A Tatter of Scarlet Part 19

Also I described what my father was doing to the Garden Cottage to fit it for their coming.

"Oh, do let me come and help. Ask your father. I should love to! And I should have far more idea than a man. I could get mother to come too, sometimes, though you know how loath she is to move far out of her own house. Still, she could drive over."

Never was there so short a walk as that between the pier above Mere Felix's and the gate of Chateau Schneider. Rhoda Polly was so eager that she would have gone right across the river there and then, and climbed the hill to Garden Cottage, if I had not insisted on delivering her to her mother, and generally giving an account of my stewards.h.i.+p.

Before going in, however, I warned her that the secret of Alida the Princess must be kept. It was only for herself. To the rest of the family she must be Mademoiselle Keller, the daughter of Keller Bey and his wife Linn.

The need to keep so great a matter secret seemed to damp the girl's enthusiasm for a moment, but almost instantly she caught me by the hand in her impulsive boyish way.

"I promise," she said, "and you are quite right. It was splendid of you to tell me. I am so grateful for that."

"Of course I told you, Rhoda Polly. Who else could I have told?"

She meditated a little, finger on lip before speaking.

"Do you know it is rather a pity not to tell mother," she said at last.

"She does not interfere, but she moderates and eases off the hard places. She has a great deal of influence in a quiet way--more than any-one--and she would never tell a soul. I really think that it would do Alida more good than anything else to have mother on our side from the first. We are all trumpeters like father (except perhaps Hugh, who is not like any of our brood), but it is mother who tells the trumpets when to stop sounding."

I a.s.sured Rhoda Polly that she could do as she thought best in the matter. Mrs. Deventer was all she said and more. She possessed, besides, a pleasant quality of motherhood that glinted kindly through her spectacles. Then, of course, Rhoda Polly knew best. All that I wanted to avoid was having the secret which had been entrusted to me being battered about in the daily brawls of the Deventer family--still less did I wish that it should get abroad to set talking the commonplace gossips of the town.

"Ah, _mon ami_," said Rhoda Polly, "you need not fear my mother. She knows the secrets of every one of us, I think--except perhaps Hugh's, who is too young to have any--and yet when we girls come to confide some tremendous fact to each other, we are astonished to find that mother has known it all the time."

CHAPTER XXII

IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW

Garden Cottage was occupied on the eleventh of March, 1871. For several days before that, the great discharging lorries lent by Mr. Deventer had toiled up the hill, the four stout horses leaning hard on the collar and their drivers ready to insert the wheel-rest at every turning.

Ever since this time began, Rhoda Polly had almost lived at our house, and she it was who had done the ordering of all the strange Oriental furnis.h.i.+ngs, partly from her own taste and partly from questioning me as to the arrangement of the different rooms I had seen at Autun.

Mrs. Deventer came across the bridge every day in her little blue Victoria--taking a peep in at us in the morning and hurrying back to tend her flocks, but in the afternoon, stopping over tea till she could drive a rather soiled Rhoda Polly home, as it were a much ruffled chick under a motherly wing. For indeed Rhoda Polly spared neither man nor beast, least of all did she spare herself. A tack-hammering, painting and varnis.h.i.+ng, cellar-to-garret Rhoda Polly pervaded the house, swooping upon all and sundry and compelling strict attention to business among the much-promising, little-performing tradesmen of Aramon.

My father had already done his part, for he was a man who could not endure the chill mistral of the Rhone valley. Every room which had a chimney was equipped above with a wind s.h.i.+eld, and beneath with steel andirons, beside which the cut f.a.ggots lay ready piled. The chambers without chimneys had been fitted with porcelain German stoves, the pipes of which bristled like lightning-rods along the roof ridges, and in the hall a great open fire-place shone with bra.s.s and copper, the spoil of an ancient Spanish monastery condemned in 1835 by Mendizabal, prime minister and Jew share-broker. What wonder if Rhoda Polly went home dishevelled and not over clean, but full of excitement and ready to battle for her new fad with the family at Chateau Schneider. Once there her mother plumped her into a hot bath, and after a smart douche to close the pores, Rhoda Polly came down literally as fresh as paint, to do battle for her new enthusiasms.

