Chapter 11 The Sands At Weston

"Thursday morning? Is it possible that this is Thursday morning? And I must run up to London on Saturday," said Lavendar to himself as he finished dressing by the open window. He looked up the day of the week in his calendar first, in order to make quite sure of the fact. Yes, there was no doubt at all that it was Thursday. His sense of time must have suffered some strange confusion; in one way it seemed only an hour ago that he had arrived from the clangour and darkness of London to the silence of the country, the cuckoos calling across the river between the wooded hills, and the April sunshine on the orchard trees; in another, years might have passed since the moment when he first saw Robinette Loring sitting under Mrs. Prettyman's plum tree.

"Eight days have we spent together in this house, and yet since that time when we first crossed in the boat, I've never been more than half an hour alone with her," he thought. "There are only three other people in the house after all, but they seem to have the power of multiplying themselves like the loaves and fishes (only when they're not wanted) so that we're eternally in a crowd. That boy particularly! I like Carnaby, if he could get it into his thick head that his presence isn't always necessary; it must bother Mrs. Loring too; he's quite off his head about her if she only knew it. However, it's my last day very likely, and if I have to outwit Machiavelli I'll manage it somehow! Surely one lame old woman, and a torpid machine for knitting and writing notes like Miss Smeardon, can't want to be out of doors all day. Hang that boy, though! He'll come anywhere." Here he stopped and sat down suddenly at the dressing-table, covering his face with his hands in comic despair. "Mrs. Loring can't like it! She must be doing it on purpose, avoiding being alone with me because she sees I admire her," he sighed. "After all why should I ever suppose that I interest her as much as she does me?"

No one could have told from Lavendar's face, when he appeared fresh and smiling at the breakfast table half an hour later, that he was hatching any deep-laid schemes.

Robinette entered the dining room five minutes late, as usual, pretty as a pink, breathless with hurrying. She wore a white dress again, with one rose stuck at her waistband, "A little tribute from the gardener," she said, as she noticed Lavendar glance at it. She went rapidly around the table shaking hands, and gave Carnaby's red cheeks a pinch in passing that made Lavendar long to tweak the boy's ear.

"Good morning, all!" she said cheerily, "and how is my first cousin once removed? Is he going to Weston with me this morning to buy hairpins?"

"He is!" Carnaby answered joyfully, between mouthfuls of bacon and eggs. "He has been out of hairpins for a week."

"Does he need tapes and buttons also?" asked Robinette, taking the piece of muffin from his hand and buttering it for herself; an act highly disapproved of by Mrs. de Tracy, who hurriedly requested Bates to pass the bread.

"He needs everything you need," Carnaby said with heightened colour.

"My hair is giving me a good deal of trouble, lately," remarked Lavendar, passing his hand over a thickly thatched head.

"I have an excellent American tonic that I will give you after breakfast," said Robinette roguishly. "You need to apply it with a brush at ten, eleven, and twelve o'clock, sitting in the sun continuously between those hours so that the scalp may be well invigorated. Carnaby, will you buy me butter scotch and lemonade and oranges in Weston?"

"I will, if Grandmother'll increase my allowance," said Carnaby malevolently, "for I need every penny I've got in hand for the hairpins."

"I hope you are not hungry, Robinetta," said Mrs. de Tracy, "that you have to buy food in Weston."

"No, indeed," said Robinette, "I was only longing to test Carnaby's generosity and educate him in buying trifles for pretty ladies."

"He can probably be relied on to educate himself in that line when the time comes," Mrs. de Tracy remarked; "and now if you have all finished talking about hair, I will take up my breakfast again."

"Oh, Aunt de Tracy, I am so sorry if it wasn't a nice subject, but I never thought. Anyway I only talked about hairpins; it was Mr. Lavendar who introduced hair into the conversation; wasn't it, Middy dear?"

Lavendar thought he could have annihilated them both for their open comradeship, their obvious delight in each other's society. Was he to be put on the shelf like a dry old bachelor? Not he! He would circumvent them in some way or another, although the role of gooseberry was new to him.

The two young people set off in high spirits, and Mrs. de Tracy and Miss Smeardon watched them as they walked down the avenue on their way to the station, their clasped hands swinging in a merry rhythm as they hummed a bit of the last popular song.

"I hope Robinetta will not Americanize Carnaby," said Mrs. de Tracy. "He seems so foolishly elated, so feverishly gay all at once. Her manner is too informal; Carnaby requires constant repression."

"Perhaps his temperature has not returned to normal since his attack of quinsy," Miss Smeardon observed, reassuringly.

