The Elderbrook Brothers (12 page)

Felix, though little or nothing was said, could not help knowing that he had failed to do what was expected of him. Even in what was not said there was the implication that he might have worked harder. This made him feel guilty, and a little resentful. It was Joe's idea, not his, that he should have ‘letters after his name'. He would have been content, so he fancied, to stay with Matthew on the farm, or to follow some kindred country pursuit. He had never asked to be singled out and made much of. As for working harder, perhaps he would have done, had he known where he was making for. At home there had been some vague desultory talk of making a clergyman of him: Joe recurred, at intervals, to his notion that such a consummation would be, in some undefined way, peculiarly pleasing to Emily, who acquiesced in this conspiracy for her happiness, but without marked enthusiasm. Joe, with his habit of quick decision, was nettled by her mild insistence that it would be best to wait and see. Meanwhile, with other boys of his age Felix learnt his Catechism, was ‘prepared' by Mr Williams, and in due time was confirmed as a member of the Anglican Communion. But he heard, as yet, no call. A phrase here and there, in the praying or the preaching, would sometimes echo in his heart with music and illumination; and the familiar Christian story, which had always been ‘true' to him but never ‘real', as true as a date in history and as little related to his own life, remained so still. Mr Williams in the pulpit, wearing a surplice instead of a Master's gown, had his moments of inspiration and of eloquence; the prayers, in his reading of them, lost nothing of their verbal beauty; and in chapel, in the quietness of a summer's evening, it was easy to believe that the light falling across the chancel floor, the glow of the stained glass, came from a world beyond the world. These things, in sum, were religion; it was something as easy to disregard as to accept; and Felix shied away from the idea that he should make it his special business and his means of livelihood. He shrank from the prospect of setting up to know and to teach those remote irrelevant mysteries. Indeed, he
was not confident of being fitted to teach anything. But, if anything, he argued, let it be something more neutral and more definite: in short a ‘subject'. Even Mr Surrey's evangelizing fervour, though he could not help liking Mr Surrey, had failed to attach him to the idea of becoming a preacher of the gospel; he therefore read Classics and English during his academic terms, graduating with second class honours. He might have done worse; he might have done better. If he had done better he might have become a University lecturer and in time a Fellow of his college. That would have pleased Joe mightily, but was it what he himself wanted? He did not know, until it was too late; and even then he was by no means sure. And, whatever he wished, wishing would not mend matters; for second class honours—though Joe was ingenuously impressed by the deceptive word
honours
—led nowhere, he ruefully reflected.

Yet not quite nowhere. For it had led to his accepting Mr Williams's invitation to join the staff at Stanton. And here he was, punctually doing his duty in that state of life unto which it had pleased God to call him, and not so much wanting anything better as wishing he wanted it. He had much to be thankful for. His geographical situation was perfect. There was no fairer valley in all England than Stanton Wold, no comelier house—though there were grander ones—than Stanton. And the Meldreth family was only just round the corner.

Mrs Meldreth had been married three times, and was now, but not for the third time, a widow. From her first husband, the father of her two daughters, she was divided not by death but by a process of law which provided her in retrospect with endless amusement. She never tired of telling the story of how, in order to provide the court with evidence of cruelty, she arranged with the erring husband that he should meet her in
the garden, pick a quarrel with her, and strike her, with Essie Mullins for witness, and how that simple warmhearted domestic had flown to the rescue with a garden broom and chased him, helpless with laughter, back into the house. By means of this pantomime, which the law of that day required in addition to evidence of what Mrs Meldreth sweetly called misbehaviour, poor Richard was enabled to make an honest woman of his new lady-love. ‘And a pretty dance she led him, poor lamb!' said Mrs Meldreth, dimpling indulgently. At the time she was perhaps more sorry to lose Richard than she would now admit; but any such regret had been quite obliterated by Henry, who had been (she said) a splendid father to the girls, and by Captain Meldreth, R.N., by whose death at the age of eighty-two she was but recently bereaved. With her snow-white hair and speedwell blue eyes she had the air of being at once older and younger than her fifty-odd years. She affected the manner of a benign motherly old lady, but her capacity for being amused was that of a child. Her daughters, different as they were from each other, in some indefinable fashion took after her, though the fair one, Florrie, had less humour, and the dark one, Kate, more reserve. Kate at eighteen gave promise, to a discerning eye, of a late-flowering beauty; and Florrie, two years younger, sanguine and freckled, was sighing and storming her way through a difficult stage in adolescence. Each of the three had her individual charm, and it was a miracle to Felix that their startling unlikeness from each other did not prevent their having something perceptibly in common: something more audible than visible, for it was a voice, he thought, that they shared; or if not a voice, a tone; or if not a tone, a cadence; or, at any rate, something. He was lightly in love not with any one of them, unless it were Mrs Meldreth herself, but with the trinity in unity that they were, and with the house that contained and expressed them. He was at home the moment he crossed the threshold, and indeed was in the habit of drifting in and out of the house as though it were his own, and with scarcely more ceremony on either side. Mrs Meldreth called him Felix,
by virtue of her years; but to the girls, for no reason except that they were living in the first decade of the century, instead of in the twenties or thirties or forties, he was Mr Elderbrook. Even when young Florrie was throwing cushions at him, he was that.

