CHAPTER XIV
RELATIONS-IN-LAW
"I am very glad to meet you, my dear."
The frosty voice entirely failed to confirm the sense of the words as Lady Gertrude Trenby bent forward and imprinted a somewhat chilly kiss on Nan's cheek.
She was a tall woman, thin and aristocratic-looking, with a repressive manner that inspired her domestic staff with awe and her acquaintances with a nervous anxiety to placate her.
Nan shrank sensitively, and glanced upward to see if there were anything in her future mother-in-law's face which might serve to contradict the coldness of her greeting. But there was nothing. It was a stern, aquiline type of face, with a thin-lipped mouth and hard, obstinate chin, and the iron-grey hair, dressed in a high, stiff fashion, which suggested that no single hair would ever be allowed to stray from its lawful place, seemed to emphasise its severity.
The chilly welcome, then, was intentional—not the result of shyness or a natural awkwardness with strangers. Lady Gertrude was perfectly composed, and Nan felt an inward conviction that the news of Roger's engagement had not met with her approval. Perhaps she resented the idea of relinquishing the reins of government at Trenby Hall in favour of a daughter-in-law. It was quite possible, few mothers of sons who have retained their bachelorhood as long as Roger enjoy being relegated to the position of dowager. They have reigned too long to relish abdication.
As Nan replied conventionally to Lady Gertrude's greeting, some such thoughts as these flashed fugitively through her mind, and with them came a rather tender, girlish determination, to make the transition as easy as possible to the elder woman when the time came for it. The situation made a quick appeal to her eager sympathies. She could imagine so exactly how she herself would detest it if she were in the other woman's position. Somewhat absorbed in this line of thought, she followed her hostess into a stiff and formal-looking drawing-room which conveyed the same sense of frigidity as Lady Gertrude's welcome.
There are some rooms you seem to know and love almost the moment you enter them, while with others you feel that you will never get on terms of friendliness. Nan suddenly longed for the dear, comfortable intimacy of the panelled hall at Mallow, with its masses of freshly-cut flowers making a riot of colour against the dark oak background, its Persian rugs dimmed to a mellow richness by the passage of time, and the sweet, "homey" atmosphere of it all.
Behind her back she made a desperate little gesture to Roger that he should follow her, but he shook his head laughingly and went off in another direction, thinking in his unsubtle mind that this was just the occasion for his mother and his future wife to get well acquainted.
He felt sure that Nan's charm would soon overcome the various objections which Lady Gertrude had raised to the engagement when he had first confided his news to her. She had not minced matters.
"But, my dear Roger, from all I've heard, Nan Davenant is a most unsuitable woman to be your wife. For one thing, she is, I believe, a professional pianist." The thin lips seemed to grow still thinner as they propounded the indictment.
Most people, nowadays, would have laughed outright, but Roger, being altogether out of touch with the modern attitude towards such matters, regarded his mother's objection as quite a normal and reasonable one. It must be overcome in this particular instance, that was all.
"But, of course, Nan will give up everything of that kind when she's my wife," he asserted confidently. And quite believed it, since he had a touching faith in the idea that a woman can be "moulded" by her husband.
"Roger has rather taken me by surprise with the news of his engagement," said Lady Gertrude, after she and Nan had exchanged a few laboured platitudes. "Do you think you will be happy with him? We live a very simple country existence here, you know."
To Nan, the use of the word "we" sounded rather as though she were proposing to marry the family.
"Oh, I like country life very much," she replied. "After all, you can always vary the monotony by running up to town or going abroad, can't you?"
"I don't think Roger cares much for travelling about. He is extremely attached to his home. We have always made everything so easy and comfortable for him here, you see," responded Lady Gertrude, with a certain significance.
Nan surmised she was intended to gather that it would be her duty to make everything "so easy and comfortable" for him in the future! She almost smiled. Most of the married men she knew were kept busy seeing that everything was made easy and comfortable for their wives.
"Still," continued Lady Gertrude, "there could be no objection to your making an occasional trip to London."
She had a dry, decisive method of speech which gave one the impression she was well accustomed to laying down the law—and that her laws were expected to remain unbroken. The "occasional trip to London" sounded bleakly in Nan's ears. Still, she argued, Lady Gertrude would only be her mother-in-law—and she was sure she could "manage" Roger. There is a somewhat pathetic element in the way in which so many people light-heartedly enter into marriage, the man confident in his ability to "mould" his wife, the woman never doubting her power to "manage" him. It all seems quite simple during the adaptable period of engagement, when romance spreads a veil of glamour over the two people concerned, effectually concealing for the time being the wide gulf of temperament that lies between them. It is only after the knot has been tied that the unlooked-for difficulties of managing and moulding present themselves.
Nan found it increasingly difficult to sustain her side of the conversation with Lady Gertrude. The latter's old-fashioned views clashed violently with her own modern ones, and there seemed to be no mutual ground upon which they could meet. Like her son, Lady Gertrude clung blindly to the narrow outlook of a bygone period, and her ideas of matrimony were based strictly upon the English Marriage Service.
She had not realised that the Great War had created a different world from the one she had always known, and that women had earned their freedom as individuals by sharing the burden of the war side by side with men. Nor had Roger infused any fresh ideas into her mind on his return from serving in the Army. He had volunteered immediately war broke out, his sense of duty and loyalty to his country being as sturdy as his affection for every foot of her good brown earth he had inherited. But he was not an impressionable man, and when peace finally permitted him to return to his ancestral acres, he settled down again quite happily into the old routine at Trenby Hall.
So it was hardly surprising that Lady Gertrude had remained unchanged, expecting and requiring that the world should still run smoothly on—without even a side-slip!—in the same familiar groove as that to which she had always been accustomed. This being so, it was quite clear to her that Nan would require a considerable amount of tutelage before she was fit to be Roger's wife. And she was equally prepared to give it.
