“Who is playing, Beck?” I asked.
“Your mother, Cyril.”
“But she never plays. I thought she couldn’t.”
“Ah,” replied Rebecca, “you forget when you was a little thing sitting playing against her frock with the prayer-book, and she singing to you. You can’t remember her when her curls was long like a piece of brown silk. You can’t remember her when she used to play and sing, before Lettie came and your father was —”
Rebecca turned and left the room. I went and peeped in the drawing-room. Mother sat before the little brown piano, with her plump, rather stiff fingers moving across the keys, a faint smile on her lips. At that moment Lettie came flying past me, and flung her arms round mother’s neck, kissing her and saying:
“Oh, my Dear, fancy my Dear playing the piano! Oh, Little Woman, we never knew you could!”
“Nor can I,” replied Mother laughing, disengaging herself. “I only wondered if I could just strum out this old tune; I learned it when I was quite a girl, on this piano. It was a cracked one then; the only one I had.”
“But play again, dearie, do play again. It was like the clinking of lustre glasses, and you look so quaint at the piano. Do play, my dear!” pleaded Lettie.
“Nay,” said my mother, “the touch of the old keys on my fingers is making me sentimental — you wouldn’t like to see me reduced to the tears of old age?”
“Old age!” scolded Lettie, kissing her again. “You are young enough to play little romances. Tell us about it, Mother.”
“About what, child?”
“When you used to play.”
“Before my fingers were stiff with fifty-odd years? Where have you been, Cyril, that you weren’t in to dinner?”
“Only down to Strelley Mill,” said I.
“Of course,” said Mother coldly.
“Why ‘of course’?” I asked.
“And you came away as soon as Em went to school?” said Lettie.
“I did,” said I.
They were cross with me, these two women. After I had swallowed my little resentment I said:
“They would have me stay to dinner.”
My mother vouchsafed no reply.
“And has the great George found a girl yet?” asked Lettie. “No,” I replied, “he never will at this rate. Nobody will ever be good enough for him.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you can find in any of them to take you there so much,” said my mother.
“Don’t be so mean, Mater,” I answered, nettled. “You know I like them.”
“I know you like her,” said my mother sarcastically. “As for him — he’s an unlicked cub. What can you expect when his mother has spoiled him as she has. But I wonder you are so interested in licking him.” My mother sniffed contemptuously.
“He is rather good-looking,” said Lettie with a smile.
“You could make a man of him, I am sure,” I said, bowing satirically to her.
“I am not interested,” she replied, also satirical.
Then she tossed her head, and all the fine hairs that were free from bonds made a mist of yellow light in the sun. “What frock shall I wear, Mater?” she asked.
“Nay, don’t ask me,” replied her mother.
“I think I’ll wear the heliotrope — though this sun will fade it,” she said pensively. She was tall, nearly six feet in height, but slenderly formed. Her hair was yellow, tending towards a dun brown. She had beautiful eyes and brows, but not a nice nose. Her hands were very beautiful.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
She did not answer me.
“To Tempest’s!” I said. She did not reply.
“Well, I don’t know what you can see in him,” I continued. “Indeed!” said she. “He’s as good as most folk —” then we both began to laugh.
“Not,” she continued blushing, “that I think anything about him. I’m merely going for a game of tennis. Are you coming?”
“What shall you say if I agree?” I asked.
“Oh!” she tossed her head. “We shall all be very pleased I’m sure.”
“Ooray!” said I with fine irony.
She laughed at me, blushed, and ran upstairs.
Half an hour afterwards she popped her head in the study to bid me good-bye, wishing to see if I appreciated her. She was so charming in her fresh linen frock and flowered hat, that I could not but be proud of her. She expected me to follow her to the window, for from between the great purple rhododendrons she waved me a lace mitten, then glinted on like a flower moving brightly through the green hazels. Her path lay through the wood in the opposite direction from Strelley Mill, down the red drive across the tree-scattered space to the highroad. This road ran along the end of our lakelet, Nethermere, for about a quarter of a mile. Nethermere is the lowest in a chain of three ponds. The other two are the upper and lower millponds at Strelley; this is the largest and most charming piece of water, a mile long and about a quarter of a mile in width. Our wood runs down to the water’s edge. On the opposite side, on a hill beyond the farthest corner of the lake, stands Highclose. It looks across the water at us in Woodside with one eye as it were, while our cottage casts a sidelong glance back again at the proud house, and peeps coyly through the trees.
I could see Lettie like a distant sail stealing along the water’s edge, her parasol flowing above. She turned through the wicket under the pine clump, climbed the steep field, and was enfolded again in the trees beside Highclose.
Leslie was sprawled on a camp-chair, under a copper beech on the lawn, his cigar glowing. He watched the ash grow strange and grey in the warm daylight, and he felt sorry for poor Nell Wycherley, whom he had driven that morning to the station, for would she not be frightfully cut up as the train whirled her farther and farther away? These girls are so daft with a fellow! But she was a nice little thing — he’d get Marie to write to her.
At this point he caught sight of a parasol fluttering along the drive, and immediately he fell in a deep sleep, with just a tiny slit in his slumber to allow him to see Lettie approach. She, finding her watchman ungallantly asleep, and his cigar, instead of his lamp, untrimmed, broke off a twig of syringa whose ivory buds had not yet burst with luscious scent. I know not how the end of his nose tickled in anticipation before she tickled him in reality, but he kept bravely still until the petals swept him. Then, starting from his sleep, he exclaimed:
“Lettie! I was dreaming of kisses!”
“On the bridge of your nose?” laughed she —“But whose were the kisses?”
“Who produced the sensation?” he smiled.
“Since I only tapped your nose you should dream of —”
“Go on!” said he, expectantly.
“Of Doctor Slop,” she replied, smiling to herself as she closed her parasol.
“I do not know the gentleman,” he said, afraid that she was laughing at him.
“No — your nose is quite classic,” she answered, giving him one of those brief intimate glances with which women flatter men so cleverly. He radiated with pleasure.
Chapter