i

Anne Severn had come again to the Fieldings.  This time it was because her mother was dead.

She hadn’t been in the house five minutes before she asked “Where’s Jerrold?”

“Fancy,” they said, “her remembering.”

And Jerrold had put his head in at the door and gone out again when he saw her there in her black frock; and somehow she had known he was afraid to come in because her mother was dead.

Her father had brought her to Wyck-on-the-Hill that morning, the day after the funeral.  He would leave her there when he went back to India.

She was walking now down the lawn between the two tall men.  They were taking her to the pond at the bottom where the goldfish were.  It was Jerrold’s father who held her hand and talked to her.  He had a nice brown face marked with a lot of little fine, smiling strokes, and his eyes were quick and kind.

“You remember the goldfish, Anne?”

“I remember everything.”

She had been such a little girl before, and they said she had forgotten.

But she remembered so well that she always thought of Mr. Fielding as Jerrold’s father.  She remembered the pond and the goldfish.  Jerrold held her tight so that she shouldn’t tumble in.  She remembered the big grey and yellow house with its nine ball-topped gables; and the lawn, shut in by clipped yew hedges, then spreading downwards, like a fan, from the last green terrace where the two enormous peacocks stood, carved out of the yew.

Where it lay flat and still under the green wall she saw the tennis court.  Jerrold was there, knocking balls over the net to please little Colin.  She could see him fling back his head and laugh as Colin ran stumbling, waving his racquet before him like a stiff flag.  She heard Colin squeal with excitement as the balls flew out of his reach.

Her father was talking about her.  His voice was sharp and anxious.

“I don’t know how she’ll get on with your boys.” (He always talked about Anne as if she wasn’t there.) “Ten’s an awkward age.  She’s too old for Colin and too young for Eliot and Jerrold.”

She knew their ages.  Colin was only seven.  Eliot, the clever one, was very big; he was fifteen.  Jerrold was thirteen.

She heard Jerrold’s father answering in his quiet voice.

“You needn’t worry.  Jerry’ll look after Anne all right.”

“And Adeline.”

“Oh yes, of course, Adeline.” (Only somehow he made it sound as if she wouldn’t.)

Adeline was Mrs. Fielding.  Jerrold’s mother.

Anne wanted to get away from the quiet, serious men and play with Jerrold; but their idea seemed to be that it was too soon.  Too soon after the funeral.  It would be all right to go quietly and look at the goldfish; but no, not to play.  When she thought of her dead mother she was afraid to tell them that she didn’t want to go and look at the goldfish.  It was as if she knew that something sad waited for her by the pond at the bottom.  She would be safer over there where Jerrold was laughing and shouting.  She would play with him and he wouldn’t be afraid.

The day felt like a Sunday, quiet, quiet, except for the noise of Jerrold’s laughter.  Strange and exciting, his boy’s voice rang through her sadness; it made her turn her head again and again to look after him; it called to her to forget and play.

Little slim brown minnows darted backwards and forwards under the olive green water of the pond.  And every now and then the fat goldfish came nosing along, orange, with silver patches, shining, making the water light round them, stiff mouths wide open.  When they bobbed up, small bubbles broke from them and sparkled and went out.

Anne remembered the goldfish; but somehow they were not so fascinating as they used to be.

A queer plant grew on the rock border of the pond.  Green fleshy stems, with blunt spikes all over them.  Each carried a tiny gold star at its tip.  Thick, cold juice would come out of it if you squeezed it.  She thought it would smell like lavender.

It had a name.  She tried to think of it.

Stonecrop.  Stonecrop.  Suddenly she remembered.

Her mother stood with her by the pond, dark and white and slender.  Anne held out her hands smeared with the crushed flesh of the stonecrop; her mother stooped and wiped them with her pockethandkerchief, and there was a smell of lavender.  The goldfish went swimming by in the olive-green water.

Anne’s sadness came over her again; sadness so heavy that it kept her from crying; sadness that crushed her breast and made her throat ache.

They went back up the lawn, quietly, and the day felt more and more like Sunday, or like ­like a funeral day.

“She’s very silent, this small daughter of yours,” Mr. Fielding said.

“Yes,” said Mr. Severn.

His voice came with a stiff jerk, as if it choked him.  He remembered, too.

ii

The grey and yellow flagstones of the terrace were hot under your feet.

Jerrold’s mother lay out there on a pile of cushions, in the sun.  She was very large and very beautiful.  She lay on her side, heaved up on one elbow.  Under her thin white gown you could see the big lines of her shoulder and hip, and of her long full thigh, tapering to the knee.

Anne crouched beside her, uncomfortably, holding her little body away from the great warm mass among the cushions.

Mrs. Fielding was aware of this shrinking.  She put out her arm and drew Anne to her side again.

“Lean back,” she said.  “Close.  Closer.”

And Anne would lean close, politely, for a minute, and then stiffen and shrink away again when the soft arm slackened.

Eliot Fielding (the clever one) lay on his stomach, stretched out across the terrace.  He leaned over a book:  Animal Biology.  He was absorbed in a diagram of a rabbit’s heart and took no notice of his mother or of Anne.

