Chapter III: Part ONE: The Wooing of Mouldy Jakes (2)

Miss Mayne smiled too. "I hope I shall be spared apologies. As long as they realise at once---- As you say----" She hesitated and drove the point home. "The idea is--comic! And," she added graciously, "I'm not in the least angry with you."

So ended Graeme's party. He retraced his steps, puffing furiously at his pipe, jolted out of the accustomed orbit of his thoughts as completely as a maiden after her first dance.

On the whole he had enjoyed the afternoon immensely and found himself wondering why he had never done anything of the sort before. They were such jolly kids; the brown-faced, impulsive Cornelius James, aglow with imagination and as affectionate as a puppy; Jane, a feminine edition of him, with thick hair, "bobbed" above the nape of her white neck (he had discovered for the first time the witchery that lies in the back of a child's neck); and Georgina, shy, long slip of a thing with eyes like a fawn and hints of a not-distant womanhood in her quick changes of colour and the pretty immature curves of her young body.

Of Miss Mayne he thought with a queer mixture of compunction and pleasure. She so obviously would have enjoyed the afternoon had it not been for the lamentable business of the ring, and the ridiculous remark addressed to her by Josephine Smedley. Her husband indeed...! Somehow that possible interpretation never entered his head when he suggested temporarily adopting the children. The ring she was still wearing during tea must have been responsible for it. He wished they had got it off with soap and water when she wanted to, instead of leaving it till afterwards. "Comic!" The intonation in Miss Mayne's voice came back to him as she echoed the word. After all, why comic----?

He wondered, sailor-like, what manner of man her brother had been, that dead Guardsman who slept "in Flanders' fields." He realised with an unfamiliar thrill the fearless, frank way she had looked him in the eyes, the poise of her head, the gay quality of her laugh, and somehow wished he had had that man for a pal; he, who since boyhood had never really opened his heart to another human being.

He found a letter from his step-sister awaiting him on his return. It was a hurried epistle communicating the fact that Sir Malcolm was in bed with influenza, which at that time was raging in London. It postponed their return indefinitely and bade Graeme make himself as comfortable as circumstances permitted in their absence until the end of his leave.

Perhaps nothing more was necessary than this absence of Lady Manners from the scene to mature Graeme's friendship with his new acquaintances.

From the formal invitation to a return party at Glebe Farm penned by Georgina and signed by all three children, they passed by rapid stages to an easy comradeship. In a week the boy and both girls were as free of the demesne as Graeme was of the noisy teas in the farm parlour. Further, the latter unearthed a governess cart out of the stables, and harnessing a fat pony between the shafts, led them off on long rambling expeditions amongst the thickly-wooded hills, and lanes drowsy with the scent of honeysuckle.

It is not for me to attempt any convincing record of the imperceptible stages by which, as the days passed, Graeme fell in love with Claire Mayne.

She obtruded upon his thoughts as sunlight enters a room past curtains waving in the breeze, while with the dour perversity of his queer nature he tried to shut her out.

There were women about whom no one could cherish any illusions; with these Graeme Jakes was half contemptuously, half pityingly at ease. But in Claire Mayne he saw someone who approached so exquisitely to his ideal of womanhood that he dreaded disillusionment. Thus and thus must his goddess be fashioned, and the first word or act of hers that betrayed feet of clay would have filled him with bitterness and disappointment.

However, as time went on, one after another he drew forth timidly from the secret hiding-place of his soul some fresh idealism; draping them about his conception of her, until the real and the imaginary woman blended into that dear, everlastingly inaccessible unreality which is all mankind's first love.

Transports of this nature are usually apparent enough in the demeanour; but Graeme Jakes's oriental imperturbability of countenance gave not the slightest betrayal of the turmoil in his thoughts.

Claire Mayne herself remained serenely unconscious of anything in the air more vibrant than a grave friendliness and a shy, half-reluctant admiration. She would not have been the normal, healthy young woman she was had she not thought about him a good deal. When the children were in bed and the stars made visible the dark outline of the hills opposite, she sat by her open window, with the tiny room behind her in darkness; there, chin in hand, she tried to assign him to some known category amongst her limited male acquaintances, and found the task difficult.

