The Setons Part 34

_CHAPTER XV_

"There was a lady once, 'tis an old story, That would not be a queen, that would she not For all the mud in Egypt."

_Henry VIII._

"It is funny to think," Elizabeth said, "that last Friday I was looking forward to your visit with horror."

"Hospitable creature!" Arthur replied.

"And now," she continued, "I can't remember what it was like not to know you."

They were sitting in the drawing-room after dinner. Mr. Seton had gone out, and Buff was asleep after such an hour of crowded life as seldom fell to his lot. He had been very down at the thought of losing his friend, and had looked so small and forlorn when he said his reluctant good-night, that Arthur, to lighten his gloom, asked him if he had ever taken part in a sea-fight, and being answered in the negative, had carried him upstairs shoulder-high. Then issued from the bathroom such a splashing of water, such gurgles of laughter and yells of triumph as Buff, a submarine, dashed from end to end of the large bath, torpedoing warships under Arthur's directions, that Elizabeth, Marget, and Ellen all rushed upstairs to say that if the performance did not stop at once the house would certainly be flooded.

As it was, fresh pyjamas had to be fetched, the pair laid out being put out of action by the wash of the waves. Then Arthur carried Buff to his room and threw him head-over-heels into bed, sitting by his side for quite half an hour and relating the most thrilling tales of pirates; finally presenting him with two fat half-crowns, and promising that he, Buff, should go up in an aeroplane at the earliest opportunity.

Buff, as he lay pillowed on that promise, his two half-crowns laid on a chair beside him along with one or two other grubby treasures, and his heart warm with grat.i.tude, wondered and wondered what he could do in return--and still wondering fell asleep.

Elizabeth was knitting a stocking for her young brother, and counted audibly at intervals; Arthur lay in a large arm-chair and looked into the fire.

"Buff is frightfully sorry to lose you. _One two_--_one two._ This is a beautiful 'top,' don't you think? Rather like a Persian tile."

"Yes," said Arthur rather absently.

There was silence for a few minutes; then Elizabeth said, "There is something very depressing about last nights--we would really have been much better at the Band of Hope, and I would have been doing my duty, and thus have acquired merit. I hate people going away. When nice people come to a house they should just stay on and on, after the fashion of princes in fairy-tale stories seeking their fortunes. They stayed about twenty years before it seemed to strike them that their people might be getting anxious."

"For myself," said Arthur, "I ask nothing better. You know that, don't you?"

"_One two_--_one two_," Elizabeth counted. She looked up from her knitting with twinkling eyes. "Did you hate very much coming? or were you pa.s.sive in the managing hands of Aunt Alice?"

He looked at her impish face blandly, then took out his cigarette case, chose a cigarette carefully, lit it, and smoked with placid enjoyment.

"Cross?" she asked, in a few minutes.

"Not in the least. Merely wondering if I might tell you the truth."

"I wouldn't," said Elizabeth. "Fiction is always stranger and more interesting. By the way, are you to be permanently at the Foreign Office now?"

"I haven't the least notion, but I shall be there for the next few months. When do you go to London?"

In the spring, she told him, probably in April, and added that her Aunt Alice had been a real fairy G.o.dmother to her.

"Very few ministers' daughters have had my chances of seeing men and cities. And some day, some day when Buff has gone to school and Father has retired and has time to look about him, we are going to India to see the boys."

"You have a very good time in London, I expect," Arthur said. "I can imagine that Aunt Alice makes a most tactful chaperon, and I hear you are very popular."

"'Here's fame!'" quoted Elizabeth flippantly. "What else did Aunt Alice tell you about me?"

Arthur Townshend put the end of his cigarette carefully into the ash-tray and leant forward.

"You really want to know--then here goes. She told me you were tall--like a king's own daughter; that your hair was as golden as a fairy tale, and your eyes as grey as gla.s.s. She told me of suitors waiting on your favours----"

Elizabeth dropped her knitting with a gasp.

"If Aunt Alice told you all that--well, I've no right to say a word, for she did it to glorify me, and perhaps her kind eyes and heart made her think it true; but surely you don't think I am such a conceited donkey as to believe it."

"But isn't it true?--about the suitors, I mean?"

"Suitors! How very plural you are!"

"But I would rather keep them in the plural," he pleaded; "they are more harmless that way. But Aunt Alice did talk about some particular fellow--I think Gordon was his wretched name."

"Bother!" said Elizabeth. "I've dropped a st.i.tch." She bent industriously over her knitting.

"I'm waiting, Elizabeth."

"What for?"

"To hear about Mr. Gordon."

"Oh! you must ask Aunt Alice," Elizabeth said demurely. "She is your fount of information." Then she threw down her knitting. "Arthur, don't let's talk any more about such silly subjects. They don't interest me in the least."

"Is Mr. Gordon a silly subject?"

"The silliest ever. No--of course he isn't. Why do you make me say nasty things? He is only silly to me because I am an ungrateful creature. I don't expect I shall ever marry. You see, I would never be a grateful wife, and it seems a pity to use up a man, so to speak, when there are so few men and so many women who would be grateful wives and may have to go without. I think I am a born spinster, and as long as I have got Father and Buff and the boys in India I shall be more than content."

"Buff must go to school soon," he warned her. "Your brothers may marry; your father can't be with you always."

"Oh, don't try to discourage me in my spinster path. You are as bad as Aunt Alice. She thinks of me as living a sort of submerged existence here in Glasgow, and only coming to the surface to breathe when I go to London or travel with her. But I'm not in the least stifled with my life. I wouldn't change with anybody; and as for getting married and going off with trunks of horrid new unfamiliar clothes, and a horrid new unfamiliar husband, I wouldn't do it. I haven't much ambition; I don't ask for adventures; though I look so large and bold, I have but a peeping and a timorous soul."

She smiled across at Arthur, as if inviting him to share her point of view; but he looked into the fire and did not meet her glance.

"Then you think," he said, "that you will be happy all your life--alone?"

"Was it Sydney Smith who gave his friends forty recipes for happiness?

I remember three of them," she counted on her fingers, "a bright fire, a kettle singing on the hob, a bag of lollipops on the mantelshelf--all easy to come at. I can't believe that I shall be left entirely alone--I should be so scared o' nights. Surely someone will like me well enough to live with me--perhaps Buff, if he continues to have the contempt for females that he now has; but anyway I shall hold on to the bright fire and the singing kettle and the bag of lollipops."

She sat for a moment, absent-eyed, as if she were looking down the years; then she laughed.

"But I shall be a frightfully long gaunt spinster," she said.

Arthur laughed with her, and said:

"Elizabeth, you aren't really a grown-up woman at all. You're a schoolboy."

"I like that 'grown-up,'" she laughed; "it sounds so much less mature than the reality. I'm twenty-eight, did you know? Already airting towards spinsterhood."