THE
PELICANS

E. M. Delafield

THE NOVELS OF E. M. DELAFIELD

ZELLA SEES HERSELF
THE WAR WORKERS
THE PELICANS

Joseph Hergesheimer writes:

“The solid accomplishment of Miss Delafield’s three novels establishes her as a figure of actual literary importance. Writing, from her first published sentence to the ending phrase of The Pelicans, with a delicate mastery and finish, she expresses her witty and forceful personality with the utmost clearness.

Zella Sees Herself, The War Workers, and The Pelicans offer to honest and intelligent people an enjoyment of what are recognized as really high traits of creative literature together with a pervading amusement and lively interest sustained from paragraph to paragraph and from novel to novel. Miss Delafield is a valuable addition to the number of writers, always small, whose books ornament equally the drawing-room table and the preference of undisturbed private hours.”

At all bookshops

ALFRED A. KNOPF, Publisher, NEW YORK

THE PELICANS

by
E. M. Delafield

New York
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
MCMXIX

COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To
MABEL LLOYD
Without whose enduring friendship
my books would not have
come to being

I

“AS a matter of fact—although one hates to say such a thing——” Lady Argent paused, in order to give the thing its full conversational value. “As a matter of absolute fact, those poor children are really to be congratulated.”

“Because they are left orphans at five years old?”

“How you exaggerate, Ludovic! Rosamund is quite fourteen, and the little one can’t be less than ten or eleven years old. And she wasn’t much of a mother to them, poor thing.”

“Well, what form did her modified motherhood take?”

“Ludovic, she is dead, after all,” Lady Argent reminded her son. “But she was so much absorbed in her music, and they didn’t get any proper education, as far as one knows. And then, of course, during this last year she was quite obviously dying—she ought really to have been in a sanatorium.”

“She must have been quite young,” said Ludovic Argent reflectively.

“Only about seven- or eight-and-thirty. Don’t you remember when she first settled here, just after the husband died, and we were all so excited about this pretty young widow and that enormous grand piano that had to be forced in at the front-door with such difficulty?”

“I suppose I was at Oxford then, since I don’t remember the sensation which the grand piano must indeed have caused, if they got it through the front-door of that small place.”

Ludovic Argent and his mother both gazed across the valley below, because the front-door under discussion was immediately opposite their own, although separated from it by two slopes of hill and the River Wye. Only the window-panes twinkling in the afternoon sun were visible.

“And what will happen to her grand piano now? I suppose it will have to be got out again,” said Ludovic nonchalantly.

“That’s what I was just telling you,” Lady Argent mistakenly assured him. “In a way they really are to be congratulated, poor little things. I believe Bertie Tregaskis is going to look after them.”

“Is that the woman who pervades Cornwall with model dairies and good works generally, and if so, what is she doing in this galère?”

“She was a cousin of Mrs. Grantham’s, and the very day after Mrs. Grantham became so much worse Bertie was down here to see after those poor little girls. So exactly like her, because it wasn’t a particularly near relationship or anything—simply one of her magnificent, generous impulses. They really have nobody, poor waifs; the mother doesn’t seem to have had any belongings at all, or if she had, they are Hungarians of sorts, and much better not raked up, in all probability.”

“It is difficult to see who is available to do the raking, certainly,” Ludovic admitted.

“Oh, Bertie would do anything that was right, of course, but she’s simply solved the whole problem by saying she’ll take them home with her. A woman who’s got more responsibilities already than anyone I know—and a child of her own besides—it really is rather magnificent of her, Ludovic.”

“But haven’t they got any guardian or anything?”

“Nothing at all. That’s one of the things that shows you what poor Mrs. Grantham was. Although she must have known for at least a year that she was dying, she never made any sort or kind of will. As a matter of fact I don’t suppose she had anything to leave, and the father’s money is safely secured for the two girls, Bertie says.”

“So Mrs. Tregaskis won’t have to take them for charity, so to speak?”

“Oh no! I don’t think even she could do that, wonderful manager though she is. She’s not at all well off. But of course it’s everything for girls of that age—or of any age, for that matter—to have a home. And she’ll be such a mother to them! She always says she was meant to be the mother of a large family and is wasted with just one little girl.”

“So the children are to be congratulated,” remarked Ludovic meditatively, as though summing up the situation.

“Well,” said his mother apologetically, “you know what I mean. Poor Mrs. Grantham was so ill, and she really was erratic—those long earrings, and all that music, and she seemed altogether more Hungarian than English, which was natural enough, I dare say, but not the best sort of thing for the daughters of an English father. One wouldn’t say anything unkind for the world—de mortuis—you know what I mean, dear, though I can never recollect the end of that proverb—or is it some sort of text?”

“I know what you mean,” Ludovic gravely assured her.

This untruth had been for many years his conversational cheval-de-bataille in intercourse with his mother.

“You always do, darling,” she returned gratefully. “So much more like a daughter than a son.”

