“Though that is enough, in all conscience,” said Jill, counting cups. “Thirteen.” She paused in consternation. “Thirteen! There now, how unfortunate! That means I’ll have to have tea with the rest of you, when I wanted to do my ironing. If I don’t, one of you will die before the year is out. There now!”
“It is all right, Jill,” said Lucilla soothingly. “Mr. Weber is here. That makes fourteen.”
“Daddy says,” chimed in Caroline, “that there is nothing in these old superstitions.”
“Isn’t there, then?” said Jill darkly. “And I don’t feel happy even with fourteen, for the Reverend might be sent for to a sick bed.”
“Nonsense, Jill,” said Caroline strong-mindedly.
“I sympathise with you, Jill,” said Lucilla. “Count in Mary and Mouse. Put bowls for them, Caroline.”
Laughing, Caroline took from the china cupboard a pink bowl inscribed “Mary” and a green one bearing the legend “Drink, Puppy, Drink,” and put them beside the beautiful pale yellow Worcester cups and saucers. “Now everything’s all right. Grandmother, I like it when it’s just us—you and me and Jill. Everyone else is in the wood.”
“The General and the Reverend are in the garden,” said Jill, cutting bread-and-butter with the precision of a reaper cutting corn. She had been cutting bread-and-butter for children on and off for twenty years, and had evolved a technique all her own. Lucilla loved to watch her, though the rhythm combined with the warmth of the fire made her sleepy. Jill held the loaf against the bib of her white apron and cut towards it. The process looked most dangerous, but the knife never slipped. It swung out and back with perfect timing, and the slices of bread-and-butter fell to the plates on the table below in a constant even flow, thick for the children to the left, thin for the grown-ups to the right. She counted in a soft singsong as she cut, to the accompaniment of the ticking of the grandfather clock. Two each for the grown-ups, four each for the children. If they wanted more they couldn’t have it, for the fat ration wouldn’t stand it. Bread-and-jam for them after that. Jill still counted Ben and Tommy amongst the children, and would do when they were old and bald-headed, for she had been their nurse. “Forty-one, forty-two,” she counted. “That’s the lot. Her Ladyship is asleep again. Come along, Caroline; time those biscuits of yours came out of the oven.”
Caroline was looking out of the window that faced on the garden. Her father and her uncle were sitting together on a seat in the sun. George’s hat was tipped over his eyes, and Hilary’s mouth was slightly ajar.
“They’re asleep, too,” laughed Caroline. “The moment they sit down together they fall asleep. You’d think they’d have something to say to each other, wouldn’t you?”
“Not two brothers to each other at their time of life,” said Jill. “What should they say?”
Now she came to think of it, Caroline didn’t know. Being so old, they probably couldn’t think of anything to say to each other that they hadn’t said before. Yet they were happy together. One could see that by the way they were not minding if one of them woke up first and saw what the other looked like.
“They might as well not be there,” she said, turning her back on them and sitting down on the window-seat. “And we are alone together in The Herb of Grace.”
Jill smiled at her as she went into the inner kitchen, where the oven was, and rescued the biscuits. No use expecting any work from Caroline just for the moment, if she had been taken with one of her dreaming fits. She’d come to later and get on with it, for she was naturally domesticated and a good worker. Why the three of them alone in the house gave such pleasure to Caroline, Jill didn’t know and didn’t enquire. Girls had odd fancies when they were growing up, and it was best to take no notice.
Caroline folded her hands in her lap and was deeply happy. All was so well with her young and healthy body that she was not aware of it. Looking down for a moment, she was conscious only of the wide-spreading rose-pink skirts of a girl who had always lived and worked in this house, and loved it, and always would so live and work and love. And beyond the girl was an older woman in a white apron, and she, too, had always been here, loving the work that she did. And by the fire was the very old woman who did not work any more, but sat with her eyes shut and slept and prayed, but without whose past work and present prayer the other two would have been no good at all. The three of them, who were perhaps not three women at all but one woman getting older, were an inseparable part of The Herb of Grace, and stood there behind the hospitable spirit of the house whose arms spread wide in welcome.
For what is the welcome of the host if behind it there is not the labour of the women? Through the years the three women had lit the fires and spread the sheets, scrubbed the floors and washed the dishes, polished the furniture and baked the bread, tended the children and nursed the sick, comforted the sorrowful and prayed for them. Caroline could never understand how women could dislike looking after a house, especially an old house like this one. Did they never pause sometimes and sit quietly as she was sitting now, and remember the other women and feel their present toil a part of that past toil? A sort of freshness came when one did that, as though the work were a clean wind or a running river that lived forever to cleanse impurities away. For herself she asked nothing better in life than to stand always behind the master of the house and make it possible for him to welcome all who came.
The master of the house now was Daddy. Perhaps she would not have felt quite the same if he had not been Daddy for Caroline loved her father deeply. Her whole life at present circled about him. It was because this house was his that she loved and served it with such devotion. She had decided that she would never leave it until the hero of her other daydream, the magnificent young man who would one day love her to distraction, came to fetch her away to a house even lovelier than The Herb of Grace, where she would be what her mother was here, an adored wife and mother and a hostess of renown, and also what her mother was not, an incomparable housewife.
