XII
AND WILT THOU LEAVE ME THUS?
There were eight young Laurensons, of whom the two youngest were Laurence Lionel, commonly known as Lal, and Angela. Angela was the only girl, and had been spoilt, or rather given her own way; but then, that way was always exemplary. She had done her best for all her brothers, she said, with pathos, yet Bertie still remained a dude and Harold still a fool, and with none of them had she succeeded save with Lal, who was a pattern of virtue. Angela bade him work for the army, enter Woolwich, and pass into the Royal Engineers; he obeyed her by coming out first in his batch. After this they had a slight difference of opinion, for Lal chose to enter the Royal Artillery and would not be dissuaded from it by all the accusations of laziness which his guardian angel hurled at his head. She did not know, and nobody else noticed, that a certain poor country parson’s son, who after patient toil had attained only the eighteenth place on the list, was by Lal’s retirement elevated among the lucky seventeen to be drafted into the Engineers—the only regiment where a penniless man can live on his pay. Lal’s choice remained a puzzle to Angela. But Lal was queer; she was sure that her deepest soundings never quite touched bottom.
Lal entered at once upon a distinguished career. During the South African war he was twice mentioned in despatches, received the Distinguished Service Order, and was never taken prisoner: three grand distinctions which made the guardian angel proudly preen her wings. She had cried herself to sleep every night of the first week after he sailed. In Somaliland he got enteric and was wounded in the foot; he was invalided home amid a blaze of glory with six months’ sick leave and another medal to hang beside the two which a liberal Conservative War Office had already bestowed for his services in Africa. He sustained the character of wounded hero with fortitude, but without enjoyment: Lal was modest. Admiration silenced him; he had been more open with Bernard, a stranger who did not know him, than he had ever been with his sister. He made a vaguely impressive figure at Ella Merton’s garden-parties: a quiet, languid, fair-haired young aristocrat, always very correctly dressed, always courteous, always reticent. Maud Prideaux, who had names for everybody, hit off the Laurensons’ peculiarities to a nicety when she christened Angela On dit and her brother Cela va sans dire.
Angela Laurenson had views; she had also a first-class dressmaker. These sentences are not gems from a German grammar, but the statement of correlated facts; the first would never have been in evidence but for the second. The temperance question, the rights of women, public scandals, and private fads were Angela’s happy hunting-grounds. She was member of a dozen associations, and corresponded with a dozen wooden-headed boards. She had chased the Protestant donkey to his home in a mare’s-nest. Sweeping into one condemnation offenders against manners and morals, she declined to know wicked noblemen, whitewashed ladies, grocery knights, and Chicago millionaires. In fact, her fair little thin face, her clear little imperious voice, her perfectly simple and simply perfect frocks were pretty widely known; and in spite of certain errors, she was respected.
In the fore-front of her battles she always posted Lal. He was not allowed to smoke. He would have been enrolled in the Ladies’ League had that been possible. He was constrained to become what in temperance language is called an abstainer: which was especially hard on Lal, who inherited a delicate critical taste in wines together with an ancestral cellar. But he disliked these things less than being dragged to meetings and forced to sing “Dare to be a Daniel” upon a platform. Lal hated publicity: not the lion, but the lookers-on, seemed to him the real test of Daniel’s courage. If anything could have held him back from distinguishing himself in action, it would have been the fear of reward.
Now one day at lunch the story of Mrs. Searle and her copper came up, and was discussed in all its ramifications, down to the illness of Mrs. Searle’s baby and Noel Farquhar’s political prospects. Angela, who was present, took it into her pretty little head that duty called her to visit the sick child. Like most city-bred girls, she expected the country lanes to be haunted by drunken tramps, and was nervous of walking alone; but Maud Prideaux vowed that babies were beyond her charity, and Mrs. Merton, who was enthusiastically consulting planchette in a corner with a serious young man, professed a bad headache. Angela fell back on Lal; and, accordingly, at three o’clock they were walking towards Burnt House, Lal irreproachable in grey, with lilies in his button-hole; Angela, also in grey, a demure little Quakeress. The sky was in grey as well, and mist clung to the face of the earth like fine grey powder, dulling all colours. The flattened uplands round the black cottages were as dingy as a suburban street on a wet day.
