Pink sugar

Chapter I

“Now Mercy was of a fair countenance and there¬ fore the more alluring.”

The Pilgrim’s Progress.

DESCRIBED myself as a spinster without encum-

A brances. I don’t know quite what I meant by it, but I thought it sounded well.”

Kirsty Gilmour stood in the window in the spring sun¬ shine, arranging daffodils in a wide bowl, and laughed.

Blanche Cunningham, lying back comfortably in a large armchair, looked at her friend appraisingly.

^^How old are you, Kirsty ?” she asked lazily, choosing with care a chocolate from an opulent-looking box that lay on her knee.

“I’m thirty,” said Kirsty, “but you shouldn’t make me say it out loud like that.”

“How would you like to be forty, my dear?—that’s what I’ll be on my next birthday. But you don’t look thirty, child. You can stand in that glare of revealing sun and work with spring flowers and fear nothing. You’re rather like a daffodil yourself, now that I come to think of it, with that green frock and cloud of pale yellow hair—^your eyes are green too. Did you know that?”

“Of course,” said Kirsty, attempting to make a weakkneed daffodil stand upright, “that’s why I’m so fond of jade. . . . ISTow, isn’t that pretty? They look as if they were growing in the moss. I like best the small single daffodils that grow almost wild, they have such an eager look.”

<<Yei-y pretty,” Mrs. Cunningham said, glancing care¬ lessly at the bowl of flowers. ^^But, Kirsty, it’s absurd that you should be a spinster. How have you managed it?”

“I wonder! Blanche, you married so young that, as I’ve often told you, you’ve acquired the male attitude of mind. Ho man ever allows himself to believe that a woman is single from choice, and, in your heart, neither do you.”

^^Pouf!” Mrs. Cunningham waved the imputation aside and searched diligently in the chocolate-box. “I’m afraid I’m making a dreadful mess of your chocolates. I’m looking for a hard one, and I’ve squashed all the soft ones pinching them. . . . You forget, my dear, when you accuse me of unbelief that I was on the spot and saw at least two aspirants to your hand—at Cannes, you remem¬ ber? There was the hidalgo from the Tyne (I’ve for¬ gotten his name), just baroneted, with all his blushing honours thick upon him. How red the back of his neck was! And there ...”

“Blanche,” Kirsty was smiling, but there was a note of appeal in her voice. ^^Need you talk about ugly things the first real day of spring? I’ve had no luck in suitors —let us leave it at that. . . . You really aren’t behaving very nicely. I’ve looked forward so to your visit, and, instead of giving me a week as you promised, you are only staying a miserable few hours—^you arrived at luncheon¬ time and you say you must leave by the early train to¬ morrow morning. I’ve so much to tell you and to show you, and you don’t seem interested . . . it’s very dis¬ appointing.”

Blanche Cunningham sprang up impulsively, upsetting the box of chocolates in her haste, and attempted to grab Kirsty and the bowl of flowers she was carrying in her arms. ^^But I am interested, Kirsty dear,’’ she cried; ^^I’m dying to see every corner of this delectable place. How did you find it ? lAttle Phantasy, I love the name.”

^^Just see what you’ve made me do!” said Kirsty, carry¬ ing the flowers to a place of safety, and proceeding to mop up the water spilt on the floor with her handkerchief. Then she sat down on the arm of her friend’s chair and tried to dry her wet fingers with her wet handkerchief.

^Tt was the name that fascinated me,” she said. “As soon as I read the advertisement I knew I simply must live here. But I’ll tell you about that later.—To begin just where we are, do you approve of this room ?”

