CHAPTER VIII
THE MIDDLE OF THE STAIRCASE
Mallow Court, the Seymours' country home, lay not a mile from the village of St. Wennys. A low, two-storied house of creeper-clad stone, it stood perched upon the cliffs, overlooking the wild sea which beats up against the Cornish coast.
The house itself had been built in a quaint, three-sided fashion, the central portion and the two wings which flanked it rectangularly serving to enclose a sunk lawn round which ran a wide, flagged path. A low, grey stone wall, facing the sea, fenced the fourth side of the square, at one end of which a gate gave egress on to the sea-bitten grassy slope that led to the edge of the cliff itself.
A grove of trees half-girdled the house, and this, together with the sheltering upward trend of the downs on one side of it, tempered the violence of the fierce winds which sometimes swept the coast-line even in summer.
Behind the house, under the lee of the rising upland, lay the gardens of Mallow, witness to the loving care of generations. Stretches of lawn, coolly green and shaven, sloped away from a terrace which ran the whole length of the house, meeting the gravelled drive as it curved past the house-door. Beyond lay dim sweet alleys, over-arched by trees, and below, where a sudden dip in the configuration of the land admitted of it, were grassy terraces, gay with beds of flowers, linked together by short flights of grass-grown steps.
"I can't understand why you spend so much time in stuffy old London,
Kitty, when you have this heavenly place to come to."
Nan spoke from a nest of half-a-dozen cushions heaped together beneath the shade of a tree. Here she was lounging luxuriously, smoking innumerable Turkish cigarettes, while Kitty swung tranquilly in a hammock close by. Penelope had been invisible since lunch time. They had all been down at Mallow the better part of a month, and she and Ralph Fenton quite frequently absented themselves, "hovering," as Barry explained, "on the verge of an engagement."
"My dear, the longer I stay in town, the more thoroughly I enjoy the country when we come here. I get the quintessence of enjoyment by treating Mallow as a liqueur."
Nan laughed. There was a faint flavour of bitterness in her laughter.
"Practically most of our good times in this world are only to be obtained in the liqueur form. The gods don't make a habit of offering you a big jug of enjoyment."
"If they did, you'd be certain to refuse it because you didn't like the shape of the jug!" retorted Kitty.
Nan smiled whole-heartedly.
"What a miserable, carping, discontented creature I must be!"
"I'll swear that's not true!" An emphatic masculine voice intervened, and round the corner of the clump of trees beneath which the two girls had taken refuge, swung a man's tall, well-setup figure clad in knickerbockers and a Norfolk coat.
"Good gracious, Roger, how you made me jump!" And Kitty hurriedly lowered a pair of smartly-shod feet which had been occupying a somewhat elevated position in the hammock.
"I'm sorry. How d'you do, Kit? And how are you, Miss Davenant?" answered the new-comer.
The alteration in his voice as he addressed Nan was quite perceptible to anyone well-versed in the symptoms of the state of being in love, and his piercing light-grey eyes beneath their shaggy, sunburnt brows—fierce, far-visioned eyes that reminded one of the eyes of a hawk—softened amazingly as they rested upon her charming face.
"Oh, we're quite all right, thanks," she answered. "That is, when people don't drop suddenly from the clouds and galvanise us into action this warm weather."
She regarded him with a faintly quizzical smile. He was not particularly attractive in appearance, though tall and well-built. About forty-two, a typical English sportsman of the out-door, cold-tub-in-the-morning genus, he had a square-jawed, rather ugly face, roofed with a crop of brown hair a trifle sunburnt at its tips as a consequence of long days spent in the open. His mouth indicated a certain amount of self-will, the inborn imperiousness of a man who has met with obedient services as a matter of course, and whose forebears, from one generation to another, have always been masters of men. And, it might be added, masters of their women-kind as well, in the good, old-fashioned way. There was, too, more than a hint of obstinacy and temper in the long, rather projecting chin and dominant nose.
But the smile he bestowed on Nan when he answered her redeemed the ugliness of his face considerably. It was the smile of a man who could be both kindly and generous where his prejudices were not involved, who might even be capable of something rather big if occasion warranted it.
"It was too bad of me to startle you like that," he acknowledged. "Please forgive me. I caught sight of you both through the trees and declared myself rather too suddenly."
"Always a mistake," commented Nan, nodding wisely.