Mrs. Searle was at the new copper, trying to do the family wash; but between the naughtiness of Randolph, aged thirteen months, the frettiness of Florry, aged twenty days, and her own health, she had not done much. She was not at first very gracious; poor people have their feelings, and the attitude of Angela, with her skirts unconsciously held very high to avoid contamination, suggested the supercilious patronage of the lady bountiful. But Angela’s kindness was too homely to remain hidden under a Paris hat; she soon received the story of Mrs. Searle’s illness and the baby’s delicacy: “but we’re getting on nicely now,” the girl added, leaning against the copper and holding the brickwork to keep herself steady, the lovely, pathetic brown eyes uncomplainingly lifted to Angela’s. She said she had at first fed the baby on Brighton biscuit and boiled bread, beaten up in water.
“Brighton biscuit?” said Angela, doubtfully, looking, with no feeling but repulsion, at the purplish, spidery, open-mouthed creature in its tumbled clothes. “Is that good for it, do you think?”
“Well, Miss Dolly she says give her milk and barley-water, but the milkman don’t come up here. So I tried her with the condensed, and it’s wonderful how she’s got on since.”
“I’ll tell the milkman to bring you up a gallon a day,” said Angela, with a small sigh relinquishing a silver blotting-book which she had coveted. “That will be enough for it, won’t it?”
“Well, I’m sure you are kind—”
“And couldn’t you get a woman in to help you? You’re not fit to be doing your own work yet.”
Then suddenly Mrs. Searle melted into tears, not for her own misfortunes, and poured forth the tale of her sister Hilda, who should have been her help, but had got into trouble. Not yet seventeen, very pretty, and now desperate, she was gone to a low public-house in Swanborough. “Mr. Searle he can’t get her to come away, and I can’t get so far, you see. And really, miss, some days I don’t know how to crawl about, my back is that bad; only things has got to be done somehow. I did think Hilda would have kept straight. Or she might have stopped at home till my trouble was over. I told her as nobody would think the worse of her if it was just once, as you may say, and she kept herself respectable after; but there, you never know how to have girls, and off she goes, as bold as brass, and me so ill I couldn’t say nothing to her—”
Angela sighed impatiently; none of her pet reforms touched Mrs. Searle’s case; no reforms ever do. The celebrated last words of the poor woman who always was tired, who lived in a house where help was not hired, represent the aspirations of most cottage mothers, night by night, until the children are grown old enough to help them. Angela did her best; she promised a nurse, and left a half-crown; and then walked out upon Dolly Fane, who was talking to Lal. They were standing so close to the door that Angela knew Lal must have overheard Mrs. Searle’s story, and the colour came into her face as she took Dolly’s hand. She forgot to be surprised to find them acquainted until Dolly in her direct fashion told her of their early meeting; when Angela did not forget to feel annoyed.
Nor was she better pleased when Dolly, entering the cottage, quieted Randolph and prescribed for the baby and put Mrs. Searle into a chair, proving herself efficient where Angela had just proved herself incapable. It was all done in innocence, and innocent, too, was Dolly’s laugh when she heard of the liberal provision of milk allotted for the baby, for Mrs. Searle had not mentioned the giver; nevertheless, Angela decided that she was not a nice companion for Lal.
“We shall be late for tea, Lal,” she whispered, suggestively.
“Miss Fane will be ready directly.”
“Not for half an hour or so; I am going to finish these things in the copper,” said Dolly, appearing at the door in a large apron and with her sleeves rolled up. No inclement clouds could dim the brilliancy of her colouring; she was independent of sun and sky. But Angela became conscious that her own face looked drab, and that did not please her.
“If you don’t mind walking home alone I think I’ll stay and help Miss Fane; these cans are very heavy,” said Lal, depriving Dolly of that she was carrying.
“I do mind walking home alone, across all those fields!”
“It really is not lonely, Angela.”
“But there are bulls in them!”
“Oh no, Miss Laurenson, the cows have been driven home to be milked by now,” said Dolly, serenely; “you need not be alarmed. But I don’t want any help; I hope Mr. Laurenson won’t stay for me.”
“I’ll take you as far as the high-road, then, and come back,” said Lal.
Dolly put up her eyebrows and laughed softly. “I’m perfectly competent to do the work myself; these cans weigh nothing.” She held it out at arm’s-length and lightly put it down, rising again elastic from the burden.
