Sisters Part 7

"DON'T!" muttered Guthrie Carey, shivering. The ghost of his sweet Lily seemed to reproach him with Deb's voice. But the ghost-woman fifteen months old had no chance with the glowing live woman born into his life but yesterday; and no blame to him either, and no wrong to the dead, if one can look at the thing dispa.s.sionately and with an unbiased mind.

"Let us go and see the dam," Deb cheered him, as she turned the ponies'

heads. "You haven't seen our big dam, have you? Everybody that comes to Redford must see that, or father will want to know the reason why.

'Pennycuick's Folly' some people call it, because he spent so much money on it; but father is not one to spoil the ship for a pen'orth of paint. He likes to do things thoroughly. So do I."

And soon they halted on the embankment of a mile-wide sheet of water, shining like a mirror in a setting of soft-bosomed hills, their dun day colour changed to a heavenly rose-purple under the poetic evening sky.

"Why, it is a lake," said Guthrie Carey. "You could hold regattas on it." "We do, now and then, with our little boats. We have three over there"--pointing with her whip to a white shed on the farther sh.o.r.e.

"And swimming matches. We used sometimes, when we were younger, to come down on hot nights and be mermaids. Once we moored ourselves out in the middle, away from the mosquitoes, and slept in the bottom of the boat, under the stars."

"How charming!"

"It was holiday time, and our parents were away. We took cushions and things, and it was great fun; but Keziah reported us, and we were never allowed to do it again."

They sat in the pony-carriage on the dam embankment, gazing silently. A flock of wildfowl had been scared away by their approach, and now not a wing, not an eye was near. At a great distance curlews wailed, only to make the stillness and solitude more exquisite, more profound. The purple of the hills grew deeper and softer, the lake a mere pulseless shimmer through the twilight haze. And then, last touch of magic, the moon swam up--the same moon that had transfigured Five Creeks garden and Alice Urquhart last night.

He poured out his soul to Deborah Pennycuick.

First, it was only the story of the baby--the story he had told Alice, with some omissions and additions. He took advantage of the opportunity to ask Deb's invaluable advice.

Deb, well aware of the influence of a summer night and certain accessories, tried her best to be practical. She asked straight questions about the baby.

"Where have you got him? Where does this friend live who has been recommended to you?"

"In Sandridge--all at Sandridge--"

"That dirty, low part! That's no place to rear a boy in. Bring him into the bush, to clean air, if you want to make a man of him. I know a dear, nice woman--she is our overseer's wife--who has no children, and is dying to get hold of one somehow or other. We might make some arrangement with her, I am sure; and, if so, the little fellow would be in clover. We'd all look after him, of course, while you were at sea--"

"Oh! oh! oh!" The young father's heart simply exhaled itself in grat.i.tude too vast for words. Ah! there was no hanging back now! Not the baby only, but the dog-chain, was laid at Deborah's feet.

"You go and fetch him tomorrow," said she, "and I'll talk to Mrs Kelsey while you are away. Then I'll meet you at the station on your return, to help you with him, and tell you what Mrs Kelsey says--though I have no doubt of what it will be. But we'll keep him at Redford for a bit, till he gets used to everybody; and you must stay with him all you can until your ship sails...."

His eyes were full of tears. He laid his hand on her shawl again. He leaned to her. It was no use--the moon and his feelings were too much for him. They were talking of the baby, and the word "love" had not been, and was not going to be, mentioned; but there the thing was, unmistakable to her keen intelligence, looming like a frontier custom-house on the road ahead.

She grasped his big, trembling hand, and with it held him back, meeting his adoring gaze with steady eyes and mouth.

"My dear boy, don't--don't! Don't spoil this nice evening--"

It was all that was necessary. And still so kind, so gentle with him!

No scorn, no offended dignity, no displeasure even. She, who could punish insolence with anybody, was never hard upon the humble admirer--only too soft, in fact, with all her basic firmness, and incapable of the hard-hearted coquetry that so commonly makes beauty vile. "Face of waxen angel, with paw of desert beast"--that was not Deborah Pennycuick.

A sob broke from him.

"I am a d.a.m.ned fool!" he muttered savagely, and by a violent effort collected himself. "I beg your pardon."

"That's all right," she said, turning the ponies from the embankment and whipping them to a gallop.

CHAPTER VII.