Anne had been at the Manor five days, and she had got used to Jerrold’s mother’s caresses.  All but one.  Every now and then Mrs. Fielding’s hand would stray to the back of Anne’s neck, where the short curls, black as her frock, sprang out in a thick bunch.  The fingers stirred among the roots of Anne’s hair, stroking, stroking, lifting the bunch and letting it fall again.  And whenever they did this Anne jerked her head away and held it stiffly out of their reach.

She remembered how her mother’s fingers, slender and silk-skinned and loving, had done just that, and how their touch went thrilling through the back of her neck, how it made her heart beat.  Mrs. Fielding’s fingers didn’t thrill you, they were blunt and fumbling.  Anne thought:  “She’s no business to touch me like that.  No business to think she can do what mother did.”

She was always doing it, always trying to be a mother to her.  Her father had told her she was going to try.  And Anne wouldn’t let her.  She would not let her.

“Why do you move your head away, darling?”

Anne didn’t answer.

“You used to love it.  You used to come bending your funny little neck and turning first one ear and than the other.  Like a little cat.  And now you won’t let me touch you.”

“No.  No.  Not ­like that.”

“Yes.  Yes.  Like this.  You don’t remember.”

“I do remember.”

She felt the blunt fingers on her neck again and started up.  The beautiful, wilful woman lay back on her cushions, smiling to herself.

“You’re a funny little thing, aren’t you?” she said.

Anne’s eyes were glassed.  She shook her head fiercely and spilled tears.

Jerrold had come up on to the terrace.  Colin trotted after him.  They were looking at her.  Eliot had raised his head from his book and was looking at her.

“It is rotten of you, mater,” he said, “to tease that kid.”

“I’m not teasing her.  Really, Eliot, you do say things ­as if nobody but yourself had any sense.  You can run away now, Anne darling.”

Anne stood staring, with wild animal eyes that saw no place to run to.

It was Jerrold who saved her.

“I say, would you like to see my new buck rabbit?”

“Rather!”

He held out his hand and she ran on with him, along the terrace, down the steps at the corner and up the drive to the stable yard where the rabbits were.  Colin followed headlong.

And as she went Anne heard Eliot saying, “I’ve sense enough to remember that her mother’s dead.”

In his worst tempers there was always some fierce pity.

iii

Mrs. Fielding gathered herself together and rose, with dignity, still smiling.  It was a smile of great sweetness, infinitely remote from all discussion.

“It’s much too hot here,” she said.  “You might move the cushions down there under the beech-tree.”

That, Eliot put it to himself, was just her way of getting out of it.  To Eliot the irritating thing about his mother was her dexterity in getting out.  She never lost her temper, and never replied to any serious criticism; she simply changed the subject, leaving you with your disapproval on your hands.

In this Eliot’s young subtlety misled him.  Adeline Fielding’s mind was not the clever, calculating thing that, at fifteen, he thought it.  Her one simple idea was to be happy and, as a means to that end, to have people happy about her.  His father, or Anne’s father, could have told him that all her ideas were simple as feelings and impromptu.  Impulse moved her, one moment, to seize on the faithful, defiant little heart of Anne, the next, to get up out of the sun.  Anne’s tears spoiled her bright world; but not for long.  Coolness was now the important thing, not Anne and not Anne’s mother.  As for Eliot’s disapproval, she was no longer aware of it.

“Oh, to be cool, to be cool again!  Thank you, my son.”

Eliot had moved all the cushions down under the tree, scowling as he did it, for he knew that when his mother was really cool he would have to get up and move them back again.

With the perfect curve of a great supple animal, she turned and settled in her lair, under her tree.

Presently, down the steps and across the lawn, Anne’s father came towards her, grave, handsome, and alone.

Handsome even after fifteen years of India.  Handsomer than when he was young.  More distinguished.  Eyes lighter in the sallowish bronze.  She liked his lean, eager, deerhound’s face, ready to start off, sniffing the trail.  A little strained, leashed now, John’s eagerness.  But that was how he used to come to her, with that look of being ready, as if they could do things together.

She had tried to find his youth in Anne’s face; but Anne’s blackness and whiteness were her mother’s; her little nose was still soft and vague; you couldn’t tell what she would be like in five years’ time.  Still, there was something; the same strange quality; the same forward-springing grace.

Before he reached her, Adeline was smiling again.  A smile of the delicate, instinctive mouth, of the blue eyes shining between curled lids, under dark eyebrows; of the innocent white nose; of the whole soft, milk-white face.  Even her sleek, dark hair smiled, shining.  She was conscious of her power to make him come to her, to make herself felt through everything, even through his bereavement.

The subtle Eliot, looking over the terrace wall, observed her and thought, “The mater’s jolly pleased with herself.  I wonder why.”

It struck Eliot also that a Commissioner of Ambala and a Member of the Legislative Council and a widower ought not to look like Mr. Severn.  He was too lively, too adventurous.

He turned again to the enthralling page.  “The student should lay open the theoracic cavity of the rabbit and dissect away the thymous gland and other tissues which hide the origin of the great vessels; so as to display the heart...”