“You’re accustomed to the work, of course,” said Angela, dryly.
“I am; we do our own washing at home.”
“If you want to be in by four, we had better start,” Lal interposed.
“Good-bye,” said Angela, not offering her hand; was not Dolly’s wet?
“Pray don’t come back, Mr. Laurenson; there are so many bad characters about the roads now; you might meet my brother Bernard!” Dolly retorted, with a faintly satirical accent.
“I certainly shall,” said Lal, quietly.
Between Burnt House and the high-road Lal received a full-length portrait of his misconduct; he listened, as his habit was, in silence. Angela soon tired of reproving a dummy. “Why don’t you say something?” she cried at last.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Do you mean to go back to that girl?”
“Certainly I do.”
“O Lal!” said Angela. “Oh, do you really?”
“I can’t leave her with that work on her hands.”
“Yes, but—Lal, I don’t like walking alone!”
“I’m sorry, Angela, but I promised.”
“There’s Mr. Fane,” cried Angela, in a note of relief, and she hurried to meet him. Bernard in his working clothes was something of a shock to her nerves, but she got over it and gave him her hand.
“We’ve left your sister at the black cottages, Mr. Fane,” she began, “and my brother wanted to go back and help her—”
“And my sister is a little nervous in these lanes,” Lal continued, “so that if you would be so good as to see her as far as The Hall, I should be very grateful. It is on your way, I know.”
“I’d like to very much,” said Bernard, promptly.
“Thanks so much. Good-night.”
He lifted his hat and walked off, leaving Angela speechless and ready to cry; for she had not desired Lal’s presence with her so much as his absence from Dolly, and that Lal knew, and she knew that he knew. However, it was not easy to embarrass Bernard; he talked on for both till she had recovered. “Ah,” thought Angela, coming back to the remembrance of her escort, “here is some one who will not flout and contradict me and fling my own axioms in my face!”
“That chap Searle, now,” Bernard was saying when next his word reached her brain: “he’s a good worker; he might get on if he liked; but he will drink. Comes home every Saturday night drunk as a lord. What are you to do with a chap like him?”
“He should be persuaded to take the pledge,” said Angela, reviving a little to discuss one of her favourite hobbies.
“Oh, the teetotal tomfoolery; no, I guess that wouldn’t do for him. What he wants is to know when to pull up.”
“Teetotal—nonsense?” said Angela, avoiding Bernard’s too strong expression. “The pledge of abstinence is the only safeguard for an habitual drunkard. I am a total abstainer myself.”
“Ah, but I guess you didn’t ever drink,” said Bernard, as one who scores a point. “Besides, girls don’t want it so much; I daresay they can do without. But it stands to reason a man can’t do a decent day’s work on water. Spirits are no good; they’re mostly adulterated with beastly stuff, and the best of them isn’t wholesome. But a glass of good, honest beer don’t do anybody any harm. A couple of quarts a day, that’s my limit; I dare say a quart and a half would do for a little chap like Searle, except, perhaps, in harvesting. The point is to know your limit and stick to it, and that he’ll never do, more’s the pity.”
Angela felt the primitive truths of her life flying round her like slates in a gale. “But doctors say—” she was beginning.
“Doctors’ll say anything; and, come this time ten years, they’ll all say all different. That old chap in Tennyson, now, who said he’d have his quart if he died for it; I guess he didn’t lose much by sticking to his beer.”
“Oh, do you read Tennyson?” said Angela, faintly.
“Sometimes, on Sunday afternoons. There isn’t much to do on the farm, and there’s no paper, and you can’t read the Bible all day long; so when I’ve done my chapter I often turn in on him. I like the things in dialect; they’re uncommonly good. I like the thing about the Baptists, who left their sins in the pond and poisoned the cow,” he continued, with a grin. “Father lent ’em our pond once, when he’d had a split with the Wesleyans; but I guess they won’t come there again to do their baptising. It looks as clear as the river, but it’s about six feet deep in mud.”
“I was thinking of starting a branch of the C. E. T. S. here, and asking you to join it,” said Angela, with the calmness of despair.
“Me turn teetotaller? I should die of it!”
“Your adherence would have strengthened my hands, but, of course, since you feel like this, there is no more to be said.”
“Do you want me to join?”
“It does not matter. I sha’n’t start the branch now.”
