Chapter 5

It had lain tenantless for two years, when one spring morning Miss Bracy and Mr. Frank Bracy arrived and took possession. They came (for aught we knew) out of nowhere; but they brought a good many boxes, six cats, and a complete set of new muslin blinds. On their way they purchased a quart of fresh milk, and Mr. Frank fed the cats while Miss Bracy put up the blinds. In the afternoon a long van arrived with a load of furniture; and we children who had gathered to watch were rewarded by a sensation when the van started by disgorging an artist's lay-figure, followed by a suit of armour. From these to a mahogany chest of drawers with brass handles was a sad drop, and we never regained the high romance of those first few minutes; but the furniture was undeniably handsome, and when Miss Bracy stepped out and offered us sixpence apiece to go and annoy somebody else, we came away convinced that our visitors were persons of exceptionally high rank. It puzzled us afterwards that, though a bargain is a bargain, not one of us had stayed to claim his sixpence.

The newcomers brought no servants; but after a week there arrived (also out of nowhere) an elderly and taciturn cook. Also, Miss Bracy on the third morning walked up to the farm at the head of the valley and hired down the hind's second daughter for a "help." We knew this girl, Lizzie Truscott, and waylaid her on her homeward road that evening for information. She told us that Miss Bracy's cats had a cradle apiece lined with muslin over pink calico; that the window curtains inside reached from the ceilings to the floors; that the number of knives and forks was something cruel--one kind for fish, another for meat, and a third for fruit; that in one of the looking-glasses a body could see herself at one time from head to feet, though why you should want a looking-glass to see your feet in when you could see them without was more than she knew; and, finally, that Miss Bracy had strictly forbidden her to carry tales--a behest which, convinced that Miss Bracy had dealings with the Evil One, she meant to observe. The elderly cook when she arrived warned us away from the door with a dialect we did not recognise. Her name (Lizzie reported) was Deborah, and in our haste we set her down for a Jewess; but I seem to have detected her accent since, and a few of her pet phrases, in the pages of Scottish fiction.

This is all I can tell--so fitful are childish memories--of the coming of Miss Bracy and Mr. Frank. I cannot say, for instance, what gossip it bred, or how soon they wore down the edge of it and became, with their eccentricities, an accepted feature of the spot they had made their home. They made no friends, no acquaintances: everyone knew of Miss Bracy's cats, but few had seen them. Miss Bracy herself was on view in church every Sunday morning, when Mr. Frank walked with her as far as the porch. He never entered the building, but took a country walk during service, returning in time to meet her at the porch and escort her home. His other walks he took alone, and almost always at night. The policeman tramping towards Four Turnings after midnight to report to the country patrol would meet him and pause for a minute's chat. Night-wandering beasts--foxes and owls and hedgehogs--knew his footstep and unlearned their first fear of it. Sometimes, but not often, you might surprise him of an afternoon seated before an easel in some out-of-the-way corner of the cliffs; but if you paused then to look, he too paused and seemed inclined to smudge out his work. The Vicar put it about that Mr. Frank had formerly been a painter of fame, and (being an astute man) one day decoyed him into his library, where hung an engraving of a picture "Amos Barton" by one F. Bracy. It had made a small sensation at Burlington House a dozen years before; and the Vicar liked it for the pathos of its subject--an elderly clergyman beside his wife's deathbed. To him the picture itself could have told little more than this engraving, which utterly failed to suggest the wonderful colour and careful work the artist (a young man with a theory and enthusiasm to back it) had lavished on the worn carpet and valances of the bed, as well as on the chestnut hair of the dying woman glorified in the red light of sunset.

Mr. Frank glanced up at the engraving and turned his face away. It was the face of a man taken at unawares, embarrassed, almost afraid. The Vicar, who had been watching him, intending some pleasant remark about the picture, saw at once that something was wrong, and with great tact kept the talk upon some petty act of charity in which he sought to enlist his visitor's help. Mr. Frank listened, gave his promise hurriedly and made his escape. He never entered the Vicarage again.

