Back to Billabong Part 2

"Cecilia! Cecilia! Come here a minute."

The girl went down slowly. Mrs. Rainham was standing before her mirror.

"Just come and hook my dress, Cecilia. This new dressmaker has a knack of making everything hard to fasten. There--see that you start with the right hook and eye."

At the moment, physical contact with her stepmother was almost the last straw for the girl. She obeyed in silence, shrinking back as far as she could from the stout, over-scented body and the powdered face with the thin lips. Mrs. Rainham watched her with a little smile.

"Yes, that's all right," she said. "Now, my hat, Cecilia--it's in the bandbox under the bed. I can't stoop in this dress, that's the worst of it. And my gloves are in that box on the chest of drawers--the white pair. Hurry, Cecilia, my appointment is for four o'clock."

"Mine was for three o'clock," said the girl in a low voice.

"Oh, well, you should manage your work better. I always tell you that.

Nothing like method in getting through every day. However, Bob is only your brother--it would be more serious if it was a young man you were meeting. Brothers don't matter much."

Cecilia flamed round upon her.

"Bob is more to me than anyone in the world," she cried. "And I would rather keep any other man waiting."

"Really? But I shouldn't think it very likely that you'll ever have to trouble about other young men, Cecilia; you're not the sort. Too thin and scraggy." Mrs. Rainham surveyed her own generous proportions in the gla.s.s, and gathered up her gloves with a pleased air. For the moment she could not possibly believe that anyone could have referred to her as "an over-ornamented pie." "Good-bye, Cecilia; don't be late for tea." She sailed down the stairs.

Even the bang of the hall door failed to convey any relief to Cecilia.

For the second time she toiled upstairs, to the bare freshness of her little room. Generally, it had a tonic effect upon her; to-day it seemed that nothing could help her. She leaned her head against the window, a wave of homesick loneliness flooding all her soul. So deep were its waters that she did not hear the hall door open and close again, and presently swift feet pounding up the stairs. Someone battered on her door.

"Cecilia! Are you there?"

She ran to open the door. Bob stood there, a short, muscular fellow, in Air Force blue, with twinkling eyes. She put out her hands to him with a little pitiful gesture.

"Don't say that horrible name again," she whispered. "If anyone else calls me Cecilia I'll just go mad."

Bob came in, and flung a brotherly arm round her shoulders.

"Has it been so beastly?" he said. "Poor little Tommy. Oh, Tommy, I saw the over-ornamented pie sailing down the street, and I dived into a side alley until she'd gone out of range. I guessed from her proud and happy face that you'd been scarified."

"Scarified!" murmured Cecilia. But Bob was not listening. His face was radiant.

"I couldn't wait in the park any longer," he said. "I had to come and tell you. Tommy, old thing--I'm demobilized!"

CHAPTER II

THE RAINHAMS

It was one of Mrs. Mark Rainham's grievances that, comparatively late in her married life, she should suddenly find herself brought into a.s.sociation with the children of her husband's first marriage. They were problems that Fate had previously removed from her path; she found it extremely annoying--at first--that Fate should cease to be so tactful, casting upon her a burden long borne by other shoulders. It was not until she had accepted Mark Rainham, eleven years before, that she found out the very existence of Bob and Cecilia; she resented the manner of the discovery, even as she resented the children themselves. Not that she ever dreamed of breaking off her engagement on their account. She was a milliner in a Kensington shop, and to marry Mark Rainham, who was vaguely "something in the city," and belonged to a good club, and dressed well, was a distinct step in the social scale, and two unknown children were not going to make her draw back. But to mother them was quite another question.

Luckily, Fate had a compa.s.sionate eye upon the young Rainhams, and was quite willing to second their stepmother's resolve that they should come into her life as little as possible. Their father had never concerned himself greatly about them. A lazy and selfish man, he had always been willing to shelve the care of his small son and daughter--babies were not in his line, and the aunt who had brought up their mother was only too anxious to take Bob and Cecilia when that girl-mother had slipped away from life, leaving a week-old Cecilia and a st.u.r.dy, solemn Bob of three.

