly. I fail to find either pleasure or excitement in appointing a new s.e.xton. Canon Beresford, our rector, is no more enthusiastic about such things than I am. He and I are very good friends, but when he suspects me of paying him a business visit he goes out to fish. There are, I believe, trout in the stream which flows at the bottom of the glebe land, but I never heard of Canon Beresford catching any of them.

It must have been business of some sort which took me to the rectory that afternoon, for Canon Beresford had gone out with his rod. Miss Battersby told me this and added, as a justification of her own agreeable solitude, that Lalage was with her father. Miss Battersby is Lalage's governess, and she would not consider it right to spend the afternoon over a novel unless she felt sure that her pupil was being properly looked after. In this case she was misinformed. Lalage was not with her father. She was perched on one of the highest branches of a horse-chestnut tree. I heard her before I saw her, for the chestnut tree was in full leaf and Lalage had to hail me three or four times before I discovered where she was. I always liked Lalage, and even in those days she had a friendly feeling for me. I doubt, however, whether a simple desire for my conversation would have brought her down from her nest. I might have pa.s.sed without being hailed if it had not happened that I was riding a new bicycle. In those days bicycles were still rare in the west of Ireland. Mine was a new toy and Lalage had never seen it before. She climbed from her tree top with remarkable agility and swung herself from the lowest branch with such skill and activity that she alighted on her feet close beside the bicycle. She was at that time a little more than fourteen years of age. She asked at once to be allowed to ride the bicycle. I was a young man then, active and vigorous; but I was hot, breathless, and exhausted before Lalage had enough of learning to ride.

I doubt whether she would have given in even after an hour's hard work if we had not met with a serious accident. We charged into a strong laurel bush. Lalage's frock was torn. The rent was a long one, extending diagonally from the waistband to the bottom hem. I knew, even while I offered one from the back of my tie, that a pin would be no use.

"Cattersby," said Lalage, "will be mad--raging mad. She's always at me because things will tear my clothes. Horrid nuisance clothes are, aren't they? But Cattersby doesn't think so of course. She likes them."

The lady's name is Battersby, not Cattersby. She held the position of governess to Lalage for more than a year and is therefore ent.i.tled to respect. Her predecessor, a Miss Thomas, resigned after six weeks. It was my mother who recommended Miss Battersby to Canon Beresford. I felt that I ought to protest against Lalage's irreverent way of speaking. In mere loyalty to my mother, apart altogether from the respect which, as a landed proprietor, I naturally entertain for all forms of law and order, I was absolutely bound to say something.

"You should speak of her as Miss Battersby," I said firmly.

"I call her Cattersby," said Lalage, "because that is her nature."

I said that I understood what this marker meant; but Lalage, who even then had a remarkable faculty for getting at the naked truth of things, did not even pretend to believe me.

"Come along," she said, "and I'll show you why."

I followed her meekly, leading my bicycle, which, like Lalage's frock, had suffered in its contest with the laurel. We pa.s.sed through the stable yard and I stopped to put my bicycle into the coach house. An Irish terrier, Lalage's property, barked at me furiously, thinking, I suppose, that I intended to steal Canon Beresford's cart. Lalage chose to regard this as a ridiculous affectation on the part of the dog and shut him up in the stable as a punishment for folly. Then we climbed a stile, paddled round a large manure heap, crossed an ash pit, and came at last to a pigsty. There were no pigs in it, and it was, for a pigsty, very clean. Lalage opened the gate and we entered the small enclosure in which the pigs, if there had been pigs, would have taken food and exercise.

"You'll have to stoop down now and crawl," said Lalage. "You needn't be afraid. The pigs were sold last week."

I realized that I was being invited to enter the actual home, the private sleeping room, of the departed swine. The door of it had been newly painted. While I knelt in front of it I read a notice which stretched across it in large white letters, done, apparently, with chalk:

The Office of the Anti-cat Editor: Miss Lalage Beresford, B. A.

Sub-Editor: Ditto. Ditto.

Underneath this inscription was a carefully executed drawing of a spear with a large, a disproportionately large, and vicious looking barb. A sort of banner depended from its shaft, with these words on it: "For Use on Cattersby. Revenge is sweet!" I looked round at Lalage, who was on her hands and knees behind me.

