Part 3

“I never joke,” said Cousin Frederick with an acid expression that did much to confirm his statement. “Another cup of tea, if you please.”

“Here is Minnie,” cried Mrs. Tregaskis in tones of relief not wholly attributable to the appearance of Miss Blandflower.

“Here I am, last but not least,” agitatedly murmured the late-comer, while her hostess cordially embraced her, and presented Rosamund and Frances.

Miss Blandflower belonged to that numerous and mistaken class of person which supposes the art of witty conversation to lie in the frequent quotation of well-known tags and the humorously-intended mispronunciation of the more ordinary words in the English language.

She said, “Not lost, but gone before,” with a slightly nervous laugh, when Bertha deplored her lateness for tea, and explained that this was due to a mistaken impression that tea was to be at five o’clock. However, live and learn. And it was almost mechanically that she murmured, on being invited to eat saffron cake: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, well, perhaps I will----”

“Minnie,” said Mrs. Tregaskis, shaking a playfully admonishing finger at her, “how, now _how_, is the dairy? Have you been in once since I’ve been away?”

“Dear Mrs. Tregaskis, how can you? Of course I have. I’ve tried to see to everything, though of course no one could take your place. I needn’t tell you that.”

“Rubbish, my dear, rubbish. How’s the new dairy-maid? I was very vexed at having to leave without settling her, I must confess. Will she do?”

“‘I doubt it, said the carpenter,’” returned Minnie, shaking her head.

Her voice never gave any hint of inverted commas, and Frances looked at her with large, surprised eyes.

Miss Blandflower was thin and sandy, with eyeglasses, and might have been of any age between thirty-four and forty. She several times glanced affectionately at Mrs. Tregaskis, and said, “A sight for sore eyes, as they say,” and then flung a nervous look at Frederick, who remained silent.

After tea Rosamund and Frances were shown the garden, where Cousin Bertha had turned a piece of rough ground into a tennis court, and made a herbaceous border and two rockeries, and the stables, where Cousin Bertha proposed personally to conduct the clipping of the mare Jenny, on the morrow, and where she slapped Jenny’s hind-quarters with a heartiness that violently disconcerted both children, unused to animals of any description.

They were also taken over the little dairy, where Cousin Bertha superintended the making of cheese and butter and cream which, she assured them, to their utter bewilderment, “paid,” and where she also weekly instructed a class of girls from the neighbouring farms. They were shown the chickens, bred and kept and fed, and, Frances supposed in her utter ignorance of the expert language employed by her cousin, doubtless hatched by Cousin Bertha, and the little orchard where Cousin Bertha had planted a variety of small apple-trees, most of which she indicated by name.

Hazel came with them, and gazed compassionately at the obviously bewildered pair.

“Haven’t you got a dairy and chickens and a horse at your home?” she asked Rosamund, who replied darkly:

“No. We don’t understand about those sort of things. We had books and a garden, and two cats with kittens, at home.”

“Well, _this_ home will give you something new!” declared her guardian with undiminished brightness, although Rosamund’s tone had been far indeed from expressing enthusiasm for “those sort of things.”

“We had a most beautiful piano,” said Frances to Hazel. “It was so good that it was called the Grand Piano, and nobody ever touched it except----”

She stopped and coloured.

Hazel nodded her head quickly.

“Except your mummy, I expect,” she said calmly, and gave Frances’ hand a little squeeze.

Rosamund heard and saw her, and from thence onward she liked Hazel Tregaskis.

Cousin Bertha said:

“Well, we’ve got a piano here, and you shall hear it presently. I expect you’re fond of music, aren’t you?”

There was a silence before Frances timidly replied “Yes,” as in duty bound. She liked tunes very much herself, and she knew that Rosamund never would talk about music, and that mother had said she had no ear. But Cousin Bertha evidently expected “yes” for an answer, and Frances unconsciously felt that Cousin Bertha was one of those persons who would always receive just exactly that answer which they expect to receive.

When it grew dark they went indoors, and into the drawing-room. There was some furniture, which Cousin Bertha, who knew a great deal about furniture, said was old and very good, and an upright piano.

