A Sovereign Remedy Part 9

"It is most kind of you gentlemen to be up so early," said Myfanwy, dispensing her smiles impartially. "It is no use asking you, Mr.

Morris," she said, throwing a little flavouring of regret into her voice, "you are too busy and too good; but if Mr. Mervyn comes up to town I trust he will call on me."

Mervyn, whose front lock looked exactly as if it had just left a curling-pin's care, nodded at her approvingly.

"That would be jolly fun," he said. "I have to go up for an examination in September."

"Good-bye, then, till September. Good-bye, Alicia." As she kissed the latter she whispered, "That will be a guinea to your account for the hat."

"You said a pound," protested Alicia.

"That was for cash, child. And what is a shilling? But two sixpences; and you shall pay when you are married, see you."

CHAPTER V

Would anything stop those waves except a Cornish coast? thought Helen Tressilian, as she watched the green-blue, solid water slip over a half-sunk rock, and with unabated strength, send up against a higher shelving ma.s.s a forty-foot column of reckless spray.

And the sky was so blue, the sun so hot, bringing out all the aromatic odours of the cliff herbs. How sweet they were! It would almost be worth while to be a humble bee to work so busily among the purple thyme. She let some heads of it she had picked fall on her lap with a little listless gesture. Yes! to work instead of droning out the days.

To work as Herbert, the dead young husband of her dreams, had meant to work. It was seven years since she had lost him in Italy, whither they had gone on their honeymoon for his health. So he lay there dead through the breaking of a blood vessel; dead without a good-bye; dead under the blue sky amid the orange blossoms, while she, after her mother's death, kept house for her father, Sir Geoffrey Pentreath. And still on her roughest serge suits she wore the conventional muslin of widowhood round her throat and wrists.

And in her heart? In her heart she had set up such a fetich of bereavement that the idea of a second marriage was unthinkable. Yet it would have been advisable. The death of her only brother in South Africa sent the few farms, which was all that remained of the great Pentreath estates, to a distant cousin, and for long years past Sir Geoffrey had had no ready money. Poor father! It was the thought of her which made him----

She glanced to the left, over a great scaur of tumbled rocks like some giant's house in ruins, gave a little shiver and buried her face in her hands.

Poor father! Yet how could he? And how could he be mixed up with all those fateful, hateful people with money, who brought their _chauffeurs_ to the old serving-hall at the Keep? Those _chauffeurs_ were the bane of her life; for what should she give them to eat!

Some one from behind clasped her wrists close, and held her hands still on her eyes.

"Guess!" said a sepulchrally gruff voice.

"My dear Ned! Where have you come from?" she answered gaily.

"How did you find out?" asked Ned Blackborough, seating himself on the thyme beside her.

"As if any one but Ned Cruttenden--I can't help the name, my dear--was ever quite so hoa.r.s.e!"

"By George, Nell," he said, looking seawards, "it is good to be here.

That's what one always says, isn't it, when the visible Body of the Lord is transfigured before one's eyes as it is now."

"You know, Ned, I do not agree with your Buddhistic notions," she said, a trifle severely.

"Beg pardon! They're not Buddhistic; but I'm always forgetting you don't like--though you will some day! Meanwhile I want to ask you a question: and as the butler told me you would be on the coast somewhere ... you've a most superior set of London servants just now, Nell----"

"To keep the _chauffeurs_ company," she interrupted, shrugging her shoulders. "One must--but don't let's talk of it--it's sickening---- And so you came to the old place?"

"To the old place, Nell," he repeated, looking at her with criticising eyes of kind affection, and thinking she looked as though she stood in need of physical and moral backing; "I always think of you here, looking out to sea, just under Betty Cam's chair----" he nodded his head backwards to the scaur of tumbled rocks. "If you get looking so long, Nell, you will be seeing ghostly things--like she did. She was your ancestress, you know, and it isn't safe----"

He spoke tentatively, but she evaded him. "You said you had a question," she asked; "what is it?"

