Chapter 5

In a well-cushioned chair by the sunny window sat a short, stout lady with very pretty pink hands and faded blue eyes, who rose up from her knitting to greet the visitor. She was the old governess who lived with Laura, and her real name was Panton, but she had always been "Nanty" in the far-off nursery days, and so she was called still by intimates of the family whose various branches she had trained to read and spell. Now she was--as she herself said--eating the bread of idleness; her two great and absorbing interests in life being Laura and knitting. She had been afflicted doubtless with adenoids in her own childhood, but at that time they were not generally considered removable. At all events, she now confused her M's and B's intermittently, as she always had done, and never troubled herself about it, being an easy-going person.

She did not mind, for instance, telling anyone how Laura called to see her one day when she was living in lodgings in Flodmouth, and there and then invited her to come and keep house. But she could not tell what caused this sudden impulse, because she did not know. As a matter of fact, it was just one of those trifles which do influence human conduct by touching the emotions--and always will, let cynics say what they may. And the ridiculous thing which touched this hidden spring in Laura was a very stale, untouched, highly ornamented cake which Miss Panton cut with fingers that trembled from eagerness--so pleased and excited was she by having a visitor at last. "I rather thought I might have had a good bany callers--my papa was so well down here in the old days. But there does not seeb to be anybody left."

The familiar "seeb"--the sudden picture of poor old Nanty waiting there for those callers, descendants of her papa's substantial circle, who never came--the glow of a generous girl newly engaged who wants to make everybody else happy--all this had influenced Laura to say, without waiting to think: "Come and live with me until I am married. I'd simply love to have you, Nanty. Miss Wilson is always saying I ought to have a chaperone since I ceased wandering about and went to live in my own little house at Thorhaven."

So that was how Miss Panton came to be sitting in that pleasant corner of the sunny room, doing her knitting and listening while Laura talked to Miss Ethel about the nursing fund in which they were both interested. Occasionally Miss Panton would push forward mechanically a conversational counter from the little store she kept always by her. Thus when Miss Ethel spoke of the bricks that had arrived on the other side of the privet hedge, Nanty glanced up for a second to remark in her throaty little voice: "It is hard. That lovely garden of yours, Miss Ethel---- But tibe and tide wait for no ban!" Then she sighed and resumed her absorbing occupation, satisfied that she had taken her due part in the social amenities.

This habit of using ready-made platitudes arose no doubt from laziness of mind, as well as from the natural timidity produced by being a nursery governess in days when such unfortunate young females hovered ever uncertainly between basement and drawing-room. She had got into the way then of making remarks at the luncheon table which she knew must be correct, because they were in all the copy-books.

Now she and Laura lived very happily together, and this pleasant feeling was intensified by the rather exaggerated adoration of the girl's lover which such a situation is apt to produce. The little household circled round his goings and comings, and the young mistress of it lavished on Wilson all the family affection she had at the disposal of a large circle, if she had been blest with one, as well as the pure passion of a woman deeply in love.

At last Miss Ethel finished her business, closed her little notebook and made a brisk remark about the building in the next field, because she was always very careful not to hurt Miss Panton's feelings.

"Delightful! Delightful!" said Nanty, seeking the appropriate conversational counter--"at least, I bean----" She paused, breathed hard, and added with a rush: "I'm sure Mr. Wilson was deeply distressed at being obliged to be the one to sell it. But if he had not done so, somebody else would. Business is business," she concluded, pink to the nose-end with the effort.

Laura's colour also rose a little. "Yes. I know Godfrey was sorry. Only he is tremendously keen to get on, of course, and you can't afford--I sometimes think he is too keen."

But Miss Ethel was not going to have that. It must be made plain at once, that though _she_, herself, might run down her own second cousin, he was the sort of man whom any girl ought to be proud to marry, even though she did possess an agreeable sum of money at her own sole disposal. "I have always considered Godfrey a gentleman--if that is what you mean?" she said stiffly.

