My Little Sister Part 8

If my mother sent me into the garden to see whether the autumn crocuses were up--all I could see was his face. It came up everywhere I looked. I grew impatient of the companionship I had most loved. I was thankful when Hermione had carried off my sister for the afternoon. I felt Lord Helmstone had done me a personal kindness when he dropped in, on the way to or from the golf links, to talk to my mother. I would slip away just for ten minutes to think about "him" in peace. When I went in I would find I had been gone for hours.

The old laws of Time and s.p.a.ce seemed all at sixes and sevens. The old devotions paled.

Mercifully, n.o.body knew.

I looked for him all the next spring. In the summer I said to myself, I shall never see him again.

Then a day in September when he came. Came not only to Big Klaus's and the Links. He came to Duncombe the very first evening, to ask about my mother.

I heard his voice at the door. It seemed to come up from the roots of the world to knock against my heart. I stood by the banisters out of sight and listened, while I held the banisters hard.

No, he wouldn't come in now. He would come to-morrow.

I flew to the window in the morning-room, and looked out.

I had not dreamed him. He was true.

The next day brought him.

I had all those hours to get myself in hand. I was quite quiet. The others seemed gladder to see him than I.

He was pleased at finding my mother so well. The crowning proof of her being stronger was her doing a quite unprecedented thing. She invited Mr. Annan to come and have tea at Duncombe, instead of tramping all that distance back to the Farm. Big Klaus's tea she was sure was worse even than the Club House brew.

The result was that he fell into the habit of playing another round after tea, which my mother said was good for him. She agreed with Lord Helmstone that Mr. Annan should not work when he had come away for a holiday. The Helmstones were for ever asking him to lunch and dine. But he always said "that sort of thing" took up too much time. So we felt flattered when, instead of playing the other round, he would sit there in the garden, after tea, smoking a pipe and talking to us.

Bettina said our home-made cakes and delicious Duncombe tea were quite wasted on him. I was secretly indignant at the charge. But Bettina made him confess he could not tell Indian from China.

"Very well then," I said, "it proves he doesn't come only for tea," and upon that a fire seemed to play all round my body, scorching me. But no one noticed.

It was wonderful to see him again--to verify all those things I had been thinking about him for the year and four months since he went away.

But if I were told, even now, to describe Eric Annan, I would say at once that he was a person whose special quality escaped from any net of words that sought to catch it. If, at the time I speak of, I had been compelled to make the attempt, I should have taken refuge in such commonplaces as: strongly-built; colouring, between dark and fair; a wholesome kind of mouth, with good teeth; brown eyes, not large, with reddish flecks in the iris. And I might have added one thing more uncommon. That gift of his for saying nothing at all without embarra.s.sment.

I thought of him as a person standing alone. I could not imagine him in the usual relationships. The others must have felt like that about him, too, for I remember they were surprised when Lord Helmstone told us that Eric Annan was one of the large family of an impoverished Scots laird.

Bettina said to him the next day: "I don't suppose you have any sisters."

He looked surprised, and I expected him to repudiate such trifles. But he said: "Yes. Three," in a tone that dismissed them.

But the confession seemed to have brought him nearer, to make him more human. He had been a little boy, then, playing with little girls. He had grown up, not only with students and professors, but with sisters. Oh, happy sisters! how they must adore him! I asked him to tell us about them: were the sisters like him? No. What were they like?

"Oh----" he looked vague. Then he presented a testimonial. They were "all right."

The proof: two of them were married. And the third? Oh, the third was only twenty. I felt a special interest in that one. But all we could learn was that she was engaged. So she was probably "all right," too.

My mother was the best at making him talk. She discovered that he was "like so many of the silent-seeming people," fluent enough when he liked. Though he never was fluent about his sisters, when he came to know us better, he told my mother about his elder brother, struggling still to keep up the property--a losing battle. And a second brother, not very clever, intended for the navy. He hadn't got on. He left the navy and had some small post in the Customs. The third brother was "trying to grow tea in Ceylon."

Bettina hoped the third brother was more intelligent about tea than our friend. Eric was the fourth son. To get a scientific education, on any terms, had been a struggle. He had to arrive at it obliquely, by way of studying medicine. Pure science didn't pay. But science was the one thing on earth worth a man's giving his life to.

I see him sitting in the level light on Duncombe lawn, looking up in that sudden way of his, and narrowing his eyes at the sunset, bringing out the word _research_ with a tenacity of insistence on the "r" which must make even a Natural Law feel the hopelessness of hiding any longer.

That preliminary to setting aside his earlier reserve--a forefinger sweeping upward and outward through the red-brown thatch on his upper lip--and then telling my mother about those hours of fathoms-deep absorption; of the ray of light that, from time to time, would pierce the darkness. He told her, with something very like emotion, of the great, still gladness that came out of conquest of the smallest corner of the Hidden Field--that vast Hinterland as yet untrodden.

CHAPTER X

THE BUNGALOW

My mother said this was the New Consecration. He is the stuff of the _devot_, she said. In another age he would have been a great ascetic, or a saint.

I was thankful the temptations, in these directions, were slight for people of our time. I liked better to think of him in one of his boyish moods, helping us to re-stock our aquarium.

Hermione Helmstone's inclination to mock behind his back, to imitate little stiffnesses and what she called his "Scotticisms," even Lady Barbara's unblushing _Schwarmerei_, was less a trial to me than the talk about saints and ascetics.

The Helmstone girls fell into the bad habit of dropping in to share our tea and our visitor.

Hermione pretended that she came solely to keep Barbara in countenance.

But Hermione on these occasions did most of the talking.

She didn't care what she said. "How long," she demanded, "are you going to stay?"--a heart-thumping question which none of us had ventured to put.

"Three weeks."

"A beggarly little while," she said, exchanging looks with her confederate. Then her malicious sympathy at his having to spend so much of his life in sick rooms and hospitals, "looking at horrors."

He said, somewhat shortly, that he spent most of his life nowadays--thank G.o.d!--in a laboratory.

Which was scarcely polite.

"Ouf!" Hermione sniffed, "I know! Place full of bottles and bad smells."

He smiled at that, and took it up with spirit.

"No room in your house so clean," he said. "And no place anywhere half so interesting." A laboratory was full of mystery; yes, and of romance--oh, naturally, not _her_ kind.

What did he know about "her kind"? Hermione demanded.

Perhaps he knew more than we suspected. For, just as though he guessed that Hermione's name for him was "Scotch Granite," and that she lamented Barbara's always falling in love with such unromantic people, he scoffed at Hermione's conception of romance. "An ideal worthy of the servants'

hall. A marble terrace by moonlight.... No? Well, then, the supper-room at the Carlton--Paris frocks, diamonds, a band banging away; and a thousand-pound motor-car waiting to whirl the happy pair away to bliss of the most expensive brand."

They went on to quarrel about novels. Hermione hated the gloomy kind.

For Eric's benefit she added, "And the scientific kind."