Yearp, the vet, would show him how to do that.

iv

“His name’s Benjy.  He’s a butterfly smut,” said Jerrold.

The rabbit was quiet now.  He sat in Anne’s arms, couching, his forepaws laid on her breast.  She stooped and kissed his soft nose that went in and out, pushing against her mouth, in a delicate palpitation.  He was white, with black ears and a black oval at the root of his tail.  Two wing-shaped patches went up from his nose like a moustache.  That was his butterfly smut.

“He is sweet,” she said.

Colin said it after her in his shrill child’s voice:  “He is sweet.”  Colin had a habit of repeating what you said.  It was his way of joining in the conversation.

He stretched up his hand and stroked Benjy, and Anne felt the rabbit’s heart beat sharp and quick against her breast.  A shiver went through Benjy’s body.

Anne kissed him again.  Her heart swelled and shook with maternal tenderness.

“Why does he tremble so?”

“He’s frightened.  Don’t touch him, Col-Col.”

Colin couldn’t see an animal without wanting to stroke it.  He put his hands in his pockets to keep them out of temptation.  By the way Jerrold looked at him you saw how he loved him.

About Colin there was something beautiful and breakable.  Dusk-white face; little tidy nose and mouth; dark hair and eyes like the minnows swimming under the green water.  But Jerrold’s face was strong; and he had funny eyes that made you keep looking at him.  They were blue.  Not tiresomely blue, blue all the time, like his mother’s, but secretly and surprisingly blue, a blue that flashed at you and hid again, moving queerly in the set squareness of his face, presenting at every turn a different Jerrold.  He had a pleasing straight up and down nose, his one constant feature.  The nostrils slanted slightly upward, making shadows there.  You got to know these things after watching him attentively.  Anne loved his mouth best of all, cross one minute (only never with Colin), sweet the next, tilted at the corners, ready for his laughter.

He stood close beside her in his white flannels, straight and slender.  He was looking at her, just as he looked at Colin.

“Do you like him?” he said.

“Who?  Colin?”

“No.  Benjy.”

“I love him.”

“I’ll give him to you if you’d like to have him.”

“For my own?  To keep?”

“Rather.”

“Don’t you want him?”

“Yes.  But I’d like you to have him.”

“Oh, Jerrold.”

She knew he was giving her Benjy because her mother was dead.

“I’ve got the grey doe, and the fawn, and the lop-ear,” he said.

“Oh ­I shall love him.”

“You mustn’t hold him too tight.  And you must be careful not to touch his stomach.  If you squeeze him there he’ll die.”

“Yes.  If you squeeze his stomach he’ll die,” Colin cried excitedly.

“I’ll be ever so careful.”

They put him down, and he ran violently round and round, drumming with his hind legs on the floor of the shed, startling the does that couched, like cats, among the lettuce leaves and carrots.

“When the little rabbits come half of them will be yours, because he’ll be their father.”

“Oh ­”

For the first time since Friday week Anne was happy.  She loved the rabbit, she loved little Colin.  And more than anybody or anything she loved Jerrold.

Yet afterwards, in her bed in the night nursery, when she thought of her dead mother, she lay awake crying; quietly, so that nobody could hear.

v

It was Robert Fielding’s birthday.  Anne was to dine late that evening, sitting beside him.  He said that was his birthday treat.

Anne had made him a penwiper of green cloth with a large blue bead in the middle for a knob.  He was going to keep it for ever.  He had no candles on his birthday cake at tea, because there would have been too many.

The big hall of the Manor was furnished like a room.

The wide oak staircase came down into it from a gallery that went all around.  They were waiting there for Mrs. Fielding who was always a little late.  That made you keep on thinking about her.  They were thinking about her now.

Up there a door opened and shut.  Something moved along the gallery like a large light, and Mrs. Fielding came down the stairs, slowly, prolonging her effect.  She was dressed in her old pearl-white gown.  A rope of pearls went round her neck and hung between her breasts.  Roll above roll of hair jutted out at the back of her head; across it, the foremost curl rose like a comb, shining.  Her eyes, intensely blue in her milk-white face, sparkled between two dark wings of hair.  Her mouth smiled its enchanting and enchanted smile.  She was aware that her husband and John watched her from stair to stair; she was aware of their men’s eyes, darkening.  Then suddenly she was aware of John’s daughter.

Anne was coming towards her across the hall, drawn by the magic, by the eyes, by the sweet flower smell that drifted (not lavender, not lavender).  She stood at the foot of the staircase looking up.  The heavenly thing swept down to her and she broke into a cry.

“Oh, you’re beautiful.  You’re beautiful.”

Mrs. Fielding stopped her progress.

“So are you, you little darling.”

She stooped quickly and kissed her, holding her tight to her breast, crushed down into the bed of the flower scent.  Anne gave herself up, caught by the sweetness and the beauty.

“You rogue,” said Adeline.  “At last I’ve got you.”