The arrangement suited Mark Rainham very well. Aunt Margaret's house at Twickenham was big enough for half a dozen babies; the children went there, with their nurse, and he was free to slip back into bachelor ways, living in comfortable chambers within easy reach of his club and not too far, with a good train service, from a golf links. The regular week-end visits to the babies suffered occasional interruptions, and gradually grew fewer and fewer, until he became to the children a vague and mysterious person named Papa, who dropped from the skies now and then, asked them a number of silly questions, talked with great politeness to Aunt Margaret--who, they instinctively felt, liked him no better than they did--and then disappeared, whereupon every one was immensely relieved. Even the fact that he generally brought them a packet of expensive sweets was as nothing beside the harrowing knowledge that they must kiss him, thereby having their faces brushed with a large and scrubby moustache. Aunt Margaret and nurse did not have to endure this infliction--which seemed to Bob and Cecilia obviously unfair. But the visits did not often happen--not enough to disturb seriously an existence crammed with interesting things like puppies and kittens, the pony cart, boats on the river that ran just beyond the lawn, occasional trips to London and the Zoo, and delirious fortnights at the seaside or on Devons.h.i.+re moors. Cecilia had never known even Bobby's shadowy memories of their own mother. Aunt Margaret was everything that mattered, and the person called Papa was merely an unpleasant incident.

Other little boys and girls whom they knew owned, in their houses, delightful people named Daddy and Mother; but Cecilia and Bob quite understood that every one could not have the same things, for possibly these fortunate children had no puppies or pony carts. Nurse had pointed out this, so that it was perfectly clear.

It was when Cecilia was eight and Bob eleven, that their father married again. To the children it meant nothing; to Aunt Margaret it was a bomb.

If Mark Rainham had happened to die, or go to the North Pole, she would have borne the occurrence calmly; but that he should take a step which might mean separating her from her beloved babies shook her to her foundations. Even when she was a.s.sured that the new Mrs. Rainham disliked children, and had not the slightest intention of adding Bob and Cecilia to her household, Aunt Margaret remained uneasy. The red-haired person, as she mentally labelled her, might change her mind. Mark Rainham was wax in her hands, and would always do as he was told. Aunt Margaret, goaded by fear, became heroic. She let the beloved house at Twickenham while Mr. and Mrs. Rainham were still on their honeymoon; packed up the children, her maids, nurse, the parrot and most of the puppies; and kept all her plans a profound secret until she was safely established in Paris.

To the average Londoner, Paris is very far off. There are, of course, very many people who run across the Channel as easily as a Melbourne man may week-end in Gippsland or Bendigo, but the suburban section of London is not fond of voyaging across a strip of water with unpleasant possibilities in the way of choppiness, to a strange country where most of the inhabitants have the bad taste not to speak English. Neither Mark Rainham nor his new wife had ever been in France, and to them it seemed, as Aunt Margaret had shrewdly hoped it would, almost as though the Twickenham household had gone to the North Pole. A great relief fell upon them, since there could now be no question of a.s.suming duties when those duties were suddenly beyond their reach. And Aunt Margaret's letter was convincing--such a good offer, suddenly, for the Twickenham house; such excellent educational opportunities for the children, in the shape of semi-English schools, where Bob and Cecilia might mix with English children and retain their nationality while acquiring Parisian French. If Mark Rainham felt any inward resentment at the summary disposal of his son and daughter, he did not show it; as of old, it was easier to let things slide. Aunt Margaret was given a free hand, save that at fourteen Bob returned to school in England; an arrangement that mattered little, since all his holidays were spent at the new home at Fontainebleau--a house which, even to the parrot, was highly reminiscent of Twickenham.

Bob and Cecilia found life extremely interesting. They were cheery, happy-go-lucky youngsters, with an immense capacity for enjoyment; and Aunt Margaret, while much too shrewd an old lady to spoil children, delighted in giving them a good time. They found plenty of friends in the little English community in Paris, as well as among their French neighbours. Paris itself was full of fascination; then there were wonderful excursions far afield--holidays in Brussels, in the South of France, even winter sporting in Switzerland. Aunt Margaret was determined that her nurselings should miss nothing that she could give them. The duty letters which she insisted on their writing, once a month, to their father told of happenings that seemed strangely remote from the humdrum life of London. "By Jove, the old lady gives those youngsters a good time!" Mark Rainham would comment, tossing them across the table to his wife. He did not guess at the dull rage that filled her as she read them--the unreasoning jealousy that these children should have opportunities so far beyond any that were likely to occur for her own, who squabbled angrily over their breakfast while she read.