She sighed, and Ludovic wondered if the sigh were a tribute to the thought of her own non-existent daughter, or to the infirmity which had kept her only son at home, to limp his way through life in the Wye valley.

“Anyway,” his mother concluded as though presenting a final solution, “Bertie is bringing the poor children here this afternoon to say good-bye to me. It will be very good for them to come out, and Bertie is so wonderfully broad-minded—there’s no conventional nonsense about her. I do want you to meet her, Ludovic.”

“Very well, mother dear. I’m rather curious, I’ve heard so much about her.”

Towards five o’clock of that crisp October afternoon, Ludovic Argent’s curiosity was gratified.

He limped into the library and found his mother in earnest conversation with her friend.

Bertha Tregaskis was a woman of forty-five, and the dominant impression produced upon Ludovic was one of intense capability. Her strong black hair, untouched with grey, sprang crisp and wiry from a capacious forehead, and the broad contour of her strong face revealed innumerable lines, hinting at the many activities indicated by Lady Argent. Her white, rather prominent teeth were freely revealed as she greeted Ludovic with the sane, ample smile in which she seemed to envelop all her surroundings.

“This is a sad expedition of mine, but I’m very glad to meet Sybil’s son at last; I’ve heard of you so often.”

Her voice was very much what he had expected from her appearance—full, rather deep, and with a native decision of utterance.

“And I of you, from my mother and—in Cornwall.”

“Ah, Cornwall!” She laughed outright. “I be Carnish wumman, sure ’nuff.”

Her instant assumption of the Cornish burr, natural and almost instinctive though it appeared to be, irritated Ludovic.

With a quickness of perception which he was to learn was characteristic of her, Mrs. Tregaskis appeared to perceive it.

“I suspect you heard of me as ‘Miss Bertie,’ since I am never allowed to be anything else down there. I do believe that half Cornwall knew me as ‘Miss Bertie’ until I married, and the name has stuck. At home, when I’m in the village with Hazel, all the old women stand at their doors and tell each other ‘’tis Miss Bertie and her l’il maid.’”

“‘L’il maid’—how perfectly priceless,” murmured the sympathetic Lady Argent, as in duty bound. Ludovic, again conscious of unreasonable annoyance, found himself wondering captiously whether anyone ever spoke of anyone else as a “l’il maid” outside the pages of a novel in dialect, his pet aversion. The phrase seemed too probable to be possible.

“Have you come from the Granthams’ place?” he demanded abruptly, impelled by a vicious desire to abandon the cloying topic of “Miss Bertie” and the atmosphere of local adulation of which she seemed to him redolent.

Where else should she have come from? He was aware that the question was ridiculous to the verge of politeness, but she replied, with all her armour of cheery friendliness unimpaired: “Yes, I’ve brought those two poor little girls, but your mother very kindly let them go out and play in the garden. So much better for them, after being shut up these last few days. I shall be very glad to get them home to-morrow; a change is the only thing.”

Her eyes, charged with kindly meanings, sought the sympathetic response of Lady Argent’s gaze.

“Of course it is. And they are too young to feel any wrench at leaving the place. It will probably be a relief to get right away from the atmosphere—and then, of course, they’ll love to be with your Hazel.”

“They’ve seen far too little of other children, and so, for the matter of that, has Hazel,” declared Bertha Tregaskis briskly. “I expect half a dozen rows royal to begin with, but the prospect doesn’t daunt me, on the whole.”

“I’m sure you’ll cope with all and any of it,” returned Lady Argent with a glance of fond admiration.

Ludovic felt sure of it too, but his sureness was untempered by either fondness or admiration.

He felt a strong desire to be matter-of-fact, almost disagreeable as far as possible, in this atmosphere of competent kindness.

“I shall go and fetch them in to tea,” he announced, reaching for his stick that was almost a crutch.

“Do, dear.”

As he went out at the French window Ludovic heard his mother murmuring wistfully: “He is so fond of children.”

He knew that she fostered this idea because she wished him to marry. He told himself that, in point of fact, he was not fond of children at all, and supposed that she based her assertion on an isolated liking for the intelligent small boy of an under-gardener.

Presently he saw the two children, in very modified mourning, under a great ilex-tree at the bottom of the garden. They were sitting on a bench side by side, very quietly, but they both rose at the sound of his crutch on the gravel.

“How do you do?” said Ludovic gravely, and shook hands with them both.

His first thought was that it was not fair to speak of Rosamund Grantham, at all events, as a child, to bring her out to tea, as though she were in need of childish diversion to make her forget a childish sorrow, to send her to play in the garden. He thought that perhaps she also had felt it so. Resentment smouldered in her dark-ringed eyes, and in the sulkily-cut lines of her very beautiful mouth.