Bernard walked on in silence. Six miles an hour was his usual rate of walking, four when with Dolly, or, as he supposed, with any other able-bodied female; but Angela was used to crowded London pavements and the very deliberate pace of lazy Lal. She did not protest, she was too much out of heart to mind being out of breath. She sadly supposed that Bernard was not observant. Great was her surprise when, remarking, “I guess we’re going too fast,” he reduced his pace to three miles an hour and rather doubtfully offered his arm.
“I suppose it’s not the proper thing,” was his comment when she declined it. “Dolly said so, but then she doesn’t know everything; and you do take arms in to dinner. I’ll remember another time. Look here, are you set on this temperance business?”
“I think it a noble cause,” said Angela, wearily standing to her guns.
“Then I’ll take the pledge for a month.”
“You will?”
“I guess I couldn’t stand it any longer,” Bernard explained; “but a month from now’ll just keep clear of the harvesting. I’d like to do what you want, as far as is reason. And here we are. I’m awfully glad to have met you. You’ll remember I’d like to please you, won’t you?”
Oh yes, Angela said, she would remember; and she kept her word, for all the night through she reflected alternately on Lal’s defection and on Bernard Fane’s subjection—a word which she refused to lengthen into subjugation.
Lal, on his way to the black cottages, walked really fast, but he did not get back in time to help Dolly with her cans of water; she was feeding the baby when he came up. Sitting in a low chair with the child on her knee, holding the bottle, the delicate little toy fingers clasped round her own, Dolly, intent and serious, was no Madonna of pity and love, but a business-like young woman performing a duty. But Lal, who was fond of little children, unconsciously ascribed to her his own feelings; he saw the divine spirit of motherhood, and stood quietly watching, too reverent to speak and break the charm. It was the traitorous sun, suddenly bursting out to throw Lal’s shadow on the floor, which made Dolly look up. She smiled. She had forgotten her vexation, and was frankly glad to see him, yet her first words were a reproach.
“Why did you come back? Your sister hated it, and there was no need!”
“I came to help you.”
“It was a pity. Your sister is very fond of you, very proud; you should not vex her,” Dolly said, laying the child in the cradle. She rose and came to the door, and stood in the hot sunshine, rich in colour as a Tintoretto, spiritual as the crowned Madonna of the angelical painter. She was still thinking of Mrs. Searle, and pity was Dolly’s loveliest expression.
“I left my sister in the charge of your brother; he was going to see her home. Now will you accuse me of vexing her? Or are you going to give me something to do?”
“You may watch the baby while I sweep the room.”
“Thank you; I will sweep the room while you watch the baby.”
“You? You sweep?”
“Why not?”
“Have you ever swept in your life?”
“I have not; but I can try.”
“Oh! very well,” said Dolly, suddenly folding her hands and sitting down in her low chair. “Do it: there’s the broom behind the door. Do it: I should love to see you.”
The road outside was far cleaner than the floor of Mrs. Searle’s kitchen. Lal stood, doubtfully surveying his task and the aged broom. “It really wants scrubbing,” he said, seriously.
“Sweeping will do, if you sweep properly.”
“‘Will do!’ Miss Fane, I am surprised to hear you use that sloven’s expression. However, I am afraid sweeping will have to do, as we have neither sand nor Brooke’s soap.”
Leaving Dolly amazed at his erudition, Lal made a sudden descent upon the hearth-rug, shook it, rolled it up, and carried it out. He took out the cradle as well, very gently putting it down in the shade without waking the child. The chairs he piled on the table; the curtains he tucked up. Dolly took her place outside with the rest of the furniture, and stood in the doorway, watching and laughing. Lal paused, leaning on his broom in the middle of the floor as Maud Muller might have leaned upon her hay-rake.
Suddenly he made a triumphant pounce upon Mrs. Searle’s brown teapot, which spent all its days upon the hob. He emptied away the liquid tea, shook out the leaves on a broken plate, and began to strew them with fastidious fingers about the floor: the contrast between him and his task was piquant. Bernard would never have attempted to sweep at all, Lucian might have tried, but he was not wise enough for the tea-leaf plan. Dolly’s imagination could see him happily brooming all the dust out of the open door, and gathering it up with his fingers when it lodged in the inequalities of the flooring. This amateur house-maid worked in different style. Neat, deft, precise, that was Lal; he coaxed the flue out of the corners, he lifted the fender and swept underneath, he took away cobwebs from the window and spiders’ nests from the angles of the ceiling, and swept all his gleanings into a symmetrical pile.
