Peter west, p.7
Peter West, page 7
Presently they walked home together up the hill, arm in arm it is true, but without the inward companionship which should have gone with the outer.
“It must come right,” Natalie was saying to herself. “It must — it shall. I will make him forget everything but me. He shall be all mine. Oh, heavens, what a fool I have been! What an utter, utter fool!”
If anything could be expected to allay Peter’s doubts, the intense surprise evinced by his sister when the interesting news was broken to her should surely have done so.
“She is overdoing it,” thought Natalie, looking with an anxious heart from Adelaide’s raised eyebrows to Peter’s rather set expression.
Natalie had thought of warning Adelaide beforehand, but it suddenly seemed despicable to plot with Adelaide behind Peter’s back. Natalie wished that Adelaide need not come into this at all; she was surprised to find that she had a conscience.
They were very gay at dinner that night; the men were all anxious to drink Natalie’s health in Peter’s champagne.
“I wish to goodness I did not see through them,” Peter thought, looking down the table at the flushed faces of his guests. He was embarrassed to find himself suddenly in the rôle of hero, to find his hand shaken cordially by every one. It transpired that every one had seen it coming from the very beginning — this incredible thing — every one, that is, except himself and Adelaide.
Peter was sure there was something queer about it, but every one was making such a noise, he couldn’t think.
CHAPTER
TEN
I.
Peter and Natalie were quite unconscious of the fact that any living creature, except, perhaps, the jackdaws, had witnessed their betrothal in the courtyard of the old castle.
They had imagined themselves alone, shut off from the whole world by the mountain mist; but they were mistaken, for Beth Kerr had escaped from her household duties for a breath of fresh air and turned her light steps towards her beloved old castle for a morning ramble. Reaching the ruin while the mist was still thick, she ran straight up to her favourite haunt, shared only by the jackdaws — an old tower overlooking the courtyard and the battlements. It was covered with thick ivy, and the steps leading to it were broken and crumbling, but this was nothing to Beth, who flew up them like a bird, her thin frock fluttering behind her.
She ensconced herself in a nook which just fitted her slim body, and drawing a book out of her apron pocket was soon deep in the Heart of Midlothian.
It was her favourite book — perhaps because there was so much in it that she could really understand from personal experience in her own short and restricted life. Beth had very little imagination, and she found it difficult to picture things that she had never seen. She had, moreover, a great deal of good common-sense and pluck, and Jeanie’s journey to London appealed to something fundamental in her own nature.
Beth was roused from her intense concentration by Natalie’s shrill voice, and leaning rather precariously over the crumbling wall, had been the startled and unwilling witness of their kiss. She drew back from the edge as a sudden faintness assailed her. “Mr West,” she whispered, and then “Peter — oh, Peter!”
The mist seemed to thicken.
When Beth came to herself she heard the two voices much nearer to her, and realised that the lovers had taken up their position on the battlements just below the tower where she lay concealed. She was a prisoner in the tower for as long as they chose to stay. It would have taken a more assured and worldly person than Beth to have walked down the stairs and past them to liberty. Beth had no fear of their discovering her hiding-place, for she knew that there were few who would venture up the crumbling staircase which she negotiated so light-heartedly. Her only plan, therefore, was to remain where she was and to hope that they would soon tire of their hard, stony seat.
Their voices drifted up to her very clearly in the still air — she could not help hearing every word they said. It was happy, inconsequent, rather foolish talk, natural enough under the circumstances, but it seemed to turn a knife that was sticking in Beth’s heart.
She put her fingers in her ears.
⋆ ⋆ ⋆
When Peter and Natalie had at last gone Beth surrendered to a sudden, violent fit of weeping, her soft little body lying uncontrolled upon the moss-grown stones.
In a sense it was a childish sorrow, hardly understood by herself — for even then she did not realise that she loved Peter in the full meaning of the word (he had always been a god to her — never a man); she only knew that she was hurt, wounded beyond words, and in a subconscious way she felt defiled. She knew so little of the world that it was almost all feeling with her; she was like a dumb creature that feels but does not understand, that knows it is hurt but does not know where nor how.
In all her short life Beth had never touched such depths of misery and despair as she did then. She hated “that woman,” hated both of them with a wild, childish passion of hatred.
Poor little Beth, she was such a wild, uncontrolled little creature, undisciplined as yet by sorrow or pain. She was so intense, so vivid, so full of vitality, yet withal so shy and innocent and young. The Beths of this world are born to get hurt and mangled in the Mill of Life. They cannot take things, good and ill, calmly, like their neighbours. The philosophy of life is not theirs as a birth-gift; if they attain to it eventually, it must be through many vicissitudes, many trials and troubles, and a sea of bitter tears.
II.
It was late afternoon when Beth crept home to the Boat House. All traces of tears had vanished, but her eyes were very bright, and her cheeks suspiciously pink.
Although it was still quite light, Beth was astonished to see that the curtains had been drawn and a streak of lamplight showed from within. She paused with her hand on the latch as a gust of loud laughter proclaimed the fact that her father had “company.”
This was a most unusual thing, for Kerr was not a sociable man, and considered himself a good deal better than his neighbours.