But Laura was looking out of the window and did not listen. "Oh, here is Godfrey!" she said, jumping up. "Will you excuse me a moment, Miss Ethel?" And she hurried off to prevent an awkward meeting.

But before she reached the door, Godfrey was already in the room--alert, buoyant, with his air of being well fed, well bathed, well groomed and entirely certain of himself. Immediately after greeting Laura, he turned to Miss Ethel. "I am very glad to have come across you," he said, "I am afraid you felt hurt about that field before your house; but the Warringborns meant to sell, so of course I couldn't tell them to take their business elsewhere. And they were urgent, so the whole thing was arranged hurriedly."

Miss Ethel drew down her mouth but said nothing; and before Laura could make some trivial remark Miss Panton nervously filled in the pause by murmuring: "Quite so. Delays are dadegerous."

Then Miss Ethel rose to go, and having recovered herself a little she did manage to say a civil word to Wilson about the weather--because after all he was her kinsman, and must be supported here as such.

A few minutes later, Wilson and Laura followed along the same road. "Then I suppose we may take it that diplomatic relations have now been resumed?" he said with a grin.

Laura smiled--but kindly--feeling some pity for Miss Ethel. "After all, it is hard to have people looking over your hedge when you have always had the place absolutely private. Only she will make such a tragedy of the inevitable."

But Godfrey was not greatly concerned with Miss Ethel's feelings. "I say, Laura," he began eagerly, pointing to some new houses. "There are tremendous opportunities in Thorhaven for a man with capital. If only I had twenty thousand pounds at my disposal, I could be a rich man in ten years' time."

She looked up at him quickly, flushing a little. "Well, you can have, Godfrey. I'd like you to have it. I get possession of my money on my marriage, you know: and, thank goodness, it is not in trust. My father had a perfect horror of leaving things in trust."

"I'm not sure I agree with him there," said Godfrey. "You might have got hold of a chap who would make ducks and drakes of your money. But as things are, it is all right, of course. The only question is--shall you always be absolutely comfortable about it? Because, if you would even feel the very faintest----"

"But I don't! I never shall," interposed Laura. "You know I'd trust you with a million if I had it."

He slipped his hand through her arm, for just then they turned the corner and met the sea wind full in their faces. "Dear old girl: there are not many like you."

Laura felt herself propelled along so easily with his thick-set figure between her and the wind from the sea; the warm vitality that came out from him and seemed to run also through her veins, making her feel stronger, gayer, more exuberantly full of energy than she ever did when alone. She wanted to tell him her feelings, after the way of lovers, and so she turned to him with a little quick pressure of his arm in hers as they neared the pay-box. "Godfrey! I feel as if I could jump over the moon. Don't you? It must be this lovely morning."

He let his glance rove idly over the promenade gardens and the road leading to it, which certainly looked their best on this day of real summer, when there was hot sunshine to warm the breeze, and girls and children in pink and blue and white and yellow playing on the sands. The sea was a sparkling green and a couple of boys ran out into the surf, shouting as they ran. . . . But though Wilson had an eye for beauty, he was thinking chiefly of the row of villas which could be built where a cornfield now grew--and lodging-houses on the cliff top with steps down from the gardens to the shore--and the money rolling in. Then he heard Laura speaking to the girl in the pay-box as she went through the barrier; and with a sudden jolt of the memory the nymph in the flame-coloured gown came back to mind, though he had forgotten all about her from the night of the promenade dance until the present moment.

He hesitated a few seconds, then he also stepped forward and peered in at the little window with Laura, who was still talking; and instantly, his sudden curiosity fell flat like a bubble pricked. For he saw just enough resemblance in this ordinary, pale, alert little girl, with the bright eyes and the freckles on her nose, to make sure she was the same person, and after that one glance he stood looking away to sea with his hands in his pockets, whistling softly, awaiting his lady's pleasure. He was no longer curious.