She looked proudly round the gay white room with its wide windows of small-paned glass, and before her friend could reply went on: “You don’t think the chintzes too bright, do you ? I like a lot of colour in a country room, and I thought the white-panelled walls could stand the tulips and the parrots. Isn’t it luck that there should be such a good oak floor when we have so many rugs ? I col¬ lected them for years all over the place, hoping that some day I might find a use for them. That Bokhara one is my special find. When I showed it to Mrs. Paynter—you remember the delightful American lady?—she took it in her arms and hugged it and said, T don’t care how much you paid for this, it couldn’t be too much.’ ”

Blanche laughed. “Yes, but I like best the big one in the middle. It makes me think of a meadow of bright flowers. . . . But it’s all charming: the dark old mahog¬ any, and the white walls, and the bright chintzes, and the gentle colours of the rugs. Somehow I’m surprised. I never seem to have thought of you as a homemaker.”

Kirsty shook her head rather mournfully.

^^You see,” she said, the very first home IVe ever had, though I am thirty.”

Blanche was silent, remembering the Kirsty she had first known, a rather listless girl, dragged from one smart hotel to another by a valetudinarian but sprightly step¬ mother. Change had been the breath of life to Lady Gilmour. Plaintively seeking health, she had moved from one to another Pool of Bethesda, where in very truth she ^^troubled the waters.”

Thinking of Lady Gilmour, Blanche was conscious again of the hot wave of dislike that had so often engulfed her when she had come in contact with that lady in life. She remembered the baby-blue eyes, the appealing ways, the smooth sweet voice that could say such cruel things, the too red lips, the faint scent of violets that had clung to all her possessions, the carefully thought-out details of all she wore, her endless insistent care for herself and her own comfort, her absolute carelessness as to the feelings of others. Blanche told herself that she had done more than dislike Lady Gilmour, she had almost hated the woman— chiefiy on Kirsty’s account.

She had first met Kirsty and her stepmother ten years before at an hotel in Mentone where she was recruiting after an illness in India. She had been interested at once in both of them, the pretty fragile mother and the young daughter with the cloud of pale gold hair and grave green eyes. They made a charming picture, she thought, but they were so constantly surrounded by a crowd of admir¬ ers, both male and female, that it was some time before an opportunity came to speak to the girl. When it came she found her shy and, for such an attractive creature, oddly grateful for attention and responsive to kindness. When she heard that Mrs. Cunningham was Scots she cried, ‘^But so am I, through and through—Kirsty Gil¬ mour—that sounds Scots enough, doesnT it ?”

^^And you live in Scotland she had asked.

You see my stepmother hates Scotland. It makes her ill, she says: so draughty and cold. We seem to go everywhere but to Scotland. D^you know, I haven’t been home—to Scotland, I mean—since I was eight. NTot since my father died.”

Blanche had laughed at the woeful droop of the girl’s soft mouth and said, ^What part of Scotland do you be¬ long to ? The Borders ^ Ah, well, you must see that you marry a Scotsman and make your home there.”

Later on she had been introduced to Lady Gilmour, and had found her sweet and friendly and quite intoler¬ able. For the sake of seeing something of Kirsty she had tried to dissemble her dislike and make one of the admir¬ ing crowd that murmured at intervals, ^^Dear Lady Gil¬ mour, so frail, so touching”; but at all times Blanche dis¬ sembled with difficulty, and Lady Gilmour had herself seemed to feel the antagonism and return it with interest. She had done her best to wean Kirsty from her new friend, but Kirsty was staunch, and she and Blanche had corre¬ sponded regularly and met at intervals all through the ten years.

Lady Gilmour had been dead about six months, and Kirsty had come, like a homing bird, to the Borders.

^^Kirsty,” Blanche laid her hand on her friend’s arm. ^^How ever did you stand it all those years? What an intolerable woman she was!”

Kirsty sat looking in front of her.

^^She’s dead,” was all she said.

^Well,” Mrs. Cunningham retorted briskly, ^^being dead doesn’t make people any nicer, does it ?”

it makes them so harmless and unresentful.”

^‘As to that. Lady Gilmour wouldn’t be harmless if she could help it, you may be sure of that. I never met a woman with such a genius for mischief-making. ... You were a model of discretion, my dear, the most dutiful of stepdaughters, but you aren’t naturally stupid—^you mud have seen.”