"Only if you have room at the Keep?"

She laid her hand on his in swift reproof--"Was there ever a time when there was not room?"

He smiled. "True; but unfortunately I've--I've a second self now."

"Ned!" She stared at him. "Oh Ned! How could you--without a word! Who is she?"

"It is a he, my dear. We collided together and found out our respective names were the same. But of that anon. And there is a Scotch doctor too--a rattling good fellow, one Peter Ramsay, whom we picked up--but of that also anon. Meanwhile these are at the 'Crooked Ewe' regaling themselves, and--well! I can't leave them, you see, for they're my guests, but--but we could dine with the _chauffeurs_, you know."

"Don't be silly, Ned! Of course you must come. There's still room in the ruins for the family--and _you_ won't mind----"

She broke off suddenly, and looked out to sea.

"Tired, Nell?" he asked quietly. "How you fuss, my dear cousin!"

"Who could help fussing?" she said without looking at him. "We could live so comfortably, father and I, on what we have got, if it were not for this craze of his to make money for me. Ah, Ned! I wish you had never lent him that fifteen thousand."

It was nearer twenty-five thousand, but that fact lay lightly on Ned Blackborough's mind.

"I believe it to be an excellent investment," he remarked coolly, "though I own I didn't know what he wanted it for at the time."

"And you don't know now?" she broke in pa.s.sionately. "There it stands--despicable utterly--facing the sea--that sea." She pointed to it appealingly.

Ned looked out to the clear horizon, so definite yet so undefined, where a liner, after taking its bearings from the lighthouse far away to the west, was steering straight up Channel. It seemed to glide evenly between sea and sky, and yet here the thunder of each wave filled the air with sound. Ay! a sea not to be safely faced by anything despicable.

"You are letting this beast of an hotel get on your mind, Nell," he said, after a pause. "After all, half the white and coloured cliffs of Old England are so desecrated----"

"Don't excuse it," she interrupted almost fiercely; "it's inexcusable.

When I think what Jeff would have said--Jeff who loved every stone--dear old Jeff----" She broke off and hid her face in her hands.

"Curse South Africa!" said Ned under his breath.

She looked up after a while. "You see," she began more composedly, "what stings is that it is all done for me; and I--fifty pounds a year would keep me going as a hospital nurse; and I shall never be anything else, Ned, never! I lost everything for myself seven years ago, and what I have belongs to others. And there is so much in the past for which atonement should be made. You don't belong to the Pentreaths, you see; but they were a wild race--Betty Cam, as you reminded me!

Think of her! Why, Ned, when I see at night that hateful place all lit up with electric light and shining far, far out to sea, I feel as if we were doing it all over again! Luring ships to the rocks!"

"My dear Nell, what an imagination you've got!" expostulated her cousin.

She pulled herself up. "Have I? But it is so useless. And it seems to get worse and worse since Mr. Hirsch came in. He is at the Keep now, arranging for a light railway. And oh, Ned! the place where we used to picnic as children--you remember, of course--is all placarded as 'eligible building-sites.'"

Ned whistled, and looked out to sea. As he had said, the white cliffs of Marine England were so disfigured everywhere; but that did not bring much consolation for the destruction of absolute beauty.

"Well," he said, "I only hope some one may think them so, and that the hotel is crowded up to the garrets. It's got to be; for the farmers and the little shopkeepers at Haverton, who put their piles into it--because my uncle did--will expect a dividend!"

"And the others too," she added bitterly. "You know Mr. Hirsch has floated it. It's quoted on the Stock Exchange now, and they are going to run up select jerry-built villas with the money they get on the new shares, as they ran up the jerry-built hotel----"

"With mine," laughed Ned, a trifle uneasily. "Well, my dear child, I hadn't any intention of building it--but it's there--and let us come and look at it. It can't help, can it, being in a lovely spot?"