The Lowest Rung Part 12

But a man of forty-six is younger than a woman of forty-four."

I was silent. There was no contradicting that obvious fact.

"He will probably come by the 4.12 train," said Aunt Emmy, rising. "If you don't mind, as there are so many preparations to make, I will leave you to finish your breakfast. I have had mine."

She left the room, and I stared at her empty plate. I was not hungry either. I was frightened for my dear Aunt Emmy.

And yet, she was so yielding, so selfless, so absolutely uncritical, that if any woman could marry late she was the woman. She could have lived with a monster of egotism without finding it out. Had she not devoted herself to two such monsters most of her life? And perhaps Mr.

Kingston was not a monster. Aunt Emmy arranged the flowers early as she only could arrange them. I was only allowed to fetch the water and clean the gla.s.ses. A certain pony-cart was sent to Muddington with the cook in it to buy a tongue, and a Stilton cheese, and a little barrel of anchovies, and various other condiments which Uncle Tom approved. Uncle Tom's tastes represented those of his whole s.e.x for Aunt Emmy.

I insisted on her eating some luncheon, but this was barely possible, as in the midst of it a telegram was brought in from Mr. Kingston to say he should arrive by the 4.12 train.

After luncheon Aunt Emmy went to her room. I followed her there half an hour later to give her a note, and found her standing in the middle of the floor, looking at all her gowns laid out on chairs.

"I am afraid you can only think me very silly, my dear," she said, with a sort of humble dignity. "I wished to consult you, but I did not like to; but as you _are_ here, and if you don't mind my asking you--a relation can often judge best what is advantageous--which gown _do_ you think suits me best, the grey voile, or the lilac delaine, or the white serge?"

I decided on the white serge, and long before the dogcart ordered to meet him could possibly arrive, Aunt Emmy was sitting, paler than I had ever seen her, beside a wood fire in the parlour in the soft white gown I loved her best in, pretending to read. She had lit the fire, though we were not in the habit of having it till later in the day, because she thought Australians might feel chilly.

"I don't know how it is," she said at last, laying down the book, "but I seem quite blind. I can't see the print."

I could not see the needle-work I was bending over either. But that was because senseless tears kept on rising to my eyes, do what I would. Aunt Emmy's eyes had no tears in them.

"It is very petty of me, I know, but I do hope he has not grown stout,"

she said presently. "But of course it is to be expected, and if it is so I must try to bear it. It could not make any _real_ difference. Your Uncle Tom is the same age, and of course he is not--he really is _not_ as thin as he was."

"Was he ever thin?"

"N-no. But Mr. Kingston was, at least, not thin, but very spare and agile-looking."

At last the sound of wheels reached us. Aunt Emmy clasped the arms of her chair convulsively.

"I daresay he has not come," she said almost inaudibly.

The wheels stopped. I went into the tiny hall.

A tall, spare, distinguished-looking man, with weather-beaten face and peculiarly intent, hawklike eyes, was at the gate, and I went out to greet him. As he took off his cap his crisp hair showed a little grey in it. He was delightful to look at.

I don't know what I said, but I mumbled something as I shook hands with him, and pointed to the parlour door. He nodded gravely and went in, hitting his tall head against the low lintel. Then he closed the door gently. And I went to my room, and locked myself in.

When I went into the parlour an hour later at tea-time I found them sitting one on each side of the fire. I wished with all my heart that they could have been sitting together at this moment after the marriage of their daughter. Both had cried a little, I could see. He certainly had. They got up when I came in, and stood together on the hearth, a splendid-looking couple, dwarfing the white room with its low ceiling.

What they must have been in youth I could well imagine.

I was reintroduced to him, and I am not sure, though they were both smiling at each other, that they were not relieved by my entrance with the tea. He handed her her cup and waited on her with the deferential awkwardness of a man who has not been in women's society for years.

"I am a rough fellow, Emmy," he said once or twice. But he was not rough. He was charming. He did not fit in at all with my preconceived ideas of "Colonials." And it was quickly evident to me that his tender admiration of Aunt Emmy still survived. I was partly rea.s.sured. Perhaps, after all, he had brought happiness with him.

Saint Luke's summer was glorious that year, and it was nowhere more wonderful than in the forest. One still golden day followed another, the gossamer-threaded suns.h.i.+ne flooding the glades of yellowing and amber trees, spilling itself headlong amid the rusting bracken, and losing itself in the tiny foliage of the whortleberry, which, all its little oval leaves, ruddy as a robin's breast, was imitating the trees, like a miniature autumn forest underfoot.

Aunt Emmy and Mr. Kingston walked daily in the marvel of the forest, and it seemed as if the autumn sun shone kindly on them. Sometimes on her return there was a bewildered look in her face which I did not understand, and I wondered whether indeed all was well; but I put the thought away, for his love for her was beyond the possibility of doubt, and had not her love for him coloured her whole life?

And yet--

Once I saw him take up _Ole Scorpio_ with a careful hand, and then replace it in its recess with its spout pointing towards the room.

Presently, when he had gone, she gently moved it back to its former position, exactly _en profile_, and the senseless idea darted through my mind as I watched her do it that if her romance were moved from its niche, she would instinctively wish to do the same, to readjust it to the angle from which she had looked at it so long.