Roger Trenby regarded her doubtfully. She was extraordinarily attractive, this slim young woman from London who was staying at Mallow, but she not infrequently gave utterances to remarks which, although apparently straight-forward enough, yet filled him with a vague, uneasy feeling that they held some undercurrent of significance which had eluded him.
He skirted the quicksand hastily, and turned the conversation to a subject where be felt himself on sure ground.
"I've been exercising hounds to-day."
Trenby was Master of the Trevithick Foxhounds, and had the reputation of being one of the finest huntsmen in the county, and his heart and his pluck and a great deal of his money went to the preserving of it.
"Oh," cried Nan warmly, "why didn't you bring them round by Mallow before you went back to the kennels?"
"We didn't come coastward at all," he replied. "I never thought of your caring to see them."
Nan was not in the least a sportswoman by nature, though she had hunted as a child—albeit much against her will—to satisfy the whim of a father who had been a dare-devil rider across country and had found his joy in life—and finally his death—in the hunting field he had loved. But she was a lover of animals, like most people of artistic temperament, and her reply was enthusiastic.
"Of course I'd like to have seen them!"
Roger's face brightened.
"Then will you let me show you the kennels one day? I could motor over for you and bring you back afterwards."
Nan nodded up at him.
"I'd like to come very much. When shall we do it?"
Kitty stirred idly in her hammock.
"You've let yourself in for it now, Roger," she remarked. "Nan is the most impatient person alive."
Once more Nan looked up, with lazy "blue violet" eyes whose seductive sweetness sent an unaccustomed thrill down Roger's spine. She was so different, this slender bit of womanhood with her dusky hair and petal skin, from the sturdy, thick-booted, sporting type of girl to which he was accustomed. For Roger Trenby very rarely left his ancestral acres to essay the possibilities of the great outer world, and his knowledge of women had been hitherto chiefly gleaned from the comely—if somewhat stolid—damsels of the countryside, with whom he had shot and fished and hunted since the days of his boyhood.
"Don't be alarmed by what Kitty tells you, Mr. Trenby," Nan smiled gently as she spoke and Roger found himself delightedly watching the adorable way her lips curled up at the corners and the faint dimple which came and went. "She considers it a duty to pick holes in poor me—good for my morals, you know."
"It must be a somewhat difficult occupation," he returned, bowing awkwardly.
Into Nan's mind flashed the recollection of a supple, expressive, un-English bow, and of a deftness of phrase compared with which Trenby's laboured compliment savoured of the elephantine. Swiftly she dismissed the memory, irritably chasing it from her mind, for was it not five long, black, incomprehensible weeks since Peter had vanished from her ken? From the day of the bridge-party at the Edenhall flat, she had neither seen nor heard from him, and during those five silent weeks she had come to recognise the fact that Peter meant much more to her than merely a friend, just as he himself had realised that she was the one woman in the world for him. And between them, now and always, stood Celia, the woman in possession.
"Well, then, what about Thursday next for going over to the kennels?
Are you disengaged?"
Trenby's voice broke suddenly across her reverie. She threw him a brilliant smile.
"Yes. Thursday would do very well."
"Agreed, then. I'll call for you at half-past ten," said Trenby. "Well"—rising reluctantly to his feet—"I must be moving on now. I have to go over one of my off-farms before dinner, so I'll say good-bye."
He lifted his cap and strode away, Nan watching his broad-shouldered well-knit figure with reflective eyes, the while irrepressible little gurgles and explosions of mirth emanated from the hammock.
At last Nan burst out irritably:
"What on earth are you giggling about, Kitty?"
"At the lion endeavouring to lie down with the lamb," submitted Kitty meekly.
"Don't talk in parables."
"It's a very easy one to interpret"—Kitty succumbed once more to a gale of laughter. "It was just too delicious to watch you and Roger together! You'd much better leave him alone, my dear, and play with the dolls you're used to."
"How detestable you are, Kitty. I promise you one thing—it's going to be much worse for the lion than the lamb."
Mrs. Barry Seymour sat up suddenly, the laughter dying out of her eyes.
"Nan," she admonished, "you leave Roger alone. He's as Nature made him and not fair game for such as you. Leave him to some simple country maiden—Edna Langdon, for instance, who rides straight to hounds and whose broad acres—or what will be her broad acres when Papa Langdon is gathered—'march' with his."
"Surely I can out-general her?"—impertinently.
"Out-general her? Of course you can. But that's just what you mustn't do. I won't allow you to play with Roger. He's too good a sort—even if he is a bit heavy in hand."
"I agree. He's quite a good sort. But he needs educating. . . . And perhaps I'm not going to 'play' with him."