She couldn’t bear to be repulsed, to have anything about her, even a cat or a dog, that had not surrendered.

vi

Every evening, soon after Colin’s Nanna had tucked Anne up in her bed and left her, the door of the night nursery would open, letting a light in.  When Anne saw the light coming she shut her eyes and burrowed under the blankets, she knew it was Auntie Adeline trying to be a mother to her. (You called them Auntie Adeline and Uncle Robert to please them, though they weren’t relations.)

Every night she would hear Aunt Adeline’s feet on the floor and her candle clattering on the chest of drawers, she would feel her hands drawing back the blankets and her face bending down over her.  The mouth would brush her forehead.  And she would lie stiff and still, keeping her eyes tight shut.

To-night she heard voices at the door and somebody else’s feet going tip-toe behind Aunt Adeline’s.  Somebody else whispered “She’s asleep.”  That was Jerrold.  Jerrold.  She felt him standing beside his mother, looking at her, and her eyelids fluttered; but she lay still.

“She isn’t asleep at all,” said Aunt Adeline.  “She’s shamming, the little monkey.”

Jerrold thought he knew why.  He turned into the old nursery that was the schoolroom now, and found Eliot there, examining a fly’s leg under his microscope.  It was Eliot that he wanted..

“I say, you know, Mum’s making a jolly mistake about that kid.  Trying to go on as if she was Anne’s mother.  You can see it makes her sick.  It would me, if my mother was dead.”

Eliot looked as if he wasn’t listening, absorbed in his fly’s leg.

“Somebody’s got to tell her.”

“Are you going to,” said Eliot, “or shall I?”

“Neither.  I shall get Dad to.  He’ll do it best.”

vii

Robert Fielding didn’t do it all at once.  He put it off till Adeline gave him his chance.  He found her alone in the library and she had begun it.

“Robert, I don’t know what to do about that child.”

“Which child?”

“Anne.  She’s been here five weeks, and I’ve done everything I know, and she hasn’t shown me a scrap of affection.  It’s pretty hard if I’m to house and feed the little thing and look after her like a mother and get nothing.  Nothing but half a cold little face to kiss night and morning.  It isn’t good enough.”

“For Anne?”

“For me, my dear.  Trying to be a mother to somebody else’s child who doesn’t love you, and isn’t going to love you.”

“Don’t try then.”

“Don’t try?”

“Don’t try and be a mother to her.  That’s what Anne doesn’t like.”

They had got as far as that when John Severn stood in the doorway.  He was retreating before their appearance of communion when she called him back.

“Don’t go, John.  We want you.  Here’s Robert telling me not to be a mother to Anne.”

“And here’s Adeline worrying because she thinks Anne isn’t going to love her.”

Severn sat down, considering it.

“It takes time,” he said.

She looked at him, smiling under lowered brows.

“Time to love me?”

“Time for Anne to love you.  She ­she’s so desperately faithful.”

The dressing-bell clanged from the belfry.  Robert left them to finish a discussion that he found embarrassing.

“I said I’d try to be a mother to her.  I have tried, John; but the little thing won’t let me.”

“Don’t try too hard.  Robert’s right.  Don’t ­don’t be a mother to her.”

“What am I to be?”

“Oh, anything you like.  A presence.  A heavenly apparition.  An impossible ideal.  Anything but that.”

“Do you think she’s going to hold out for ever?”

“Only against that.  As long as she remembers.  It puts her off.”

“She doesn’t object to Robert being a father to her.”

“No.  Because he’s a better father than I am; and she knows it.”

Adeline flushed.  She understood the implication and was hurt, unreasonably.  He saw her unreasonableness and her pain.

“My dear Adeline, Anne’s mother will always be Anne’s mother.  I was never anywhere beside Alice.  I’ve had to choose between the Government of India and my daughter.  You’ll observe that I don’t try to be a father to Anne; and that, in consequence, Anne likes me.  But she’ll love Robert.”

“And ‘like’ me?  If I don’t try.”

“Give her time.  Give her time.”

He rose, smiling down at her.

“You think I’m unreasonable?”

“The least bit in the world.  For the moment.”

“My dear John, if I didn’t love your little girl I wouldn’t care.”

“Love her.  Love her.  She’ll love you too, in her rum way.  She’s fighting you now.  She wouldn’t fight if she didn’t feel she was beaten.  Nobody could hold out against you long.”

She looked at the clock.

“Heavens!  I must go and dress.”

She thought:  “He didn’t hold out against me, poor dear, five minutes.  I suppose he’ll always remember that I jilted him for Robert.”

And now he wanted her to see that if Anne’s mother would be always Anne’s mother, his wife would be always his wife.  Was he desperately faithful, too?  Always?

How could he have been?  It was characteristic of Alice Severn that when she had to choose between her husband and her daughter she had chosen Anne.  It was characteristic of John that when he had to choose between his wife and his Government, he had not chosen Alice.  He must have had adventures out in India, conducted with the discretion becoming in a Commissioner and a Member of the Legislative Council, but adventures.  Perhaps he was going back to one of them.

Severn dressed hastily and went into the schoolroom where Anne sat reading in her solitary hour between supper time and bed-time.  He took her on his knee, and she snuggled there, rubbing her head against his shoulder.  He thought of Adeline, teasing, teasing for the child’s caresses, and every time repulsed.

