Poor Relations Part 8

Edith started: it was the first time in eleven years of married life that her husband had adopted the Touchwood style of addressing or referring to their mother, and it seemed to set a seal upon his more intimate a.s.sociation with her family in the future. If any doubts still lingered about the forthcoming immigration of the vicarage party to Ambles they were presently disposed of once and for all by Laurence.

"What are you carrying?" he asked Frida, when they were gathered in the hall before starting.

"Uncle John's present," she replied.

"Do not bother. Uncle John has invited us to stay here, and you do not want to expose your little animals to the risk of being chipped. No doubt Harold will look after them for you in the interim--the short interim. Come, Edith, the moon is not going to wait for us, you know. I have the reins. Gee-up, Primrose!"

"Fond as I am of Edith," Hilda said, when the vicarage family was out of hearing. "Fond as I am of Edith," she repeated without any trace of affection in accent or expression, "I do think this invasion is an imposition upon your kindness. But clergymen are all alike; they all become dictatorial and obtuse; they're too fond of the sound of their own voices."

"Laurence is perhaps a little heavy," John agreed, "a little suave and heavy like a cornflour shape, but we ought to do what we can for Edith."

He tactfully offered Hilda a share in his own benevolence, in which she ensconced herself without hesitation.

"Well, I suppose we shall have to make the best of it. Indeed the only thing that _really_ worries me is what we are to do with the apples."

"Oh, Harold will soon eat them up," said John; though he had not the slightest intention of being sarcastic, Hilda was so much annoyed by this that she abandoned all discussion of the vicarage and talked so long about Harold's inside and with such a pa.s.sionate insistence upon what he required of sweet and sour to prevent him from dropping before her very eyes, that John was able fairly soon to plead that the hour was late and that he must go to bed.

In his bedroom, which was sharp-scented with autumnal airs and made him disinclined for sleep, John became sentimental over Edith and began to weave out of her troubles a fine robe for his own good-nature in which his sentimentality was able to show itself off. He a.s.sured himself of Edith's luck in having Ambles as a refuge in the difficult time through which she was pa.s.sing and began to visualize her past life as nothing but a stormy prelude to a more tranquil present in which he should be her pilot. That Laurence would be included in his beneficence was certainly a flaw in the emerald of his bounty, a fly in the amber of his self-satisfaction; but, after all, so long as Edith was secure and happy such blemishes were hardly perceptible. He ought to think himself lucky that he was in a position to help his relations; the power of doing kind actions was surely the greatest privilege accorded to the successful man. And what right had Hilda to object? Good gracious, as if she herself were not dependent enough upon him! But there had always been visible in Hilda this wretched spirit of compet.i.tion. It had been in just the same spirit that she had married Daniel Curtis; she had not been able to endure her younger sister's engagement to the tall handsome curate and had s.n.a.t.c.hed at the middle-aged explorer in order to be married simultaneously and secure the best wedding presents for herself.

But what had Daniel Curtis seen in Hilda? What had that myopic and taciturn man found in Hilda to gladden a short visit to England between his life on the Orinoco and his intended life at the back of the uncharted Amazons? And had his short experience of her made him so reckless that nothing but his spectacles were found by the rescuers?

What mad impulse to perpetuate his name beyond the numerous beetles, flowers, monkeys, and b.u.t.terflies to which it was already attached by many learned societies had led him to bequeath Harold to humanity? Was not his collection of humming birds enough?

"I'm really very glad that Edith is coming to Ambles," John murmured.