Meanwhile Lavendar sat in Admiral de Tracy's old smoking room for half an hour writing letters. Every time that he glanced up from his work, and he did so pretty often, his eyes fell on a picture that hung upon the opposite wall. It was the copy of Sir Joshua's "Robinetta" made long ago and just presented to its namesake.

In the portrait the girl's hair was a still brighter gold; yet certainly there was a likeness somewhere about it, he thought; partly in the expression, partly in the broad low forehead, and the eyes that looked as if they were seeing fairies.

Of course to his mind Mrs. Loring was a hundred times more lovely than Sir Joshua's famous girl with a robin. He felt very ill-used because Robinette and Carnaby had deliberately gone for an excursion without him and had left him toiling over business papers when they had gone off to enjoy themselves.

How bright it was out there in the sunshine, to be sure! And why should it be Carnaby, not he, who was by this time walking along the sea front of Weston, and watching the breeze flutter Robinette's scarf and bring a brighter colour to her lips?

There! the last words were written, and taking up his bunch of letters, watch in hand, he sought Mrs. de Tracy, and explained that he would bicycle to Weston and catch the London post himself.

"I'll send William"--she began; but Lavendar hastily assured her that he should enjoy the ride, and hurried off in triumph. Miss Smeardon smiled an acid smile as she watched him go. "He has forgotten all about poor Miss Meredith, I suppose," she murmured. "Yet it was not so long ago that they were supposed to be all in all to each other!"

"It was a foolish engagement, Miss Smeardon," said Mrs. de Tracy in a cold voice. "I never thought the girl was suited to Mark, and I understand that old Mr. Lavendar was relieved when the whole thing came to an end."

"Quite so; certainly; no doubt Miss Meredith would never have made him happy," said Miss Smeardon at once, "though it is always more agreeable when the lady discovers the fact first. In this case she confessed openly that Mr. Lavendar broke her heart with his indifference."

"She was an ill-bred young woman," said Mrs. de Tracy, as if the subject were now closed. "However, I hope that the son of my family solicitor would think it only proper to pay a certain amount of attention to the Admiral's niece, were she ever so obnoxious to him."

Miss Smeardon made no audible reply, but her thoughts were to the effect that never was an obnoxious duty performed by any man with a better grace.

The sea front at Weston was the most prosaic scene in the world, a long esplanade with an asphalt path running its full length, and ugly jerrybuilt houses glaring out upon it, a gimcrack pier with a gingerbread sort of band-stand and glass house at the end;--all that could have been done to ruin nature had been determinedly done there. But you cannot ruin a spring day, nor youth, nor the colour of the sea. Along the level shore, the placid waves swept and broke, and then gathered up their white skirts, and retreated to return with the same musical laugh. Children and dogs played about on the wet sands. The wind blew freshly and the sea stretched all one pure blue, till it met on the horizon with the bluer skies.

Weston seemed to Lavendar a very fresh and delightful spot at that moment, although had he been in a different mood its sordidness only would have struck him. Yes, there they were in the distance; he knew Robinette's white dress and the figure of the boy beside her. Hang that boy! Were they really going to buy hairpins? If so, then a hair-dresser's he must find. Lavendar turned up the little street that led from the sea-front, scanning all the signs--Boots--Dairies--Vegetable shops--Heavens! were there nothing but vegetable and boot shops in Weston? Boots again. At last a Hairdresser; Lavendar stood in the doorway until he made sure that Robinette and the middy had turned in that direction, and then he boldly entered the shop.

To his horror he found himself confronted by a smiling young woman, whose own very marvellous erection of hair made him think she must be used as an advertisement for the goods she supplied.

In another moment Robinette and the boy would be upon him, and he must be found deep in fictitious business. He cast one agonized glance at the mysteries of the toilet that surrounded him on every side, then clearing his throat, he said modestly but firmly, that he wanted to buy a pair of curling tongs for a lady.

"These are the thing if you wish a Marcel wave," was the reply, "but just for an ordinary crimp we sell a good many of the plain ones."

"Yes, thank you. They will do; the lady--my sister, also wished--"

"A little 'addition,' was it, sir?" she moved smilingly to a drawer. "A few pin curls are very easily adjusted, or would our guinea switch--"

At this moment the boy and Robinette entered the shop. Lavendar was paying for the curling tongs, and not a muscle of his face relaxed. "Oh, here you are. I have just finished my business," he said, turning round, "I thought we might encounter one another somewhere!"

