Lonesome Road Page 6

  The Market Square is the center of Ledlington, and in the center of the Market Square stands the statue of Sir Albert Dawnish of which the townsfolk are so justly proud. They have a well-founded belief that it can give points and a beating to any other statue in any other market town in England, both for its own size and for that of the cheque which paid for it. From a highly ornate pedestal Sir Albert in rigid marble trousers gazes down upon the cradle of his enormous fortune-or, shall we say, upon the spot where once that cradle stood. The first of the long line of Quick Cash Stores which have made the name of Dawnish a household word was pulled down some years ago, but the statue of Sir Albert is good to last as long as the Market Square.

  Mr. Enderby’s old shop is behind Sir Albert’s back. He would not in any case think it worth looking at. It has, indeed, a somewhat rickety air, as if its four hundred years had at last begun to tell upon its constitution, but the oak beams are still staunch, and the brickwork holds. About a hundred and fifty years ago Josiah Enderby the third threw out a bow window the better to exhibit his goods; nothing else has emerged from the fifteenth century. The shop is still very nearly as dark, stuffy, and inconvenient as it must have been when Elizabeth was on the throne. The old oak boards are bare to the customer’s foot. There is no electric light and no counter. A long trestle table black with age serves Mr. Thomas Enderby as it served his forebears. In spite of these drawbacks, or perhaps because of them, the shop is a famous one. The Enderby’s have always had two assets, absolute probity and a most astonishing flair for stones. Thirty years ago Tobias Enderby was considered the finest judge of pearls in Europe. His son Thomas runs him close. People with great names and deep purses have sat at that trestle table and watched an Enderby-Josiah, Tobias, Thomas-bring out his treasures for their inspection. Not always easy to buy from, the Enderbys. A few years before the war a Personage who has since lost the throne which he then adorned wished to buy the Gonzalez ruby, once the property of Philip II of Spain, and come by devious ways to the Market Place in Ledlington. The Personage offered a fabulous price. He also offered some discourtesy. Nobody seems to know quite what it was, but old Tobias gazed past him with an abstracted air and murmured, “No, sir, it is not for sale.”

  Rachel told Gale Brandon the story as they were crossing the Square.

  “It’s rather nice to feel that there are some things money won’t buy.”

  He stood still under the very shadow of Sir Albert Dawnish.

  “Now, Miss Treherne, I don’t like to hear you say that. And why? Because it sounds to me as if you were letting money get you down. You know, you’re all right as long as you’re on top of it, but the minute you let it get on top of you you’re done. It’s a servant, and like all servants you’ve got to look out it doesn’t get the upper hand. Use it, work it, don’t let it drive you, don’t let yourself think you can’t do without it, don’t let yourself believe for a single moment that it can give you any value you haven’t got already. It’s the other way round. It’s you who give money its value by the way you spend it.” He laughed suddenly and came down on a schoolboy joke. “It isn’t the money that makes the man, it’s the man that makes the money.”

  “I didn’t make mine,” said Rachel.

  “Then somebody made it for you.”

  He laughed again, and took her across the line of traffic. With her hand on the latch of Mr. Enderby’s door, Rachel said with all her heart,

  “I wish they hadn’t.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Thomas Enderby was exactly like an old gray mouse, except that a mouse’s eyes are bright and dark, and his were veiled and of no color at all.

  There was an interchange of courtesies reminding Rachel of an old lady she had known as a child who was wont to say with an approving nod of the head, “Compliments pass when gentlefolk meet.”

  The compliments having passed, Mr. Brandon said something in a low voice, from which Rachel inferred that their visit had not been without preliminaries. With a bow Mr. Enderby disappeared through a door in the back of the shop, returning immediately with a square of black velvet which he laid before Miss Treherne. He then disappeared again, and this time for longer.