III.

Eighteen years had passed since Miss Bracy's interview with Bassett; and now, late on a summer afternoon, she and Mr. Frank were pacing the little waterside garden while they awaited their first visitor.

Mr. Frank betrayed the greater emotion, or at any rate the greater nervousness. Since breakfast he had been unable to sit still or to apply himself to any piece of work for ten minutes together, until Miss Bracy suggested the lawn-mower and brought purgatory upon herself. With that lawn-mower all the afternoon he had been "rattling her brain to fiddle-strings"--as she put it--and working himself into a heat which obliged a change of clothes before tea. The tea stood ready now on a table which Deborah had carried out into the garden--dainty linen and silverware, and flowered china dishes heaped with cakes of which only Scotswomen know the secrets. The sun, dropping behind Battery Point, slanted its rays down through the pine-trunks and over the fiery massed plumes of rhododendrons. Scents of jasmine and of shorn grass mingled with the clean breath of the sea borne to the garden wall on a high tide tranquil and clear--so clear that the eye following for a hundred yards the lines of the cove could see the feet of the cliffs where they rested, three fathoms down, on lily-white sand. Miss Bracy adored these clean depths. She had missed much that life could have given; but at least she had found a life comely and to her mind. She had sacrificed much; but at times she forgot how much in contemplating the modest elegance of the altar.

She wore, this evening, a gown of purplish silk, with a light cashmere scarf about her shoulders. Nothing could make her a tall woman; but her grey hair, dressed high _a l'imperatrice_, gave her dignity at least, and an air of old-fashioned distinction. And she was one of those few and fortunate ladies who never need to worry about the appearance of their cavaliers. Mr. Frank--six feet of him, without reckoning a slight stoop--always satisfied the eye; his grey flannel suit fitted loosely but fitted well; his wide-brimmed straw hat was as faultless as his linen; his necktie had a negligent neatness; you felt sure alike and at once of his bootmaker and his shirtmaker; and his fresh complexion, his prematurely white hair, his strong well-kept hands, completed the impression of cleanliness for its own sake, of a careful physical cult as far as possible removed from foppery.

This may have been in Miss Bracy's mind when she began: "I daresay he will be fairly presentable, to look at. That unfortunate woman had at least an art of dressing--a quiet taste too, quite extraordinary in one of her station. I often wondered where she picked it up."

Mr. Frank winced. Until the news of his wife's death came, a fortnight ago, her name had not been spoken between them for years. That he and his cousin regarded her very differently he knew; but while silence was kept it had been possible to ignore the difference. Now it surprised him that speech should hurt so; and, at the same moment, that his cousin should not divine how sorely it hurt. After all _he_ was the saddest evidence of poor Bassett's "lady-like" tastes.

"I suppose you know nothing of the school she sent him to?" Miss Bracy went on--"King William's, or whatever it is."

"King Edward's," Mr. Frank corrected. "Yes, I made inquiries about it at the time--ten years ago. People speak well of it. Not a public school, of course--at least, not quite; the line isn't so easy to draw nowadays--but it turns out gentlemen."

In her heart Miss Bracy thought him too hopeful; but she said, "He wrote a becoming letter--his hand, by the way, curiously suggests yours; it was quite a nice letter, and agreeably surprised me. I shouldn't wonder if his headmaster had helped him with it and cut out the boyish heroics; for of course _she_ must have taught him to hate us."

"My dear Laura, why in the world--" began Mr. Frank testily.

"Oh, she had spirit!"--the encounter of long ago rose up in Miss Bracy's memory, and she nodded her head with conviction. "Like most of the quiet ones, she had spirit. You don't suppose, I imagine, that she forgave?"

"No." Mr. Frank came to a halt and dug with his heel at a daisy root in the turf. Then using his heel as a pivot he swung himself round in an awkward circle. The action was ludicrous almost, but he faced his cousin again with serious eyes. "But it is not her heart that I doubt," he added gently.