Caroline, defiantly aware of all this, answered Laura's pleasant remarks at random. She was not going to have him tell about the red dress in his own way--since he had evidently never thought again of it or her--making a funny tale to amuse Miss Laura--she'd tell it in _her_ way! "Miss Temple, I wanted to tell you, I wore that flame-coloured dress you gave Aunt Creddle at the promenade dance the other night. She burnt mine ironing it out, so I borrowed that at the last minute. But I did it no harm and gave it back to her next day." The words came out breathlessly, in a little rush, and the bright eyes peered defiantly through the little window.

"Oh, what a pity to give it back," said Laura. "I expect it suited you, and really I only gave it to Mrs. Creddle, because Mr. Wilson disliked it so much." She smiled round at him, then turned again to Caroline. "Do wear it again, and then I can let you have the shoes and stockings to match. They are such a peculiar shade that they will go with nothing else I have."

"No, thank you," said Caroline abruptly: but the next minute she smiled into the face so near her own, softening her refusal--for she could not help feeling the charm of that open-eyed kindness with which Laura had looked out at the world since she was in the cradle. It was so real: and yet it formed a weak spot in Laura's nature. For she wanted so much to be liked that she was--as some one had once said of her--just a little bit disappointed if a stray cat did not purr as she went past. Now she answered quite eagerly, but with a perfectly genuine eagerness: "Oh, I do hope you'll change your mind. Anyway, I'll send the shoes and stockings, though I'm afraid the shoes will be too big for you."

Then she went off, leaving Caroline tingling from head to foot with annoyance against Wilson. To think he should treat her in that way, as if the dance the other night were something to be ashamed of. Only wait until he tried to speak to her when Miss Temple was not there, and he should see what would happen.

But Wilson was walking by Laura's side on the promenade without the remotest intention of talking to Caroline again: and he had so lost interest in her that he was almost surprised to hear his lady ask how the dress looked.

"I spoke to the girl because I mistook her for you from the back," he said.

"But did she look nice in it?" persisted Laura.

"Nice?" He paused, and she was so tall that his face was almost on a level with her own. Then he glanced back at the pay-box. "Poor little devil! She can't have known herself, if she happened to see her reflection that night. The dress worked miracles. I can hardly believe it was the same girl."

"She is engaged to some young man in an office in Flodmouth, I believe," said Laura. "I wonder if you could do anything for him?"

"I'm afraid not. We don't interfere in each other's office arrangements in Flodmouth business circles," he said, teasing her, though he saw and appreciated that kindness always welling up in her like a spring, ready for every one. "All right, old girl. If I have a chance, I'll do what I can," he added, "but the youth only looks about nineteen, so they have plenty of time yet."

"Nobody has too much time to be happy in," said Laura, smiling at her lover. "Fancy, if we had fallen in love with each other and married ten years ago, we should have been all that to the good."

He laughed. "We might have been all that to the bad," he said. "You don't know what I was like at nineteen, Laura."

So they went along, very happy, laughing and talking together, viewed with envy, contempt or sympathy by the girls and women who read and worked round the band-stand. A thin stream of music drifted out with a sort of melancholy sprightliness to join the deep sound of waves breaking and drawing back from the gravel on the sands. In the distance Caroline looked out from her little window at Wilson's broad back and hated them both, in spite of Laura's kindness. They'd everything--everything. What right had one girl to have so much more than another? . . . Then a bevy of children came through the barrier, and when she next looked the lovers had vanished.

But later in the morning when Wilson returned home alone by way of the promenade, he glanced at Caroline in passing the barrier with the faintest renewed stirring of curiosity. Surely there must have been something--he couldn't quite have imagined it _all_ that night at the dance. Then he saw a bill near the gate announcing another dance this week, and that made him say lightly, as he went through the iron turnstile: "Shall you be at the dance on Thursday? You ought to wear that red dress again."

"No, I aren't--I'm not going to wear the dress any more." She spoke rudely, abruptly--saying to herself that this was what she had expected.