“Would you like me to play to you?” said Cousin Bertha. “Hazel always comes to the drawing-room for an hour before she has her supper, and we enjoy ourselves. There’ll be lots more games we can play now you two have come. But I dare say you’d rather just have a little music, to-night.”

Rosamund, the unmusical, shook her head dumbly and almost imperceptibly. But Frances, still with that hypnotic sense of having to reply whatever Cousin Bertha expected her to reply, said: “Yes, if you please.”

So Mrs. Tregaskis sat down at the piano and played without any music in front of her, some very gay and spirited tunes, and sometimes she sang in a strong, ringing voice, and called to Hazel to join in the chorus.

Rosamund and Frances sat in the shadow and held one another’s hands.

Presently Hazel joined them and said very low indeed:

“Do you like it?”

“It is very kind of Cousin Bertha,” gravely returned Rosamund.

“I don’t much like it when mother plays. I would rather play myself,” said Hazel. “There’s a person at Porthlew called Mrs. Severing who plays beautifully. She has published a lot of music--songs and things.”

“Shall we ever see her?” asked Frances.

“Oh yes, she often comes here. She is mother’s greatest friend. We’ll make her play really nice things.”

“Don’t you like Cousin Bertha’s things that she plays? I do,” said Frances, rather shocked.

“Rosamund doesn’t,” shrewdly returned Hazel. But Rosamund remained silent, partly from courtesy, and partly because she knew that she would not be able to keep the tumult of misery that was choking her out of her voice.

The memory of Wye Valley days, already remote, was gripping her unendurably. Her emotions, infinitely stronger than her undeveloped personality, were always strung to breaking pitch at the appeal made to them by music. For although it was true that she had very little ear, and that her fingers were devoid of all skill, the Slavonic tradition and the Slavonic passion were in her blood, and to such as these, music is a doorway better left secure.

When Mrs. Tregaskis had reiterated several times in rousing tones that here was a health unto His Majesty, with a Fal-lal-lal-lal lah la, Hazel said:

“Please, will you play the one I like out of that book?”

“I thought you liked them all,” her parent replied, not without a hint of amused resentment. “Which do you mean?”

“King Charles.”

“Oh! ‘Farewell Manchester.’ Very well, darling, and then you must pop off upstairs.”

The song she played was much slower and quieter than the others, and she did not sing it. Neither Rosamund nor Frances had ever heard it before, but the infinite sadness of the simple melody made its instant appeal to a sensitiveness which was singularly developed in both.

Frances cried a little quite silently with her face pressed against her sister’s arm, and Rosamund clenched her hands together and set her teeth.

When Mrs. Tregaskis closed the piano and came towards them, Rosamund said: “Thank you very much, Cousin Bertha.”

It seemed to her that she had been saying just that, again and again, for days.

“Call me ‘Cousin Bertie,’ darling. I declare I shall fine the next person who says that dreadful ‘Cousin Bertha.’ Such a prim, horrid name, I always think. Besides, I only know myself as Bertie. Do you know the people down here still call me Miss Bertie. Don’t they, Hazel?”

Rosamund did know. She had heard Mrs. Tregaskis say so already.

She went drearily up to the schoolroom supper, where Miss Blandflower was waiting for them.

“I hope you’ve brought good appetites with you from Wales,” she said, taking her place at the head of the table. “I see I must ‘_wrastle_’ with this large ham-bone.”

She did so, in the ineffectual manner that was characteristic of her.

“Shall I cut the bread, Miss Blandflower?” asked Hazel.

“Please, dear, if you will do,” replied her teacher of English.

The meal was a silent one.

Little Frances was fighting bravely with tears and fatigue, and Rosamund’s thoughts were in the Wye Valley, where lights were beginning to tremble in the cottage windows, and only the little house on the slope of the hill would remain dark and silent. Hazel looked at them from time to time with a sort of compassion in her great laughing eyes, but was more engaged in a kind of silent drama conducted between her knife and her silver mug, with which she nightly diversified the monotony of meals eaten in Miss Blandflower’s company.

When presently she upset the mug half-full of milk, Minnie rose, rebuked her pupil querulously, murmured something which sounded like “Well, Allah gear cum allah gear, as they say,” applied her table-napkin to the widening pool, and the meal came to an end.