"Very glad indeed. It will serve Hilda right." He began to wonder if he actually disliked Hilda and to realize that he had never really forgiven her for refusing to be interested in his first published story. How well he remembered that occasion--twenty years ago almost to a day. It had been a dreary November in the time when London really did have fogs, and when the sense of his father's approaching death had added to the general gloom. James had been acting as his father's partner for more than a year and had already nearly ruined the practice by his inexperience and want of affability. George and himself were both in the city offices--George in wool, himself in dog-biscuits. George did not seem to mind the soul-destroying existence and was full of financial ambition; but himself had loathed it and cared for nothing but literature. How he had pleaded with that dry old father, whose cynical tormented face on its pillow smeared with cigar ash even now vividly haunted his memory; but the fierce old man had refused him the least temporary help and had actually chuckled with delight amidst all his pain at the thought of how his family would have to work for a living when he should mercifully be dead. Was it surprising, when that morning he had found at the office a communication from a syndicate of provincial papers to inform him of his story's being accepted, that he should have arrived home in the fog, full of hope and enthusiasm? And then he had been met with whispering voices and the news of his father's death. Of course he had been shocked and grieved, even disappointed that it was too late to announce his success to the old man; but he had not been able to resist telling Hilda, a gawky, pale-faced girl of eighteen, that his story had been taken. He could recall her expression in that befogged gaslight even now, her expression of utter lack of interest, faintly colored with surprise at his own bad taste. Then he had gone upstairs to see his mother, who was bathed in tears, though she had been warned at least six months ago that her husband might die at any moment.

He had ventured after a few formal words of sympathy to lighten the burden of her grief by taking the auspicious communication from his pocket, where it had been cracking nervously between his fingers, and reading it to her. He had been sure that she would be interested because she was a great reader of stories and must surely derive a grateful wonder from the contemplation of her own son as an author. But she was evidently too much overcome by the insistency of grief and by the prospect of monetary difficulties in the near future to grasp what he was telling her; it had struck him that she had actually never realized that the stories she enjoyed were written by men and women any more than it might have struck another person that advertis.e.m.e.nts were all written by human beings with their own histories of love and hate.

"You mustn't neglect your office work, Johnnie," was what she had said.

"We shall want every halfpenny now that Papa is gone. James does his best, but the patients were more used to Papa."

After these two rebuffs John had not felt inclined to break his good news to James, who would be sure to sneer, or to George, who would only laugh; so he had wandered upstairs to the old schoolroom, where he had found Edith sitting by a dull fire and dissuading little Hugh from throwing coals at the cat. As soon as he had told Edith what had happened she had made a hero of him, and ever afterwards treated him with admiration as well as affection. Had she not prophesied even that he would be another d.i.c.kens? That was something like sisterly love, and he had volunteered to read her the original rough copy, which, notwithstanding Hugh's whining interruptions, she had enjoyed as much as he had enjoyed it himself. Certainly Edith must come to Ambles; twenty years were not enough to obliterate the memory of that warm-hearted girl of fifteen and of her welcome praise.

But Hugh? What malign spirit had brought Hugh to his mind at a moment when he was already just faintly disturbed by the prospect of his relations' increasing demands upon his attention? Hugh was only twenty-seven now and much too conspicuously for his own good the youngest of the family; like all children that arrive unexpectedly after a long interval, he had seemed the pledge of his parents' renewed youth on the very threshold of old age, and had been spoiled, even by his cross-grained old father, in consequence: as for his mother, though it was out of her power to spoil him extravagantly with money, she gave him all that she did not spend on caps for herself. John determined to make inquiries about Hugh to-morrow. Not another penny should he have from him, not another farthing. If he could not live on what he earned in the office of Stephen Crutchley, who had accepted the young spendthrift out of regard for their lifelong friends.h.i.+p, if he could not become a decent, well-behaved architect, why, he could starve. Not another penny ... and the rest of his relations agreed with John on this point, for if to him Hugh was a skeleton in the family cupboard, to them he was a skeleton at the family feast.

John expelled from his mind all misgivings about Hugh, hoped it would be a fine day to-morrow so that he could really look round the garden and see what plants wanted ordering, tried to remember the name of an ornamental shrub recommended by Miss Hamilton, turned over on his side, and went to sleep.