Miss Bracy stared up at him, "My dear Frank, do you mean to tell me that you _regret_?"

Yes; as a fact he did regret, and knew that he would never cease to regret. He was not a man to nurse malice even for a wrong done to him, still less to live carelessly conscious of having wronged another. He was weak, but incurably just. And more; though self entered last into his regret, he knew perfectly well that the wrong had wrecked him too. His was a career _manque_: he had failed as a man, and it had broken his nerve as an artist. He was a dabbler now, with--as Heine said of de Musset--a fine future _behind him_, and none but an artist can tell the bitterness of that self-knowledge. Had he kept his faith with Bassett in spirit as in letter, he might have failed just as decidedly; her daily companionship might have coarsened his inspiration, soured him, driven him to work cheaply, recklessly; but at least he could have accused fate, circumstance, a boyish error, whereas now he and his own manhood shared the defeat and the responsibility. Yes, he regretted; but it would never do to let Laura know his regret. That would be to play the double traitor. She had saved him (she believed) from himself; with utterly wrong-headed loyalty she had devoted her life to this. The other debt was irredeemable, but this at any rate could be paid.

He evaded her question. "My dear," he said, "what was done has been atoned for by her, and is being atoned for by--by us. Let us think of her without bitterness."

Miss Bracy shook her head "I am a poor sort of Christian," she confessed; "and if she has taught this boy to hate us--"

"Mr. Victor Bracy," announced Deborah from the garden-porch behind them, and a tall youth in black stepped past her and came across the turf with a shy smile.

The pair turned with an odd sense of confusion, almost of dismay. They were prepared for the "Victor," but somehow they had not thought of him as bearing their own surname. Mr. Frank had felt the shock once before, in addressing an envelope; but to Miss Bracy it was quite new.

Yet she was the first to recover herself, and, while holding out her hand, took quick note that the boy had Frank's stature and eyes, carried his clothes well, and himself, if shyly, without clumsiness. She could find no fault with his manner of shaking hands; and when he turned to his father, the boy's greeting was the less embarrassed of the two. Mr. Frank indeed had suddenly become conscious of his light suit and bird's-eye neckcloth.

"But how did you come?" asked Miss Bracy. "We sent a cart to meet you-- I heard no sound of wheels."

"Yes, I saw it outside the station; but the man didn't recognise me-- quite a small crowd came by the train--and of course I didn't recognise him. So I bribed a porter to put my luggage on a barrow and come along with me. Half-way up the hill the cart overtook us--the driver full of apologies. While they transhipped my things I walked on ahead--yes, listen, there it comes; and--Oh, I say, what a lovely spot!"

Miss Bracy was listening--not for the wheels and not to the story, but critically to every word as it came from his lips. "The woman has certainly done wonders," was her unspoken comment. At Victor's frank outburst, however, she flushed with something like real pleasure. She was proud of her cottage and garden, and had even a sort of proprietary feeling about the view.

They sat down around the little tea-table; the boy first apologising for his travel-stains (he was, in fact, as neat as a pin) and afterwards chatting gaily about his journey--not talking too much, but appealing from one to another with a quick deferent grace, and allowing them always the lead. "This is better and better," thought Miss Bracy as she poured tea; and, after a while, "But this is amazing!" He was a thorough child, too, with all his unconscious tact. The scent of a lemon-verbena plant fetched him suddenly to his feet with his eyes bright. "Please let me--" he thrust his face into the bush; "I have never seen it growing like this."

Miss Bracy looked at Mr. Frank. How utterly different it was from their old-maidish expectations! They had pictured the scene a hundred times, and always it included some awkwardly decorous reference to the dead woman. _This_ had been their terror--to do justice to the occasion without hurting the poor boy's feelings--to meet his sullen shyness, perhaps antipathy, with a welcome which somehow excused the past. Yes, the past (they had felt) required excuse to _him_. And he had made no allusion to his mother, and obviously wished for none. Miss Bracy could not help smiling at the picture of their fears.