Interminable though the day had seemed, it was finished at last, and Rosamund and Frances were lying in the pretty bedroom which they were to share.

“I think Hazel is going to be nice,” whispered Frances wistfully.

“Yes, so do I. But I wish we had stayed with Lady Argent and the son who was lame.”

“Oh! so do I!”

“Nearly asleep, my darlings?” inquired Cousin Bertha at the door. “I’ve just run up to say good-night. I always tuck Hazel up, and now I must do the same to my two new little daughters.”

“Rosamund,” said Frances in a guilty whisper, when Mrs. Tregaskis had rustled softly away again, “perhaps we oughtn’t to have wished that, about having stayed with Lady Argent. Cousin Bertie is very, very kind, isn’t she?”

If an unconscious appeal for reassurance underlay the question, neither Frances nor Rosamund was aware of it.

“Yes,” answered Rosamund, with shamed conviction; “she is very, very kind.”

Kind Mrs. Tregaskis was already hastening downstairs again. In the lamp-lit library her husband was reading the newspaper. He did not stir as she came in to the room, nor raise his eyes.

“Well!” sighed Bertha, as she moved to her writing-table, stacked with papers in orderly pigeon-holes and bearing a goodly pile of unopened letters. “How dreadfully work accumulates, even during a week. Here are all those leaflets for the Mothers’ Union that ought to have gone out last week. Minnie really is a fool. And she forwarded all the wrong letters to me, too, and none of the right ones. I must answer half these to-night.”

She sat down, and drew paper and ink towards her.

At the first sound which indicated that her pen was fairly started, Frederick put down his newspaper and spoke.

“Well Bertha, as you have had your way in the matter of bringing these children home with you, I suppose we had better come to an understanding on the subject.”

He invariably called his wife Bertha.

“No, dear, not to-night,” said Mrs. Tregaskis with pseudo-firmness. “I have to deal with all these letters.”

Frederick, who knew his wife, remained silent.

In a moment she resumed with spirit:

“Besides, what is there to discuss? I wrote to you when poor Rose Grantham died and said that I wanted to take her children, and give them a home. The alternative was either a cheap school, or the raking up of some third-rate foreign relation who might have been paid to look after them. I told you that it seemed to be--how shall I put it?--plus fort que moi--the impulse simply to take and--and love them.”

“I do not like impulses,” said Frederick coldly, “but you do not often--I might almost say ever--act on impulse, Bertha.”

She laughed angrily. “I’m very glad to hear you say so, since I’m always trying to learn caution, but as a matter of fact you are utterly mistaken, as you very often are where I am concerned. I’ve been exceedingly impetuous all my life, and I haven’t outgrown it yet. Of course I know very well that only an impetuous woman would have suggested adopting two children like that--but, upon my word, I’d rather trust to my love of children and take my risks.”

She drew up her fine figure as she spoke.

“Your risks, in this case, may safely be reckoned as non-existent. On your own showing, Dick Grantham’s money will bring in about three hundred a year to each of his children until it passes into their own control. To feed and clothe them meanwhile will cost perhaps a hundred a year each, and leave a handsome margin for educational and other expenses. There is no question of risk.”

“My dear man, I’ve been into the business part of it from end to end and understand it perfectly--a great deal better than you do, in all probability. That’s not the point. There are other risks than monetary ones. Good Heavens! if _that_ was all one thought of!”

“Do you mean risks to the children themselves?”

“You know very well that I don’t. Little sheltered happy things, what risks do they run, I should like to know? But the responsibility is a big one for me--two more to love and guard and teach, and turn into honest, healthy, happy young women.”

“The constant society of Miss Blandflower is hardly likely to do that.”

“Poor Minnie! Why do you hate her?”

“I don’t. But she is neither honest nor healthy nor happy, and I therefore fail to see why you should expect her to make her pupils so.”

“She is perfectly honest, Frederick. If she isn’t healthy, it’s because she won’t take enough exercise, and that whining voice doesn’t mean that she isn’t happy. It’s only affectation.”