Since girlhood her pet character in fiction had been Alan Breck; not for his swashbuckling gallantry, nor the efficient way with him in sword play, but because, as she herself put it, "he wanted looking after so dreadfully."

Graeme Jakes, in some subtle way that eluded analysis, appealed to her in much the same manner. His clothes lacked buttons at times and his hair was generally dreadfully untidy. She would like, she thought, to brush his hair for him ... in a brisk, sisterly fashion.

The tranquillity of her meditations would have been sorely disturbed could she have seen the object of her thoughts. Half a mile away, from a vantage point amid the dewy bracken, stood her devout lover, watching with all a lover's faculty for self-hypnotism a light burning behind a blind in one of the upper windows of the farm. Fondly he watched its orange glow through the darkness until it was abruptly extinguished, and returned home in a mood of exalted melancholy. Judge though how greater the melancholy had he realised the blind screened no other than the conjugal chamber of the farmer and his wife....

The days went by thus to merge into weeks, and the children's visit was fast drawing to a close. Graeme, too, had received orders to attend at the Admiralty for medical survey. The halcyon days were numbered.

They had planned an expedition to the coast, an all-day affair that was to include sea-bathing for the children, for the last day. The sun shone out of a cloudless sky, the air was clear and sweet with autumn scents, and the cavalcade set forth on the appointed morning in wild spirits. Mrs. Mackworth had provided lunch and tea, and the food, together with bathing things, cameras, and all the impedimenta of a holiday, were piled into the pony cart. Miss Mayne held the reins and Georgina walked at the pony's head; Jane and her brother ranged along the hedgerows like a couple of terriers; while Graeme brought up the rear, outwardly cheerful, but inwardly experiencing the varied sensations of a man who has decided to propose ere the going down of the sun to a damsel whose only concern appeared to be to avoid being left alone in his company.

They reached the sea about noon; Graeme had chosen a little bay where the sands were safe for bathing. The coast stretched away on one hand in a waste of dunes and marsh, and on the other rose in indented cliffs from a rock-strewn beach.

On the top of the cliffs they unpacked the baskets, turned the pony loose to graze, and, when the children had had their longed-for bathe, lunched al fresco as might the gods have eaten upon Olympus.

It was after lunch that Graeme made his first anxious bid for the company of Miss Mayne alone. "Supposing you three go and explore the caves," he suggested to the children, a clumsy argument which, for its very ingenuousness, roused no suspicions in that maiden's heart.

"But what about you and Miss Mayne?" inquired Jane.

"Well," said Graeme feebly, "p'raps we'll go and look for seagulls' eggs along the cliffs."

"Gulls don't lay eggs in September," said Miss Mayne. "Why shouldn't we all go and explore caves?"

Nothing was further from her mind than the imminence of the proposal shaping itself on Graeme's lips, but a pretty loyalty to the children's parents forbade her to let them out of her vision. "A nice business," said her conscience, "if one of them got hurt. Where was Miss Mayne? Philandering somewhere out of sight with a Naval officer.... Well, not philandering exactly, but----"

"I thought perhaps you might be tired," broke in the voice of the Naval officer upon her meditations.

"Not in the least," she replied. "Come along, we'll all go down to the beach."

So off they set and awakened the echoes of the shallow caves with their voices, explored the pools left by the tide; built with the aid of pieces of driftwood a sand castle that had cockle shells for windows and a tiny green crab as keeper of the gateway, and through all the absorption of this light nonsense Graeme was conscious of Claire Mayne, whether she spoke or was silent, in view or out of sight, as a man is aware of the sunlight and the wind on his cheek. She seemed inevitable--inevitable and indispensable.

The children found him dullish and rather distrait.

Curiously enough it was she who at last gave him his opportunity to speak his heart. The children decreed it was time for their next bathe, and while they undressed in the shelter of the rocks, Graeme set about unpacking the tea-things and boiling the kettle. He watched, kneeling, the three slim forms scamper across the short stretch of sands in the sunlight to meet the incoming tide, and suddenly Miss Mayne joined him on the cliff.

"I'll help you," she said; "I can watch the children from here and cut bread and butter at the same time. They are quite safe."

Her manner was unconcerned; she spoke in the unrestrained note of comradeship, and stood watching the children capering in the sunlit waves, with the wind moulding her garments to her long limbs and drawing loose tendrils of her hair in careless, happy disorder across the curve of her cheek outlined against the sky.