In some inexplicable manner her attitude of mind conveyed itself to Nan, and the latter was rebelliously conscious of the older woman's efforts to dominate her. It came as an inexpressible relief when at last their tête-à-tête was interrupted.
Through the closed door Nan could hear Roger's voice. He was evidently engaged in cheerful conversation with someone in the hall outside—a woman, from the light trill of laughter which came in response to some remark of his—and a moment later the door opened and Nan could see his head and shoulders towering above those of the woman who preceded him into the room.
"Isobel, my dear!"
For the first time since the beginning of their interview Nan heard Lady Gertrude's voice soften to a more human note. Turning to Nan she continued, still in the same affectionate tone of voice:
"This is my niece, Isobel Carson—though she is really more like a daughter to me."
"So it looks as though we shall be sisters!" put in the newcomer lightly. "Really"—with a quick, bird-like glance, that included everyone in the room—"our relationships will get rather mixed up, won't they?"
She held out a rather claw-like little hand for Nan to shake, and the unexpectedly tense and energetic grip of it was somewhat surprising. She was a small, dark creature with bright, restless brown eyes set in a somewhat sallow face—its sallowness the result of several husband-hunting years spent in India, where her father had held a post in the Indian Civil Service.
It was one of those rather incomprehensible happenings of life that she had been left still blooming on her virgin stem. It would have been difficult to guess her exact age. She owned to thirty-four, and a decade ago, when she had first joined her father in India, she must have possessed a certain elfish prettiness of her own. Now, thanks to those years spent under a tropical sun, she was a trifle faded and passée-looking.
Following upon the advent of Roger and his cousin the conversation became general for a few minutes, then Lady Gertrude drew her son towards a French window opening on to the garden—a garden immaculately laid out, with flower-beds breaking the expanse of lawn at just the correct intervals—and eventually she and Roger passed out of the room to discuss with immense seriousness the shortcomings of the gardener as exemplified in the shape of one of the geranium beds.
"You won't like it here!" observed Isobel Carson rather bluntly, when the two girls were left alone.
"Why shouldn't I?" Nan smiled.
"Because you won't fit in at all. You'll be like a rocket battering about in the middle of a set piece."
Isobel lacked neither brains nor observation, though she had been wise enough to conceal both these facts from Lady Gertrude.
"Don't you like it here, then?"
Isobel regarded her thoughtfully, as though speculating how far she dared be frank.
"Of course I like it. But it's Hobson's choice with me," she replied rather grimly. "When my father died I was left with very little money and no special training. Result—I spent a hateful year as nursery governess to a couple of detestable brats. Then Aunt Gertrude invited me here on a visit—and that visit has prolonged itself up till the present moment. She finds me very useful, you know," she added cynically.
"Yes, I suppose she does," answered Nan, with some embarrassment. She felt no particular desire to hear a resume of Miss Carson's past life. There was something in the girl which repelled her.
As though she sensed the other's distaste to the trend the conversation had taken, Miss Carson switched briskly off to something else, and by the time Lady Gertrude returned with Roger, suggesting that they should go in to lunch, Nan had forgotten that odd feeling of repulsion which Isobel had first aroused in her, and had come to regard her as "quite a nice little thing who had had rather a rotten time."
This was the impression Lady Gertrude's niece contrived to make on most people. It suited her very well and secured her many gifts and pleasures which would not otherwise have come her way. She had accepted her aunt's invitation to stay at Trenby Hall rather guardedly in the first instance, but when, as the visit drew towards its end, Lady Gertrude had proposed that she should make her home there altogether, she had jumped at the offer.
She speedily discovered that she and Trenby had many tastes in common, and with the sharp instinct of a woman who has tried hard to achieve a successful marriage and failed, there appeared to her no reason why in this instance "something should not come of it"—to use the time-honoured phrase which so delicately conveys so much. And but for the fact that Nan Davenant was staying at Mallow, something might have come of it! Since community of tastes is responsible for many a happy and contented marriage.
Throughout the time she had lived at Trenby Hall, Isobel had contrived to make herself almost indispensable to Roger. If a "damned button" flew off his coat, she was always at hand with needle and thread, and a quaint carved ivory thimble crowning one small finger, to sew it on again. Or should his dress tie decline to adorn his collar in precisely the proper manner, those nimble, claw-like little fingers could always produce a well-tied bow in next to no time. It was Isobel who found all the things which, manlike, he so constantly mislaid, who tramped over the fields with him, interesting herself in all the outdoor side of his life, and she was almost as good at landing a trout as he himself.
There seemed small likelihood of Roger's going far afield in search of a wife, so that Isobel had not apprehended much danger to her hopes—more especially as she had a shrewd idea that Lady Gertrude would look upon the marriage with the selfish approval of a woman who gains a daughter without losing the services of a niece who is "used to her ways."
Such a union need not even upset existing arrangements. Isobel had learned by long experience how to "get on" amicably with her autocratic relative, and the latter could remain—as her niece knew very well she would wish to remain at Trenby Hall, still nominally its chatelaine.
Lady Gertrude and Isobel had never been frequent visitors at Mallow, and it had so happened that neither they, nor Roger on the rare occasions when he was home on leave from the Front, had chanced to meet Nan Davenant during her former visits to Mallow Court.
Now that she had seen her, Isobel's ideas were altogether bouleversée. Never for a single instant would she have imagined that a woman of Nan's type—artistic, emotional, elusive—could attract a man like Roger Trenby. The fact remained, however, that Nan had succeeded where hitherto she herself had failed, and Isobel's dreams of a secure future had come tumbling about her ears. She realised bitterly that love is like quicksilver, running this way or that at its own sweet will—and rarely into the channel we have ordained for it.