Hannah and Liz Deventer came once or twice to see what it was all about, but as they would not help, but only went round acc.u.mulating brickbats to pelt Rhoda Polly with later in the day, on the second occasion that capable young woman turned them both out _vi et armis_, though she must have weighed a good third less than Hannah.

The girls went good-humouredly enough, and having found my father talked with him in the Gobelet garden, by the old sundial which bore the arms of a former Marquis de Gallifet, and a date which commemorated the visit of Mesdames de Grignan and de Sevigne during the governors.h.i.+p of the former's husband.

Gordon Cawdor, my father, pleased all women, and I must admit most men--though up till now I had not been able to allow him the full measure of my sympathy or admiration. To do him justice he did not seem in the least conscious of the need of these, so long as I behaved decently and did my duty at school and college.

He was a man wonderfully stoical about the modern lack of filial recognition, no doubt saying to himself, as I came to do later, that the bringing up of sons was a poor business if one looked for direct returns on the capital and labour expended. But he never complained, and must, I think, have been finally and lastingly astonished when the long-barren fields of my filial piety ripened of themselves.

At any rate I began to know him better during these days. I marked his gentle ways, his enormous reading and erudition, never flaunted, never refused, never at fault. He had already finished his part of the work at the Garden Cottage, so he sat either in his study with the tall French window on the hasp ready to a visitor's hand--or, if the sun shone and the mistral was stilled, out on the broad wooden bench by the fish pond, a volume in his hand to read or annotate when alone--but quite ready to drop it into the pocket of his velvet jacket, and turn the gaze of his gentle scholarly eyes upon whomsoever had come forth in need of society or soul refreshment.

I learned a lesson in those days--to know how other people estimated my father. Of course, I had seen Dennis Deventer drinking in the knowledge he felt the lack of, as from a fountain. I knew what Professor Renard and the Bey thought of him. Yet, after all, these were men of Gordon Cawdor's own age and stamp.

But when I saw the fine sweet house-motherliness of Mrs. Deventer sitting at my father's feet and talking confidentially yet with respect, the thing seemed to me strange. I have seen her finish the review and arrangement of a series of china and napery closets, the laying down of fresh papers in chests of drawers, or the ordering of knick-knacks gathered in the Bey's campaigns. Then she would throw a fold of black Spanish lace over her pretty grey hair, always s.h.i.+ning and neat--and so, without explanation or apology, hie herself out to find my father.

"A talk with him is my refreshment!" she said once when she came back and laid the folded lace scarf down beside the work she was next to attack. More than once I had pa.s.sed them speaking low and earnestly, and I am sure she was consulting him about some intimate affairs of which she had spoken to no one else.

Or it was the turn of Rhoda Polly and her procedure was different. She would remove the provision of tin-tacks, French nails, or whatnot from her mouth, her habitual ready receptacle, throw a wisp or two of rebellious ripe-corn hair back from her brow, and demand to be told if there were any very bad s.m.u.ts on her face! When she presented her handkerchief or the hem of her ap.r.o.n to me I knew from long experience what was expected of me. I was to remove the offending s.m.u.ts from Rhoda Polly's face with the oldest and most natural of cleansers, exactly as we had done to one another when the dinner bell or the voice of authority called us from some extra grubby tree-climbing or mud-pie making experiment in the days when the world was young.

"Spell ho!" Rhoda Polly would cry; "had enough this one time. I am off to talk to your father. He does me good."

And now when the other Deventer girls, the stately swan-necked Hannah and the Dresden shepherdess of a dainty Liz, being expelled for "shameless slacking" and "getting in everybody's way," took their road with happy expectant faces to the bench by the sundial, I knew in my heart for the first time that I would never so add to the happiness of humanity as that gentle refined scholarly man who was my father.