Though Caroline found it difficult to imagine a lovelier house than this one, or any room that she would love better than this kitchen-living-room. It was the private property of the family, and the guests seldom came to it. There were two kitchens at The Herb of Grace, the inner one where they cooked and washed up, and this one where they lived and ate. It was a beautiful room, stone-floored with white-washed walls. Besides the south window looking across the garden to the river, there was another looking on the stable yard, set open above the pots of geraniums on the sill, and through it came the cooing of doves. Oak beams crossed the ceiling, darkened by age to the same rich color as the big oak table and the dresser with its willow-patterned china. There were bright rugs on the floor and gay chintz curtains at the windows. Nearly all the year round there was a log fire burning on the wide hearth, with the settle set at right angles to it. Beside the hearth the bread-oven was set in the thickness of the wall, and the spit for roasting the meat was still there, and the hook for the kettle.
Jill had filled the kettle and was hanging it on its hook to boil as Caroline came back from her dream. The firelight lit up her pale plain face and her usually lustreless tow-colored hair. Jill at thirty-three was skinnier than ever, and had no beauty to commend her except her clear green eyes and the tender mouth above the strong chain. But her neatness and freshness gave her a sort of beauty. There was never a hair out of place on her small well-shaped head, and her flowered cotton dress and white apron always looked as though they had just come from the wash-tub and the iron; as indeed they generally had, for Jill adored washing and ironing, and was at it for Nadine, Caroline, the twins and herself every spare minute that she had. Caroline never thought of beauty in connection with Jill; she was just Jill, who had been nurse to them all and was now their mainspring at The Herb of Grace. It was difficult to imagine the house without Jill; indeed, it had never occurred to Caroline to try, for apart from the two daydreams of the three women and the
adoring husband, she was not imaginative. She loved beauty and she was creative, but her creativeness found its joy in the shaping of everyday life to a form of comeliness, so that it became not just something that one put up with, but something that was enjoyable and lovely in itself.
Caroline could never understand Ben’s impatience with everyday life, as though it were no more than a jumping-off place for something else. It was the something else that roused Caroline’s impatience because Ben could not seem to find it. He fell between two stools, and she thought he was the most tiresome and discontented young man she had ever come across. Just at present she liked Tommy better, for there was never anything vague about Tommy. He went bald-headed for what he wanted, and always had the sense to want what he could get. And the stuff of everyday life meant a good deal to him. He would have roared with derisive laughter if she had told him that making beds and baking cakes were activities that had for her beautiful shapes like flowers, but he snored in a well-made bed and devoured a well-made cake with equal pleasure and enthusiasm while Ben had no idea what he was eating and slept just as badly between smooth linen sheets as he would have done on a mattress on the floor.
To Caroline at present Tommy was certainly the more satisfactory of the two, though she confessed to herself with shame that she did not much care for either of them, nor for the beautiful gay and blatant twins, though they, too, did great justice to her cooking. She stood a little by herself in the middle of the family, looking neither to right nor left, but directly to her father at the centre. Of her mother with her cool clear beauty and her cool clear brain, she was a little afraid, though she admired her intensely and hungered for her love. If Nadine was disappointed in her eldest daughter she never showed it, but her gentle kisses and amused tenderness seemed to Caroline to come to her from some way off; while her father had only to touch her cheek with his hand to make her pulses leap as though his life as well as her own was flowing through her body. She felt very near to Grandmother, too, who with Jill and Aunt Margaret had loved her so much when she had been little and lived at Damerosehay and she was very fond of Uncle Hilary and Sally. Meg and Robin she adored, as she adored all children.
Of David, in spite of the hero-worship she felt for him, she was frankly terrified, as though in some way that she could not understand he constituted a threat to her happiness. Lucilla, seeing her admiration and her fear, could see that subconsciously she knew already that the vital spark that attracts men to women was not in her; she was not likely to marry and have the children she longed for. David just now was a symbol of the magnificent male who would never open the door of her woman’s paradise to her anywhere but in her dreams. Lucilla, awake now, but not opening her eyes, and deeply aware of Caroline and all her thoughts, thanked heaven that the child and her father were so infatuated with each other, for at least Caroline would have that much of a man’s love in her life. They had a fellow feeling, no doubt, for George had never had the vital spark either. He had married a beautiful wife, but until the last few years had never won from her more than affection and her wifely duty. Lucilla could only hope that Caroline was as slow in the uptake as dear old George, who had never even guessed the identity of the man who had set Nadine on fire as he had never been able to do. It was always better for the frustrated to be slow in the uptake, Lucilla thought. A certain amount of stupidity was nicely insulating.
Her heart ached over Caroline, who at eighteen had not yet discovered how many gaps there were in the personality that had been given her. She still walked in a dream world that endowed her with all the gifts and graces, and had never had a good look at herself, and found, to her misery and shame, that the attributes she most admired were the very ones that were missing. When that happened she would need to have someone there to tell her that it was not only what she had that was important to her, but what was missing; what she did about the gaps would play the larger part in the making or breaking of her soul. Lucilla was sure that there would be someone, for it was her belief that for the children of many prayers—and all her grandchildren were that—the vital moments are always taken care of.