Graeme knelt observing her, suddenly tongue-tied. You can invent speeches to a goddess, aye, and deliver them effectively enough to a silent night of stars, but this radiant, composed girl was flesh and blood; he could almost see the warm vitality glowing through her skin. She needed no clap-trap speech about love such as fellows deliver in novels.... He rose to his feet. The wind and the sunshine and the sound of the sea seemed to sing and shout together. "Man! Here's your mate at last!" was the burden of the song. "Here's the goal of all your heart's desire; the haven of your soul's adventure! Look at her, shaped for you by incalculable forces and laws, beautified and perfected and handed down through infinite ages, to stand thus within your arms' reach. Yours, man, if you can but win her! Tell her, fool ... tell her."

"I'm glad you came," said the fool, and his voice, husky and unfamiliar, startled him.

A sound, distinct from the noises of wind and shore, obtruded upon his consciousness as he spoke, and the girl heard it too, for she wheeled sharply and stood staring, not at her companion, but back across the sheep-cropped turf.

Two horses were approaching at a canter, near enough already for their riders' faces to be discernible. One was Josephine Smedley; the other, a vapid-faced young man in extravagant equestrian attire. They drew rein and approached the cliff at a walk, Miss Smedley waving her whip in greeting. Her companion touched his horse with the spur, holding it on the curb while it curveted effectively.

"Topping day!" cried Josephine. "Watching the kids bathe, Mrs. Jakes?"

Graeme heard the girl give a little gasp. She stood quite motionless for a few seconds and then, still staring at the rider, he heard her say in a low voice, as if speaking to herself: "This has gone far enough; it's got to stop." Miss Smedley's cavalier had rather overdone the spur business and was having considerable difficulty in controlling his horse, which was plunging and pulling some distance away.

Graeme stepped forward. "I'll explain," he said. "Miss Smedley----"

"No," interrupted Claire Mayne, "leave this to me. You should have explained before this." She took a few steps in the direction of the other girl. "Miss Smedley," she said in a clear voice, "I think it only right I should tell you I am not married. I am not Mr. Jakes's wife." She paused, apparently from loss of breath.

In the middle distance the young man, obviously losing control of his mount, was shouting something over his shoulder. Miss Smedley glanced in his direction and then looked Claire Mayne brutally from head to toe. "Please don't apologise," she said, "I--we suspected as much." It took the short, hard laugh that followed the words to drive the insult home. She flicked her horse sharply on the flank and rode after her escort.

The sound of the horses' hoofs had died away before Miss Mayne spoke.

"Did she mean--was that woman trying to----?" she began, and stopped. Mechanically she knelt down and began setting out the tea-things as if in a trance.

"Why didn't you leave it to me?" expostulated Graeme, kneeling beside her. "I'd have explained properly. She misunderstood ... or pretended to."

The girl raised a face from which all vestige of colour had fled. Her eyes were wide and pitiful; she held a sugar basin in one hand, in the other a butter knife.

"But I did explain," she said. "How could I know...?"

"You should have left it to me," repeated Graeme. He put out his hand and took the sugar basin from her. She laid the butter-knife with precision beside the cabbage leaf containing the butter. Their actions were mechanical and inconsequent, as if the kneeling figures were two automata actuated by wires.

"I thought I'd left enough to you," she said. "You laughed it over the first time, as if it were a joke. Perhaps it was a joke. One would rather look at it in that light. But at least you could have made sure there would have been no second misunderstanding. No possibility of my being--being insulted." The colour flamed back into her cheeks. "And you did nothing--nothing." She bit her lower lip to control its trembling.

Graeme forced a wan smile. "There wasn't time, then.... But I will do something--and anyhow, it doesn't matter, really."

"Doesn't matter!" she echoed in frozen tones. "_Doesn't matter_! You put me in odiously false positions, you expose me to an outrageous insult ... and you--you laugh and say it doesn't matter! Oh, this is intolerable!" Angry tears forced themselves to her eyelashes.

Graeme groped for the hand that fumbled for a preposterous handkerchief (with what care had that little scrap of cambric been selected a few short hours before, and with what unconsciousness of the purpose it would serve!) "Claire! Claire! don't you understand, I want you to marry me."