CHAPTER IV

Early next morning John dreamed that he was buying calico in an immense shop and that in a dreamlike inconsequence the people there, customers and shopmen alike, were abruptly seized with a frenzy of destruction so violent that they began to tear up all the material upon which they could lay their hands; indeed, so loud was the noise of rent cloth that John woke up with the sound of it still in his ears. Gradually it was borne in upon a brain wrestling with actuality that the noise might have emanated from the direction of a small cas.e.m.e.nt in his bedroom looking eastward into the garden across a steep penthouse which ran down to within two feet of the ground. Although the noise had stopped some time before John had precisely located its whereabouts and really before he was perfectly convinced that he was awake, he jumped out of bed and hurried across the chilly boards to ascertain if after all it had only been a relic of his dream. No active cause was visible; but the moss, the stonecrop and the tiles upon the penthouse had been clawed from top to bottom as if by some mighty tropical cat, and John for a brief instant savored that elated perplexity which generally occurs to heroes in the opening paragraphs of a sensational novel.

"It's a very old house," he thought, hopefully, and began to grade his reason to a condition of sycophantic credulity. "And, of course, anything like a ghost at seven o'clock in the morning is rare--very rare. The evidence would be una.s.sailable...."

After toadying to the marvelous for a while, he sought a natural explanation of the phenomenon and honestly tried not to want it to prove inexplicable. The noise began again overhead; a fleeting object darkened the cas.e.m.e.nt like the swift pa.s.sage of a bird and struck the penthouse below; there was a slow grinding shriek, a clatter of broken tiles and leaden piping; a small figure stuck all over with feathers emerged from the herbaceous border and smiled up at him.

"Good heavens, my boy, what in creation are you trying to do?" John shouted, sternly.

"I'm learning to toboggan, Uncle John."

"But didn't I explain to you that tobogganing can only be carried out after a heavy snowfall?"

"Well, it hasn't snowed yet," Harold pointed out in an offended voice.

"Listen to me. If it snows for a month without stopping, you're never to toboggan down a roof. What's the good of having all those jolly hills at the back of the house if you don't use them?"

John spoke as if he had brought back the hills from America at the same time as he was supposed to have brought back the toboggan.

"There's a river, too," Harold observed.

"You can't toboggan down a river--unless, of course, it gets frozen over."

"I don't want to toboggan down the river, but if I had a Canadian canoe for the river I could wait for the snow quite easily."

John, after a brief vision of a canoe being towed across the Atlantic by the _Murmania_, felt that he was being subjected to the lawless exactions of a brigand, but could think of nothing more novel in the way of defiance than:

"Go away now and be a good boy."

"Can't I ..." Harold began.

"No, you can't. If those chickens' feathers...."

"They're pigeons' feathers," his nephew corrected him.

"If those feathers stuck in your hair are intended to convey an impression that you're a Red Indian chief, go and sit in your wigwam till breakfast and smoke the pipe of peace."

"Mother said I wasn't to smoke till I was twenty-one."

"Not literally, you young a.s.s. Why, good heavens, in my young days such an allusion to Mayne Reid would have been eagerly taken up by any boy."

Something was going wrong with this conversation, John felt, and he added, lamely:

"Anyway, go away now."

"But, Uncle John, I...."

"Don't Uncle John me. I don't feel like an uncle this morning. Suppose I'd been shaving when you started that fool's game. I might have cut my head off."

"But, Uncle John, I've left my spectacles on one of the chimneys. Mother said that whenever I was playing a rough game I was to take off my spectacles first."

"You'll have to do without your spectacles, that's all. The gardener will get them for you after breakfast. Anyway, a Red Indian chief in spectacles is unnatural."

"Well, I'm not a Red Indian any longer."

"You can't chop and change like that. You'll have to be a Red Indian now till after breakfast. Don't argue any more, because I'm standing here in bare feet. Go and do some weeding in the garden. You've pulled up all the plants on the roof."

"I can't read without my spectacles."