He read her thoughts with ease, smiling to himself, for he knew something about women. But as he looked at her closely in the strong light, he became aware of a velvety texture in her skin which is usually seen only in children. She had a powdering of freckles on her nose, and her pupils had dilated with anger until her eyes looked black; her head was very erect on her slim shoulders. He thought to himself that here were traces of the nymph after all---at least, here was a girl who might conceivably look like one by artificial light and in the right gown. And beyond that, he was vaguely conscious of something in her that was pliant yet unbreakable--or almost unbreakable--and which defied him and all the world.

"What will your other cavalier say to that?" he said. "I expect he will want to see you take the shine out of all the other girls once more."

"Excuse me. There is some one waiting to come through," said Caroline with immense aloofness.

But inwardly she was furious with herself for feeling a just perceptible response to his virile personality and his absolute sureness. Anything he _wanted_---- Then she bent her mind resolutely upon a respected inhabitant of Thorhaven.

"Yes, lovely day, isn't it?" she said. "I suppose you're full up with visitors?"

The woman replied that she was full up, and furthermore that she would remain in the same happy condition until October, then said casually as she moved off: "I didn't know you were living servant with Miss Wilson. I suppose you'll stop there altogether when this job on the promenade is done?"

"I aren't--I'm not living servant with her," said Caroline sharply. "Who's been telling you that? I simply went to light the fire for them in the morning and do a few odd jobs until they could get somebody permanent."

"But I always understood from Mrs. Creddle you were going to be servant there," persisted the woman. "She once told me your aunt Ellen promised years ago."

"Very likely she did," said Caroline. "I can't help that. Everybody must do the best they can for themselves."

"Well, you're right there," answered the woman, and saying Amen thus to the creed of her day, she took up her basket and went through the turnstile.

_Chapter VII_

_Sea-Roke_

One afternoon at the turn of the tide, a sort of transformation scene took place along the sands and on the promenade; a bank of cold vapour advanced from the sea, through which the sun glimmered faintly yellow, then disappeared. The girls' thin blouses began to flap limply against their chilled arms; matrons turned a little red or blue about the nose; children's hair either curled more tightly or hung limp, while their cheeks took on a lovely colour in the cool dampness; tiny beads of moisture hung on everybody's eyelashes. Those who had come out to the seaside from the hot streets of Flodmouth felt when they emerged from the railway station, as if they were plunging into a cold vapour bath.

When Caroline went to relieve her colleague Lillie at tea-time, she was met by a stream of nurses, protesting infants and middle-aged women on their way home. And as the men who had just arrived from a day's business in the city made straight for their lodgings, Thorhaven in the very midst of the season took on an air of exclusion--of remoteness. You could notice the wash of the waves again now.

The mist crept steadily along inland, muffling the church, the trees beyond--almost hiding the privet hedge from Miss Ethel as she glanced out of the window.

"A heavy roke. I hope it won't last," she said; but she was not really thinking of what she was saying because her attention was engrossed by the noises on the other side of the hedge. Never the same continuously, but always changing, so that the ear never became dulled by knowing what to expect. A sharply whistled tune. Voices. The knock, knock, knock of a tool on a hard substance. A sound of scraping. Then blessed silence for a few seconds. Then knock, knock, knock again. She turned impatiently to Mrs. Bradford, who sat close up to the window reading the paper. "Thank goodness, it is nearly five; the men will be gone directly."

"You should try to get used to it," said Mrs. Bradford. "You have let it get on your nerves." And she returned at once to the newspaper in which she was reading a minutely-reported divorce case; for though a stolid and intensely respectable woman she loved to read these reports. "It is plain to see that the husband wants to get rid of his wife," she said after a while.

"Well, that seems easily done nowadays," said Miss Ethel, listening still as she spoke. "Perhaps women don't realize that though they can easily get rid of an unsatisfactory husband, it will be just as easy for a satisfactory husband to get rid of them."