She whipped to her feet. "Oh, don't be absurd!" she cried. "Do you imagine--is this your idea of doing something? Of rep--reparation for dragging my name--my brother's----" She was weeping now.

From somewhere on the sands below came the voices of the children returning from their bathe. With a wrung heart Graeme realised his chance had gone; the children could see them. Miss Mayne turned her face from the sea. "I'm going for a walk for a few minutes," she said; "will you all start tea?"

"But won't you give me a chance to speak to you later on?" gasped Graeme, "just for a second. It isn't anything to do with this wretched business. I mean I don't want you to marry me just because----"

Miss Mayne turned a tear-wet face towards him for one instant. "If you are what I once thought you were--if you even remotely resemble what I've always heard of Naval officers, you'll never, never broach this odious topic again, by word or letter or implication."

And with that she went off along the cliff, walking very fast with her head bent.

Mouldy Jakes fell to buttering a slice of bread.

_Dies irae_! And the night that followed, little better for most of the participators in that memorable picnic. Tears wetted two pillows at least; a third remained uncreased until the dawn by the head that ought to have lain there.

Cornelius James awoke on the morrow to manifold perplexities.

To Jane, his confidante in most tribulations, he unburdened himself after an early breakfast, what time Miss Mayne and Georgina, the former heavy-lidded and both uncommunicative, were putting finishing touches to the packing. The two children were taking a valedictory stroll round the farm.

"Miss Mayne's been crying," he observed gloomily. He abhorred tears.

Jane confirmed this with a nod that set her curls bobbing. "So's Georgie."

"I know." Cornelius James's tone was one of exasperation. "I'm sorry to be leaving Glebe Farm, but I don't cry about it. You're sorry, too, aren't you, Jane?"

Jane nodded again, but hesitated before disclosing the maiden secret of another's breast. "'Tisn't that, Georgie wasn't crying 'cos we're leaving, 'xactly."

"Then _why_?" demanded her brother. He scrambled on to the wall of the pigsty, and sat moodily dropping bits of stone on the porker's back.

"You see," explained Jane, not without diffidence, "she's in love."

"What next!" gasped her outraged brother. "Who's she in love with?"

"Mr. Jakes."

Cornelius James could find no words applicable to the situation.

"But--but," he finally exclaimed, "even if she is, what's she got to cry about?"

Jane clambered up beside her brother. "Well, you see," she began, "it was that picnic."

"It was a jolly picnic," maintained the other.

"Yes, but Georgie counted on having Mr. Jakes all to herself on the way back."

"So she jolly well did!" commented her brother wrathfully.

"Yes, but he never opened his mouth 'cept once, and then he only said something about selling a farm and going to sea, and Georgie thinks he hates her."

Cornelius James pondered over this insight into the enigma of the feminine heart.

"She's an ass!" was his final comment. "And what about Miss Mayne? Don't tell me she's in love!" Assuredly the queen could do no wrong nor stoop to such folly.

"I don't know," replied Jane, "but last night I went to her room to borrow a ribbon to tie my hair up with 'cos I'd lost mine, an' she was lying on her bed with her face in her hands. I thought she had a headache, and I was going out again when she jumped up. Her face was all smeary and her eyes were red, like when her brother was killed. 'Member? I per-tended I didn't notice anything, and asked for the ribbon and she got it from a drawer and gave it to me without a word, and suddenly she sat down on the window seat and put her arms round me and held me against her so tight I could hardly breathe."

The mystified eyes of the brother and sister met. "But didn't she _say_ anything?" demanded the former. "Has anybody been killed she's fond of?"

"I don't think so," replied Jane; "she hardly said anything. Just whispered little soft words like 'darling.'"

"She did that when we tried to cheer her up 'cos her brother died," said the boy, as if condoning a lapse on Miss Mayne's part.

"Oh, there was one thing," added Jane after reflection; "she said, 'Oh, Janie, Janie, don't grow up!'"

Which left Cornelius James not much the wiser.

To a more sophisticated mind the utterance might have meant much or little. For my part I look for my clue to the riddle in a later remark Miss Mayne made aloud to the darkness, from off a crumpled tear-wet pillow.

"He never said he loved me," she pleaded. The darkness held no answer.