“Anne,” he said, “don’t you think you can love Auntie Adeline?”

Anne straightened herself.  She looked at him with candid eyes.  “I don’t know, Daddy, really, if I can.”

“Can’t you love her a little?”

“I ­I would, if she wouldn’t try ­”

“Try?”

“To do like Mummy did.”

Robert was right.  He knew it, but he wanted to be sure.

Anne went on.  “It’s no use, you see, her trying.  It only makes me think of Mummy more.”

“Don’t you want to think of her?”

“Yes.  But I want to think by myself, and Auntie Adeline keeps on getting in the way.”

“Still, she’s awfully kind to you, isn’t she?”

“Awfully.”

“And you mustn’t hurt her feelings.”

“Have I?  I didn’t mean to.”

“You wouldn’t if you loved her.”

“You haven’t ever hurt her feelings, have you, Daddy?”

“No.”

“Well, you see, it’s because I keep on thinking about Mummy.  I want her back ­I want her so awfully.”

“I know, Anne, I know.”

Anne’s mind burrowed under, turning on its tracks, coming out suddenly.

“Do you love Auntie Adeline, Daddy?”

It was terrible, but he owned that he had brought it on himself.

“I can’t say.  I’ve known her such a long time; before you were born.”

“Before you married Mummy!”

“Yes.”

“Well, won’t it do if I love Uncle Robert and Eliot and Colin?  And Jerrold?”

That night he said to Adeline, “I know who’ll take my place when I’m gone.”

“Who?  Robert?”

“No, Jerrold.”

In another week he had sailed for India and Ambala.

viii

Jerrold was brave.

When Colin upset the schoolroom lamp Jerrold wrapped it in the tablecloth and threw it out of the window just in time.  He put the chain on Billy, the sheep-dog, when he went mad and snapped at everybody.  It seemed odd that Jerrold should be frightened.

A minute ago he had been happy, rolling over and over on the grass, shouting with laughter while Sandy, the Aberdeen, jumped on him, growling his merry puppy’s growl and biting the balled fists that pushed him off.

They were all out on the lawn.  Anne waited for Jerry to get up and take her into Wyck, to buy chocolates.

Every time Jerrold laughed his mother laughed too, a throaty, girlish giggle.

“I love Jerry’s laugh,” she said.  “It’s the nicest noise he makes.”

Then, suddenly, she stopped it.  She stopped it with a word.

“If you’re going into Wyck, Jerry, you might tell Yearp ­”

Yearp.

He got up.  His face was very red.  He looked mournful and frightened too.  Yes, frightened.

“I ­can’t, Mother.”

“You can perfectly well.  Tell Yearp to come and look at Pussy’s ears, I think she’s got canker.”

“She hasn’t,” said Jerry defiantly.

“She jolly well has,” said Eliot.

“Rot.”

“You only say that because you don’t like to think she’s got it.”

“Eliot can go himself. He’s fond of Yearp.”

“You’ll do as you’re told, Jerry.  It’s downright cowardice.”

“It isn’t cowardice, is it, Daddy?”

“Well,” said his father, “it isn’t exactly courage.”

“Whatever it is,” his mother said, “you’ll have to get over it.  You go on as if nobody cared about poor Binky but yourself.”

Binky was Jerry’s dog.  He had run into a motor-bicycle in the Easter holidays and hurt his back, so that Yearp, the vet, had had to come and give him chloroform.  That was why Jerrold was afraid of Yearp.  When he saw him he saw Binky with his nose in the cup of chloroform; he heard him snorting out his last breath.  And he couldn’t bear it.

“I could send one of the men,” his father was saying.

“Don’t encourage him, Robert.  He’s got to face it.”

“Yes, Jerrold, you’d better go and get it over.  You can’t go on funking it for ever.”

Jerrold went.  But he went alone, he wouldn’t let Anne go with him.  He said he didn’t want her to be mixed up with it.

“He means,” said Eliot, “that he doesn’t want to think of Yearp every time he sees Anne.”

ix

It was true that Eliot was fond of Yearp’s society.  He would spend hours with him, learning how to dissect frogs and rabbits and pigeons.  He drove about the country with Yearp seeing the sick animals, the ewes at lambing time and the cows at their calving.  And he spent half the midsummer holidays reading Animal Biology and drawing diagrams of frogs’ hearts and pigeons’ brains.  He said he wasn’t going to Oxford or Cambridge when he left Cheltenham; he was going to Barts.  He wanted to be a doctor.  But his mother said he didn’t know what he’d want to be in three years’ time.  She thought him awful, with his frogs’ hearts and horrors.

Next to Jerrold and little Colin Anne loved Eliot.  He seemed to know when she was thinking about her mother and to understand.  He took her into the woods to look for squirrels; he showed her the wildflowers and told her all their names:  bugloss, and lady’s smock and speedwell, king-cup, willow herb and meadow sweet, crane’s bill and celandine.