Kirsty looked out to the wild garden where the daffodils danced in the April sun. All the light had gone out of her face, the very gold of her hair seemed dulled. She was again the listless girl who had followed apathetically in the train of her egotistical stepmother.

When she spoke her voice too had changed: it dragged tonelessly. ^^Oh, don’t you see? If I had ever even to myself put it into words, I couldn’t have stood it another day. I never let myself say to myself how I hated it, I just went on—dreary day after dreary day. And after all, Marmee was all I had, she needed me, and perhaps she did care for me a little in her own way, though she couldn’t help always stinging me like a gadfly. I’ve been thinking since that my misery was greatly my own fault. If I had been a different kind of girl I might have enjoyed the life very well. To many it would have been rapture to go from one gay place to another, to have their fill of pretty dresses and dancing and tennis and no domestic cares or duties. But to me it was anathema. The fact is, I was born out of due season. I should have lived in mid-Victorian days.”

Kirsty stopped to laugh at herself, and Blanche said:

^^Yes, I know what you mean. You would have en¬ joyed what somebody calls The comfortable commonplaces, the small crises, the recurrent sentimentalities of domestic life’ . . .”

Kirsty nodded. would indeed. I would have re¬ joiced in nurseries of bashful babies, brothers and sisters, warm family affection. But I was set solitary in the world with no mother and a very busy father. I suppose, poor innocent, he thought he was doing his best for me when he married again; and when I was eight he died.

. . . My stepmother didn’t care for children, and I stayed at school until I was seventeen. Then she sent for me, and took me about with her everywhere, made me call her ^Marmee,’ and liked people to say that we looked like sisters. She loved hotel life, and I loathed it from the first—the publicity, the abiding smell of rich food and cigars, the rooms with their expensive furniture and utter lack of homelikeness or individuality; the people who sat about fatly in fat armchairs, the way they gloated over their food, their endless efforts to keep themselves enter¬ tained.”

Blanche nodded comprehendingly, and Kirsty went on:

^Tt wasn’t only the hotels I loathed—indeed I might have enjoyed them if they had only been an interlude in a life filled with other things. But it was the way we behaved in hotels. I don’t know what my father did to be given a knighthood, but whatever it was, I wish he hadn’t. It complicated matters so. A title—even a very little one—has a wonderful attraction for certain people, and those people swarmed round Marmee like wasps round a honey-pot. I remember one idiot saying to me, ‘^How gracious dear Lady Gilmour is’—and poor Marmee lapped it all up like a hungry cat.”

Blanche cracked a hard chocolate with her strong white teeth, and can see her,” she said.

‘^And we were such snobs ourselves,” Kirsty went on. ^We always pursued the worth-while people—Marmee had a wonderful keen eye for ^the best people’—and very often we were snubbed for our pains. It served us right, of course, but it was pretty ghastly. Happily we never stayed long in one place. Nearly always we quarrelled with some one, and Marmee lost taste for her new friends and left.”

^‘Yes,” Blanche said, ^^she was like the lady in one of

^Elizabeth^s’ books whose new friends liked her, and who had no old friends/’

^^Poor Marmee,” said Kirsty.

^^ISTo, don’t pity her. She was the most accomplished egoist I ever came across. . . . But you were greatly to blame, Kirsty. Why were you so weak ? Surely you had the right to live your own life. Why didn’t you break away ?”

‘Well, you see”—Kirsty looked at her friend deprecatingly—“after I was twenty-one most of the money was mine, and I couldn’t very well—I mean to say it would have crippled her a lot, and she liked to do things well, and— Oh, I know I sound frightfully feeble, but I can’t help it. I simply hate to hurt people’s feelings or make them feel uncomfortable. It’s the way I’m made. . . . I did try once to break away as you call it. It was the second year of the War, and I suddenly felt that I simply could not go on doing nothing but knit socks and make shirts and give subscriptions. I went off, after a wild scene, to work in a hospital. I hadn’t well begun when I was sent for. Marmee had had a heart attack, and the doctor—a new one—^blamed me severely for having left her. Oh, it was no good, Blanche. I was bound. She wove a web around me.”

