South Riding (34 page)

She must have fallen asleep, because she opened her eyes to see Dr. Campbell’s familiar red face staring into hers.

“Well, young woman,” Dr. Campbell’s manner was invariably facetious. Midge detested it. “Let’s look at your chest. Ah, a yery nice crop. Rich, fine fruity measles. Well, now, what are we going to do with her, matron? Better wrap her up and I’ll take her home in my car. Where’s your father, Miss Fishywigs?”

“He’s at Flintonbridge on the council. I can’t go home. It’s all empty,” said Midge with dignity and emphasis.

“Where’s Elsie?”

“Out visiting her mother.”

Dr. Campbell knew all about the Maythorpe household.

“Well, I suppose we shall have to wait till we can get hold of your father. I suppose one can catch him at the County Hall.”

“He doesn’t like being disturbed there. And I can’t go home. He’s got to go to Ireland. I can’t stay there with Elsie if I’m ill. She’s rough and her hands smell of onions, and she’s not nice to me.” Midge’s large eyes filled with tears. Already she could see Elsie, a great rough hulking bully, herself, a forlorn deserted invalid, twilight enveloping the echoing house, her father in Ireland. “I shall die! I shall die!” sobbed Midge. “I can’t be left all alone there ill. I can’t! I can’t!”

“Now then, now then, we’re not going to desert you. Pull yourself together. How old are you? Fifteen? God bless my soul! I thought you were only five,” Dr. Campbell teased her. But Midge wept and moaned, and eventually Miss Burton appeared beside Miss Parsons, and laid a cool firm hand on the girl’s tossing head.

“Midge, be quiet. Because you happen to have measles, that’s no reason for behaving like a baby. You’re not the only one. I’ve telephoned to your father and he’ll come here and discuss things. Of course you won’t be sent home to an empty house. Do use your common sense.”

Her quiet voice, her assumption that Midge was really a reasonable being, had their accustomed effect. Midge controlled herself, and dozed off again, waking at intervals to drink orange juice or to let Miss Parsons turn her fiery pillows.

Aeons passed before Miss Burton reappeared with Carne behind her. This time Midge was steeled to play the heroic invalid. She smiled up wanly at her father, swallowing painfully, and he stared down at her, gruff and worried.

It was Miss Burton who took charge of the situation.

“Well, Midge. Your father’s here, and he’s come to take you home if you’d like to go with him. You would have a nurse, so you wouldn’t be left alone. And though you may feel rather rotten for two or three days, in a week you’ll be almost yourself again. But if you prefer it, you can stay here because Nancy has measles now as well as Gwynneth, and I’m turning my house into a sanatorium. I’ve discussed it with your father and you are to do just whichever you prefer.”

Midge turned her great feverish eyes from one adult to the other. Daddy, poor Daddy, so big and white and worried, all by himself alone in Maythorpe Hall. Sitting at night over his figures in the gun-room. Eating solitary suppers in the candlelit dining-room. Pathos choked her.

“Oh, Daddy, darling! I don’t want to be a nuisance.”

“Nobody’s going to let you be a nuisance,” said Miss Burton crisply. She looked cool and young in her green linen dress.

“You’re going to Ireland,” wailed Midge.

“Not if you don’t want me to,” mumbled her father.

“It doesn’t matter whether you are at Maythorpe or here,” Miss Burton said. “Stop crying and help us, please, Midge. In both cases you will be looked after. You like Gwynneth and Nancy, don’t you?”

“Oh,
yes
, Miss Burton.”

“I thought they were rather special friends of yours.” The blessed compliment sang in Midge’s head. “Very well, then. If you like to share their room we’ll take you round right away now in my car.”

“Oh,
thank
you, Miss Burton.”

Only be good, thought Midge, only be unselfish, and all else shall be added unto you. She lay in her father’s arms as he carried her, rolled in a blanket, out to the car, and sat with her, pressed against his tweed coat, while Miss Burton drove them both to her little house. He held her so tightly that Midge could feel the irregular scurrying beat of his heart, a queer motion. He carried her up to a room where a nurse in a starched apron was already laying sheets on a narrow bed between two others.