In the late middle of the morning Felix drifted across to the Meldreths', as he had known he would. He entered unannounced by the garden door that gave into the drawing-room and found Kate there, sitting at the piano, her fingers gliding reflectively, without conscious plan, over the keyboard.

She gave him a brief friendly glance. ‘Hullo, Mr Elder-brook.'

‘Hullo, Kate. Don't stop playing.'

She didn't. Nor did she pay him any further attention for the next half minute. He sat himself down and was at peace. He had come with no special purpose and to see no one in particular, and he found it pleasant to be so taken for granted.

Presently Kate remarked: ‘Mother's about somewhere. In the kitchen, I expect.'

‘Are you practising?' Felix asked.

‘Good gracious, no! You wouldn't call this practising, would you?'

‘Not if you wouldn't, dear Kate.'

‘Thank you, dear Mr Elderbrook.' She made a small derisive face at him. ‘Practising is hard work. This is just playing about.'

She sat, hands in lap, idly regarding him. Though his mind was half elsewhere, wandering aimlessly in a no man's land between sleep and purpose, his eyes took quiet pleasure in the shining darkness of the girl's glance and the proud unconscious carriage of her head. So different in type from her sister Florrie.

‘What's Florrie doing to-day?'

‘Breaking up,' said Kate.

‘So sorry.' Felix waxed facetious. ‘Is the doctor with her?'

‘I mean the school, silly. As well you know. She's
rather indignant at being a day later than the Stanton boys. Especially as Aunt Ellen's here.'

‘Oh yes,' said Felix, recalling the talk about Aunt Ellen. ‘She arrived then?'

‘Yes, last night. You'll see her presently. She's out for a walk.'

‘All by herself?'

‘She's great on walking. And likes being alone, I think. A rather sudden person. She vanished directly after breakfast.'

Felix had been faintly disappointed to hear that a guest was expected for the holidays. It was not exactly that he wanted a monopoly of the Meldreths, but he felt that with a stranger there the atmosphere of the house could not be quite the same. He liked his pot pourri to have precisely the fragrance it had always had for him, with no admixture of alien scents.

‘Look, Kate. I've been thinking.'

‘Yes, Mr Elderbrook?'

‘Precisely!' said Felix. ‘That's just what I mean.'

‘What
do you mean?'

‘How would you like me to call you Miss Meldreth in future?'

‘I should hate it, because it isn't my name. Captain Meldreth didn't marry all three of us, you know. Only Mother.'

‘Well, Miss Whatever-it-is. Not Winter, is it?'

‘No.' Kate dimpled, for one second looking like her mother whom in general she did not at all resemble. ‘If you call me Miss Winter they'll think you mean Aunt Ellen. She's Henry's youngest sister. And Henry, if you remember, was Mother's Number Two.'

‘The point is,' said Felix, ‘I think it's time you called me Felix.'

‘Well, I could, couldn't I?'

While Kate was pretending to consider the point Ellen Winter arrived back from her walk, and Felix, who was feeling very comfortable, had to dig himself out of his chair and be
introduced to her. To his surprise he found she was not very much older than himself. So much the worse, he was inclined to think, for a middle-aged or elderly Aunt Ellen would have been the more likely to be lost in the background. He saw at once what Kate had meant by calling her sudden, though it was not exactly the right word. She had a very quick quiet way of moving. She did not smile easily. She seemed to listen with great intentness to what was said to her, but sometimes made no answer, or answered with a Yes or a No that left nothing more to be said. Her strange deep eyes and sallow complexion gave her a gipsyish quality, and Felix did not think he was going to like her much. But she had one great merit: she was not pretty.