The boy turned, caught her smiling, and broke into a jolly laugh at his own absurdity. It echoed in the garden, where no one had laughed aloud for years.

And with that laugh Bassett's revenge began.

IV.

For with that laugh they began to love him. They did not--or at any rate Miss Bracy 'did not--know it at the time. For some days they watched him; and he, the unsuspicious one, administered a score of shocks as again and again he took them neatly and decisively at unawares. He had accepted them at once and in entire good faith. They were (with just the right recognition of their seniority) good comrades in this jolliest of worlds. They were his holiday hosts, and it was not for the guest to hint (just yet) at the end of the holiday.

He surprised them at every turn. His father's canvases filled him with admiring awe. "Oh, but I say--however is it done?" As he stood before them with legs a trifle wide, he smoothed the top of his head with a gesture of perplexity. And Mr. Frank, standing at his shoulder with legs similarly spread, used the same gesture--as Miss Bracy had seen him use it a thousand times. Yet the boy had no artistic talent--not so much as a germ. For beauty of line and beauty of colour he inherited an impeccable eye; indeed his young senses were alive to seize all innocent delight,--his quickness in scenting the lemon-verbena bush proved but the first of many instances. But he began and ended with enjoyment; of the artist's impulse to reproduce and imitate beauty he felt nothing. Mr. Frank recognised with a pang that he had failed not only in keeping his torch bright but in passing it on; that the true self which he had missed expressing must die with him barren and untransmitted. The closer he drew in affection, the farther this son of his receded,-- receded in the very act of acknowledging his sonship--with a gesture, smilingly imprehensible; with eyes which allured the yearning he baffled, and tied it to the hopeless chase.

Mr. Frank, who worshipped flowers, was perhaps the most ineffective gardener in England. With a trowel and the best intentions he would do more damage in twenty minutes than Miss Bracy could repair in a week. She had made a paradise in spite of him, and he contented himself with assuring her that the next tenant would dig it up and find it paved with good intentions. The seeds he sowed--and he must have sown many pounds' worth before she stopped the wild expense--never sprouted by any chance. "Dormant, my dear Laura--dormant!" he would exclaim in springtime, rubbing his head perplexedly as he studied the empty borders. "When I die, and am buried here, they will all sprout together, and you will have to take a hook and cut your way daily through the vegetation which hides my grave." But Victor, who approached them in the frankest ignorance, seemed to divine the ways of flowers at once. In the autumn he struck cuttings of Miss Bracy's rarest roses; he removed a sickly passion-flower from one corner of the cottage to another and restored it to health within a fortnight. Within a week after his coming he and Miss Bracy were deep in cross-fertilizing a borderful of carnations she had raised from seed. He carried the same natural deftness into a score of small household repairs. He devised new cradles for Miss Bracy's cats, and those conservative animals at once accepted the improvement; he invented a cupboard for his father's canvases; he laid an electric bell from the kitchen beneath the floor of the dining-room, so that Miss Bracy could ring for Deborah by a mere pressure of the foot; and the well-rope which Deborah had been used to wind up painfully was soon fitted with a wheel and balance-weight which saved four-fifths of the labour.

"It beats me where you learned how to do these things," his father protested.

"But it doesn't want learning; it's all so simple--not like painting, you know."

Mr. Frank had been corresponding with the boy's headmaster. "Yes, he is a good fellow," said one of the letters; "just a gentle clear-minded boy, with courage at call when he wants it, and one really remarkable talent. You may not have discovered it, but he is a mathematician; and as different from the ordinary book-made mathematician--from the dozens of boys I send up regularly to Cambridge--as cheese is from chalk. He has a sort of passion for pure reasoning--for its processes. Of course he does not know it; but from the first it has been a pleasure to me (an old pupil of Routh's) to watch his work. 'Style' is not a word one associates as a rule with mathematics, but I can use no other to express the quality which your boy brings to that study. . . ."

"Good Lord!" groaned Mr. Frank, who had never been able to add up his washing bills.