“Hallo, Midge!” called Gwynneth, boisterous and convalescent.

“Why, it’s Midge!” cried Nancy, languid but friendly.

Their welcome flattered her, and perhaps cheered her father. She drew herself up in her wrappings of blanket, and said proudly, “This is my father. These are my friends, Gwynneth and Nancy.”

Gwynneth and Nancy said, “How do you do?” But Daddy appeared unconversational, and soon left with Miss Burton, and Midge felt so queer that she was glad to let the nurse undress her and settle her down between cool shivery sheets.

Then began a curious time, both nice and nasty. There were interminable nights, hot, restless, aching, and pleasant days, with visits from Miss Burton, and conversations with Gwynneth and Nancy, and orange juice and custard, and delicious tangerines. There were dreams of Maythorpe restored, as one day it surely should be; her mother would come home, electric light would be installed; lovely dignified happy people would tread the emerald lawns; the dining-room would be set for twenty people, with smilax trailing between the Crown Derby dessert dishes, and carnations in the finger bowls; the stables would be full of riding horses; there would be lots of money and shooting parties every autumn.

Soaring through space and time Midge dwelt in bliss. Boastful to the girls, she was pathetic to the nurses, rapturously pleased with her own imagined visions.

Then a time came when sitting up to eat her jelly, a pain shot through her side, and she cried out, gasping. For two days and two nights she was really ill with pleurisy. She was carried to Sally’s own room and lay there by herself staring at a painting on the wall of a big cactus. The nights meant a shaded lamp, and her father’s big figure just beyond it. “What’s that picture on the wall?” asked Midge, hoping that this odd dreaminess meant delirium. Delirium was impressive. Perhaps she was going to die.

“It’s a picture of scarlet aloes in South Africa,” came Sally’s voice, cool and patient from the shadows.

“Are you both there? Daddy, are you there?” asked Midge.

“Yes. I’m here.”

“And Miss Burton?”

“At the moment. We’re just going down to have some supper.”

“Why are you here so late? Am I very ill? Am I going to die?”

“No, of course not, you little goose. But your father’s a very busy man and has other things to look after as well as you. He comes when he can.”

They stood beside her bed, Carne large, silent, his face a mask under his thick black hair, Sarah small, smiling. They seemed to fit together very nicely, and Midge’s thoughts, a rolling confusion of pain and dreams, found it quite natural that they should both be with her.

Long after, she awoke to see Sarah Burton sitting in the window, her red hair outlined against the green, deep, silent bar of the sea at dawn.

“Is father still here?” asked Midge.

“Hush, go to sleep, child.”

“Is he here? I want him. I think I’m dying.”

“Nonsense. You’re much better. As a matter of fact, he is here, but he’s downstairs resting.”

“What time is it?”

“Nearly five.”

“In the morning? Has he been here all night?”

“Yes.”

Midge giggled happily.

“You and he seem to like to spend nights up together.”

“Well—he wanted to see if you were better before he decided to go off to Ireland.”

“Am I better?”

“Yes, I think so.”

And so she was, and next day he went off, and Midge’s convalescence proceeded slowly. Her eyes hurt a lot and she once had earache, and she often felt extremely cross and wretched. But while her father was away, he wrote her letters, and even when he returned to Yorkshire, he sent them on every day that he could not visit her.

Midge was proud of these letters. They were, she considered, far more sensible and adult than those sent by Nancy’s or Gwynneth’s parents. She wanted every one to know what a wonderful correspondence she conducted with her father, and one day when Miss Burton was making her usual visit, she handed her a letter, saying, “Please won’t you read it to me? My eyes hurt so.”

“They were well enough to finish
Beau Geste
last night,” said Miss Burton; but all the same she lifted the heavy expensive paper and read with suitable gravity the words she found there, written in Carne’s large, childish, laboured writing:

“D
EAR
M
IDGE
,—I went to Nutholme sale yesterday. A poor lot of stuff and moderate prices. 700 head of poultry sold poorly at about two and six apiece. The ewes made up to fifty shillings but looked light. The hogs were little things, dearly sold at 101 lb. The cattle nothing much and showed want of attention. The horses were a mixed lot—some made up to 35 guineas but £20 average and not worth that. Furniture at fire stick prices. Altogether the cheque would be a small one. The farm is not let. I fear poor Bly will have about 2,000 acres on hand.