Unless they were mere children like Kate and Florrie, Felix nowadays was afraid of pretty girls. The heady sweetness of their charms made him selfconscious and maladroit, so that he felt loutish in their presence, and conversed with difficulty, and was ashamed of his secret delight in being near them. The extent of his confusion varied with the power of the attraction. The stronger his impulse to touch these exquisite blossoms (and if he did they would at once break into ten thousand pieces), the stronger the counter-impulse that kept him trembling at a distance. There was something curious about Ellen Winter that made him frequently look at her, against his will; but, interloper though she was, it could at least be urged in her defence that she was not particularly goodlooking, and on the whole Felix was inclined to forgive her for the indiscretion of existing.

On a morning of this same vacation, during which season Felix divided his time between the Meldreths and Tom Williams and Faith's engaging inescapable children, his brother Guy, pleasantly conscious of his own importance, strode down a spacious sunlit street a hundred and fifty miles south-east of them. He
was on his way to deliver, in the name of the bank that employed him, a courteous but clear ultimatum. It was a mission of no little delicacy, and he was secretly gratified—though hardly flattered, for he knew his worth—to have been chosen for it. Mingled with his personal satisfaction was an impersonal sense of the rightness of the choice and the reasons behind it. He was just the man for this diplomatic job. No junior person could have been entrusted with it, and to have sent a conspicuously senior man would have too much softened the implied rebuke to Mr Talavera, the erring client. He applauded the Manager's choice of himself: Mr Baker had chosen as he himself would have done in Mr Baker's place.

If happiness implies contentment, Guy was not happy. But he was very much alive and alert. He was impatient because his destiny was so slow in shaping itself; for he could not and would not believe that it was his destiny to remain where he was in the world. Some years had passed since that merging of the Mercester County Bank with the more powerful Cousins Blade and Company, commonly known as Cousins, which had made possible his translation to London. Without conscious disloyalty to his native shire he was now a seasoned Londoner by adoption, member of the staff of a metropolitan branch of that world-famous banking house. Byford and Mercester, and even Upmarden itself, were left unregretfully behind him, in the discredited past. He hoped never to go back there, except on the most fleeting visits. He now lived, cheaply and abstemiously, in a bed-sittingroom at Walham Green. He did not smoke; he did not drink; he had no expensive habits or indulgences. These abstentions constituted a triumph of spirit over flesh, the control of a disposition by no means inclined towards the mean or the miserly. It was part not of any far-reaching plan (for he could not see a long way ahead) but of an interim policy for the conduct of a life in which independence and security were of first importance. He dressed with a carefully ordered casualness, made useful friends when he could, and nearly every month managed to ‘put by' a pound or two
out of his modest salary. Meanwhile he watched and prayed, keeping a sharp look-out for a chance to escape from his present routine, so sparing in its rewards, as by the grace of heaven and his own wits he had escaped from the farm and the family.

For more reasons than one, Guy was glad to be calling on Mr James Talavera. It gave him a chance of becoming better acquainted with that shy, melancholy, middle-aged gentleman, whose business transactions, so far as the ledger revealed them, had for some time past excited his curiosity. One of the consolations of being a bank-clerk was that it gave one at least a glimpse of other people's private affairs and created an agreeable illusion of holding their fortunes in the palm of one's hand. It was amusing, too, to see the fluctuations in cordiality between the customers and the Manager, who was paid to value his fellows in terms of cash and credit and found no difficulty in doing so. Guy had noticed that some of the shadiest financial characters were the most magnificent in their general bearing: the contrast between their manners and their bank-balances was piquant. Mr Talavera belonged to neither of these categories. So far from affecting magnificence, he had the face of a disconsolate poet; and though his account was far from satisfactory in its general contour, for it went down as often as it went up and it was too often overdrawn, no one yet had cast doubts on his solvency. Unless, indeed, this very visit Guy was paying him reflected some such doubt on the part of Mr Baker, in spite of his putting the blame for it, as usual, on Head Office, which notoriously looked askance at unsecured overdrafts. Mr Talavera was the father of a daughter, a pretty and demure young creature who presented herself at the counter two or three times a week with cheques to be cashed or credited. Guy had no interest in the child (she was scarcely more); he certainly had no thought of her now; but her visits to the Bank, like those of certain other young women, from secretaries and girl-cashiers to the dazzling young actress Rosalind Farr, were among the minor amenities of his situation.