The Warrielaw Jewel, page 5
“I had to make the best of it, don’t you see?” said Rhoda. “I’ve been so terrified lest she should begin to suspect someone else!”
“Who? Effie?” I asked incredulously.
“No, Mary! If everything hadn’t pointed to Annie I really feared—”
“Her own sister! What nonsense!” I said hotly.
“Do you think so?” Rhoda stared at me incredulously. “My dear, you don’t know the Warrielaws. And Mary had admitted that she was upstairs earlier!”
Anyone who climbed into our car to-day, and sat, perched over its crude gadgets, in a smell of petrol, and an incessant draught, would feel that they had strayed back into the Dark Ages. But upon that evening, I remember, our Albion seemed to me a gay centre of warmth and modernity and civilisation, as we drove homewards and left the gloomy house behind us.
CHAPTER III
A FAREWELL PARTY
“My hero in classical, or is it Biblical history, is Melchisedec,” said Neil Logan. “He had, you remember, neither father nor mother. What ingenuity, what resourcefulness, that displays! To one like myself, harassed and bedevilled by relatives, the independence of his character is even more remarkable than his longevity.”
Neil stood outside a bank at the West End of Princes Street as he made this oration, a unique and imposing figure. Eccentricity in Edinburgh tends to dowdiness, but Neil stood, in the fitful April sunshine, an eccentric and dandy of the Edwardian school. His black Mexican hat and a long cape falling from his shoulders proclaimed his artistic tendencies, but the cut of his suit was irreproachable, he wore a camellia in his buttonhole, and his shoes shone more emphatically than the sun. Beside him my brother Dennis looked a charming, overgrown schoolboy, though Dennis, who had just reluctantly left Eton at the age of nineteen, and come to pay me a long visit with some vague idea of looking round for a job, considered himself a man of the world. It was Dennis who had introduced me to Neil, but he seemed impatient of the artist’s periods.
“Are you bringing my little Cousin Alison to tea at my studio to-day?” Neil asked, turning to him benignantly.
Two months had passed since my visit to Warrielaw, and the impression made by the family and the gloomy old house had faded from my mind. In the black frosts of February and the east winds of March I had sat shivering in so many other cold, overcrowded drawing-rooms as I dutifully repaid my calls. I had met many other sisters who disagreed, other clans who denounced their mutual relations with equal bitterness, other gloomy old places where penury or economy ruled supreme. The Misses Warrielaw had honoured me with no further invitations: no further word about the burglary had reached my husband. Rhoda was out at work when I returned her call. I met Cora frequently enough in ordinary social life, but she had offered no further confidences to my husband and myself. It was only, indeed, since Dennis had come to visit us that I had extended my acquaintance with the family.
“She asked me to come,” replied Dennis. “Alison Warrielaw, you know, Betty.”
Of course I knew. Dennis had only arrived a week previously, but in that space of time he had made more friends than I had in five months. Dennis is dark and slight and not very tall: he has no very obvious good looks, but he has eyes and a smile so engaging and so friendly a manner that already he walked through life picking up lovers, acquaintances and friends at every corner. He had met former friends at once in Edinburgh, and made new ones every day. Till his coming I had been naturally set up on a shelf amongst the married, as brides were twenty-five years ago, among John’s older contemporaries and their parents. Now Dennis jumped me down with a laugh into the world of gay young people, and John smiled approval. But already Dennis’s activities were becoming more concentrated. On his third day he had come to me with news of having met a new fairy—the real thing and no mistake—and since then he and Alison Warrielaw had run in and out of our house unceasingly. Dennis had been possessed by these wild enthusiasms since he was sixteen years old, and my mother had long ago decided to dismiss them as boy-and-girl friendships. Obviously Dennis was no entry for the matrimonial stakes as yet, but it did seem to me that Alison, so unprotected by life or her busy sister, might have her head turned: she was only seventeen, with the dewy, sexless beauty of a fairy child: after a nondescript education she had settled down as maid-of-all-work in her step-sister’s flat: all the amusement she had ever enjoyed had been provided by Neil Logan, who was evidently the hero of her life.