I intended asking for some explanation of the extraordinarily vindictive spirit displayed by the spear and the banner. Lalage forestalled my question and explained something else.

"I have the office here," she said, "because it's the only place where I can be quite sure she won't follow me."

This time I understood thoroughly what was said to me. Cattersby--that is to say, Miss Battersby--if she were the sort of person who mourned over torn frocks, and if, as Lalage suggested, she liked clothes, would be very unwilling to follow any one into the recesses of the pigsty.

Even a bower in the upper branches of a tree would be less secure from her intrusion. We crawled in. Against the far wall of the chamber stood the trough from which the pigs, now no doubt deceased, used to eat.

"It was put there," said Lalage, who seemed to know that I was thinking of the trough, "after they had done cleaning out the sty, so that it wouldn't go rotten in the wet before we got some more young pigs."

"Was that Miss Battersby's idea?"

"No, it wasn't. Cattersby wouldn't think of anything half so useful.

All she cares about is sums and history and lessony things. It was Tom Kitterick who put it there, and I helped him. Tom Kitterick is the boy who cleans the boots and pumps the water. It was that time," she added, "that I got paint all over my blue dress. She said it was Tom Kitterick's fault."

"It may have been," I said, "partly. Anyhow Tom Kitterick is a red-haired, freckly youth. It wouldn't do him any harm to be slanged a bit for something."

"It's a jolly sight better to have freckles, even if you come out all over like a turkey egg, than to go rubbing stinking stuff on your face at night. That's what Cattersby does. I caught her at it."

Miss Battersby has a nice, smooth complexion and is, 'no doubt, quite justified in doing her best to preserve it. But I did not argue the point with Lalage. A discussion might have led to further revelations of intimate details of the lady's toilet. I was young in those days and I rather prided myself on being a gentleman. I changed the subject.

"Perhaps," I said, "you will now tell me why you have brought me here.

Are we to have a picnic tea in the pigs' trough?"

Lalage crawled past me. She had to crawl, for there was not room in the sty for even a child to stand upright. She took out of the trough a bundle of papers, pierced at the top left-hand corner and tied with a slightly soiled blue ribbon. She handed it to me and I looked it over.

It was, apparently, a ma.n.u.script magazine modelled on those sold at railway bookstalls for sixpence. It was called, as I might have guessed, the _Anti-Cat_. The table of contents promised the following reading matter:

1. Editor's Chat.

2. Poetry--A Farewell. To be recited in her presence.

3. The Ignominy of Having a Governess.

4. Prize Compet.i.tion for the Best Insult Story.

"You can enter for that if you like," said Lalage, who had been following my eyes down the page.

"I shall," I said, "if she insults me; but she never has yet."

"Nor she won't," said Lalage. "She'll be honey to you. That's one of the worst things about her. She's a hypocrite. I loathe hypocrites, don't you?"

I returned to the table of contents:

5. On Sneaking--First Example.

6. Our Tactics, by the Editor.

"She won't insult you," said Lalage. "She simply crawls to any grown-up.

You should hear her talking to father and pretending that she thinks fis.h.i.+ng nice."

"She's perfectly right to do that. After all, Lalage, your father is a canon and a certain measure of respect is due to his recreations as well as to his serious work. Besides----"

"It's never right to crawl to any one."

"Besides," I said, "what you call crawling may in reality be sympathy.

I'm sure Miss Battersby has a sympathetic disposition. It is very difficult to draw the line between proper respect, flavoured with appreciative sympathy, and what you object to as sycophancy."

"If you're going to try and show off," said Lalage, "by using ghastly long words which n.o.body could possibly understand you'd better go and do it to the Cat. She'll like it. I'm not going to sit here all day listening to you. Either read the magazine or don't, whichever you like.

I don't care whether you do or not, but I won't be jawed."

This subdued me at once. I began with the poem:

"Fair Cattersby I weep to see You haste away by train, As yet that Latin exercise Has not been done again.

Stay, stay, Until amo, I say.

(To be continued in our next)"