But Mrs. Bradford did not care for abstract questions. "I expect the Marchioness will have the custody of the children," she said.

So Miss Ethel took up the other half of the paper to try and distract her mind from the noises over the hedge. But every head-line seemed to dart at her sore consciousness as if it were a snake's head with a sting in it. Murder. Unrest. Strikes. Dissatisfactions. Change. The whole outlook was indescribably comfortless and depressing to her. She felt something akin to the vague, apprehensive misery--beyond reason or common sense--which people feel during the rumble of a distant earthquake.

"I hate reading the papers," she said, flinging the sheet down.

"You shouldn't read the parts that worry you. I don't," said Mrs. Bradford. "But you always were one to work yourself up about things. I remember once how you fretted over some little newsboys with no stockings on, when we went into Flodmouth as children to see the pantomime. You worried yourself and everybody else to death. But they were used to it, as dear father said, and it did them no harm. You are of the worrying sort, Ethel, and you should try to hold yourself in."

"Poor world if nobody worried," said Miss Ethel; then she rose abruptly and carried out the tea-tray.

Soon she was back again with a duster in her hand, beginning to dust the large bookshelf, which had been overlooked for a day or two. As her duster passed over the red-leather backs of the old bound volumes of _Punch_ she saw with a wistful inner eye--as if she looked back to a Promised Land on which the gate was shut for ever--that world of swells and belles, of croquet and sunshine, of benevolence to the "poor" and fingers touching forelocks, black being black and white white.

Then Mrs. Bradford spoke again. "Why not leave that dusting, Ethel? You have been at it all day."

"Somebody must," said Miss Ethel, going on dusting.

"Well, I only wish I could do more," said Mrs. Bradford, comfortably turning her page with a rustling crackle. "But my legs have given way ever since I was married. I don't know why, I'm sure; but marriage does seem to affect the constitution in queer ways."

Miss Ethel felt--as she was intended to feel--that it was not within her power to comprehend the mysteries of the conjugal state; so acquiescing from long habit in her sister's torpidity, she went on with her dusting.

But her head ached appallingly, and she looked at the clock-hands nearing five with a feeling that she could bear the sounds of building so long and no longer. If they lasted a single minute beyond that time something inside her head would snap. Knock--knock--knock; scrape--scrape; the thud of something thrown down. She felt her breath coming fast as she waited for the moment when her aching senses would be lulled by the cessation of it all--when she would rest on a blissful silence.

"Thank God, it's five o'clock!" she said, flinging down her duster.

"Yes. The men will be leaving work now," said Mrs. Bradford.

Miss Ethel continued her work again, moving quietly about the room. Wave after wave of wet salt air was rolling in from the sea, pressing upon that which travelled slowly inland, so that the roke grew very dense, and the little house seemed to be cut off from all the world.

Miss Ethel sat down and leaned her head back with her eyes shut: Mrs. Bradford continued to read the paper, then rustled a page and looked at her sister over it. As she did so, Miss Ethel sat up with a jerk and stared across the room.

"Bless me!" said Mrs. Bradford, "what are you staring at me like that for, Ethel? Do I look ill?" And she began to wonder if she felt ill, for she always feared a stroke.

"Listen!" said Miss Ethel in an odd tone. "Don't you hear them? They are working overtime."

Mrs. Bradford took her paper up irritably. "Goodness! Is that all." She also listened, then added: "What nonsense you talk, Ethel! There is not a sound. They have stopped work for the night."

Miss Ethel walked to the window where the grey air clung to the glass and stood there a moment, listening intently. It was true. She could hear nothing.

But as soon as she sat down by the fire and was not thinking, it began again--knock, knock, knock. . . .

"They are there still," she said. "They must be."

"I tell you they are not," said Mrs. Bradford. "You have simply got the noise on your nerves. If you don't take care, you will be really ill. You think about the noise morning, noon and night, until you fancy you hear it."

"I'm not a fool," said Miss Ethel. "Surely I know whether I hear a noise or not."