There was much to recall the Slavonic type in her, in the high moulding of the cheek-bones, the straight, rather blunt nose, opaque ivory complexion, and straight black brows. Her eyes, sombre and heavy-lidded, were of a colour seldom seen in England—the true tint of clear deep grey. Her build, however, showed no trace of a squat, square-standing, Hungarian ancestry. She was very tall for her thirteen years, but gave the impression of having already almost attained to her full growth. Straight and square-shouldered, she was far too thin for beauty, from the defiant curve of neck and upheld chin to the long slim fingers, betraying sensitiveness in every outstanding blue vein and narrowed finger-tip.

Ludovic Argent, then and thereafter, thought that he had never seen a creature more at odds with her world and her passionate unbalanced self, than was Rosamund Grantham.

Frances, her face at eleven years old already bearing the impress of the dreamer in the steadfast gaze of eyes as grey as those of her sister, gave a sense of reliance and purposefulness that seemed to Ludovic amazing. Her small face had a classical delicacy of outline, her mouth was pathetically childish. Both had the same very soft brown hair growing in a curious little point on the low square forehead, and seeming too light in colour and texture for the dark brows and lashes beneath.

Both greeted Ludovic with serious self-possession, but Frances smiled at him a little, timidly, revealing teeth that sloped inwards.

“My mother sent me to tell you that tea is ready. She is in the library with Mrs. Tregaskis,” he said.

“Shall we come, then?” murmured Rosamund conventionally. Her manner was that of a princess, and he surmised that whatever the Hungarian past of Mrs. Grantham might have concealed, a very secure assurance in her own ineradicable birthright and breeding had descended to her daughter.

“You have been here before, I know,” he said, as they walked towards the house. “I expect I was at Oxford, or abroad,” he added hastily, cursing himself for the allusion which might recall expeditions with the dead mother.

But Rosamund adjusted the trend of the conversation as easily as she adjusted her pace to his halting steps.

“How nice to go abroad,” she said wistfully. “You must know a lot of places. Have you been to Russia?”

“No,” said Ludovic, and almost found himself asking, “Have you?” as though to a contemporary.

“Neither have I, of course,” Rosamund assured him rather apologetically, “but I am very much interested in it just at present; I’ve been reading about Siberia.”

“What was the book?”

“Oh, it’s only a children’s book—and I think it’s rather old-fashioned—one about Siberian exiles.”

A sudden memory of his boyhood, book-encompassed, stirred eagerly in Ludovic.

“Is it called ‘The Young Exiles’?” he cried.

“Oh! have you read it too?”

Their eyes met, and a delighted sense of recognition seemed to dance in both.

“I like the beginning part of it best, when the father is first arrested, and they go to the Czar. Do you remember?”

“Yes. And have you come to the part....”

They were as much excited as old friends meeting unexpectedly in a foreign country.

Ludovic remembered the book, which had absorbed him twenty years earlier, a good deal more clearly than he remembered the reviews which were now the objects of his monthly perusal.

They talked about “The Young Exiles” until the house was reached.

Lady Argent greeted them with smiles and kind, outstretched hand, but Ludovic felt convinced by the rather nervous cheeriness of her “Well, children dear, how do you like the garden?” that Mrs. Tregaskis had been impressing upon his mother the necessity for carrying off the situation with a high-handed brightness.

The brightness of Mrs. Tregaskis herself was beyond question.

“We heard you having a great pow-wow as you came along,” she said gaily. “What was it all about?”

She looked at Rosamund, but it was Frances who, after an instant’s pause, replied gently and gravely:

“It was about a book, mostly.”

“Ah! story-books, story-books, story-books!” Mrs. Tregaskis shook her head good-humouredly. “I suspect both these little people of being book-worms.”

The laugh in her kindly gaze was inflexible, and Lady Argent responded to it by a faint tinkle of mirth that Ludovic savagely told himself was sycophantic.

“Well, I was a bit of a book-worm myself, once upon a time. No, no, don’t ask me how long ago.” No one showed any signs of doing so. “It must have been quite a hundred years ago, since I wasn’t much bigger than Frances is now, if you can imagine such a thing.”

She gave her ready, jolly laugh with both hands on her wide hips.

“I used to sit up in an old pear-tree in the orchard (down tü Tintagel ’twas, ma dear), and read everything I could find—not the sort of story-books you children of to-day get hold of, I can assure you, but books that you’d think very stiff and dry, I expect.”

She was now addressing herself, almost in narrative form, to Rosamund and Frances, but Ludovic noted with venomous satisfaction that the politely unresponsive expression on both faces seemed to discourage her slightly.

She turned to Lady Argent again, with another slight laugh, as it were of proud apology for her own literary infancy.

“I really believe I’d worked my way through the whole of Motley’s ‘Dutch Republic’ before I was ten years old, and as for Don Quixote, he was my hero. In fact my lightest literature was Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queen,’ most of which I knew by heart.”

“My dear! At ten years old! Just think of it!” This from Lady Argent. Ludovic contented himself with the bitter ejaculation:

“Liar!”

Which civil and ingratiating apostrophe was naturally confined to his own breast.