“I may get over Saturday. Hope you are getting fit.”

Your affec. father,

“R
OBERT
G
EORGE
C
ARNE
.”

Miss Burton handed the letter back to Midge.

“Don’t you think,” challenged the girl, “that my father writes beautiful letters?”

“Well—this is a—very friendly one.”

“Poor Daddy. I expect he’s worrying about the Nutholme sale because he’s always selling things and they make so little money.”

She sighed expansively and caught Miss Burton’s quick green eyes glancing at her under their long light lashes.

“What do you mean about always selling things?” asked Nancy.

“Well, he sells horses. But he’s very particular where they go to,” said Midge. “I’ll tell you something. One day two men drove up to our house in a motor-car. Daddy and I had just come in and were talking to Hicks—our groom—in the stable-yard, when these men arrive and come straight up to Daddy. ‘Are you Mr. Robert Carne?’ they say, and my father says, ‘Yes, I am.’ ‘Thank God,” said the man. ‘We’ve been hunting for you for days. We want to buy some of your horses.’ ‘Oh, do you?’ says Daddy. ‘Then you’ve come to the wrong place.’ ‘Indeed? Why?’ ‘Because you’re not the sort of customers I care to deal with,’ says my father. ‘And why not, pray?’ ‘Well, if I tell you I shall only vex you,’ says Daddy. ‘No. Go on. It takes a deal to vex me,’ says the man,’ and I want a good horse.’ ‘Well, then, were you at Ripon Agricultural Show in 1923 judging horses?’ ‘Well,’ says the man, surprised like anything. ‘What of it?’ ‘Well,’ says my father, ‘you gave first prize to a horse that was never heard of again, second prize to a creature that hardly was a horse, and only honourable mention to that bay gelding of Miss Grey’s that swept the country later. Now, a chap that’ll do that is either a knave or a fool, and I sell my animals to neither.’ That’s the sort of man my father is. He said, ‘Good-evening,’ and ‘Come in, Midge,’ and we both went indoors and have never seen those men from that day to this.”

Midge told the tale well because she was showing off before Miss Burton. The anecdote impressed her. She thought that it displayed her father as a quite remarkable person. She was sorry that the head mistress did not stay for further discussion. Sarah threw a light word to the girls, a glance at the temperature charts, and was gone, leaving a fragrance of lavender and a sense of cool critical detachment on the air behind her.

“Oh, Midge Carne,” cried Jennifer, “I’m sick and tired of your father. If he’s so wonderful, why is he going bankrupt?”

“He’s not. How dare you?”

“Well, my dad said . . .”

“Your father’s only a common vet. . . .”

“He’s not common . . .”

“
And
a liar.”

“Oh, shut up, both of you!”

“Girls, girls, what is all this?” Miss Parsons fluttered in, fussy and ineffective but endowed, after all, with statutory powers, able to impose silence upon controversy and to report contention.

Midge Carne exposed such flushed cheeks and bright eyes to her anxious investigations that she took her temperature and found that it was 100.6 degrees again. It was too bad. Girls like Midge needed watching every moment. Miss Parsons wished that the child was safely back at Maythorpe.

I’
VE GOT
rid of him, thought Lily Sawdon, riding from Fleetmire in the Kingsport bus. He’s gone. I’ll never have to deal with him again.

A shudder convulsed her body; her triumph shocked her. Was this really herself rejoicing because Rex, the beautiful silvery-brown Alsatian, Rex, the gay, the boisterous, the uncontrollable, had been led off by Lee the vet, down the muddy path to execution? He had marched off, stepping daintily, feathery tail in air, proud as a prince, unconscious of her treachery, and it was Tom’s eyes that were wet as they watched him go. Was it really true that any one could change so? Eh, I wouldn’t know myself, thought Lily.