As the days pa.s.sed and the first shyness between them wore off, the primitive life he had led for so many years showed itself in a certain slowness of speech, a disinclination to make acquaintance with the neighbours, and an increasing tendency to long, tranquil silences with a pipe in the garden. But, wonderful to say, it had not apparently blunted him mentally. And he actually cared for books. Unfortunately, there were almost no books in the cottage. How he had kept it I cannot imagine, but he certainly had retained a quickness of apprehension which made him half-unconsciously adapt himself to Aunt Emmy and her little habits in a way that astonished me. It was she who showed herself less perceptive as regarded him. But this she never divined. She had got it rooted into her small, graceful head that he would naturally wish to converse princ.i.p.ally about his farm. And, in spite of scant encouragement, she continually "showed an interest," as she herself expressed it, in sheep, and water creeks, and snakes, and bush fires. He was always perfectly good-natured, and ready to answer; but I sometimes wondered how it was she did not realise that she asked the same questions over and over again.

"Uncle Bob does not seem to care to talk much about his farming," I ventured one day. "Perhaps he wishes to forget it for a little while."

"My dear," said Aunt Emmy rebukingly, "when you are as old as I am, you will know that the only thing men really care to talk of _is_ their business. My dear father always talked of stocks, and shares, and--and bonuses. He said I could not understand about them, as indeed I could not, but it interested me very much to listen. And your Uncle Tom, as you may remember"--I did indeed--"did the same. It is natural that Mr.

Kingston's mind should dwell on agricultural subjects."

Presently wicked men began to mow the bracken with great scythes, and to carry it away in carts which tilted and elbowed their way down the mossy, heather-fringed tracks. Here and there the down-stretched arms of the firs caught the topmost fronds of bracken and swept them from their murdered brethren, and held them precariously suspended, only to drop them when the first wind went by.

I left the cottage for a week to visit my husband's relations, and when I returned the forest was bare. An indefinable sadness seemed to brood over it, and to have reached Aunt Emmy as well. Mr. Kingston had also been away to visit his relations, and had returned, and was staying at the little inn on the edge of the forest, from which he could more readily run up daily to town to have his shoulder ma.s.saged, which still troubled him.

Aunt Emmy told me all this in her garden, where she was dividing her white pinks. I knew she intended to make a fresh border, but the action filled me with consternation.

"But Aunt Emmy," I said (the foolish words jolted out of me by sudden anxiety), "will you--will you be _here_ next spring?"

I could have struck myself the moment the words were out of my mouth.

The trowel dropped from her hand.

"Oh no!" she said confusedly. "Neither I shall. I was forgetting. I shall be in Australia."

She looked round the little garden which she had made with her own hands, and back to the white cottage, up to its eyes in Michaelmas daisies, which had become such an ideal home, and in which, poor dear!

she had taken a deeper root than she knew, and a bewildered pain pa.s.sed for a moment over her face. It was as if she had been walking in her sleep, and had suddenly come in contact with some obstacle, and had waked up and was not for the first moment certain of her surroundings.

"He is more to me than any cottage," she said, recovering herself with a little gasp. "I had hoped perhaps he would have come and lived here, and let me take care of him, after all his years of hard work.

But it was a selfish idea. He has told me that he cannot leave his work or his uncle, who has been so kind to him, and who is very infirm now--partially paralysed, and needing the greatest care. I shall--let the cottage."

"What is the place in Australia like?" I said with duplicity, for of course I knew by this time exactly what it was like. But I wanted to change her thoughts.

She led the way indoors, and pointed to a sheaf of unmounted photographs. I took them up, and examined them as if for the first time.

My heart sank as I looked at the inoffensive figure of the poor old uncle in the verandah, whom Aunt Emmy was of course to nurse. The house which that hard-working old man had built himself stood nakedly upon a piece of naked ground. There was not a tree near it. Beyond were the great cattle-yards and farm buildings, and what looked like an endless, shrubless field. And on the right was the new two-windowed room, no longer very new, which Mr. Kingston had built seventeen years ago for Aunt Emmy. I knew how much labour that hideous addition meant, which was a sort of degraded cousin many times removed from the pert villa drawing-rooms, peering over portugal laurels on the road to Muddington.

I knew that Mr. Kingston had papered and painted that room with his own hands. I knew also, but Aunt Emmy did not, that he had repapered and repainted it several times while it waited for her. And yet by no wildest effort of the imagination could I picture Aunt Emmy living there, though her heart had been there all her life.

A sudden rage rose within me against the deceased Uncle Thomas, and against this other decrepit uncle, waiting to be nursed.

I laid down the photographs, and went a turn in the forest, leaving Aunt Emmy sitting idle in her gardening gloves. My foolish words had stopped her happy activity. I was angry with myself, with Fate, with Australia, with everything, and not least with Mr. Kingston.

Everywhere in the bare glades little orphaned families of bracken held their arched necks a few inches from the ground. Even in their bereavement they too had remembered that it was autumn, and their tiny curled fronds protecting their downcast faces were golden and ruddy. As I turned a corner I suddenly caught sight of Mr. Kingston a few paces from me, looking earnestly at one of these little groups. I did not want to meet him just then, and I half turned aside; but he had already seen me, and he gave a gesture of welcome, and I had to stop.

My anger subsided somewhat as he came up. He looked hara.s.sed, and as if he had not slept.