For a brief moment Beth stood there wondering what would happen. She was no coward, but the day’s events had made her unusually sensitive, and had tired her. At any rate, she concluded, her father could not say much to her “before company,” however angry he might be at her long absence from home; then she opened the door and stepped into the room.
There was dead silence as every eye was turned in her direction.
“And here she is hersel’ — the bonny bairn!” said a harsh and strident voice.
So they had been talking about her, was Beth’s instant thought. She looked round through the haze of tobacco smoke, and discovered that the speaker was Mrs Baines. She and her son Alexander owned a big farm — The Mains — on the far side of the hill. It was beyond the village and above the castle and the river, half-hidden by trees. They were Lowlanders, and, as such, had always looked down on their Highland neighbours as an idle, worthless crowd, while their neighbours looked down on them for grasping Lowlanders. While this state of affairs was not conducive to friendliness, it was an indubitable fact that the Baineses made their farm pay, and pay well, while their more happy-go-lucky neighbours only wrung a bare subsistence from the stony soil. This, so far from being accounted a merit to them, made the Highland farmers so angry that they would hardly consent to do business with their Lowland neighbour, and Alec Baines was obliged to go south to markets at Stirling and Lanark if he wanted to buy or sell a beast.
Mrs Baines was a large, fat woman with a red, serious face. Her dress was black, tight, and spangly. It looked as if it had been made on her like a pin-cushion, and Beth felt sure that it never came off. Her hair was iron-gray; it was combed over a large pad on the top of her head, and wound tightly into a hard knob at the back.
This unprepossessing person had been housekeeper for many years to Lord Elles of Carnes, and she never allowed any one to remain in ignorance of the fact, of which she was inordinately proud. It was dragged in at every turn of the conversation, in and out of season. She had a loud, harsh voice and a luxuriant beard, both of which terrified Beth.
Alexander Baines was fat and very like his mother; his face was red too, but not so red as hers. He had always adored little Beth, and his rather watery blue eyes met hers now with a pathetic appeal in them.
There was no mention of Beth’s long absence from home and late arrival, and she was surprised to see that her father was in high good-humour. This was the more surprising as he and her brothers had presumably returned from work to find no dinner awaiting them.
As Beth flitted about the kitchen getting the supper ready she wondered and wondered in her busy little brain what could be the explanation of it all.
III.
Supper was a very lengthy affair, for Sandy and Ian Kerr were tremendous trenchermen, and their guests were not far behind them. When the supper was cleared away they sat down to play whist, whilst Beth took up her knitting and stood by the window looking out at the clear moon and bright stars. She longed for the silence and privacy of her little bedroom under the sloping roof, but she was afraid to bring herself into notice by trying to escape.
The evening dragged on slowly, bringing forth at ever shorter intervals long and often painful reminiscences of Carnes Castle and its glories. Mrs Baines’s pièce de résistance was her ladyship’s death and funeral, at both of which Mrs Baines had, presumably, played an important rôle. “As sure as I’m here, Mr Kerr,” she would begin — and Beth could not help thinking how very sure that was — “as sure as I’m here, there was sixteen hams ate, besides the rounds of beef and gigots of mutton cold. An’ the whisky that was drunk — well, you’ll mebbe not credit me, Mr Kerr, but it would ha’ floated your ferry-boat neat — yes, indeed, it would so!”
Beth stole a look at her father, for this was not his style by any means, but John Kerr was treating his visitor with at least outward respect, whatever he was thinking inwardly. “Will it never end?” thought Beth desperately.
At last Mrs Baines rose to go, gathering up her various belongings, which had found their way, in some mysterious fashion, to the four corners of the room. There was a black velvet bag, a black silk fan, a smelling-salts bottle, and a large, bulgy umbrella, without which she was never seen.
The two young Kerrs volunteered to see their guests home, and, after interminable leave-takings, the party started off up the silent moonlit street.
“Eh, what a wunnerful moon, Mr Sandy!” Beth heard Mrs Baines’s departing voice. “Now, when I was at Carnes Castle —”
She shut the door on that and turned back into the kitchen, where her father was awaiting her.
“Well, Beth!” he said, and his voice sounded very loud in the silence left by the speeded guests. “Well, Beth, dae ye ken what they came for?”
“No, father,” she replied, eyeing him as he stood, big and burly, in front of the faintly glowing embers of the kitchen fire.
“Can ye no’ give a guess?”
“No,” she said again. Her one wish was to have done with explanations, to get upstairs and be by herself. The day had been a long and trying one, and the child was spent with emotion.
Kerr looked at her white face with unwonted kindness. She sat on the table in her favourite position, perched like a bird ready to fly away. His heart went out a little towards his motherless child, but he crushed down the feeling as weakness unfit for a man, unbecoming in a servant of the stern God of Fear he worshipped so unswervingly.