“Don’t you find that this generation has a positively vitiated taste as regards fiction?” Bertha Tregaskis demanded of her hostess, who, having all her life been innocently devoid of any taste for fiction at all, replied in an unsure voice:

“Do you mean sort of penny dreadfuls, Bertie, dear? which they always say the housemaids like, though I’m sure mine have the most superior taste, for they read books like ‘St. Elmo’ or ‘Donovan’ for choice, I believe. I know my maid told me she was reading a novel called ‘Infelice,’ whatever that may mean. So educated of her, I thought, to choose a book with a foreign name like that.”

“‘Infeleese’?” repeated Mrs. Tregaskis uncomprehendingly. “Oh, Infelice! I know what you mean. My dear Sybil!”

More laughter.

“Have I said something absurd?” Lady Argent helplessly inquired; “I never do know anything about books, you know—so unlike Ludovic.”

She looked proudly at her son.

“You know he writes, Bertie?”

Ludovic had writhed under this simple announcement ever since his tenth year.

“But how splendid!” cried Mrs. Tregaskis with enthusiasm. “Who publishes for you?”

Ludovic felt convinced that she expected him to disclaim ever having got as far as publication, and took a vicious satisfaction in replying:

“‘Cameron’s Review’ has taken one or two small things, but they really are so very few and far between that only a fond parent could look upon me as a writer, in any sense of the word.”

“Nonsense,” murmured his mother. “Don’t listen to him, Bertie. He had a most beautiful thing, pages and pages long, all about Early English Poetry in the ‘Age of Literature,’ only a few weeks ago.”

Mrs. Tregaskis appeared to be as much impressed as the fondest of parents could desire.

“You don’t say so! Splendid! Scrumptious!” She almost shouted in her enthusiasm.

“I envy you dilettantes, who have time for all that sort of thing. A poverty-stricken Cornish woman like myself has to write what and when she can, just to turn an honest penny now and then.”

“Bertie! you don’t mean to say you write, as well as everything else?”

“Oh my dear Sybil, the greatest rubbish, you know—just a story here and there, to bring in a much-needed guinea.”

She laughed the gallant laugh of one who would scorn to deny the need of guineas.

“How too wonderful she is,” said Lady Argent in an undertone to the universe at large. “Bertie, you must let us read your stories.”

“Oh no, my dear. They’re only just scribbled off between a Mothers’ Meeting and a dairy class—just anyhow. What would the writer say to that?”

She looked roguishly at Ludovic.

“How I envy you! If I had nothing else to do but sit in this magnificent study, I should try and write a book, perhaps; but as it is ... I envy you.”

There was an instant’s silence.

An unpardonable instinct to see whether it were possible thoroughly to disconcert his mother’s friend seized upon Ludovic.

“I wish to goodness,” he said slowly, and with an entirely assumed bitterness of tone, “that I had something to do besides sit in a study and scribble—it’s not fit for a man.”

It was almost the first time that his mother had ever heard him allude to his infirmity, and she flushed from brow to chin.

But Mrs. Tregaskis was more than equal to the situation, as its creator had surmised that she would be.

The jovial lines of her face softened into kindly compassion, and the slow noddings of her head were portentous with understanding:

“Aha!” she murmured eloquently, and the depths of comprehension in her brooding gaze left Ludovic utterly defeated. Then, after a moment’s silence, obviously consecrated by Mrs. Tregaskis to her complete and all-embracing understanding of Ludovic Argent, she gravitated skilfully towards a brighter outlook.

“What a joy that little gift of writing is, though! I always say it’s like the quality of mercy, twice blessed—it blesses him that gives and him that takes——”

“My dear Bertie!” said Lady Argent with her soft laugh, and under a vague impression that Bertie was being epigrammatic and slightly daring with a passage from the Scriptures.

“Well, it’s very true,” laughed Mrs. Tregaskis. “I’m sure the readers of ‘Cameron’s’ and the ‘Age of Literature’ often bless your son’s contributions, and as to ‘him that gives,’ I know it really is the greatest joy to me sometimes, when the real work of the day is done, to feel I can let myself sit down for a few minutes and turn out half a dozen little French couplets or some fanciful piece of nonsense about children and fairies—you know the sort of thing. It does seem to rest one so.”

“To rest one!” echoed Lady Argent, with at least three notes of admiration in her voice.

“Children, do you realize what a wonderful person your—your guardian is? She’ll tell you all sorts of stories about fairies and things. I know you’re perfectly marvellous with children, Bertie,” she added in a most audible aside.

“Little people generally like my long yarns about the Cornish pixies,” admitted Mrs. Tregaskis. “Have you ever seen a pixie, Frances?”

“No,” said Frances coldly.

“Ah, they don’t grow in this part of the world. But there are wonderful things in Cornwall, as you’ll find out when you live there.”

“When do you go?” asked Ludovic of Rosamund.

Her sensitive face flushed.

“To-morrow, I think,” she half-whispered, with a glance in the direction of Mrs. Tregaskis, that seemed to Ludovic to convey hostility and a half defiant fear.