“Melchisedec had no pretty cousin!” I said. It had been my reference to the Misses Warrielaw which began Neil’s sermon.
“There are too many of us, however, and our eyes betray us,” said Neil. “As Jessica would say: ‘All Warrielaws have eyes.’”
“And queer ones!” I said, looking frankly at Neil. It was curious how the so-called fairy origin was impressed on the family. In Neil’s case the squareness of the face was softened by side-whiskers, the high forehead by a drooping forelock, and the square sturdy figure by the artistic cape, but those queer eyes with contracted pupils and big yellow irises made me realise his likeness to his aunts. I could see it in Alison too, at the moment, as she came round the corner of Castle Street to meet us. When time filled out her slight form and thinned her wonderful golden hair, filled out the curves of her pointed face, and brought lines and disillusion to her dreaming eyes, she too would be a Warrielaw. That seemed a pity, for in her little green coat and hat in the spring sunshine she looked like a fairy who had wandered into middle earth.
“Alison’s are queer,” said Neil, greeting his cousin, “for they seem to dream of magic casements and they are really wondering how to do up yesterday’s mutton. She has the face of Titania and the heart of Queen Victoria: that is why I adore her.”
(And that, I reflected, is why Dennis dislikes you.)
“Now we have all met, Mrs. Morrison, you must, I insist, come with these young people to tea in my studio. If indeed Jessica consents to leave the bank at any reasonable hour. She would not let me cross the magic portals. She is breaking the bank by cashing a cheque to take her to London to-morrow.”
“Then she’s really going?” I said involuntarily.
“Yes, and when Rhoda and Cora know they will try to wreck the train. All Warrielaws hate each other, as Jessica would say.”
“Neil, she adores you!” protested Alison.
“Alas, she does,” agreed Neil, tapping his goldheaded cane on the pavement. “That is why I have had to endure a day of her, shopping. Oh, my God! buying stay-laces and fringe-nets and soap, articles one cannot apparently purchase in London!—lunching in the bleak desolation of a temperance hotel, walking on this side of Princes Street, greeting acquaintances. Are you as yet, Mrs. Morrison, one of us, the choice souls, the illuminati who always walk on the wrong side of Princes Street?”
“How that fellow does jaw! He is an outsider,” muttered Dennis as Jessica Warrielaw came out of the bank, clutching her black bag. In the sunshine her square, wrinkled face, beneath her black pudding-bowl hat, was set in such suspicious dislike of her surroundings that she might well serve as a warning to her relations of the effect of bad temper, in advancing years, on the family features. The trivial bangles and lockets and earrings she wore seemed, like her tiresome mannerisms and affectations, to make her personality even more oppressive.
“Now, Neil,” she said in her high nagging voice, “that’s that. Oh, here is John’s wife.”
“And John’s wife’s brother,” said Neil, “and John’s wife’s brother’s friend. We are all coming now to my studio for tea. Let us hail a cab.”
“Nonsense, Neil,” said Jessica. “It’s only a step, and all Warrielaws are good walkers. Besides, I want to order a cab at Small’s to fetch me to the station to-morrow morning, and I must call at South’s in George Street for a parcel.”
“My car’s just round the corner,” said Dennis proudly. Dennis’s single-cylinder Renault was the joke of the family; these, as I said before, were the early days of motoring, and few second-hand cars were available for owner-drivers. Dennis’s was popularly supposed to be held together by strings and faith, and just now both were holding. “I’ll take Alison.”
“Mine, alas, is in the vile grasp of a garage,” said Neil, “being nursed for a tour in England next month. Ah, here is a cab. This Warrielaw is a rotten walker.”
Neil leant back in the cab in obvious relief and lit a cigarette. Miss Jessica wore one of those long, heavy black capes which were called Inverness cloaks in those days. It caught in the door every time she got in and out of the cab, but Neil made no effort to help her. “She has to do everything in her own way,” he explained when she disappeared into South’s shop. “She must order a cab from Small’s because fifty years ago Small’s father lived on the estate, and so a halo hangs over his business still. You, Mrs. Morrison, are reflecting that I am behaving very badly to my Aunt Jessica. She has been very good to me and I am an incredible ruffian, but I must plead for myself by explaining that she sets every nerve of my body on edge. These days on which I pay for my benefits are little short of torture. There are the confessions of a sensitive blackguard!”