Robinette and Carnaby exchanged knowing glances of which Lavendar was perfectly conscious, but he stood by while Mrs. Loring bought her hairpins, and Carnaby endeavoured to persuade her to invest in a few "pin curls." "Not an hour before it is absolutely necessary, Middy dear," she said; "then I shall bear it as bravely as I can. Come now, carry the hairpins for me, and let me take Mr. Lavendar out of this shop, or he will be tempted to buy more than he needs."

"Oh, no!" Lavendar remarked pointedly. "I have what I came for!"

"Don't forget your parcel," Carnaby exclaimed, darting after Lavendar as they went into the street. "You've left it on the counter."

"How careless!" said Mark. "It was for my sister."

"You never told me you had a sister," said Robinette, as they walked together, Lavendar wheeling his bicycle and Carnaby sulking behind them.

"I am blessed with two; one married now; the other, my sister Amy, lives at home."

"Well, you see, in spite of all our questions the first time we met, we really know very little about each other," she went on lightly. "It takes such a long time to get thoroughly acquainted in this country. Do they ever count you a friend if you do not know all their aunts and second cousins?"

Lavendar laughed. "Willingly would I introduce you to my aunts and my uttermost cousins, and lay the map of my life before you, uneventful as it has been, if that would further our acquaintance."

Even as he spoke a hateful memory darted into his thoughts, and he reddened to his temples, until Mrs. Loring wondered if she had said anything to annoy him.

Some fortunate accident at this point ordered that Carnaby should meet a friend, another middy about his own age, and they set off together in quest of a third boy who was supposed to be in the near neighbourhood.

As soon as the lads were out of sight Lavendar found the jests they had been bandying together die on his lips. "I'm going down deeper; I shall be out of my depth very soon," he thought to himself, as he walked in silence by Robinette's side.

"Let us come down to the beach again; we can't go to the station for half an hour yet," she said. "I like to look out to sea, and realize that if I sailed long enough I could step off that pier, and arrive in America."

They stood by the sea-wall together with the fresh wind playing on their faces. "Isn't it curious," said Robinette, "how instinctively one always turns to look at the sea; inland may be ever so lovely, but if the sea is there we generally look in that direction."

"Because it is unbounded, like the future," said Lavendar. He was looking as he spoke at some children playing on the sands just beside them. There was a gallant little boy among them with a bare curly head, who refused help from older sisters and was toiling away at his sand castle, his whole soul in his work; throwing up spadefuls--tremendous ones for four years old--upon its ramparts, as if certain they could resist the advancing tide.

"What a noble little fellow!" exclaimed Robinette, catching the direction of Lavendar's glance. "Isn't he splendid? toiling like that; stumping about on those fat brown legs!"

"How beautiful to have a child like that, of one's own!" thought Lavendar as he looked. On the sands around them, there were numbers of such children playing there in the sun. It seemed a happy world to him at the moment.

Suddenly he saw his companion turn quickly aside; a nurse in uniform came towards them pushing, not a happy crooning baby this time, but a little emaciated wisp of a child lying back wearily in a wheel chair. Something in Robinette's face, or perhaps the bit of fluttering lace she wore upon her white dress, had attracted its notice, and it stretched out two tiny skeleton hands towards her as it passed. With a quick gesture, brushing tears away that in a moment had rushed to her eyes, young Mrs. Loring stepped forward, and put her fingers into the wasted hands that were held out to her. She hung above the child for a moment, a radiant figure, her face shining with sympathy and a sort of heavenly kindness; her eyes the sweeter for their tears.

"What is it, darling?" she asked. "Oh, it's the bright rose!" Then she hurriedly unfastened the flower from her waist-belt and turned to Lavendar. "Will you please take your penknife and scrape away all the little thorns," she asked.

"The rose looked very charming where it was," he remarked, half regretfully, as he did what she commanded.

"It will look better still, presently," she answered.

The child's hands were outstretched longingly to grasp the flower, its eyes, unnaturally deep and wise with pain, were fixed upon Robinette's face. She bent over the chair, and her voice was like a dove's voice, Lavendar thought, as she spoke. Then the little melancholy carriage was wheeled away. Motherhood always seemed the most sacred, the supreme experience to Robinette; a thing high and beautiful like the topmost blooms of Nurse Prettyman's plum tree. "If one had to choose between that sturdy boy and this wistful wraith, it would be hard," she thought. "All my pride would run out to the boy, but I could die for love and pity if this suffering baby were mine!"

Lavendar had turned, and leaned on the wall with averted face. "Sweet woman!" he was saying to himself. "It is more than a merry heart that is able to give such sympathy; it's a sad old world after all where such things can be; but a woman like that can bring good out of evil."