“A dust-pan, now,” he said, looking round enquiringly.
“There’s no such thing. Let me do it now: you’ve proved your powers.”
“No,” said Lal; “no.” His eye rested on a copy of the local paper; in a trice he had it folded firmly with sharp edges, and was bending it into a convenient receptacle for the débris, which he emptied into the fire. Then he dusted the furniture with his handkerchief and put everything back in place, twitching the ragged hearth-rug straight to the eighth of an inch and arranging all the chairs in pairs exactly.
“But it should have been scrubbed,” he wound up, with a sigh of regret.
“I won’t have it; Mrs. Searle wouldn’t know her own room. Do you know, I never thought a man could have so—could be—”
“Could have so much sense,” Lal finished, quaintly.
“Well, I didn’t. Where did you learn how to do it?” said Dolly, laughing.
“Miss Fane, I have a pair of eyes, and our rooms at home are swept sometimes.”
“Ah, but you’ve the hands, too.”
“I know it,” Lal said, displaying them with disgust. Dolly looked, with a wise little nod, and went into the scullery; she brought back a fresh towel, a piece of yellow soap, and a tin basin full of clean hot water.
“That is good,” Lal said, plunging in his hands with an air of relief. Dolly was looking at her own. “I think I’ll wash, too,” she said; and without more ado stripped back her cuffs and slipped her fingers in beside Lal’s. The sunlight sparkled in the water and flashed in silver circles, following the curve of the white metal. Dolly chased the piece of soap all round the basin, and Lal captured it and gave it to her; her wrist was soft to the touch as a baby’s. Lal was warmly alive to the charm of the moment, and would have prolonged it; not so Dolly. She withdrew her hands with the same indifference as though Bernard had been her partner. They were obliged to share the same towel; there were but two in Mrs. Searle’s establishment.
“What a pussy-cat you are!” Dolly laughed, noticing Lal’s fastidious movements. “Do you manicure your hands?”
“I rather think that is a deadly insult. No, I do not manicure my hands; I am merely clean.”
“Merely clean! You’re hard on the rest of us.” Dolly was thinking of Lucian as he had appeared after half an hour of weeding in the violet-bed. She held out her own hand, soft, rosy, crinkled by the hot water. “There are stains on my fingers; I can’t get them off without taking the skin, too; so I leave them on. Am I not clean, please?”
Lal was in danger of losing his head, and kissing the pretty palm that lay in his, “I don’t see any stains,” he said. Dolly withdrew it, colouring at his tone. She pulled down her sleeves, and told herself she was a fool to forget that men are fools.
“Do you always do as your sister tells you?” she asked, abruptly.
“Miss Fane, do you always do as your brother tells you?”
“I? Not often,” Dolly frankly admitted. “I do as I like.”
“You’re more independent than I am: I do what Angela likes, except on serious and important questions of principle. It saves so much trouble, you know; I can do no wrong, like the king.”
“What principle was involved in your staying this afternoon?”
Lal was dumb, manifestly embarrassed by this sudden attack.
“Tell me,” Dolly insisted. She was expecting that he would answer “You,” in which case she meant to snub him and give him up. But he remained silent.
“Why did you come back, when your sister hated it and you hated vexing her, as I know very well you did?”
“Because I couldn’t stand seeing a girl carry those heavy cans.”
Dolly had her answer now, and she knew it was the truth. Lal had coloured over his admission and cast down his eyes; he should have looked youthful and ingenuous, but he did not. A very expressive mouth had Lal; the underlip was remarkably firm, pure, decisive; tenacity and independence controlled its curves. One might expect to find originality in his theory of life, anachronisms in his creed, possibly asceticism, certainly unworldliness: in fact, all those queer ideas whose existence Angela unhappily suspected. So much may be read in a momentary twist of the lips. Chivalry here in the twentieth century! Bernard looked on woman as an inferior animal, Lucian as a comrade, Farquhar as slave or sultana by turns: Dolly’s observations and reflections were summed up in the involuntary remark:
“Mr. Laurenson, how very odd you are!”