He read the letter to Miss Bracy, and the pair began to watch Victor with a new wonder. They were confident that no Bracy had ever been a mathematician; for an uncle of theirs, now a rector in Shropshire and once of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where for reasons best known to himself he had sought honours in the Mathematical Tripos and narrowly missed the Wooden Spoon, had clearly no claim to the title. Whence in the world did the boy derive this gift? "His mother--" Miss Bracy began, and broke off as a puff of smoke shot out from the fireplace. It was late September; Deborah had lit the fire that morning for the first time since May, and the chimney never drew well at starting. Miss Bracy took the tongs in hand, but she was not thinking of the smoke; neither was Mr. Frank, while he watched her. They were both thinking of the dead woman. The thought of her--the ghost of her--was always rising now between them and her boy; _she_ was the impalpable screen they tried daily and in vain to pierce; to _her_ they had come to refer unconsciously all that was inexplicable in him. And so much was inexplicable! They loved him now; they stretched out their hands to him: behind _her_ he smiled at them, but through or across _her_ their hands could never reach.

As at first they had avoided all allusion to her, and been thankful that the boy's reticence made it easy, so now they grew almost feverishly anxious to discover how he felt towards his mother's memory. They detected each other laying small traps for him, and were ashamed. They held their breath as with an air of cheerful unconsciousness he walked past the traps, escaping them one and all. At first in her irritation Miss Bracy accused him of what she (of all women!) called false pride. "He is ashamed of her. He wishes to forget, and is only too glad that we began by encouraging him." On second thoughts she knew the charge to be undeserved and odious. His obvious simplicity gave it the lie. Moreover she knew that a small water-colour sketch of her in her youth--a drawing of Mr. Frank's--stood on the table in the boy's bedroom. Miss Bracy often dusted that room with her own hands.

"And, Frank," she confessed one day, "he kisses it! I know by the dullness on the glass when I rub it." She did not add that she rubbed it viciously. "I tell you," she insisted, almost with a groan, "he lives with her. She is with him in this house in spite of us; she talks with him; his real existence is with her. He comes out of it to make himself pleasant to us, but he goes back and tells her his secrets."

"Nonsense, Laura," Mr. Frank interrupted testily. "For some reason or other the boy is getting on your nerves. It is natural, after all."

"Natural? Yes, I see: you mean that I'm an old maid, and it's a case of crabbed age and youth."

"My dear Laura, I mean nothing so rude. But, after all, we have been living here a great many years and it _is_ a change."

"Frank, you can be singularly dense at times. Must I tell you in so many words that I am fond of the boy, and if he'd be only as fond of me he might racket the house down and I'd only like him the better for it?"

Mr. Frank rubbed his head, and then with sudden resolution marched out of the house in search of Victor. He found the boy on the roof removing a patent cowl which the local mason had set up a week before to cure the smoky chimney.

"My dear fellow," the father cried up, "you'll break your neck! Come down at once--I have something particular to say to you."

Victor descended with the cowl under his arm. "Do be careful. . . . Doesn't it make you giddy, clambering about in places like that?" Mr. Frank had no head at all for a height.

"Not a bit. . . . Just look at this silly contrivance--choked with soot in three days! The fellow who invented it ought to have his head examined."

"It has made you in a horrible mess," said his father, who took no interest in cowls, but lost his temper in a smoky house.

"I'll run in and have a change and wash."

"No; put the nasty thing down and come into the garden." He opened the gate, and Victor followed, after dipping his hands in the waterfall.

"The fact is, my boy, I've come to a decision. This has been a pleasant time--a very pleasant time--for all of us. We have put off speaking to you about this, but I hope you understand that this is to be your home henceforward; that we wish it and shall be the happier for having you . . ."

Victor had been gazing out over the cove, but now turned and met his father's eyes frankly. "I have a little money," he said. "Mother managed to put by a small sum from time to time, enough to start me in life. She did not tell me until a few days before she died: she knew I wanted to be an engineer."

He said this quite simply. It was the first time he had mentioned his mother. Mr. Frank felt his face flushing.