“Well, Sybil,” Bertha observed, “am I to see the garden, too?”

“Oh yes, of course. I’m longing for your advice—you know so much about a garden, and those things you made me get for the rockery last year aren’t doing quite as well as I hoped. Do come and tell me what you think of them.”

Mrs. Tregaskis rose. Her eye rested for a moment on the children. Then she said briskly:

“The children must show us the way. I expect they’ve ferreted out every corner in the place, during that grand exploration before tea, if they haven’t actually danced upon your most cherished rock-plants. I know what country kids are like.”

Ludovic thought of the two little forlorn figures that he had found under the great ilex-tree, and Mrs. Tregaskis’ joviality seemed to him singularly out of place.

He rose and opened the door.

“Form fours—quick march—left, right, left, right,” cried Bertie playfully, giving Rosamund a gentle push by the shoulders.

Rosamund and Frances went out.

II

MRS. TREGASKIS shut the door behind them with astonishing briskness and whisked round to face her hostess.

“A little diplomatic ruse, my dear, to get those infants out of hearing. And once out of doors they’ll be tearing all over the place and forget our very existence. I really must talk to you about them—that eldest girl means trouble if I know anything of spoilt children. I foresee a scene this evening.”

“Why, Bertie dear? I thought them so very brave and good, poor little things.”

“Oh, you know what children are! They’ve practically ‘got over’ it as people say, already, but there’s bound to be an outburst, I’m afraid, at the ‘last evening’—you know the kind of thing. The men have been taking away the furniture, such of it as is going to be sold, this afternoon while we’ve been out, and I do rather dread taking them back to that half-dismantled cottage. Rosamund is very highly strung, poor child, and she always infects the little one.”

“Poor children,” sighed Lady Argent, while Ludovic was wishing that Mrs. Tregaskis had not taken up a position that rendered it impossible for him to walk out at the door.

“Poor me, too, I think. It’s very stupid to mind it, but these days have been a frightful strain, in a way—one has somehow felt for them so much more than they’ve probably felt for themselves. But what with mothering them, and seeing to the business part of it all, and packing up, I really feel a rag.”

She sank limply into an armchair and Ludovic made for the unguarded doorway as rapidly as he could.

“My poor dear! But why shouldn’t you all stay here for the night, and avoid going back to the cottage at all. Do do that, Bertie dear.”

“Sybil, you angel!” cried Mrs. Tregaskis, reviving abruptly. “What a lot it would save me—I’ve simply been dreading to-night. But wouldn’t it be a fearful nuisance?”

Ludovic opened the door, stumbled on the threshold, then awkwardly readjusted his crutch and shut the library door with a hasty bang.

He had almost fallen over Rosamund Grantham, crouching outside the door.

She raised a deeply flushed face, and he looked gravely down at her. He was shocked only at the unchildlike misery and exhaustion that showed in her dark-circled eyes.

“Let me help you up from the floor,” he said after a moment, as though her position were the most usual one for a guest to select.

She let him take her hand and raise her from the floor, and then followed him slowly across the hall into a small morning-room.

Ludovic supposed that he ought to say: “Listening at doors is dishonourable,” but the sense of courtesy, apparently less in abeyance than where Bertha Tregaskis was concerned, revolted, and he moreover felt convinced that Rosamund was as well aware as himself of the breach she had committed.

Presently she said in a low voice:

“I know it is dreadful to listen at doors. I have never done it before, but I felt certain—certain—that they would try and arrange something or other without telling me—perhaps separate me and Francie or something; there’s nobody to understand anything, and I don’t know what is going to happen to us.”

“They can’t separate you and your sister,” said Ludovic earnestly; “no one could do that.”

“Then what are they settling in there, all by themselves? I know they’re talking about us, because I could hear a little—but only a very little—that was the worst of it.”

She began to struggle with tears.

“My mother asked Mrs. Tregaskis to stay here with you and your sister, for to-night, instead of going back,” he told her straight.

“Why weren’t Frances and I asked if we would? Why is it arranged like that without telling me?” she demanded resentfully, her voice shaking.

“I don’t know. I suppose Mrs. Tregaskis thought you would not mind. Do you mind very much? If you do, I—I will see that you do go home to-night,” said Ludovic desperately.

She looked at him for an instant with a sort of wonder in her eyes that touched him acutely, and then broke into floods of tears.

Ludovic stood looking out of the window.

“She is utterly bewildered by that woman,” he told himself angrily, “and distrusts her instinctively. Heaven help the child! What will she do in Cornwall? That woman will break her. Dear, kind, wonderful Bertie, as my mother calls her! and those two—sensitive, highly-strung, who’ve probably lived in an atmosphere of understanding all their lives....”

He wondered for a wild instant if his mother could be persuaded to receive Rosamund and Frances as daughters. It hardly seemed probable, in view alone of her admiration for their self-appointed guardian. How could the charges of the benevolent cousin be reft from her under no pretext but their reluctance to be benefited, and Ludovic Argent’s passionate conviction that such beneficence would be the ruin of both?