Robinette had seated herself on a low wall beside him. Her little embroidered futility of a handkerchief was in her hand once more. "A rose and a smile! that's all we could give it," she said; "and we would either of us share some of that burden if we only could." She watched the merry, healthy children playing beside them, and added, "After all let us comfort ourselves that brown cheeks and fat legs are in the majority. Rightness somehow or other must be at the root of things, or we shouldn't be a living world at all."

"Amen," said Lavendar, "but the sight of suffering innocents like that, sometimes makes me wish I were dead."

"Dead!" she echoed. "Why, it makes me wish for a hundred lives, a hundred hearts and hands to feel with and help with."

"Ah, some women are made that way. My stepmother, the only mother I've known, was like that," Lavendar went on, dropping suddenly again into personal talk, as they had done before. He and she, it seemed, could not keep barriers between them very long; every hour they spent together brought them more strangely into knowledge of each other's past.

"She was a fine woman," he went on, "with a certain comfortable breadth about her, of mind and body; and those large, warm, capable hands that seem so fitted to lift burdens."

Lavendar was in an absent-minded mood, and never much given to noting details at any time. He bent over on the low wall in retrospective silence, looking at the blue sea before them.

Robinette, who was perched beside him, spread her two small hands on her white serge knees and regarded them fixedly for a moment.

"I wonder if it's a matter of size," she said after a moment. "I wonder! Let's be confidential. When I was a little girl we were not at all well-to-do, and my hands were very busy. My father's success came to him only two or three years before his death, when his reputation began to grow and his plans for great public buildings began to be accepted, so I was my mother's helper. We had but one servant, and I learned to make beds, to dust, to wipe dishes, to make tea and coffee, and to cook simple dishes. If Admiral de Tracy's sister had to work, Admiral de Tracy's niece was certainly going to help! Later on came my father's illness and death. We had plenty of servants then, but my hands had learned to be busy. I gave him his medicines, I changed his pillows, I opened his letters and answered such of them as were within my powers, I fanned him, I stroked his aching head. The end came, and mother and I had hardly begun to take hold of life again when her health failed. I wasn't enough for her; she needed father and her face was bent towards him. My hands were busy again for months, and they held my mother's when she died. Time went on. Then I began again to make a home out of a house; to use my strength and time as a good wife should, for the comfort of her husband; but oh! so faultily, for I was all too young and inexperienced. It was only for a few months, then death came into my life for the third time, and I was less than twenty. For the first time since I can remember, my hands are idle, but it will not be for long. I want them to be busy always. I want them to be full! I want them to be tired! I want them ready to do the tasks my head and heart suggest."

Lavendar had a strong desire to take those same hands in his and kiss them, but instead he rose and spread out his own long brown fingers on the edge of the wall, a man's hands, fine and supple, but meant to work.

"I seem to have done nothing," he exclaimed. "You look so young, so irresponsible, so like a bird on a bough, that I cannot associate dull care with you, yet you have lived more deeply than I. Life seems to have touched me on the shoulder and passed me by; these hands of mine have never done a real day's work, Mrs. Loring, for they've been the servants of an unwilling brain. I hated my own work as a younger man, and, though I hope I did not shirk it, I certainly did nothing that I could avoid." He paused, and went on slowly, "I've thought sometimes, of late I mean, that if life is to be worth much, if it is to be real life, and not mere existence, one must put one's whole heart into it, and that two people--" He stopped; he was silent with embarrassment, conscious of having said too much.

"Can help each other. Indeed they can," Mrs. Loring went on serenely, "if they have the same ideals. Hardly anyone, fortunately, is so alone as I, and so I have to help myself! Your sisters, now; don't they help?"

"Not a great deal," Lavendar confessed. "One would, but she's married and in India, worse luck! The other is--well, she's a candid sister." He laughed, and looked up. "If my best friend could hear my sister Amy's view of me, just have a little sketch of me by Amy without fear or favour, he, or she, would never have a very high opinion of me again, and I am not sure but that I should agree with her."

"Nonsense! my dear friend," exclaimed Robinette in a maternal tone she sometimes affected,--a tone fairly agonizing to Mark Lavendar; "we should never belittle the stuff that's been put into us! My equipment isn't particularly large, but I am going to squeeze every ounce of power from it before I die."

"Life is extraordinarily interesting to you, isn't it?"

"Interesting? It is thrilling! So will it be to you when you make up your mind to squeeze it," said Robinette, jumping off the wall. "There is Carnaby signalling; it is time we went to the station."

"Life would thrill me considerably more if Carnaby were not eternally in evidence," said Lavendar, but Robinette pretended not to hear.