Blanche moved impatiently. “Heart attacks wouldn’t have bound me,” she said.

“The War years,” Kirsty went on, “were the worst. We had no one even to be anxious about. I envied—^yes, I did—the haggard-eyed women devouring the news¬ papers. It is awful to be left out of everything. . . . And having borne no part in the War, we had the impertinence to be among the first who went to look at the battlefields. Marmee liked to say she had done things before the herd rushed in, so we motored from Paris by Amiens, through the Somme country to Arras. She was soon bored—^there was so pitifully little to see. ^Shocking,’ she said, as we saw shattered towns and villages, blasted trees, miles of mud. You see, it was nothing to us. We weren’t recon¬ structing it all in our minds—we weren’t saying to our¬ selves, ‘So it must have looked when he saw it.’ ‘Here perhaps he stood.’ . . . On the road from Albert to Arras our chauffeur stopped at a hillock near the roadside. This, he told us, was the famous Butte de Warlencourt which men had died by thousands to take and hold. I got out and walked across to the hillock. It was an April day, with blinks of sun between wild beating showers of rain. My feet sank in the mud —Somme mud, how often I had read of it! There were tin hats and long trench boots lying about, and here and there stood a frail wooden cross. Every inch of the ground had been black with the blood of our men—I could hardly put one foot before another as I thought of what each step must have meant to them as they struggled up against pitiless fire. On the summit there were three tall crosses—like Calvary. ... A party of four, two women and two men, had got out of a car and were walking over the ground near me. The men evi¬ dently knew the place of old, and one said to the other in tones almost of awe, ‘D’you see ? There are cowslips grow¬ ing in the shell-holes/ The women were in mourning— a mother and daughter I thought, very pale and quiet. One of the men turned to them and said softly, ‘It was about here,’ and they stood still, their hands clasped as if praying. I crept back to the car and Marmee. . . . Oh, it’s wretched of me sitting here, talking like this, making myself out a creature of fine feelings, and blaming a woman who can’t answer back. I daresay I must often have irritated her when I felt superior and showed it. If I had known she was going to die I would have been so much nicer.”

“You were amazingly patient.”

^Terhaps I seemed so, but I often wasn’t. There is one thing that comforts me, though, when I think of her. In her last illness she was surrounded by admiration and affection, and she knew it. She was only ill for a few days—really ill, I mean, for she was always delicate— and I think she knew it was the end, and the odd thing was she didn’t think about herself—she thought of others, she thought of me. I was so touched. And the nurse told me with tears in her eyes that she had never nursed a more delightful patient, and that evening when she slept peacefully away the doctor said, and his voice sounded really moved: ^A very sweet woman.’ I was so thankful to hear them speak so.”

^^And thankful that the illness was a short one,” said Blanche dryly, ‘^so that they could speak so. Ah, forgive me, Kirsty; I sound a brute, I know, but you are such an incurable sentimentalist. You find everything and everybody touching.’ You spend your time wrapping up ugly facts in pink chiffon: you see life like a picture on a chocolate-box. Yes, I know I’m being horribly rude, but who is to tell you home-truths if not an old friend ?”

Kirsty walked to the fireplace and bent over the log basket to replenish the fire.

Presently she said, lifting a flushed face to her friend: don’t mind home-truths, and I daresay I am senti¬ mental, but please try to forget what I said about Marmee. All that part is finished with. Kow I can make what I will of my life. And I mean to make just as many people happy as I possibly can.” She stopped, glanced at Blanche, and added, ^'Kow I mean to live for others.”

At this announcement Blanche sat bolt upright.