One day they found in the garden a tiny egg-shaped shell made of gold-coloured lattice work.  When they put it under the microscope they saw inside it a thing like a green egg.  Every day they watched it; it put out two green horns, and a ridge grew down the middle of it, and one morning they found the golden shell broken.  A long, elegant fly with slender wings crawled beside it.

When Benjy died of eating too much lettuce Eliot was sorry.  Aunt Adeline said it was all put on and that he really wanted to cut him up and see what he was made of.  But Eliot didn’t.  He said Benjy was sacred.  That was because he knew they loved him.  And he dug the grave and lined it with moss and told Aunt Adeline to shut up when she said it ought to have been lettuce leaves.

Aunt Adeline complained that it was hard that Eliot couldn’t be nice to her when he was her favorite.

“Little Anne, little Anne, what have you done to my Eliot?” She was always saying things like that.  Anne couldn’t think what she meant till Jerrold told her she was the only kid that Eliot had ever looked at.  The big Hawtrey girl from Medlicote would have given her head to be in Anne’s shoes.

But Anne didn’t care.  Her love for Jerrold was sharp and exciting.  She brought tears to it and temper.  It was mixed up with God and music and the deaths of animals, and sunsets and all sorrowful and beautiful and mysterious things.  Thinking about her mother made her think about Jerrold; but she never thought about Eliot at all when he wasn’t there.

She would run away from Eliot any minute if she heard Jerrold calling.  It was Jerrold, Jerrold, all the time, said Aunt Adeline.

And when Eliot was busy with his microscope and Jerrold had turned from her to Colin, there was Uncle Robert.  He seemed to know the moments when she wanted him.  Then he would take her out riding with him over the estate that stretched from Wyck across the valley of the Speed and beyond it for miles over the hills.  And he would show her the reaping machines at work, and the great carthorses, and the prize bullocks in their stalls at the Manor Farm.  And Anne told him her secret, the secret she had told to nobody but Jerrold.

“Some day,” she said, “I shall have a farm, with horses and cows and pigs and little calves.”

“Shall you like that?”

“Yes,” said Anne.  “I would.  Only it can’t happen till Grandpapa’s dead.  And I don’t want him to die.”

x

They were saying now that Colin was wonderful.  He was only seven, yet he could play the piano like a grown-up person, very fast and with loud noises in the bass.  And he could sing like an angel.  When you heard him you could hardly believe that he was a little boy who cried sometimes and was afraid of ghosts.  Two masters came out from Cheltenham twice a week to teach him.  Eliot said Colin would be a professional when he grew up, but his mother said he should be nothing of the sort and Eliot wasn’t to go putting nonsense like that into his head.  Still, she was proud of Colin when his hands went pounding and flashing over the keys.  Anne had to give up practising because she did it so badly that it hurt Colin to hear her.

He wasn’t in the least conceited about his playing, not even when Jerrold stood beside him and looked on and said, “Clever Col-Col.  Isn’t he a wonderful kid?  Look at him.  Look at his little hands, all over the place.”

He didn’t think playing was wonderful.  He thought the things that Jerrold did were wonderful.  With his child’s legs and arms he tried to do the things that Jerrold did.  They told him he would have to wait nine years before he could do them.  He was always talking about what he would do in nine years’ time.

And there was the day of the walk to High Slaughter, through the valley of the Speed to the valley of the Windlode, five miles there and back.  Eliot and Jerrold and Anne had tried to sneak out when Colin wasn’t looking; but he had seen them and came running after them down the field, calling to them to let him come.  Eliot shouted “We can’t, Col-Col, it’s too far,” but Colin looked so pathetic, standing there in the big field, that Jerrold couldn’t bear it.

“I think,” he said, “we might let him come.”

“Yes.  Let him,” Anne said.

“Rot.  He can’t walk it.”

“I can,” said Colin.  “I can.”

“I tell you he can’t.  If he’s tired he’ll be sick in the night and then he’ll say it’s ghosts.”

Colin’s mouth trembled.

“It’s all right, Col-Col, you’re coming.”  Jerrold held out his hand.

“Well,” said Eliot, “if he crumples up you can carry him.”

“I can,” said Jerrold.

“So can I,” said Anne.

“Nobody,” said Colin “shall carry me.  I can walk.”

Eliot went on grumbling while Colin trotted happily beside them.  “You’re a fearful ass, Jerrold.  You’re simple ruining that kid.  He thinks he can come butting into everything.  Here’s the whole afternoon spoiled for all three of us.  He can’t walk.  You’ll see he’ll drop out in the first mile.”

“I shan’t, Jerrold.”

And he didn’t.  He struggled on down the fields to Upper Speed and along the river-meadows to Lower Speed and Hayes Mill, and from Hayes Mill to High Slaughter.  It was when they started to walk back that his legs betrayed him, slackening first, then running, because running was easier than walking, for a change.  Then dragging.  Then being dragged between Anne and Jerrold (for he refused to be carried).  Then staggering, stumbling, stopping dead; his child’s mouth drooping.

Then Jerrold carried him on his back with his hands clasped under Colin’s soft hips.  Colin’s body slipped every minute and had to be jerked up again; and when it slipped his arms tightened round Jerrold’s neck, strangling him.