"Not? Then what . . . Nan, you never mean to suggest that you're in earnest?"
Nan regarded her consideringly.
"And why not, pray? Isn't he well-seeming? Hasn't he broad acres of his own? Do I not find favour in his eyes? . . . Surely the last four weeks have shown you that much?"
Kitty made a small grimace.
"They certainly have. But seriously, this is all nonsense, Nan. You and Roger Trenby are about as unsuited to each other as any man and woman could possibly be. In addition to which he has the temper of a fiend when roused—and you'd be sure to rouse him! You know a dozen men more suitable!"
"Do I? It seems to me I'm particularly destitute of men friends just now, either 'suitable' or otherwise. They've been giving me the cold shoulder lately with commendable frequency. So why not the M.F.H. and his acres?"
Kitty detected the bitter, hurt note in her voice, and privately congratulated herself on a letter she had posted only the previous evening telling Peter that everything was obviously over between Nan and Maryon Rooke, as the latter had failed to put in an appearance at St. Wennys—and would he come down to Mallow Court? With Peter once more at hand, she felt sure he would be able to charm Nan's bitterness away and even prevent her, in some magical way of his own, from committing such a rash blunder as marriage with Trenby could not fail to be.
She had been feeling rather disturbed about Nan ever since they had come to Mallow. The Nan she knew, wayward, tantalising, yet always lovable, seemed to have disappeared, and instead here was this embittered, moody Nan, very surely filled with some wild notion of defying fate by marrying out of hand and so settling for ever the disappointments of the past—and whatever chances of happiness there might be waiting for her in the lap of destiny. Settling them in favour of one most final and lasting disappointment of them all—of that Kitty felt convinced.
"Nan, don't be a fool!" she insisted vehemently. "You'd be wretched if you married the wrong man—far, far more wretched in the future than you've ever been in the past. You'd only repent that last step once, and that would be—always!"
"My dear Kit, I've taken so many steps that I've repented! But when you're in the middle of a staircase you must inevitably continue taking steps—either up or down. And if I take this one, and repent it—well, at all events it will be the last step."
"Not necessarily," replied Kitty drily.
"Where are you wandering now?" gibed Nan. "Into the Divorce Courts—or the Thames? Surely you know me better than that! I value my creature comforts far too much to exploit either, I assure you. The Divorce Courts are muddy—and the Thames is wet."
Kitty was silent a moment, her heart torn by the bitterness in the girl's voice.
"You'd regret it, I know," she insisted gravely.
Nan rose from her cushions, swinging her hat in her hand.
"Always remembering that a prophet hath no honour in his own country," she commented curtly over her shoulder, and sauntered away towards the house, defiantly humming the air of a scandalous little French song as she went.
Kitty sank back into the hammock, lighting a cigarette to aid her meditations. Truly matters had gone very crookedly. Maryon Rooke had been the first cause of all the trouble. Then she herself had intervened to distract Nan's thoughts by asking Peter to be a pal to her. And the net result of it all was that Peter, irrevocably bound to another woman, had fallen in love with Nan, while the latter was philandering desperately with a totally unsuitable second string.
"Dreaming, Kitty?" said a voice, and looking up with the frown still wrinkling her pretty brows, she saw Lord St. John approaching.
"If I am, it must be a nightmare, I think!" she answered lugubriously.
The old man's kindly face took on a look of concern.
"Any nightmare that I can dispel, my dear?"
Kitty patted the fine-bred, wrinkled old hand that rested on the edge of the hammock.
"I know you love to play the fairy godfather to us all, but in this case I'm afraid you can't help. In fact, you've done all you could—made her free to choose."
"It's Nan, then?" he said quickly.
Kitty laughed rather mirthlessly.
"'M. Isn't it always Nan who is causing us anxiety one way or another?"
"And just now?"
"Haven't you guessed? I'm sure you have!"
St. John's lips twisted in a whimsical smile.
"I suppose you mean that six-foot-odd of bone and muscle from Trenby
Hall?"
"Of course I mean him! Just because she's miserable over that Rooke business and because Roger is as insistent as a man with that kind of chin always is, she'll be Mrs. Roger before we can stop her—and miserable ever after!"
"Isn't the picture a trifle overdrawn?" St. John pulled forward one of the garden chairs and sat down. "Trenby's a very decent fellow, I should imagine, and comes of good old stock."
