“Nobody else?”
“No.”
“Then it’s a good thing he is out of the way if he was such a nuisance to Mother. Where is she?”
“Upstairs.”
Lettie ran to her.
Chapter 5
The Scent of Blood
The death of the man who was our father changed our lives. It was not that we suffered a great grief; the chief trouble was the unanswered crying of failure. But we were changed in our feelings and in our relations; there was a new consciousness, a new carefulness.
We had lived between the woods and the water all our lives, Lettie and I, and she had sought the bright notes in everything. She seemed to hear the water laughing, and the leaves tittering and giggling like young girls; the aspen fluttered like the draperies of a flirt, and the sound of the wood-pigeons was almost foolish in its sentimentality.
Lately, however, she had noticed again the cruel, pitiful crying of a hedgehog caught in a gin, and she had noticed the traps for the fierce little murderers, traps walled in with a small fence of fir, and baited with the guts of a killed rabbit.
On an afternoon a short time after our visit to Cossethay, Lettie sat in the window seat. The sun clung to her hair, and kissed her with passionate splashes of colour brought from the vermilion, dying creeper outside. The sun loved Lettie, and was loath to leave her. She looked out over Nethermere to Highclose, vague in the September mist. Had it not been for the scarlet light on her face, I should have thought her look was sad and serious. She nestled up to the window, and leaned her head against the wooden shaft. Gradually she drooped into sleep. Then she became wonderfully childish again — it was the girl of seventeen sleeping there, with her full pouting lips slightly apart, and the breath coming lightly. I felt the old feeling of responsibility; I must protect her, and take care of her.
There was a crunch of the gravel. It was Leslie coming. He lifted his hat to her, thinking she was looking. He had that fine, lithe physique, suggestive of much animal vigour; his person was exceedingly attractive; one watched him move about, and felt pleasure. His face was less pleasing than his person. He was not handsome; his eyebrows were too light, his nose was large and ugly, and his forehead, though high and fair, was without dignity. But he had a frank, good-natured expression, and a fine, wholesome laugh.
He wondered why she did not move. As he came nearer he saw. Then he winked at me and came in. He tiptoed across the room to look at her. The sweet carelessness of her attitude, the appealing, half-pitiful girlishness of her face touched his responsive heart, and he leaned forward and kissed her cheek where already was a crimson stain of sunshine.
She roused half out of her sleep with a little, petulant “Oh!” as an awkward child. He sat down behind her, and gently drew her head against him, looking down at her with a tender, soothing smile. I thought she was going to fall asleep thus. But her eyelids quivered, and her eyes beneath them flickered into consciousness.
“Leslie! — oh! — Let me go!” she exclaimed, pushing him away. He loosed her, and rose, looking at her reproachfully. She shook her dress, and went quickly to the mirror to arrange her hair.
“You are mean!” she exclaimed, looking very flushed, vexed, and dishevelled.
He laughed indulgently, saying, “You shouldn’t go to sleep then and look so pretty. Who could help?”
“It is not nice!” she said, frowning with irritation.
“We are not ‘nice’— are we? I thought we were proud of our unconventionality. Why shouldn’t I kiss you?”
“Because it is a question of me, not of you alone.”
“Dear me, you are in a way!”
“Mother is coming.”
“Is she? You had better tell her.”
Mother was very fond of Leslie.
“Well, sir,” she said, “why are you frowning?”
He broke into a laugh.
“Lettie is scolding me for kissing her when she was playing ‘Sleeping Beauty’.”
“The conceit of the boy, to play Prince!” said my mother. “Oh, but it appears I was sadly out of character,” he said ruefully.
Lettie laughed and forgave him.
“Well,” he said, looking at her and smiling, “I came to ask you to go out.”
“It is a lovely afternoon,” said Mother.
She glanced at him, and said:
“I feel dreadfully lazy.”
“Never mind!” he replied, “you’ll wake up. Go and put your hat on.”
He sounded impatient. She looked at him.
He seemed to be smiling peculiarly.
She lowered her eyes and went out of the room.
“She’ll come all right,” he said to himself, and to me. “She likes to play you on a string.”
She must have heard him. When she came in again, drawing on her gloves, she said quietly:
“You come as well, Pat.”
He swung round and stared at her in angry amazement.
“I had rather stay and finish this sketch,” I said, feeling uncomfortable.
“No, but do come, there’s a dear.” She took the brush from my hand, and drew me from my chair. The blood flushed into his cheeks. He went quietly into the hall and brought my cap.
“All right!” he said angrily. “Women like to fancy themselves Napoleons.”
“They do, dear Iron Duke, they do,” she mocked.
“Yet, there’s a Waterloo in all their histories,” he said, since she had supplied him with the idea.
“Say Peterloo, my general, say Peterloo.”
“Ay, Peterloo,” he replied, with a splendid curl of the lip —“Easy conquests!”
“‘He came, he saw, he conquered,’” Lettie recited.
“Are you coming?” he said, getting more angry.
“When you bid me,” she replied, taking my arm.
We went through the wood, and through the dishevelled border-land to the high road, through the border-land that should have been park-like, but which was shaggy with loose grass and yellow mole-hills, ragged with gorse and bramble and briar, with wandering old thorn trees, and a queer clump of Scotch firs.
On the highway the leaves were falling, and they chattered under our steps. The water was mild and blue, and the corn stood drowsily in “stook”.
We climbed the hill behind Highclose, and walked on along the upland, looking across towards the hills of arid Derbyshire, and seeing them not, because it was autumn. We came in sight of the head-stocks of the pit at Selsby, and of the ugly village standing blank and naked on the brow of the hill.
Lettie was in very high spirits. She laughed and joked continually. She picked bunches of hips and stuck them in her dress. Having got a thorn in her finger from a spray of blackberries, she went to Leslie to have it squeezed out. We were all quite gay as we turned off the high road and went along the bridle path, with the woods on our right, the high Strelley hills shutting in our small valley in front, and the fields and the common to the left. About half-way down the lane we heard the slurr of the scythe-stone on the scythe. Lettie went to the hedge to see. It was George mowing