At last Jerrold, too, staggered and stumbled and stopped dead.

“I’ll take him,” said Eliot.  He forbore, nobly, to say “I told you so.”

And by turns they carried him, from the valley of the Windlode to the valley of the Speed, past Hayes Mill, through Lower Speed, Upper Speed, and up the fields to Wyck Manor.  Then up the stairs to the schoolroom, pursued by their mother’s cries.

“Oh Col-Col, my little Col-Col!  What have you done to him, Eliot?”

Eliot bore it like a lamb.

Only after they had left Colin in the schoolroom, he turned on Jerrold.

“Some day,” he said, “Col-Col will be a perfect nuisance.  Then you and Anne’ll have to pay for it.”

“Why me and Anne?”

“Because you’ll both be fools enough to keep on giving in to him.”

“I suppose,” said Jerrold bitterly, “you think you’re clever.”

Adeline came out and overheard him and made a scene in the gallery before Pinkney, the footman, who was bringing in the schoolroom tea.  She said Eliot was clever enough and old enough to know better.  They were all old enough.  And Jerrold said it was his fault, not Eliot’s, and Anne said it was hers, too.  And Adeline declared that it was all their faults and she would have to speak to their father.  She kept it up long after Eliot and Jerrold had retreated to the bathroom.  If it had been anybody but her little Col-Col.  She wouldn’t have him dragged about the country till he dropped.

She added that Col-Col was her favourite.

xi

It was the last week of the holidays.  Rain had come with the west wind.  The hills were drawn back behind thick sheets of glassy rain.  Shining spears of rain dashed themselves against the west windows.  Jets of rain rose up, whirling and spraying, from the terrace.  Rain ran before the wind in a silver scud along the flagged path under the south front.

The wind made hard, thudding noises as if it pounded invisible bodies in the air.  It screamed high above the drumming and hissing of the rain.

It excited the children.

From three o’clock till tea-time the sponge fight stormed up and down the passages.  The house was filled with the sound of thudding feet and shrill laughter.

Adeline lay on the sofa in the library.  Eliot was with her there.

She was amused, but a little plaintive when they rushed in to her.

“It’s perfectly awful the noise you children are making.  I’m tired out with it.”

Jerrold flung himself on her.  “Tired?  What must we be?”

But he wasn’t tired.  His madness still worked in him.  It sought some supreme expression.

“What can we play at next?” said Anne.

“What can we play at next?” said Colin.

“Something quiet, for goodness sake,” said his mother.

They were very quiet, Jerrold and Anne and Colin, as they set the booby-trap for Pinkney.  Very quiet as they watched Pinkney’s innocent approach.  The sponge caught him ­with a delightful, squelching flump ­full and fair on the top of his sleek head.

Anne shrieked with delight.  “Oh Jerry, did you hear him say ’Damn’?”

They rushed back to the library to tell Eliot.  But Eliot couldn’t see that it was funny.  He said it was a rotten thing to do.

“When he’s a servant and can’t do anything to us.”

“I never thought of that,” said Jerrold. (It was pretty rotten.) ...  “I could ask him to bowl to me and let him get me out.”

“He’d do that in any case.”

“Still ­I’ll have asked him.”

But it seemed that Pinkney was in no mood to think of cricket, and they had to be content with begging his pardon, which he gave, as he said, “freely.”  Yet it struck them that he looked sadder than a booby-trap should have made him.

It was just before bed-time that Eliot told them the awful thing.

“I suppose you know,” he said, “that Pinkney’s mother’s dying?”

“I didn’t,” said Jerrold.  “But I might have known.  I notice that when you’re excited, really excited, something awful’s bound to happen....  Don’t cry, Anne.  It was beastly of us, but we didn’t know.”

“No.  It’s no use crying,” said Eliot.  “You can’t do anything.”

“That’s it,” Anne sobbed.  “If we only could.  If we could go to him and tell him we wouldn’t have done it if we’d known.”

“You jolly well can’t.  It would only bother the poor chap.  Besides, it was Jerry did it.  Not you.”

“It was me.  I filled the sponge.  We did it together.”

What they had done was beastly ­setting booby-traps for Pinkney, and laughing at him when his mother was dying ­but they had done it together.  The pain of her sin had sweetness in it since she shared it with Jerry.  Jerry’s arm was round her as she went upstairs to bed, crying.  They sat together on her bed, holding each other’s hands; they faced it together.

“You’d never have done it, Anne, if I hadn’t made you.”

“I wouldn’t mind so much if we hadn’t laughed at him.”

“Well, we couldn’t help that.  And it wasn’t as if we’d known.”

“If only we could tell him ­”

“We can’t.  He’d hate us to go talking to him about his mother.”

“He’d hate us.”

Then Anne had an idea.  They couldn’t talk to Pinkney but they could write.  That wouldn’t hurt him.  Jerry fetched a pencil and paper from the schoolroom; and Anne wrote.

    Dear Pinkney:  We didn’t know.  We wouldn’t have done it if we’d
    known.  We are awfully sorry.

    Yours truly,

    ANNE SEVERN.

    P.S.  You aren’t to answer this.

