Robinetta. Findlater Jane Helen

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СКАЧАТЬ tell you about it out of doors, Nurse dear,” she said tearfully; “can you come out under the plum tree in your garden? It’s lovely there.”

      “Yes, dearie, yes, we’ll come out under the plum tree, we will,” echoed Mrs. Prettyman.

      “See, Nursie, take my arm, I’ll help you out into the warm sunshine,” Robinette said.

      They progressed very slowly, the old woman leaning with all her weight upon the arm of her strong young helper. Then under the flickering shade of the tree they sat down together for their talk.

      So much to tell, so much to hear, the afternoon slipped away unknown to them, and still they were sitting there hand in hand talking and listening; sometimes crying a little, sometimes laughing; a queerly assorted couple, these new-made friends.

      But when all the recollections had been talked over and wept over, when Mrs. Prettyman had told Robinette, with the extraordinary detail that old people can put into their memories of long ago, all that she remembered of Cynthia de Tracy’s childhood, then Robinette began to question the old woman about her own life. Was she comfortable? Was she tolerably well off? Or had she difficulty in making ends meet?

      To these questions Mrs. Prettyman made valiant answers: she had a fine spirit, and no wish to let a stranger see the skeleton in the cupboard. But Robinette’s quick instinct pierced through the veil of well-meant bravery and touched the truth.

      “Nurse dear,” she said, “you say you’re comfortable, and well off, but you won’t mind my telling you that I just don’t quite believe you.”

      “Oh, my dear heart, what’s that you be sayin’? callin’ of me a liar?” chuckled the old woman fondly.

      Robinette rose from her seat on the bench and stood back to scrutinize the cottage. It was exquisitely picturesque, but this very picturesqueness constituted its danger; for the place was a perfect death trap. The crumbling cob-walls that had taken on those wonderful patches of green colour, soaked in the damp like a sponge: the irregularity of the thatched roof that looked so well, admitted trickles of rain on wet nights; and the uneven mud floor of the kitchen revealed the fact that the cottage had been built without any proper foundation. The door did not fit, and in cold weather a knife-like draught must run in under it. All this Robinette’s quick, practical glance took in; she gave a little nod or two, murmuring to herself, “A new thatch roof, a new door, a new cement floor.” Then she came and sat down again.

      “Tell me now, how much do you have to live on every week, Nurse?” she asked.

      “Oh, Miss Robinette–ma’am, I should say–’t is wonderful how I gets on; and then there’s the plum tree–just see the flourish on it, Missie dear! ’T will have a crop o’ plums come autumn will about drag down the boughs! I don’t know how ’t would be with me without I had the plum tree.”

      “Do you really make something by it?” Robinette asked.

      The old woman chuckled again. “To be sure I makes; makes jam every autumn; a sight o’ jam. Come inside again, me dear, an’ see me jam cupboard and you’ll know.”

      She hobbled into the kitchen, and opened the door of a wall press in the corner. There, row above row stood a solid phalanx of jam pots; it seemed as if a whole town might be supplied out of Mrs. Prettyman’s cupboard.

      “’T is well thought of, me jam,” the old woman said, grinning with pleasure. “I be very careful in the preparing of ’en; gets a penny the pound more for me jam than others, along of its being so fine.”

      Robinette was charmed to see that here Mrs. Prettyman had a reliable source of income, however slender.

      “How much do you reckon to get from it every year?” she asked.

      “Going five pounds, dear: four pounds fifteen shillings and sixpence, last autumn; and please the Lord there’s a better crop this season, so ’t will be the clear five pounds. Oh! I do be loving me plum tree like a friend, I do.”

      They turned back into the sunshine again, that Robinette should admire this wonderful tree-friend once more. She stood under its shadow with great delight, as the Bible says, gazing up through the intricate network of boughs and blossom to the cloudless blue above her.

      “It’s heavenly, Nurse, just heavenly!” she sighed as she came and sat down beside the old woman again.

      “Then there’s me duck too, Missie! Lard, now I don’t know how I’d be without I had me duck. Duckie I calls ’er and Duckie she is; company she is, too, to me mornin’s, with her ‘Quack, Quack,’ under the winder.”

      So the old woman prattled on, giving Robinette all the history of her life, with its tiny joys and many struggles, till it seemed to the listener that she had always known Mrs. Prettyman, the plum tree, and her duck–known them and loved them, all three.

      VI

      MARK LAVENDAR

      Hundreds of years ago the street of Stoke Revel village, if street it could be called, and the tower of the ancient church, must have looked very much the same as now.

      On such a day, when the oak woods were budding, and the English birds singing, and the spring sun was hot in a clear sky, a knight riding down the steep lane would have taken the same turn to the left on his way to the Manor. Were he a young man, he would probably have reined up his horse for a moment, and looked, as Mark Lavendar did now, at the blithe landscape before him. Only then the accessories would have been so different: the great horse, somewhat tired by long hours of riding, the armour that glinted in the sun, the casque pushed up to let the fresh air play upon the rider’s face; such a figure must have often stood just at that turn where the lane wound up the little hill. The landscape was the same, and young men in all ages are very much the same, so–although this one had merely arrived by train, and walked from the nearest station–Mark Lavendar stopped and leaned over the low wall when he came to the turn of the road, and looked down at the river.

      He boasted no war horse nor armour; none of the trappings of the older world added to his distinction, and yet he was a very pleasing figure of a man.

      The gaunt brown face was quite hard and solemn in expression; ugly, but not commonplace, for as a friend once said of him, “His eyes seem to belong to another person.” It was not this, but only that the eyes, blue as Saint Veronica’s flower, showed suddenly a different aspect of the man, an unexpected tenderness that flatly contradicted the hard features of his face. He looked very nice when he laughed too, so that most people when they had found out the trick, tried to make him laugh as often as possible.

      “What a day! Heavens! what a lovely day,” he said to himself as he leaned on the low wall. “I want to be courting Amaryllis somewhere in these woods, and instead I’ve got to go and talk business with that old woman;” and he looked ruefully towards the Manor House; for this was not his first visit by any means, and he knew only too well the hours of boredom that awaited him. Mrs. de Tracy, strange to say, had a soft side towards this young man, the son of her family solicitor. Mark was invariably sent down by his father when there was any business to be transacted at Stoke Revel. The older man was fond of a good dinner, and hated circumlocution about affairs, and it was only when a death in the family, or some other crucial event, made his presence absolutely necessary that he came down himself. Mark was sacrificed instead, and many a wearisome hour had he spent in that house. However on this occasion he had been glad enough to get out of London for a while; the country was divine, and even the de Tracy business did not occupy the whole day. There would be hours on the river; afternoons spent riding along those green lanes through which he had СКАЧАТЬ