"She seems to have any amount of money to spend on gadding about," she would say unpleasantly.

"Oh, pots of money. Wish to goodness I had some of it," her husband would answer. Money was always scarce in the Rainham household.

When the thunderbolt of war fell upon the world, Aunt Margaret, after the first pangs of panic, stiffened her back, and declined to leave France. England, she declared, was not much safer than anywhere else; and was it likely that she and Cecilia would run away when Bob was coming back? Bob, just eighteen, captain of his school training corps, stroke of its racing boat, and a mighty man of valour at football, slid naturally into khaki within a month of the outbreak of war, putting aside toys, with all the glad company of boys of the Empire, until such time as the Hun should be taught that he had no place among white men.

Aunt Margaret and Cecilia, knitting frantically at socks and m.u.f.flers and Balaclava helmets, were desperately proud of him, and compared his photograph, in uniform, with all the pictures of Etienne and Henri and Armand, and other French boys who had played with him under the trees at Fontainebleau, and had now marched away to join him at the greater game.

It was difficult to realize that they were not still little boys in blouses and knickerbockers--difficult even when they swooped down from time to time on short leave, filling the quiet houses with pranks and laughter that were wholly boyish. Even when Bob had two stars on his cuff, and wore the ribbon of the Military Cross, it would have astonished Aunt Margaret and Cecilia very much had anyone suggested that he was grown up.

Indeed, Aunt Margaret was never to think of him as anything but "one of the children." Illness, sudden and fierce, fell upon her after a long spell of duty at the hospital where she worked from the first few months of the war--working as cook, since she had no nursing experience, and was, she remarked, too old to learn a new trade. Brave as she was, there was no battling for her against the new foe; she faded out of life after a few days, holding Cecilia's hand very tightly until the end.

Bob, obtaining leave with much difficulty, arrived a few days later, to find a piteous Cecilia, white-faced, stunned and bewildered. She pleaded desperately against leaving France; amidst all the horror and chaos that had fallen upon her, it seemed unthinkable that she should put the sea between herself and Bob. But to remain was impossible. Aunt Margaret's English maids wanted to go back to their friends, and a girl of seventeen could scarcely stay alone in a country torn by two years of war. Besides, Aunt Margaret's affairs were queerly indefinite; there seemed very little money where there had formerly been plenty. There was no alternative for Cecilia but England--and England meant the Rainham household, and such welcome as it might choose to give her.

She was still bewildered when they made the brief journey across the Channel--a new Channel, peopled only with war-s.h.i.+ps of every kind, from grim Dreadnoughts to submarines; with aircraft, bearing the red, white and blue circles of Britain, floating and circling overhead. Last time Cecilia had crossed, it had been with Aunt Margaret on a big turbine mail boat; they had reached Calais just as an excursion steamer from Margate came up, gay with flags and light dresses, with a band playing ragtime on the well-deck, and people dancing to a concertina at the stern. Now they zig-zagged across, sometimes at full speed, sometimes stopping dead or altering their course in obedience to the destroyer nosing ahead of them through the Channel mist; and she could see the face of the captain on the bridge, strained and anxious. There were so few civilians on board that Cecilia and the two old servants were greeted with curious stares; nearly all the pa.s.sengers were in uniform, their boots caked with the mud of the trenches, their khaki soiled with the grime of war. It was all rather dream-like to Cecilia; and London itself was a very bad dream; darkened and silent, with the great beams of searchlights playing back and forth over the black skies in search of marauding Zeppelins. And then came her father's stiff greeting, and the silent drive to the tall, narrow house in Lancaster Gate, where Mrs.

Rainham met her coldly. In after years Cecilia never could think without a shudder of that first meal in her father's house--the struggle to eat, the lagging talk round the table, with Avice and Wilfred, frankly hostile, staring at her in silence, and her stepmother's pale eyes appraising every detail of her dress. It was almost like happiness again to find herself alone, later; in a dingy little attic bedroom that smelt as though it had never known an open window--a sorry little hole, but still, out of the reach of those unblinking eyes.