Neil’s home was as definite as his personality. He had taken a house in a forgotten, decayed square in the Old Town, and converted the upper floors into a studio. He was of course a modernist, and a picture by Gauguin, Egyptian sculptures, Japanese armour and Gothic gargoyles stared from walls striped in red and black and white. He had dabbled in his time, he admitted, in all sorts of work. There were eccentric ladies with one pink eye and green triangular bosoms, there were brilliant caricatures of old masters, his especial line, and there were some excellent portraits, including one of Cora Murray staring sullenly in a scarlet gown from a dark corner. A luxurious tea was laid on a green marble-topped table, and Neil reinforced it by numerous bottles from a wall cupboard. Even these failed, however, to make our party go. Jessica sat upright with a glass of sherry and a chocolate Eclair, a combination which Neil said, with some justice, made both food and drink seem unpalatable. Dennis and Alison retired to a distant sofa. I made suitable remarks about pictures, and Neil unsuitable remarks in the hopes of shocking us. I never know whether literary men create or portray the talk of their time. Did Elizabethans talk the bombast Shakespeare reproduced, or did they talk it in imitation of Shakespeare? Did young men—for Neil was, I suppose, about thirty then—lean against walls and fling off epigrams about sex before the novelists of the beginning of the century recorded them, or were they imitating Wilde and Shaw? Neil certainly originated or acted the part of the dissolute young artist with great success in his efforts to shock Edinburgh.
“You’ve been seeing Cora to-day,” said Jessica abruptly, sniffing at a little scented handkerchief under the cushion of her chair.
“She came to me hot-foot to enquire about your visit to London.” Neil’s voice showed his annoyance at the question. “It was an unexpected and unusual pleasure.”
“What’s it to do with her?” flashed Jessica irately.
There was no reply. Before three of us, I imagine, rose a picture of the fairy jewel. There was such tension in the air that I rose to go. There is nothing more uncomfortable than the society of those who get on each other’s nerves, and it was pathetically clear that this must always have been Jessica’s lot in life. She was so clumsy and domineering and inapropos. She referred twice to recent gifts to her nephew: she demanded openly the affection he could never give. She gave me already that dreadful frayed feeling of irritation which I could see was Neil’s sensation, intensified by years to something like hatred. I could have been sorry for him if I were not sorrier for Jessica, whose fate was so obviously to crave for affection and fail lamentably to win it.
“Can’t Dennis run you down to Warrielaw?” I suggested, as Jessica also rose uncertainly.
“No, thank you, I want to have Neil to myself for a little,” said Jessica with a frown. “And all Warrielaws—”
“Are fond of refusing lifts,” put in Neil, wincing openly. I saw he could not bear that phrase again.
“Besides, I’m in no hurry to get home. Mary is having Rhoda out to see her this afternoon, and three is no company, you know.”
“I thought you didn’t allow Rhoda on the premises,” said Neil, smiling rather unkindly at Alison. “I gathered that the door was locked upon her as well as on all undesirables since the great burglary scare.”
“That was no laughing-matter,” said Jessica severely. “Poor Effie has been worried about Annie ever since. She is taking her off to Carglin to-night, as we had a telegram just before I started to say that Ellen Hay would be glad of Effie for the night. Mary is using that as an excuse to keep Rhoda with us till to-morrow, I believe. You need not think I have my own way in my own house, Neil! The two of them are going to lunch with the Wises at Erleigh to-morrow.”
“Is Rhoda actually leaving her shop then?” asked Neil indifferently.
“Yes, it’s Good Friday, you know. It seems a strange thing that an English shop holiday should affect a Warrielaw! They have been trying to dissuade me from travelling on the grounds that the trains will be late and crowded. As if Easter holidays affected travel on the main line! The only crowd will be at Carstairs and that will not affect me. They are likely to have a far more uncomfortable time getting to Erleigh, unless they walk.”
“But it’s a long way!” I said. “Isn’t it near Balerno?”