There was a moon the next night also. It did not appreciably affect him this time--down in dirty Sandridge, hobn.o.bbing with the baby's caretaker and the general merchant, who, shutting his shop at six, was free to make the sailor's acquaintance, and help him to spend a pleasant evening. But it turned Redford garden, with its fine old trees and lawns, into the usual bit of fairyland for those who strayed therein.

Redford was packed with Christmas guests. The waggonette that had taken Guthrie Carey to the train had returned full of them, and batches had been arriving at intervals through the day. At bed-time the sisters were sharing rooms; Rose had come to Deb's, Frances to Mary's; and the unmarried men were all at the bachelors' quarters.

It was a hot night, and Deb, under the circ.u.mstances, was disinclined for sleep. She paid visits to one guest chamber and another, for private gossips and good-nights; when she returned to her own, where placid Rose had long composed herself, she roamed the floor like a caged animal.

"It is no use my coming to bed yet," she addressed her sister. "I could not sleep. I should only kick about and disturb you. I'll sit down and read a bit."

She found a novel and an easy-chair, and made deliberate efforts to tranquillise herself. Soon Rose heard sighs and phews, and sudden rustlings and slappings, and then the bang of a book upon the floor.

"I can't read! and the light brings the mosquitoes. It's too hot in here. I'm going out to get cool, Rosie."

"A'right," mumbled drowsy Rose. And the light was extinguished, and the blind of the French window rattled up.

Deb flung both leaves wide--like all the Redford doors, they were never locked or barred--and drifting over the verandah, sat down on the edge of it, with her feet on the gravel. She had tossed off her pearl necklace and a breast-knot of wilted roses; otherwise, she sat in full evening dress, and the night air bathed her bare neck and arms. Also the mosquitoes found them--a delicious morsel!--so that she had to turn her lacy skirt up over her head to be quite comfortable. From under this hood the dark lamps of her eyes shone forth, gazing steadily into the dim world--into the bit of future that she thought she saw unveiled. The loom of the trees, the glimmer of flowering bushes, the open s.p.a.ces of lawn and pallid pathways, the translucent blue-green sky, the rising moon--these things made the picture, but were to all intents invisible to the inward sight. She really saw nothing, until suddenly a pin-point spark appeared out of the shadows, moved along a hedge of laurels, and fixed itself in the neighbourhood of a distant garden-seat. Then at once she stiffened like a cat that has heard a mouse squeak or a bird's wing rustle; she was alert on the instant, concentrated upon the phenomenon. Instinct recognised the tip of a cigar which had the handsome face of Claud Dalzell behind it.

"What is he doing out of doors at this time of night?" she wondered; and the little star began to draw her like a magnet. The world becomes another world in these mystic hours; it has new rulers and new laws--or rather, it has none. The moon sways more than ocean tides. In broad day Deb would no more have stalked a man than she would a crocodile; in this soft, free, empty, irresponsible night the primal woman was out of her husk, one with the desert-prowling animal that calls through the moonlit silence for its mate. Twenty times had she snubbed an ardent lover at the behest of all sorts of reasons and so-called instincts cultivated for her guidance by generations of wise men, now, all in a moment, came this moon-born impulse to give herself to him unasked. She could not resist it.

Like Deb, Claud had not been inclined to sleep, and for much the same reason. The guest chamber usually allotted to him being needed for a lady, he had been sent to the bachelors' quarters--a barrack-like dormitory amongst the outbuildings, very useful for the accommodation of the occasional 'vet' or cattle-buyer, and to take the overflow of company on festive occasions. Jim Urquhart, when at Redford, always slept there; he preferred it, particularly when he had companions with whom to smoke and talk sheep, and perhaps play cards, at liberty; for the bachelors' quarters had its own wood-stack and supplies, and one could sit by a blazing hearth all night, if so disposed, without incommoding anybody.

Generally four bachelor beds were made up, and a screened end of the room stacked with the material for twice as many more. At Christmas all were in use, and lined the two long walls--which Dalzell called "herding", and disliked extremely, while recognising that it was a necessary arrangement to which it was his duty to conform.

The herd was undressing itself in a miscellaneous manner--yawning, chaffing, cutting stupid jokes, some of them at his expense; until the process was at an end, and he could reasonably a.s.sume the fellows to be asleep, he preferred the gardens to the bachelors' quarters.