  As she sat waiting, Rachel was aware of the romantic atmosphere. This old house, this old room; the very chair she sat in, with its high back and straight arms; the floor, black with age, uneven from the passing of the generations- all made a setting for the man who had brought her here to choose a love-gift for another woman. She was conscious of him as she had never been conscious of a man before. His look stirred her as if it had been a touch, and his touch… She steadied her thought to face what this might mean-the folly of a lonely woman who had had no time for love and had let it pass her by; the terror of a frightened woman groping for a hand that she might trust to; or something deeper, saner, more steadfast… Whichever it was, it meant pain. It meant that she must brace herself to meet pain, to endure it, to tread it down.

  The change in her feelings dazed her. She had found pleasure in Gale Brandon’s society, and in his obvious admiration for herself, but she had never dreamed that she would feel like this because he told her that he loved another woman.

  Thomas Enderby came back with an old-fashioned box of Tonbridge ware. He sat down at the table, opened the box, removed a layer of cotton wool, and took out three packages done up in tissue paper. His hands moved in a delicate and leisurely manner as he unfolded the paper. In the end he sat back and contemplated the three ornaments which he had disposed upon the square of black velvet, his eyes no longer hooded and dim, but bright with the discerning admiration of the connoisseur.

  Rachel looked too.

  The oak spray came out of its wrappings first. She found it hard to take her eyes from it-two diamond oak-leaves and three acorns, the cups shining with brilliants, and each acorn a pearl, two white and one black.

  She said, “Oh, how lovely!” and Mr. Thomas Enderby agreed.

  “It was my father’s design. It was commissioned by the Duchess of Southshire, but she died before it was completed. Now this chain came to us from abroad-Italian work, made to a Russian order.”

  The chain was about twenty-five inches in length. It had pale gold links, most exquisitely fine, between alternate sapphires and emeralds, each stone beautifully cut and set with diamond sparks, the whole effect one of lightness, brilliance, and grace.

  “This of course is the finest stone,” said Mr. Enderby. He touched the third ornament caressingly. “There is nothing like a ruby after all, and this is one of the best we have had. Look at the color!”

  The ruby burned between two diamond wings-the lifted arch of an eagle’s wings. Between the flash of them the stone seemed alive.

  “I am not, unfortunately, at liberty to give you the particular history of this piece,” pursued Thomas Enderby. “My father designed it for a member of a royal house, and it has recently come back to us.” He turned to Gale Brandon. “Those, sir, are our three best pieces.”

  Rachel felt rather dazzled. The jewels were most beautiful. They were also most costly. She admired the romance of the gesture which would offer one of these exquisite things as a declaration of love without any certainty of its acceptance. But quick on this came the thought, “It spoils it all to let another woman choose.”

  It was at this moment that he leaned to her and said,

  “Which do you like best?”

  The words struck a spark of resentment from her. She said, a thought quickly,

  “But it isn’t what I like. I can’t choose for a woman I don’t know. Pearls are for one sort of woman, rubies for another, and emeralds and sapphires for another still. You’ll have to choose for yourself. I can’t help you.”

  Gale Brandon’s eyes danced with a teasing light. He looked most extraordinarily alive in the little dark room.

  “Isn’t that too bad!” he said. “But I wasn’t asking you to choose for me. I just felt very interested to know which of Mr. Enderby’s pretty things you liked
best. Because, you see, I’ve figured it out this way. Say there’s one that I like best. Well, if you choose it too, then there are two votes for that. Do you see what I mean?”

  “But it isn’t my vote that ought to count, because I’m quite in the dark. Why, I don’t even know the color of her hair.”

  A smile flickered over his face.

  “Well, we’ll all be getting gray hair some day. I hope she’s going to wear it a good long time, so it would be better to choose something that’s going to go on looking good when she’s got those silver threads among the gold.”

  So she had golden hair… It didn’t go a good gray as a rule… She said in the friendliest tone she could compass,

  “If she is fair, the emerald and sapphire chain would suit her.”

  “But I didn’t say she was fair, Miss Treherne.”

  “I thought you did. You quoted the song about silver threads among the gold.”