“About seven miles, but we think nothing of that. You young people with your cars have lost the use of your legs. Have you met the Wises, my dear?”
I rose to go as I assented, for the party was obviously languishing, and Neil’s face was a study in boredom as he fidgeted idly with his monocle.
We made our farewells and escorted Alison home. It was not till we had parted from her that Dennis could express himself freely on the subject of Neil.
“The fellow’s a bounder and a cad,” he said vehemently, “and yet Alison says she loves him!”
“Hasn’t he been very good to her?”
“Oh, he gives her a good time now and then, but he’s not fit for a decent girl to talk to. Why, in front of her the other day he said to me, ‘We must always remember, my dear fellow, that seduction is the sincerest form of flattery.’”
“Is he really pretty fast then?” I asked uncomfortably.
“No. Yes—well, I don’t know. I think he may be mostly a poseur. All Edinburgh is thrilling about our naughty Neil, but sometimes I wouldn’t be surprised to hear he’d only come in with the milk once really. Or he may be as black as sin for all I know. But you know, really, Betty, they are a queer lot, except for Alison! That old thing sitting there eating a chocolate eclair in a black glove and swigging away at sherry! She and Neil are a couple of lunatics!”
“Yes, I expect so,” I said anxiously as we hurled round a curve excitingly. “But why are you coming the Jehu? Your string will come undone again!”
“I’m rather late. I’m motoring Carruthers out to Biggar, to his people, for that dance and staying there the night, you know. We’re starting at 5.30 and it’s after six now. I tried to get Alison to come, but she hadn’t been asked, worse luck! She does have a poor time, poor darling. I do hate the Warrielaws!”
I did not disagree with him, and I didn’t love Jessica. Yet all that evening I could not get out of my mind the picture of the poor old lady trudging along the road alone, leaving the nephew who hated the very sound of her voice for the sister and niece who were united against her. How the cold winds would buffet her and the lonely dishevelled old house frown at her as she struggled up the avenue!
CHAPTER IV
THE DEPARTURE OF MISS WARRIELAW
Every sensible person must feel the charm of Edinburgh, and learn to love it as a home, and yet there must be moments when a fleeting sense of exile assails the southerner who lives within its gates. One of these came to me on the day after the party in Neil’s studio, when I stood in the Caledonian Station at a quarter to ten, watching preoccupied travellers and laden trunks make for the express train to London. It was the morning of Good Friday, April 13th.
That train still starts from the same platform at the same hour to-day, after the lapse of more than twenty years. Only one change, I think, marks the passage of time. In those historic years the express made its first stop at Carstairs, and was joined there by the Glasgow portion, whereas now the London expresses slip past that crowded junction disdainfully. In every other way the great railway system, however its internal organisation may change, keeps to its tradition, when it conveys the Scotsman on what Dr. Johnson called his favourite road, the road which leads to London.
In other ways human nature has not changed. Dennis had come up by car from London, a daring feat in those days, and especially so in a car like my brother’s. He had sent his luggage by train, and he had arrived without my favourite fishing-rod, which he had been charged to convey to me in its wooden case. No man under the age of thirty, then or now, travels without losing something, and then, as now, it is his female relations who are sent in search. Dennis, before he left for his dance at Biggar the evening before, had charged me to enquire after the rod, and I obeyed him meekly. I had forgotten about the Easter holiday: the cloakroom and platform alike were crowded for the moment. I decided to wait till the express had gone, and strolled a little wistfully to look at it.
“Good morning.” Miss Wise of Erleigh interrupted my meditations. She was a pleasant, energetic spinster, who, from her home in the country, came in daily to dominate the many charitable societies of Edinburgh. “You’re not running away from us already, Mrs. Morrison?”
“Oh no, only waiting for the cloakroom. Have you just got in?”
“Yes, the early train is our most convenient. I’m really off for the whole day to leave Mother and Father to enjoy Mary Warrielaw at lunch alone. She’s coming to us, and when no one’s there the Edinburgh scandals of thirty years ago rise up and rustle. I fancied I saw Jessica Warrielaw getting into the London train, so I expect there’s been a row, and my people will hear of it.”