And the free night enfolded him--the rising moon uplifted him--in the usual way, he being, like Deb, like Guthrie Carey, an instrument fitted to respond to their mute appeals. Perhaps even more finely fitted than Guthrie or Deb; for he had what are called "gifts" of intellect and imagination transcending theirs--faculties of mind which, lacking worthy use, bred in him a sort of chronic melancholy, the poetic discontent of the unappreciated and misunderstood--a mood to which moonlight ministers as wine to the drinking fever, at once an exquisite exasperation and a divine appeas.e.m.e.nt. He was a poet, a painter, a musician--possibly a soldier, or a king--possibly anything--spoiled, blighted by that misnamed good fortune which the lucky workers who had to work so naturally and stupidly envied him. The proper stimulus to the worthy development of the manhood latent in him had been taken from him at the start. And now he wandered amongst his dilettantisms, dissatisfied and ineffectual. He lived beneath himself in his common intercourse with others; he ate his heart when he was alone.

Unconsciously, by force of habit, he selected the most comfortable and cleanly of the garden-seats, and made sure that the best of cigars was drawing perfectly, before he gave himself to his meditations on this particular moonlight night. Then he began to think of Deb--in the same new way that Carey had begun to think of her after discovering a dangerous rival in the field. To Claud, Guthrie was dangerous in his rude bulk and strength, the knitted brute power that the sea and his hard life had given him; to Guthrie, Claud was dangerous in the highbred beauty and finish of his person, clothes and manners, and in the astounding "cleverness" that he displayed. Each man feared the force of those qualities which he lacked himself, and was secretly ashamed of lacking.

Claud Dalzell considered this matter of the rival--not a probable but a possible rival--seriously, for the first time. Hitherto he had had an easy mind in his relations with the beauty of the countryside. She was his for all he wanted of her. And feeling this, he had taken no steps to register his claim; he had not even yet proposed to her. Matrimony was not a fashionable inst.i.tution--it was, indeed, a jest--in his set.

A young man with a heap of money was not expected to tie himself down as if he were a poor clerk on a hundred a year. The conditions of club life, with as many domestic hearths to visit as he wished, and to stay away from when he chose, the luxury and freedom of pampered bachelorhood, had not only been deemed appropriate, but necessary to his peculiar needs and organisation. He had not considered himself a marrying man. But now the new idea came to him--to make his rights in Deb secure.

Certainly he could not contemplate the possibility of doing without her. He had loved her that much for years. Within the last day or two he had loved her twice that much. And now the moonlight showed him his love enthroned above all his lesser loves--a thing of heaven, where they were of the earth--consecrated a great pa.s.sion, to lift him out of himself. He sat and smoked, spiritually bemused, his brain running like a fountain with melodies of music and poetry, notes and words that sang in his ears and murmured on his lips without his hearing them. So a distant curlew thrilled him to a more ecstatic melancholy with its call through the moon-transfigured world, and he did not notice it. All the influences of the gentle night contributed to his inspired mood, but Love was the first violin in that orchestra under Nature's conductorship--Nature, whose hour it was, walking, a G.o.d, in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day.

And here came Deb, gliding towards him by a path that he could not see, holding her lace skirts tightly bunched in her nervous hands. Youth to youth, beauty to beauty, man to woman, woman to man, the magnet to the steel--they were just elements of the elements, for once in their lives.

"How fortunate that I put on black tonight," thought Deb, as she pursued her stealthy way at the back of bushes--"and something that does not rustle!"

"How beautiful she was tonight!" thought Claud. "How a dark dress throws up that superb neck of hers! I'll take her to Europe, and show her to the sculptors and painters; but where's the hand that could carve that shape, or the paint that could give her colour? I'll have a London season with her, and see her snuff out the milk-and-water debutantes. No milk-and-water about Deb--wine and fire!--and withal so proud and unapproachable. That hulking brute imagines--but he'll find his mistake if he attempts to cross the line. Beauty, pa.s.sion, purity--what a blend! She's a woman alone--the blue rose of women--and she is mine." He murmured, to some cadence of a Schubert serenade: "My Deb! My love! My love! My queen!" and suddenly stopped short in his musings.

Her foot crunched the gravel behind him. Without turning his head, he sat alertly motionless for several minutes, listening, holding his breath. Then he dropped his cigar gently.

"Fine night, Deb," he remarked aloud.

There was no immediate answer, but presently a low chuckle from the laurel bushes.

"How did you know it was me?" she asked, imitating his casual tone.