For the first year Cecilia had struggled to get away to earn her own living. But a very few weeks served to show Mrs. Rainham that chance had sent her, in the person of the girl whose coming she had sullenly resented, a very useful buffer against any period of domestic stress.

Aunt Margaret had trained Cecilia thoroughly in all housewifely virtues, and her half-French education had given her much that was lacking in the stodgy damsels of Mrs. Rainham's acquaintance. She was quick and courteous and willing; responding, moreover, to the lash of the tongue--after her first wide-eyed stare of utter amazement--exactly as a well-bred colt responds to a deftly-used whip. "I'll keep her," was Mrs.

Rainham's inward resolve. "And she'll earn her keep too!"

There was no doubt that Cecilia did that. Wilfred and Avice saw to it, even had not their mother been fully capable of exacting the last ounce from the only helper she had ever had who had not the power to give her a week's notice. Cecilia's first requests to be allowed to take up work outside had been shelved vaguely. "We'll find some nice war-work for you presently"... and meanwhile, the household was short-handed, Mrs.

Rainham was overstrained--Cecilia found later that her stepmother was always "overstrained" whenever she spoke of leaving home--and duties multiplied about her and hemmed her in. Mrs. Rainham was clever; the net closed round the girl so gradually that she scarcely realized its meshes until they were drawn tightly. Even Bob helped. "You're awfully young to start work on your own account," he wrote. "Can't you stick it for a bit, if they are decent to you?" And, rather than cause him any extra worry, Cecilia decided that she must "stick it."

Of her father she saw little. He was, just as she remembered him in her far-back childhood at Twickenham, vague and colourless. Rather to her horror, she found that the ordeal of being kissed by his large and scrubby moustache was just as unpleasant as ever. Cecilia had no idea of how he earned his living--he ate his breakfast hurriedly, concealed behind the Daily Mail, and then disappeared, bound for some mysterious place in the city--the part of London that was always full of mystery to Cecilia. Golf was the one thing that roused him to any enthusiasm, and golf was even more of a mystery than the city. Cecilia knew that it was played with a.s.sorted weapons, kept in a bag, and used for smiting a small ball over great expanses of country, but beyond these facts her knowledge stopped. Mrs. Rainham had set her to clean the clubs one day, but her father, appearing unexpectedly, had taken them from her hands with something like roughness. "No, by Jove!" he said. "You do a good many odd jobs in this house, but I'm hanged if you shall clean my golf sticks." Cecilia did not realize that the a.s.sumed roughness covered something very like shame.

Money matters were rather confusing. A lawyer--also in the city--paid her a small sum quarterly--enough to dress on, and for minor expenses.

Bob wrote that Aunt Margaret's affairs were in a beastly tangle. An annuity had died with her, and many of her investments had been hit by the war, and had ceased to pay dividends--had even, it seemed, ceased to be valuable at all. There was a small allowance for Bob also, and some day, if luck should turn, there might be a little more. Bob did not say that his own allowance was being h.o.a.rded for Cecilia, in case he "went west." He lived on his pay, and even managed to save something out of that, being a youth of simple tastes. His battalion had been practically wiped out of existence in the third year of the war, and after a peaceful month in a north country hospital, near an aerodrome, the call of the air was too much for him--he joined the cheerful band of flying men, and soon filled his letters to Cecilia with a bewildering mixture of technicalities and aviation slang that left her gasping. But he got his wings in a very short time, and she was prouder of him than ever--and more than ever desperately afraid for him.

The children's daily governess, a down-trodden person, left after Cecilia had been in England for a few months, and the girl stepped naturally into the vacant position until some one else should be found.