To my shame I took a cast about the garden, and from the top of a ladder looked down upon the trio in an unworthy and wholly ungentlemanly way. I did not mean to overhear--of course not--but I overheard. My only excuse is that I was in a quandary. I knew that I had somehow been all wrong about my father, and I wanted to find out how I could put matters right.

Hannah was seated on the bench beside him, listening and looking down, making diagrams meanwhile in the gravel with the point of her _en-tout-cas_, a sort of long-handled parasol sent from Paris.

Liz had characteristically pulled one of the little stools called "banquettes" from under the sundial, and had seated herself between my father's knees. She had taken her hat off and now leaned her elbow on his knee looking up into his face.

He was telling them about maidens of old times, how the Lesbia of Catullus looked and dressed, how he and she idled the day by the length a-dream in a boat in the bays about Sirmio. He quoted Tennyson's delicious verses to them, and they promised to look them up that night.

"If it were not that Rhoda Polly knows so much, I should begin Latin this very day," said Liz; "but she is such a swell that she can always come down on a fellow. She thinks we know nothing!"

"I know I don't," said Hannah, "except how to walk and dance and behave at table."

"No, that last you don't," retorted Liz Deventer; "you were far the noisiest (mother said so) in our last big family fight!"

"Well, I mean I can do these things when I like, Silly!" said Hannah, unmoved.

The hand of my father descended slowly. It had been raised to mark the rhythm of _Olive-silvery-Sirmio_! It now rested on the curly brown locks of Liz Deventer. He ceased to speak, and then suddenly with a sigh he said, "I envy Dennis. I have a good son--yes, a good son," he repeated with emphasis, "but I should have liked a daughter also. There is a side of me she would have understood."

Instantly the girls had their arms about his neck, and I hastily descended my shameful ladder, leaving behind me a chorus of "We will be your daughters--Rhoda Polly too--mother too--she thinks----"

But I got out of earshot as fast as might be, quite chopfallen and ashamed. I had not been a good son, whatever Gordon Cawdor might say--I knew it. I had held him lightly and withheld what others found their greatest joy in giving him--my confidence. It was no use saying that he never invited it. No more had he invited that of Mrs. Deventer, or of the girls--or, what touched me more nearly, that of Rhoda Polly herself.

At last the great day came, and by the same train which had brought the Bey on his errand of inspection the three new tenants of the Cottage arrived. The Bey looked military and imposing as he stood over the baggage counter. Linn, tall and gaunt in unbroken black, accepted my father's arm smilingly almost at the first sound of his voice. He showed her through the narrow shed-like waiting-rooms to the carriage in readiness outside. Mrs. Deventer had received Alida into her arms as she descended from the carriage, and was now cooing over her, watched hungrily by Rhoda Polly, who wearied for her turn to come.

It struck me that Alida was not looking quite so well as usual. It had cost her more than I thought to disobey her father--more afterwards perhaps than at the time. For among those of her blood, the servitude of woman goes with heredity, and the culture of Europe, though it may render obedience impossible, does not kill the idea of parental authority. "Though he slay me, yet shall I trust in him!"

But when Alida greeted me, I knew in a moment that though the battle had been sore, the victory was won. There would be no looking back.

"What, Angoos, _mon ami_, have I all those friends already? I owe them all to you!"

I took Rhoda Polly's hand, and put it into the gloved fingers of the little Princess.

"Not to me, dear Alida," I said, "but to this girl; she has, as you shall find, a heart of gold."

Alida kept the strong roughened fingers in hers, and looked deep into the eyes of Rhoda Polly as if to read her inmost soul.

"I shall remember that, Angoos," she said; "that is a beautiful thing when it is said in the language of my own country. It sings itself--it makes poetry. Listen!

"'Rhoda Polly of the Golden Heart--Heart of Gold, how true is my maiden!' Wait, I will sing it for you in Arabic----"