“We don’t know what they are, of course,” she said, opening her eyes.
“Yes, Milady?” inquired Jill with loving but anxious concern, for really her ladyship did come out with such odd remarks at times that one feared her great age might be telling at last upon the clearness of her mind.
“The moments in life that matter most to us,” said Lucilla. “We think something very important—like getting jilted, for instance—and perhaps some little thing that we hardly notice, such as reading a particular paragraph in a book at a particular moment, or something someone says to us, matters much more.”
“Grandmother, how could anything matter more than getting jilted?” demanded Caroline. “Except, of course, getting married.”
“Getting married can be important,” agreed Lucilla. “But not getting married can be just as important, and very often a great deal pleasanter.”
“Didn’t you like being married, Grandmother?” asked Caroline.
“Not much,” confessed Lucilla with perfect truth. Then she smiled at her incredulous, almost outraged granddaughter. “But I like having grandchildren, darling. I have liked being a grandmother better than I have liked anything in my life.”
“Then that’s important,” persisted Caroline.
“No, darling, I don’t know that it is,” said Lucilla. “I remember I had an idea one day. I was sitting on the beach when I had it. Of course I can’t be certain, but I rather think it may have been more important to me than my grandchildren, dearly though I love them.”
“What was the idea, Milady?” asked Jill politely.
“Just at the moment I can’t recall it,” said Lucilla, and went to sleep again.
Jill and Caroline looked at each other.
“We have to remember,” said Jill gently, “that her ladyship is now ninety-one.”
“She looks lovely asleep, doesn’t she?” said Caroline, and they both regarded Lucilla with loving pride.
“Pretty as a picture,” agreed Jill. “She’s a wonder, that’s what she is.”
CHAPTER
9
— 1 —
What one dreads with the children,” said David, wrinkling his forehead, “is that at the most vital moments one will fail them.”
“Probably,” said Nadine serenely. “Really, David, the older you get the worse you worry.”
“Don’t you?” asked David
“Very little,” said Nadine.
“Not even about the children?” he asked.
“A little, of course—one must if one is a mother—but not more than I can help,” she said, eyeing his furrowed countenance. “I trust in Providence and cherish what remains of my looks. So should you, David. They matter in your profession. Have you ever considered your looks in connection with the children’s school bills?”
“I can always play Caliban,” said David bitterly. “I should play him well, too. I’d make a good Iago, a fine Shylock and a superb Angelo. I could play the whole bunch of the monsters and rather enjoy it. A nice change. Men have little pity for whited sepulchres, and quite rightly, but they do not always realize how bitter whitewash tastes in the mouth. Yes, I’d like to play Angelo.”
Nadine gave no sign of the slight dizziness that she felt. Angelo? She strolled on serenely, and wondered if she would be able to tackle this. How odd it was, she thought, that David, whom she had once loved with such passion that she would have consigned George and the children to the bottom of the sea if only she could have married him, had now become to her no more than the eldest and the best-loved of those children. Was that true? Yes, it was, for she loved him even more than her beloved Tommy. Nadine in her late middle age was assiduously cultivating truth as well as serenity, even when it shamed her. Yes, it was true. And the words “no more than” were true in t
hat context, too, for she was not naturally a maternal woman. When what she had of a maternal instinct was strongly called out it was seldom by her own children, whom she had borne to a man whom at the time of their birth she had not loved. She had never felt so motherly even towards Tommy as she had felt towards Annie-Laurie, the girl who had once lived at The Herb of Grace for a short while and had had great need of her, and as she now felt towards David.
How odd it was! she thought. When she had finally denied her selfish passion for him, setting him free to marry Sally, she had adopted the ruse of motherliness. She had made him feel himself relegated to the status of the twins in her love, and his hurt pride had done the rest. And yet now the ruse had become truth. That, she remembered, had always been Lucilla’s way. One worked from the outside in. One compelled feeling by action, slowly and laboriously by one act of self-denial after another, instead of allowing feeling to control action. Lucilla had done that, but she had never expected that she would do it, too. Yet she had. She felt a deep thankfulness, here in the depths of the wood where she had once died a sort of death, and received her soul made new like the soul of a child. And now her love was made new. She could walk with David in this wood made for lovers, of all sorts and kinds, and love him as the dearest of her children, and receive back from him again, even if he didn’t know it, the love of a son.
She looked at him strolling beside her, wretched and self-engrossed, and in spite of her concern for him she smiled. No, he didn’t know it, for he thought of her very little these days. But he told her things. He thought of Lucilla and Sally with a constant watchful tenderness, and spared them all that he could, but he did not spare her. Self-centred children never spare their mothers. For he was a self-centred child. Loving him as she did, she yet owned to herself that it was generally upon women that these self-engrossed men unloaded their troubles, for men are not particularly interested in each other’s woes. She did not believe that David had ever made any close friendships with men. It was a pity.