“If she’s affected she isn’t honest,” remarked Frederick, scoring a point. “However, leave Miss Blandflower out of it. I’m talking of the Grantham children. Why don’t you send them to school?”

“Because,” said Bertha, her eyes blazing, “they are two motherless children, and no woman with a heart worth the name would have them anywhere but under her own wing. My heart is big enough to take in three children, thank God--yes, and as many more as may need me.”

Quoth Frederick, utterly unmoved:

“They would be happier at school.”

“They would be miserable there. Two spoilt, uneducated, delicate children. They’d be hopelessly out of their element.”

“Not so much so as they will be here.”

Bertha Tregaskis, her face suffused with agitation, began to pace up and down the room.

“Of course, if you won’t keep them, you won’t. But I don’t pretend to see your point of view.”

“You oughtn’t to have the responsibility.”

“If you’re thinking of all I have to do,” she returned in softened tones, “I’ll manage somehow. It’s better to wear out than to rust out, and it’s little enough one can do. But as long as there’s life in me, my motto will always be the old one: ‘Lend a hand.’”

“That is precisely where I anticipate danger.”

“What danger?” she demanded sharply.

“Danger to Rosamund and Frances Grantham,” said Frederick acidly, turning out his reading lamp.

Bertha Tregaskis remained long in the library after he had gone upstairs. She knew that her husband’s opposition would find no further expression in words, and that her authority with the children would remain undisputed.

With a sigh she turned to the papers on her desk, and wrote steadily for nearly two hours, directing, encouraging, organizing, and again advising. Finally she spent some fifteen minutes on a letter to Lady Argent, of which the final page may be quoted:

“So you see, Sybil, my dear, it’s not going to be quite all plain sailing. But then one never expected that, and the privilege of _giving_ is so great that one doesn’t count the cost. After all, in all this sad old earth, the one and only thing that counts is Love, and the realest, most sacred form of it, when all’s said and done, is that of a mother for her children. Most of us find that out too late, but I don’t mean my bairns to if I can help it!

“Good-night, my dear, it’s close on twelve and I’m dead to the world. Just one look at my _three_, and then to bed.”

IV

“Well, Nina, you see I’ve trebled my responsibilities,” observed Mrs. Tregaskis to her greatest friend.

The greatest friend leant back in her chair and looked exquisitely sympathetic.

“I _know_,” she murmured, in tones which prevented the words from sounding too blatantly non-committal.

“You may say that I had my hands fairly full already, one way and another,” said Bertha, who was frequently obliged to resort to this oblique method of dragging to light Nina Severing’s opinion, in order to set it right. “But one simply couldn’t help it. Those poor little things orphaned, and with no alternative but a cheap school. I must own I acted on impulse--which I’m rather apt to do, I’m afraid, though I deplore the tendency--but somehow one hasn’t quite outgrown one’s youthful impetuosity----”

“Oh,” said Nina Severing with widely open childlike eyes; “but indeed I _quite_ think you’ve left all that behind, Bertie dear. I always envy your wonderful clear-headed prudence and far-seeing ways. I’m sure you’re quite the last person to be carried away by an impulse--so unlike my silly self, as I always say! But then I was left to be my own guide and mistress so very young--a child. Looking back, I could sometimes almost cry at the thought of that pitiful little figure--a child of twenty, with nothing left but another child to take care of, a memory--and--a star.”

Bertha knew of old her friend’s passion for analogy, more poetical than exact, and had no intention of inquiring into the antecedents of the star. Besides, she was well aware that Nina Severing was a musician, and had no difficulty in connecting the astral body in question with the composition of several extremely popular drawing-room songs.

She said: “I simply took those two and told them----”

“Not a seventh sound, but a star,” Nina quoted penetratingly, immovably determined that her allusion should be made perfectly clear.

Bertie, seeing that the star was not to be ignored, disposed of it by a hurried but sufficiently intense-sounding “Ah--one knows what music means----” She might have added “to you,” but for Nina’s gentle movement of acquiescence, unmistakably claiming and sheltering all music as her own.

“Well, darling, I simply wrote straight to Frederick and asked if we _could_ do anything else than take those two little solitary things home. Of course it isn’t an actual expense, because that wouldn’t be fair to one’s own belongings--they’ve got quite enough to make it possible. But the other things are what matter, after all.”