“I’m not crying any more,” said Rosamund’s voice behind him, after a few moments.

He turned round.

“What shall I do? Shall I tell my mother that you are to go to your home again this evening?”

She shook her head.

“No, thank you. In a way, they’re quite right. Frances would only cry, which would be bad for her.”

“Where is she now?” asked Ludovic.

“In the garden. She doesn’t know,” said Rosamund, colouring again, “about my listening at the door. She would think it dreadful, and I know it is—but somehow nothing seemed to matter except just to know what was going to be done with us.”

She looked mournfully at him and he saw her, bewildered and defenceless, thrust among alien standards and with all the foundations of her tiny world rocking. No wonder that in a suddenly revolutionized scale of values honour had seemed to count for less than the primitive instinct of self-defence.

“What can I do for you?” he said, almost unconsciously venting aloud the strong sense of impotent compassion that moved him.

“Oh,” she cried, “nobody can make things come right again—even God couldn’t, though I’ve prayed and prayed.”

“Do you mean—your mother?”

“My mother had to die,” she told him seriously. “She coughed and coughed every night, sometimes right on till the next morning. The night that she died, it was dreadful. She never stopped. I prayed for anything that might stop her coughing like that, and God answered the prayer by making her die. When I heard she wasn’t coughing any more, I thought it was all my prayers being answered, and I went to sleep, and then in the morning she came and told us that mother had died.”

She stopped and looked at him, with the most pathetic look that can be seen on a child’s face, that of bewilderment at pain.

“Go on,” said Ludovic in a low voice.

“Cousin Bertie said we could go in and see her afterwards, but I wouldn’t”—she shuddered—“I thought it would frighten Francie so. And we didn’t go to the funeral, either. Were you there?” she asked suddenly.

“No. I only came back from Paris yesterday,” he told her gently.

“Cousin Bertie went. She was very kind, and made us go in the garden, and told us a lot of things about heaven, and mother being quite well again now and happy, and somehow it didn’t all seem so bad then. But now we’re going away, and—and there’s nobody to understand. Except you,” she added mournfully.

“Haven’t you any relations at all?”

“No. Only Cousin Bertie. She is very kind, and she is taking us to live with her—but oh, she doesn’t understand!”

The despair in Rosamund’s voice seemed to Ludovic Argent to sum up all the inadequacy that he had felt in Bertha Tregaskis. She was very kind—she was taking the orphans to live with her—but she would never “understand.”

He felt her lack of understanding to be yet more apparent when Mrs. Tregaskis called Rosamund and Frances back to the library, just as Frances timidly pushed open the French window of the room where he stood with Rosamund.

An imploring look from Rosamund made him follow them quickly into the library.

Lady Argent welcomed him with a glad look in which, nevertheless, he detected a slight surprise.

“Well, you two,” began Bertha in a tone of careful gaiety, “what do you think of an invitation? Kind Lady Argent wants us all three to stay here for the night. Then cook won’t have any trouble about getting supper ready for us, and we shan’t have to bother any more about squeezing into the bedrooms with all those trunks! Isn’t that splendid?”

“We shall have to go back to get our things,” said Frances quickly and solemnly.

“I’ll see to all that,” declared kind Mrs. Tregaskis briskly. “I’m going to pop over and see to one or two things, and I’ll bring back the nighties with me. I shall put on my seven-leagued boots, and be back before you know I’ve gone.”

“I’ll go back with you,” said Rosamund.

“No, my dear. It’s too far for you.” There was an underlying anxiety in Mrs. Tregaskis’ firm kindliness.

Frances looked at her sister with consternation.

“But—but——” she half-whispered, turning her back on Mrs. Tregaskis, “it’s our very last night at home. We must go back, Rosamund.”

“Bon! ça y est,” ejaculated Bertie under her breath and casting a glance of humorous despair at Lady Argent and Ludovic. “Une scène de première classe!”

He noted with angry resentment her admirable French.

“Rosamund and Frances,” she said, in a tone of elaborate reasonableness, “I want you to listen to me, like good children. Lady Argent is very kindly letting you stay here so that we shouldn’t have to go back to the cottage, which is all upside down with packing and—and furniture and things, and I want you to be very good and give no trouble at all.”

“Oh no,” breathed Lady Argent, distressed. “But would they rather—do they want to go to the cottage again——” She hesitated helplessly.

“Bless me,” cried Bertie cheerily, “the cottage isn’t going to run away in the night. There’ll be heaps of time to-morrow morning before we start for home.”

Rosamund flushed an angry red.

“The cottage is our home,” she said with emphasis.

“Well, darling, that’s very loyal of you,” laughed her guardian, “and I’m quite ready to hear you call it so until you’ve got used to our part of the world.

“Now what about washing paws, Sybil, before we adorn your dinner-table?”