  “That was a figure of speech. I certainly shouldn’t call her fair-except in the romantic sense-and I can’t see that there is one of these jewels that wouldn’t be mighty becoming to her. But I really would appreciate it if you would tell me which one appeals to you, Miss Treherne. You see, it’s the woman’s point of view I’d like to get.”

  She found herself laughing a little scornfully.

  “Do you really think all women are alike?”

  He laughed too.

  “It would certainly be dull if they were. But I would really like to know which of these pretty things you do like the best. I’m interested in your point of view. And then I’d like to know whether you like the one that I like, and when we’ve settled that we’ll ask Mr. Enderby which is the one he’d save if his shop was burning.”

  Thomas Enderby’s hand went out a little way and drew back.

  An irrational gust of gaiety blew into Rachel’s mind. She put out her own hand and touched the oak spray with its pearl acorns.

  “Oh, that’s my one. I lost my heart to it at once. But I don’t believe Mr. Enderby can bear to let it go. He’s lost his heart to it too.”

  “And I’ve lost mine,” said Gale Brandon-“so there are three of us. Well, Mr. Enderby-what about it? Will you let me have it-for the loveliest and kindest lady in the world?”

  “It’s not everyone I’d let it go to,” said Thomas Enderby.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Rachel got back to find that she had missed Mrs. Barber by a comfortable margin. Ella, meeting her in the hall, remarked on how unfortunate this was.

  “Away yesterday, out today. I only hope, Rachel, that she won’t think you want to avoid her. Of course quite ridiculous, because she is such an exceptionally interesting and charming person, and I know she particularly wanted to talk to you about slum clearance.”

  Cosmo Frith, emerging from the study, demanded why any human being should imagine that any other human being should want to talk about slums. He slipped his arm through Rachel’s and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Well, my dear, I needn’t ask how you are. You look fine. And who was the cavalier? Wouldn’t he stay to lunch-or didn’t you ask him? I thought he looked pretty well pleased with himself as he drove away.”

  Rachel laughed. Her color was bright.

  “Oh, I asked him, but he had to get back. It was Mr. Brandon, the American who has taken the Halketts’ house for the winter. I thought you had met.”

  “No. Fancies himself, doesn’t he?”

  Rachel laughed again.

  “I think he fancies everything, and that includes himself. I’ve never met anyone who enjoys things so much. We’ve been shopping Christmas presents.”

  Cosmo looked exactly like a child who hears another child praised. He was a handsome man of forty-five. His gray hair set off a fresh complexion and a pair of fine dark eyes with well marked brows. His waist measurement was rather larger than it had been a year or two ago, and there were moments when he feared a double chin. He withdrew his arm and said with a lift of the eyebrows,

  “Christmas presents-in November? What a nauseating idea!”

  “And why nauseating?” inquired Ella Comperton. “I think this modern fashion of laughing at Christmas is a terrible sign of the times. My dear mother always used to say, ‘Ah, it isn’t the gift-it’s the loving preparation that counts,’ and we used to be set down to our Christmas presents as soon as the summer holidays were over.”

  “Horrible!” said Cosmo. “But I suppose that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children hadn’t been invented then.” He turned to Rachel. “And what were you and Mr. Brandon lovingly preparing?”

  “Chocolates, and toys, and gloves, and handbags and stockings for a lot of young people. He didn’t really need me at all. He knew exactly what he wanted.”

  They went in to lunch. Cosmo as usual monopolized the conversation, a good deal to the annoyance of the Wadlows and Miss Comperton. Maurice and Cherry having departed, their parents wished to talk about them. Ella wished to talk about slums. She had come primed from Mrs. Barber, and she wished to pose as an expert. But there was no talking against Cosmo. He told anecdotes, and laughed at them heartily in a deep, rollicking voice. He narrated the inner history of the Guffington divorce. He gave them the reasons which had led the ultra-particular Lady Walbrook to give her consent to her daughter’s marriage to a very notorious gentleman, Mr. Demosthenes Ryland. He had inside information as to the exact circumstances in which that rising star Seraphine had broken her Hollywood contract. Not that he neglected the excellent food with which he was served. He appeared to be able to eat and talk at the same time.