She had no idea that Mrs. Rainham made no effort at all to discover any other successor to Miss Simpkins. Where, indeed, Mrs. Rainham demanded of herself, would she be likely to find anyone with such qualifications--young, docile, with every advantage of a modern education, speaking French like a native, and above and beyond all else, requiring no pay? It would be flying in the face of Providence to ignore such a chance. Wherefore Cecilia continued to lead her step-sisters and brother in the paths of learning, and life became a thing of utter weariness. For Mrs. Rainham, though shrewd enough to get what she wanted, in the main was not a far-sighted woman; and in her unreasoning dislike and jealousy of Cecilia she failed to see that she defeated her own ends by making her a drudge. Whatever benefit the girl might have given the children was lost in their contempt for her. She had no authority, no power to enforce a command, or to give a punishment, and the children quickly discovered that, so long as they gave her the merest show of obedience in their mother's presence, any shortcomings in education would be laid at Cecilia's door. Lesson time became a period of rare sport for the young Rainhams; it was so easy to bait the new sister with cheap taunts, to watch the quick blood mount to the very roots of her fair hair, to do just as little as possible, and then to see her blamed for the result. Mrs. Rainham's bitter tongue grew more and more uncontrolled as time went on and she felt the girl more fully in her power. And Cecilia lived through each day with tight-shut lips, conscious of one clear thing in her mist of unhappy bewilderment--that Bob must not know: Bob, who would probably leave his job of skimming through the air of her beloved France after the Hun, and s.n.a.t.c.h an hour to fly to England and annihilate the entire Rainham household, returning with Cecilia tucked away somewhere in his aeroplane. It was a pleasant dream, and served to carry her through more than one hard moment. But it did not always serve; and there were nights when Cecilia mounted to her attic with dragging footsteps, to sit by her window in the darkness, gripping her courage with both hands, afraid to let herself think of the dear, happy past; of Aunt Margaret, whose very voice was love; least of all of Bob, perhaps even now flying in the dark over the German lines.

There was but one thing that she could hold to: she voiced it to herself, over and over with clenched hands, "It can't last for ever! It can't last for ever!"

And then, after the long years of clutching anxiety, came the Armistice, and Cecilia forgot all her troubles in its overwhelming relief. No one would shoot at Bob any longer; there were no more hideous, squat guns, with muzzles yawning skywards, ready to sh.e.l.l him as he skimmed high overhead, like a swallow in the blue. Therefore she sang as she went about her work, undismayed by the laboured witticisms of Avice and Wilfred, or by Mrs. Rainham's venom, which increased with the realization that her victim might possibly slip from her grasp, since Bob would come home, and Bob was a person to be reckoned with. Certainly Bob had scarcely any money; moreover, Cecilia was not of age, and, therefore, still under her father's control. But Mrs. Rainham felt vaguely uneasy, and visions floated before her of the old days when governesses and maids had departed with unpleasant frequency, leaving her to face all sorts of disagreeable consequences. She set her thin lips, vowing inwardly that Cecilia should remain.

Nevertheless it was a relief to her that early demobilization did not come for Bob. At the time of the Armistice he was attached to an Australian flying squadron, and for some months remained abroad; then he was sent back to England, and employed in training younger fliers at a Surrey aerodrome. This had its drawbacks in Mrs. Rainham's eyes, since he was often able to run up to London, and, to Bob, London merely meant Cecilia. It was only a question of time before he discovered something of what life at Lancaster Gate meant--his enlightenment beginning upon an afternoon when, arriving unexpectedly, and being left by Eliza to find Cecilia for himself, he had the good fortune to overhear Mrs.

Rainham in one of her best efforts--a "wigging" to which Avice and Wilfred were listening delightedly, and which included not only Cecilia's sin of the moment, but her upbringing, her French education, her "foreign fas.h.i.+on of speaking," and her sinful extravagance in shoes. These, and other matters, were furnis.h.i.+ng Mrs. Rainham with ample material for a bitter discourse when she became aware of another presence in the room, and her eloquence faltered at the sight of Bob's astonished anger.

Mrs. Rainham did not recall with any enjoyment the interview which followed--Cecilia and the children having been brushed out of the way by the indignant soldier. Things which had been puzzling to Bob were suddenly made clear--traces of distress which Cecilia had often explained away vaguely, the children's half-contemptuous manner towards her, even Eliza's tone in speaking of her--a queer blend of anger and pity. Mrs. Rainham held her ground to some extent, but the brother's questions were hard to parry, and some of his comments stung.

"Well, I'll take her away," he stormed at length. "It's evident that she does not give you satisfaction, and she certainly isn't happy. She had better come away with me to-day."