"Oh, yes, he's all that." Kitty metaphorically tossed the whole pack of qualifications into the dustbin. "But he's got the devil's own temper when he's roused and he's filled to the brim with good old-fashioned notions about a man being master in his own house, et cetera. And no man will ever be master in his own house while Nan's in it—unless he breaks her."
St. John stirred restlessly.
"Things are a bit complicated sometimes, aren't they?" he said in a rather tired voice. "Still"—with an effort—"we must hope for the best. You've jumped far ahead of the actual state of affairs at present."
"Roger's tagging round after her from morning to night."
"He's not the first man to do that," submitted Lord. St. John, smiling, "Nan is—Nan, you know, and you mustn't assume too much from Roger's liking to be with her. I'm sure if I were one of her contemporary young men, I should 'tag round' just like the rest of 'em. So don't meet trouble half way."
"Optimist!" said Kitty.
"Oh, no." The disclaimer came quickly. "Philosopher."
"I can't be philosophical, unluckily."
"My dear, we have no choice. It isn't we who move the pieces in the game."
A silence followed. Then, as Kitty vaguely murmured something about tea, St. John helped her out of the hammock, and together they strolled towards the house. They found tea in progress on the square lawn facing the sea and every one foregathered there. Nan, apparently in wild spirits, was fooling inimitably, and she bestowed a small, malicious smile on Kitty as she and Lord St. John joined the group around the tea-table.
It was a glorious afternoon. The sea lay dappled with light and shade as the sun and vagrant breezes played with it, while for miles along the coast the great cliffs were wrapt in a soft, quivering haze so that the lines and curves of their vari-coloured strata, and the bleak, sheer menace of their height, as they overhung the blue water lapping on the sands below, were screened from view.
"There are some heavenly sandwiches here," announced Nan. "That is, if
Sandy has left any. Have you, Sandy?"
Sandy McBain grinned responsively. He was the somewhat surprising offspring of the union between Nan's Early Victorian aunt, Eliza, and a prosaic and entirely uninteresting Scotsman. Red-haired and freckled, with the high cheekbones of his Celtic forebears, he was a young man of undeniable ugliness, redeemed only by a pair of green eyes as kind and honest as a dog's, and by a voice of surprising charm and sweetness.
"Not many," he replied easily. "I gave you all the largest, anyway."
"Sandy says he hasn't left any," resumed Nan calmly.
"At least, only small ones. We mustn't blame him. What are they made of, Kitty? They'd beguile a fasting saint—let alone a material person like Sandy."
"Salmon paste and cress," replied Mrs. Seymour mildly.
"I bet any money its salmon and shrimp paste," declared Sandy. "And it's the vulgar shrimp which appeals."
He helped himself unostentatiously to another sandwich.
"Your eighth," commented Nan.
"It's the shrimpness of them," he murmured plaintively. "I can't help it."
"Well, draw the line somewhere," she returned. "If we're going to play duets after tea and you continue to absorb sandwiches at your present rate of consumption, you'll soon be incapable of detecting the inherent difference between a quaver and a semibreve."
"Then I shall count," said Sandy.
"No."
"Aloud," he added firmly.
"Sandy, you're a beast!"
"Not a bit. I believe I could compose a symphonic poem under the influence of salmon and shrimp sandwiches—if I had enough of them."
"You've had enough," retorted Nan promptly. "So come along and begin."
She swept him away to the big music-room, where a polished floor and an absence of draperies offered no hindrance to the tones of the beautiful Blüthner piano. Some of the party drifted in from the terrace outside as Sandy's long, boyish fingers began to move capably over the keys, extemporising delightfully.
"If he were only a little older," whispered Kitty to Lord St. John.
"Inveterate match-maker!" he whispered back.
Sandy pulled Nan down on to the music seat beside him.
"The Shrimp Symphony in A flat minor, arranged for four hands," he announced. "Come on, Nan. Time, seven-four—"
"Sandy, don't be ridiculous!"
"Why not seven-four?"—innocently. "You have five-four. Come along. One, two, three, four, five, six, sev'n; one, two, three, four, five—"
And the next moment the two were improvising a farcical duet that in its way was a masterpiece of ingenious musicianship. Thence they passed on to more serious music until finally Sandy was persuaded to produce his violin—he had two, one of which, as he was wont to remark, "lodged" at Mallow. With the help of Penelope and Ralph Fenton, the afternoon was whiled away until a low-toned gong, reverberating through the house was a warning that it was time to dress for dinner, brought the impromptu concert to an abrupt end.