It was perhaps this masterly conduct of a difficult situation that made Lady Argent say to her son that evening, when Mrs. Tregaskis had hurried upstairs “just to give those two a tucking-up and ‘God bless you’”:

“Oh Ludovic! How splendid Bertie is, and how I hope it will turn out well.”

“Why should it not?” asked Ludovic, who held, indeed, his own certainties as to why it should not, but was perversely desirous of hearing and contradicting his mother’s point of view.

“It’s always rather a risk, isn’t it, to take other people’s children like that, even though they are relations. But they’re dear little girls, and so good and brave.”

“They seem to me singularly intelligent, and altogether rather remarkable.”

“Yes, indeed, one does feel that,” returned Lady Argent with the sort of gentle cordiality with which she almost always acclaimed any opportunity of praising others, and which consequently detracted considerably from the value of her approbation. “They are not at all ordinary, I feel sure, and that’s why it seems so very fortunate that Bertie, of all people, should take them. She will understand them so wonderfully. Her love of children is one of the most characteristic things about her, and she always says herself that she’s never quite stopped being a child in some ways, and so understands children. They come to her instinctively. Children and animals always know, they say.”

Ludovic had met this aphorism before, and disagreed with it profoundly, but he had no wish to deprive his mother of any of the gentle Victorian beliefs which ruled her life. At thirty years old, Ludovic Argent was still young enough to feel superior.

But at this moment his thoughts were altogether engaged with the little girls who yesterday had been all but unknown to him. Presently, to his own surprise, he said:

“Mother, you wouldn’t consider the idea of having those two here, I suppose?”

“You don’t mean for good, Ludovic?”

He did, but a certain strain of moral cowardice, always latent in the imaginative, made him temporize.

“Well—for a long visit, perhaps. I—I think they’d be happier near their old home, and in their own part of the world.”

“But, my dear boy,” said his astonished mother, “you surely don’t mean to suggest that I should adopt two children of whom I know hardly anything, when they’ve already been offered an excellent and much more suitable home with a relation? It would be quite impossible. Do think of what you’re saying.”

Ludovic thought. From every point of view his suggestion was inadmissible. The instinct which had prompted it, he decided, was unpractical sentimentality.

He rose abruptly.

“You’re right, of course. It would be quite impossible.”

Lady Argent’s sigh was compounded of mingled relief and regret that any scheme suggested by her son would prove to be impracticable.

“Perhaps,” she said, by way of compromise, “we could have them to stay, later on. I quite see what you mean about their liking the Wye valley, poor little things. And of course I know how fond you are of children, darling.”

Ludovic rightly conjectured that the last few hours had for ever placed this parental illusion beyond the reach of doubt. It would be part of the penalty of an unconventional, and therefore unpractical, suggestion.

“The infants are asleep!” cried Bertha Tregaskis at the door, merrily, triumphantly, and also, as it happened, altogether untruly. “At least if they’re not they ought to be. I left them very much en route for the Land of Nod, though Rosamund wouldn’t own to it, and of course the little one always holds fast by her. I tell you what, Sybil, it will be the making of them both to be with another child. As it is, I can see that Rosamund is domineering, and Frances simply has no individuality of her own. It always is so when there are only two. The elder or cleverer or stronger simply has things all her own way—and Rosamund is all three. She has any amount of character, but I foresee a handful. Well, it’s all in the day’s work, I suppose.”

“As though your day wasn’t full enough already, Bertie dear!”

Ludovic left the room.

Next morning the visitors were driven early to the station. There was, after all, Mrs. Tregaskis had declared at breakfast, no time to return to the cottage on the other side of the valley—Rosamund and Frances must wave to it from the train window. Couldn’t they see the garden and a little bit of the house from the train? Very well, then it would be quite exciting to watch for it. They could have a race to see who caught sight of it first.

Into this bracing atmosphere of cheery optimism Ludovic’s voice cut coldly and decisively:

“I can drive round that way, if you wish it.” He addressed himself directly to Rosamund. His mother looked surprised, but it was left to Bertha to exclaim:

“Only at the risk of missing the train, and I don’t want to do that—my old man is counting on my being back by the early train, and he’ll drive down to meet it, I expect. That’s no joke, when one lives three miles from the station at the top of one of our Cornish hills!”

Mrs. Tregaskis was always possessive when speaking of Cornwall.

“I’m afraid you might find it rather out of your way, Ludovic, and we haven’t left much time,” began Lady Argent apologetically.

“I don’t mind,” said Rosamund miserably, answering Ludovic’s gaze.

“Good girl!” said Mrs. Tregaskis approvingly. “Why, Francie!”

Frances had suddenly begun to cry, quietly and hopelessly.

Rosamund said “Francie!” in a tone of exasperated misery that spoke of nerves rasped to breaking point.

“Hush! Leave her to me,” commanded her guardian. “Frances, darling, what is it? Come here to me. What is the matter?”

She held out both her capable hands.

Frances looked at her quite silently with streaming eyes.

“Oh,” cried Lady Argent pitifully, and Frances turned to her at once and hid her face against the outstretched arm.