    JERROLD FIELDING.

Half an hour later Jerrold knocked at her door.

“Anne ­are you in bed?”

She got up and stood with him at the door in her innocent nightgown.

“It’s all right,” he said.  “I’ve seen Pinkney.  He says we aren’t to worry.  He knew we wouldn’t have done it if we’d known.”

“Was he crying?”

“No.  Laughing....  All the same, it’ll be a lesson to us,” he said.

xii

“Where’s Jerrold?”

Robert Fielding called from the dogcart that waited by the porch.  Eliot sat beside him, very stiff and straight, painfully aware of his mother who stood on the flagged path below, and made yearning faces at him, doing her best, at this last moment, to destroy his morale.  Colin sat behind him by Jerrold’s place, tearful but excited.  He was to go with them to the station.  Eliot tried hard to look as if he didn’t care; and, as his mother said, he succeeded beautifully.

It was the end of the holidays.

“Adeline, you might see where Jerrold is.”

She went into the house and saw Anne and Jerrold coming slowly down the stairs together from the gallery.  At the turn they stopped and looked at each other, and suddenly he had her in his arms.  They kissed, with close, quick kisses and then stood apart, listening.

Adeline went back.  “The monkey,” she thought; “and I who told her she didn’t know how to do it.”

Jerrold ran out, very red in the face and defiant.  He gave himself to his mother’s large embrace, broke from it, and climbed into the dogcart.  The mare bounded forward, Jerrold and Eliot raised their hats, shouted and were gone.

Adeline watched while the long lines of the beech-trees narrowed on them, till the dogcart swung out between the ball-topped pillars of the Park gates.

Last time their going had been nothing to her.  Today she could hardly bear it.  She wondered why.

She turned and found little Anne standing beside her.  They moved suddenly apart.  Each had seen the other’s tears.

xiii

Outside Colin’s window the tree rocked in the wind.  A branch brushed backwards and forwards, it tapped on the pane.  Its black shadow shook on the grey, moonlit wall.

Jerrold’s empty bed showed white and dreadful in the moonlight, covered with a sheet.  Colin was frightened.

A narrow passage divided his room from Anne’s.  The doors stood open.  He called “Anne!  Anne!”

A light thud on the floor of Anne’s room, then the soft padding of naked feet, and Anne stood beside him in her white nightgown.  Her hair rose in a black ruff round her head, her eyes were very black in the sharp whiteness of her face.

“Are you frightened, Colin?”

“No.  I’m not exactly frightened, but I think there’s something there.”

“It’s nothing.  Only the tree.”

“I mean ­in Jerry’s bed.”

“Oh no, Colin.”

“Dare you,” he said, “sit on it?”

“Of course I dare. Now you see. Now you won’t be frightened.”

“You know,” Colin said, “I don’t mind a bit when Jerrold’s there.  The ghosts never come then, because he frightens them away.”

The clock struck ten.  They counted the strokes.  Anne still sat on Jerrold’s bed with her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms clasped round them.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Colin said.  “Only you mustn’t tell.”

“I won’t.”

“Really and truly?”

“Really and truly.”

“I think Jerrold’s the wonderfullest person in the whole world.  When I grow up I’m going to be like him.”

“You couldn’t be.”

“Not now.  But when I’m grown-up, I say.”

“You couldn’t be.  Not even then.  Jerrold can’t sing and he can’t play.”

“I don’t care.”

“But you mustn’t do what he can’t if you want to be like him.”

“When I’m singing and playing I shall pretend I’m not.”

“You needn’t.  You won’t ever be him.”

“I ­shall.”

“Col-Col, I don’t want you to be like him.  I don’t want anybody else to be like Jerrold in the whole world.”

“But,” said Colin, “I shall be like him.”

xiv

Every night Adeline still came to see Anne in bed.  The little thing had left off pretending to be asleep.  She lay with eyes wide open, yielding sweetly to the embrace.

To-night her eyelids lay shut, slack on her eyes, and Adeline thought
“She’s really asleep, the little lamb.  Better not touch her.”

She was going away when a sound stopped her.  A sound of sobbing.

“Anne ­Anne ­are you crying?”

A tremulous drawing-in of breath, a shaking under the bed-clothes.  On Anne’s white cheek the black eyelashes were parted and pointed with her tears.  She had been crying a long time.

Adeline knelt down, her face against Anne’s face.

“What is it darling?  Tell me.”

Anne shivered.

“Oh Anne, I wish you loved me.  You don’t, ducky, a little bit.”

“I do.  I do.  Really and truly.”

“Then give me a kiss.  The proper kind.”

Anne gave her the tight, deep kiss that was the proper kind.

“Now ­tell me what it is.”  She knew by Anne’s surrender that, this time, it was not her mother.

“I don’t know.”

“You do know.  Is it Jerry?  Do you want Jerry?”

At the name Anne’s crying broke out again, savage, violent.

Adeline held her close and let the storm beat itself out against her heart.

“You can’t want him more than I do, little Anne.”

“You’ll have him when he comes back.  And I shan’t.  I shall be gone.”

“You’ll come again, darling.  You’ll come again.”