  Rachel was quite pleased to listen. She could laugh at Cosmo, but she was very fond of him, and she was very glad to have an alternative to the Wadlows and their young, or Ella on slums.

  The evil hour was, however, only postponed. As soon as lunch was over Mabel demanded an interview, and a very long, tearful and trying interview it proved to be, under such headings as a Mother’s Love, a Mother’s Anxieties, a Sister’s Heart, and, by implication, a Sister’s Purse.

  Rachel did her best to endure the Mother’s Love, to soothe the Mother’s Anxieties, and to display the Sister’s Heart, whilst keeping a reasonably firm hand upon the Sister’s Purse. It was all very difficult and very, very exhausting.

  When Mabel had at last been induced to lie down, there was Ernest, with a Father’s Anxieties and a Father’s Responsibilities.

  Retiring to her room after this encounter, Rachel found herself pursued by her cousin Ella, tall, raw-boned, and purposeful, with a small attaché-case full of pamphlets and photographs.

  “Most disappointing that you should have missed Mrs. Barber. I am a very poor substitute, but I promised her faithfully that I would do my very best to interest you.”

  She was still there when Louisa Barnet came in to draw the curtains. She rose regretfully and began to pack the attaché-case.

  “The time has simply flown-hasn’t it? I must go and wash my hands for tea, but I’ll leave you those pamphlets. Dear me, Rachel, you look quite tired. I hope you didn’t do too much this morning. Most inconsiderate of Mr. Brandon, I call it.” The door closed behind her.

  Louisa rattled the curtain rings.

  “Fair wore out is what you look, Miss Rachel, And it’s not what you did this morning that’s to blame neither.”

  She got rather a wan smile as she turned.

  “Well, I don’t think it is, Louie. You know what Miss Ella is. She’d got those papers on her mind, and she was bound to show them to me.”

  Louisa looked angrily at the pamphlets.

  “What’s it now? She doesn’t stick to nothing, does she? Last time it was lepers, and the time before that it was naked heathen cannibals. And what I say is, if they was made that way, then it was for some good purpose, and it’s not for us nor yet for Miss Ella to go flying in the face of Providence. Interferingness-that’s what it is, and you can’t get from it!”

  Rachel bit her lip.

  “But
, Louie, Providence didn’t make lepers or cannibals, and He certainly didn’t make slums.”

  Louisa gloomed.

  “That’s what you say, Miss Rachel. I’ve got my own ideas, and I’m not the only one. And it’s no good talking about lepers and cannibals to me when I see you looking as white as a sheet, and saucers under your eyes for all the world as if they were full of ink. You’ll never be going over to see Mrs. Capper tonight?”

  “Oh, yes-she counts on it. And I like going, you know. She’ll be a pleasant change, because she always tells me what a nice little girl I used to be, and when we’ve finished with me we go over all the other children she nursed. I sometimes think how odd it would be if we could all meet.”

  Louisa took no interest in Mrs. Capper’s charges. It annoyed her to think that there had been a time when Mrs. Capper had brushed Miss Rachel’s hair and turned down her bed. Rachel’s visits to her old nurse were a source of irritation, and she never let slip an opportunity of suggesting that it was too wet or too cold, or that Rachel was too busy or too tired.

  “That Miss Silver is coming at half past five, Miss Rachel. You’ll want to be in.”

  Rachel couldn’t help laughing.

  “Her train gets in at half past five-she won’t be here before six. I shall be back quite soon after that. Put my torch in the hall and hang out the lantern. Barlow can drop me before he goes to the station, and I’ll come back by the cliff.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Cosmo seemed to think it was his turn for a tête-à-tête with Rachel after tea. He had a portfolio full of sketches to show her, was quite as annoyed as Louisa had been when Rachel reminded him that it was her day for Mrs. Capper. He said “Stuff and nonsense!” several times in a loud voice, and walked up and down jingling the keys in his trouser pocket and lecturing her about running herself off her legs, and when he had finished lecturing her he started in to scold the family for allowing her to wear herself out.