“Well, Beth, seeing ye canna guess, I maun tell ye,” he said at last, and his voice despite himself was softer than usual. “It’s Alexander Baines wants ye to wife. He’s a good man,” went on Kerr, as Beth did not speak; “he’s always fancied you, it seems, and he’s respectable and God-fearin’ (tho’ he is a Lowlander), and he’s a warm man besides, with a guid farm — aye, he’s warm! Not that Ah’m caring sae muckle about the bawbees. Well, Beth, ye’re no’ sayin’ what ye’re thinkin’.”
Beth did not answer for a moment. She had got beyond surprise, beyond horror, in fact beyond every feeling whatsoever. Nothing seemed real to her; the whole day had been a ghastly nightmare, in which she had been buffeted and swept along by some unseen but malignant fate. It seemed to the child, on looking back to the morning, that she had lived a whole lifetime since setting forth so gaily to read her book in the shelter of the ruin. — Could it possibly have been only this morning?
Kerr was quite alarmed by the dazed look in his daughter’s eyes. Had things gone further than he had thought? Was he right in his black suspicions? If so, she should marry Alexander Baines at once, and so be put for ever out of reach of danger from Peter West.
“Beth, can ye no’ speak? What dae ye say tae it, child?” he said again.
At last Beth found her voice. “Do whatever you want with me,” she said. “I don’t care what happens — nothing matters — nothing.” Then, taking up her candle, she went slowly up the steep stairs to bed.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
I.
One day, shortly after Peter’s engagement, Adelaide, sitting as usual at her mother’s desk, received a letter from a friend. “I wonder if you have been told the truth about our poor Natalie,” she read. “I hear your brother is attracted to her, and I should never forgive myself if anything came of it and I had not warned you.”
Adelaide read the letter to the end, and then laid it down upon the desk. She sat and stared at it for a moment, and during that moment there grew upon her a most curious sensation of fear. It was as if that sixth sense, so highly developed in the blind, warned her that some one was near. The feeling grew into a panic which almost choked her; queerness ran across her spine like the feet of hurrying mice; she was frozen stiff with unreasoning terror so that she could not turn her head. At the same moment a sudden gust of wind out of the stillness of the summer afternoon blew the letter on to the floor.
Adelaide looked round to see if the door had been opened, to account for the sudden draught; the door was firmly closed, but with movement came the breaking of the spell — the terror receded.
Adelaide rose and searched all round the room with a vague idea that she must find it, whatever it was.
She found nothing.
Then she picked up the letter, as if it were some sort of repulsive insect, and dropped it into a drawer of the bureau, which happened to be slightly open. The drawer closed with a snap.
Again Adelaide looked furtively over her shoulder at the empty room. It was imagination — it was nothing — less than nothing. Edward must give her a tonic.
Later, when she had recovered somewhat from her extraordinary experience, Adelaide went back to retrieve her letter from the bureau, but she could not find the spring to open the drawer, which was a secret one. She tapped the bureau all over, shook it, pressed it in every conceivable place, but all to no purpose; the drawer was immovable, and that letter — that horrible letter, which she should have burnt at once (and God or the Devil alone knew why she had not done so), was locked up inside it.
There was only one thing to be done. She must go to Peter and tell him that she had taken a fancy to the bureau, and make him give it to her. This last, however, was more easily said than done, for the bureau had been one of his mother’s most precious possessions, and no persuasions of Adelaide’s would prevail on Peter either to give it or sell it to her. She was afraid to pursue her purpose too far for fear of his suspecting some ulterior motive in her sudden wish for her mother’s writing-table; so was obliged to give up her project and leave the wretched letter in its hiding-place, hoping that Peter did not know the secret of the drawer either, and that it would lie there undiscovered until it mouldered away.
II.
Peter’s last day at Kintoul House was mild and sunny, but the signs of autumn were not far to seek. A sprinkling of leaves underfoot and the smell of damp mould in the woods brought it home to Peter as he sauntered down the pine-walk to the little kirkyard to say “good-bye” to his mother’s grave. He was going south with the Braithwaites, and the wedding had been fixed for the end of November.
Peter wondered when he would be back again in this home of his which was so dear to him, so filled with tender memories. They had arranged to go abroad for the winter — not to the little villa at Como, but to a big hotel on the Riviera. Then there would be the London season, he supposed; after that — perhaps — Kintoul.
For the last few weeks Peter had been living in a dream; he was dazed with the swift change of all his plans for the future. Natalie was always there, demanding attention, and her presence was disturbing to his thoughts. He was so used to being alone that he found consecutive thought impossible in a crowd of people. His head seemed to be always in a whirl.
It was strange, too, that he had completely lost the feeling of his mother’s presence in the house; but, stranger still, it did not seem to matter very much. Had she gone away from him to some unthinkable distance, or had he lost the power to feel her near him? He felt too dazed to care. There was no inner life to him; he had lost it, and could find nothing but chaos below the surface of his mind. When he tried to think, his head swam, and Natalie’s face rose before him, Natalie’s face with the dark, tragic shadow beneath the sparkle of her eyes. He was like a swimmer overpowered by the current being swept down a river and losing all sense of direction.
Peter was not sure that he wanted to marry Natalie quite so soon. He would rather have waited a little; but when he hinted to Adelaide that there was no hurry, she merely replied by asking him what there was to wait for.