“Poor little thing,” said Lady Argent almost tearfully. But Ludovic noted that his mother seemed to comfort Frances in an instinctive sort of way, with gentle hand stroking her hair, and without attempting to make her speak.

Bertha Tregaskis, “wonderful with children,” Ludovic ironically reflected, was capable of nothing more startling than an imperative:

“Hush, now, Rosamund. She’ll stop in a minute. Go on with your breakfast, and remember that you have a long journey in front of you. However, you’ll have a real Cornish tea when you arrive—splits and cream, and pasties, and all sorts of things. Us has a real proper ole set-tü, at tay-time.” She laughed, and for the rest of the meal was very jovial and talkative, drawing attention from Frances, who presently stopped crying and wiped her eyes in a shamefaced way. She looked timidly once or twice at Rosamund, which glances were intercepted by Mrs. Tregaskis with significantly raised eyebrows which said plainly to Lady Argent, “What did I tell you?”

But it was Ludovic who saw the elder sister’s answering look and read into it her intense agony of protective love and impotent apprehension. The dead mother might have made Frances’ world, but Frances made Rosamund’s.

III

“HERE we are!” declared Mrs. Tregaskis thankfully, as the train slowed down at Porthlew. “I declare it’s good to be alive, in such weather and a country like this one.”

She descended lightly on to the astonishingly bleak little platform, empty and swept by a north wind.

“Now for bags and baggage! Frances—umbrellas, dressing-bag, papers—that’s all right. Rosamund? Come along, darlings, you must get out everything while I see to the luggage. Porter! Ah, Trewin, good-afternoon. Is the trap outside? Just show these young ladies the way, and then come back for the trunks. How’s the wife?”

“Better, thank you, Mrs. Tregaskis,” said the man, touching his cap with a grin.

“That’s right. Tell her I’ll be round to see her in a day or two.”

Kind, competent Mrs. Tregaskis hurried along, beaming and exchanging greetings with one or two porters and a newspaper-boy.

“How pleased they all are to see her,” said Frances wistfully. “Isn’t it cold, Rosamund?”

“It’s much colder than at home. Turn up your collar, Francie. Do you think we shall go to the house in a cab?”

“No—she said the old man would drive down in a trap. I suppose it’s the coachman.”

“I think she meant Cousin Frederick. She said ‘my old man.’”

“Oh! Is he very old?” asked Frances in rather awe-struck tones.

“I suppose he must be.”

But when they presently went outside the station and climbed into the tall dog-cart, driven by Cousin Frederick, they did not think him very old after all.

He was small and brown and clean-shaven, with a thin, deeply lined face and a curious twist at the corner of his mouth that gave him the appearance of always wearing a rather sardonic smile. But his little grey eyes were inscrutable, and never smiled. No one had ever called him Freddy, or even Fred.

He lifted his cap to Rosamund and Frances and said:

“I’m afraid I can’t get down. The mare won’t stand. Do you mind sitting at the back?”

They climbed up obediently, and from an elevation which both secretly felt to be perilous, watched the arrival of Mrs. Tregaskis and sundry minor articles of luggage.

“Here we are,” she announced gaily to her husband, after the universal but obvious fashion of the newly arrived. “How are you, dear? and how’s Hazel? All well at home? That’s right, thank you, Trewin. You’ll see to the boxes, won’t you. I suppose the luggage cart is here?”

Frederick pointed silently with the whip.

“Oh yes, that’s all right. Well, I’ll pop in, and we can be off.”

She patted the mare vehemently.

“Jenny needs clipping,” she observed in parenthesis. “Well”—she got in beside her husband.

As they drove through the steep town of Porthlew Mrs. Tregaskis exchanged cheery salutations in her hearty, ringing voice with a number of people. Frederick slanted the whip slightly in the direction of his cap, straightened it again, and said nothing.

Neither did he say anything throughout the three-mile drive, nor when they stopped before the square stone house, and Mrs. Tregaskis kissed first Rosamund and then Frances, on the steps of the porch, and said:

“Welcome home, darlings.”

Then she shouted aloud:

“Hazel, my poppet! Hazel! Come and say how d’ye do to the cousins.”

Hazel Tregaskis, aged fourteen, came into the hall. She was small and brown like her father, with something of the same twist at the corner of her mouth, but rendered charming by rippling tawny hair, and beautiful eyes where an elfin spirit of mockery seemed eternally to dance. She held herself very erect, and moved with remarkable grace and lightness.

They had tea in the hall, and Hazel sat beside her father and chattered freely to the new arrivals.

“Where is Minnie?” suddenly demanded Mrs. Tregaskis. “Frederick, we’ve forgotten Minnie. Where is Minnie? Hazel, where is Minnie—where is Miss Blandflower, darling?”

“I don’t know,” said Hazel calmly.

“Go and find her at once, my pet. Poor Miss Blandflower! You know this isn’t quite like her own home, and we never want to let her feel herself forgotten, or unwanted. Now run, Hazel.”