“Alas! who knows that better than I do?” sighed Nina, a widow, and a rich woman.

Mrs. Tregaskis, a poor one, instantly observed, “Not that it doesn’t imply a good many actual material little sacrifices, which perhaps may pinch here and there--but who would think twice about that? When people tell me that I’m an improvident woman, I never can help thinking of the dear old French saying: ‘Chaque enfant apporte son pain sous le bras.’”

To which Nina, who spoke no French, promptly retorted with much presence of mind:

“Dicunt. Quod dicunt? Dicant! That has been my answer for years to people who can’t mind their own business.”

The classical nature of this _riposte_ left her so content that she was able to ask with affectionate interest:

“And do tell me how it all works? Of course they appeal to me, if only as the children of an intensely musical mother. I heard her play once, I remember--oh, ages ago--when I was in London. Rather a striking-looking woman, and the eldest girl reminded me of her at once. It somehow gave me a little pang--it seemed to bring back that concert, years ago when Geoffrey and I were together.”

Bertha was too familiar with the singular power that the most unlikely incidents possessed of recalling Nina’s happier hours to accord more than a passing acknowledgment towards this tender tribute to the past.

“My poor dear,” she murmured rapidly. “Rosamund is like her mother, but she reminds me of poor Dick Grantham too. My cousin, you know; we were almost brought up together.”

Her sigh was perhaps intended to remind Nina that she held no monopoly of lost relatives. “They seem dear children, and very easy to understand, though really I always think that to understand children is a sort of God-given knack, which one is simply lucky enough to possess.”

“One” does not sound particularly egotistical, and conveys “I” quite successfully to a practised listener.

“They’re very backward about lessons, poor little things; and just imagine! neither of them has ever held a needle or been taught to keep accounts! Why, at ten years old I remember making my own pinafores and darning the boys’ socks!”

“Ah well, you’ll teach them all that kind of thing too beautifully--_so_ useful and necessary,” declared Nina negligently, “though I’m afraid I’ve rather a sneaking sympathy for unpractical, helpless creatures like myself. Poor Geoffrey used to tell me that I was too ornamental to be really useful. One can say it at this distance of time, without being thought vain by the unimaginative.”

Having thus skilfully precluded the possibility of Bertha’s attributing her innocent anecdote to vanity, Nina added tenderly:

“You’re so wonderful about clever, practical things, I know. You and I, I always think, Bertie dear, are like Martha and Mary--you know--the two types of active and contemplative, as it were.”

Bertie had heard this Scriptural parallel before, and was not in love with it.

“Oh, one has one’s hours for dreaming, of course,” she replied lightly, but with a distinct frigidity. “But with a husband and house, and those three children, I simply _must_ put my shoulder to the wheel.”

“Yes, indeed. I always wish I had your sense of responsibility. I’m afraid I’m dreadfully apt to feel that my little songs are all the work I’m meant to do, having once given a son to the nation,” sighed Nina, who was aware that her friend had always regretted Hazel’s sex.

“How _is_ Morris? Does he ever write?” was the subtle rejoinder of Mrs. Tregaskis, uttered in markedly sympathetic tones.

Morris Severing, aged seventeen, and his mother each frequently told their numerous friends in confidence that they did not understand one another. This was untrue--they only understood one another too well.

“My poor Morris!” sighed Nina. “He will see things so differently later on. Oh the _blindness_ of youth, Bertie! It makes one’s heart ache sometimes. When I think of the stores of sad, sad, unavailing memories that my poor wayward, foolish boy is laying up for himself, when it is all too late!”

A certain complacency might have been detected in these heartrending glimpses into the future.

But Mrs. Tregaskis said consolingly: “He will learn, Nina. After all, he _is_ so young--only a boy at Eton, for all his ridiculous airs.”

“He looks a man already. No one will ever believe I am the mother of that great tall creature--it’s simply too absurd. I always think that’s the penalty we poor fair-haired people have to pay.”

Nina Severing’s wavy hair was pale gold, barely flecked with grey, and her enormous eyes had up-curling golden lashes.