‘‘My dear,” she said in a shocked voice, “I’m afraid Lady Gilmour has done more than spoil your youth. I’m afraid she has destroyed your sense of humour. Live for others. You say it in cold blood, just like that.”

Kirsty laughed. admit it sounds pretty bad—prig¬ gish in the extreme; especially when you say it in that frozen clear voice of yours. But why should you he so shocked ? Surely it is a most laudable intention ?— stop eating chocolates (you don’t deserve to have a sound tooth in your head), and come and see the house. I shan’t spare you a cupboard, and it will be much better for me than talking about myself. I’m sick of the subject, any¬ way.”

Blanche rose lazily and looked at herself in the narrow gilt mirror above the mantel-shelf.

Then she turned and took Kirsty’s face between her two hands, smiled at her, and said obscurely:

''Froggy's Litile Brother/'

Chapter II OU see,” Kirsty explained, “the dining-room opens

X out of the drawing-room. It has another door, of course, which you reach by going through the hall and down a passage; that’s how we’ll go when we have a dinner¬ party (if ever we have one) ; it’s more impressive.”

She opened the dining-room door as she spoke.

“And because the other room is such a riot of colour I’ve kept this one golden-brown.”

“Like a beech-wood in autumn,” said Blanche. “The other is like a midsummer garden.—^What luck to have all this panelling!” She walked to the window and looked out. “Why, what’s this stream?”

“That,” said Kirsty, joining her, “is the Hope Water— a very delectable stream.”

“I daresay, but aren’t you a little too near it? I prophesy that some wet morning you will find the Hope Water coming in to meet you at breakfast.”

They went through the wide low-ceilinged hall and up the shallow staircase.

On the first landing Blanche paused. “This is really very pretty,” she said approvingly, “the powder-blue car¬ pets and the grey walls. By the way, have you electric light ?”

Kirsty smiled at the notion. “Of course not,” she said, and sniffed. “Lamps. Can’t you smell them ? I always think paraffin oil is such an innocent smell. It goes with dimity and pot-pourri and faded samplers.”

^‘Idiot! I never heard any one praise the smell of paraffin before. But you seem determined to be pleased with everything in your country cottage.”

^‘Please, not so superior,” Kirsty begged. ^This is such a queer uneven house. One is always going up a few steps or down a few steps. ‘Upstairs and downstairs and in my lady’s chamber.’ ” She opened the door of a room all white and blue with touches of black. “Mine,” she said, looking eagerly at her friend for approval. “I swithered between pale grey and orange, and blue and white, but I’m glad I decided on this. I do so love blue: it’s a happy colour . . . and a bathroom of my own next door, made out of a dressing-room—all black-and-whitestriped like peppermint rock.”

“How amusing!” Blanche said, sitting down on the edge of the bath and looking round. “Black and white walls, black and white tiled floor, black and white cur¬ tains, and rose-red rugs. This is rather clever of you, Kirsty. It would please my friend Joyce Parker. (You’ve heard me talk of her?) She has been in India for more than twenty years, and looks it, and when she was last home she told me a most mournful story of a visit she had paid to some people who have a cottage somewhere on the Thames. She had a luxurious bathroom for her own use, snow-white from floor to ceiling, with a window through which the sun streamed, and a cherry-tree in full blossom just outside. The cherry-tree was the last straw. The poor dear said she had never realised, quite how faded and finished she was until that May morning, in that white bathroom with the flaunting cherry-tree outside. It quite cast a blight upon her visit.”

“Dear me!” said Kirsty. “I never thought before about a becoming bathroom. My cleverness is quite unintentional, but it is a hint to me to be tactful in details—if ever I do entertain.”

They went into Kirstj’s bedroom and sat down on the wide window-seat.

Kirstj pulled aside the chintz curtains.

The warm west-looking window-seat/ ” she quoted, and pointed over the flower garden and across the park. ^That, you see, is Phantasy proper. We are actually in the grounds. I suppose this is a sort of dower-house.”

Blanche knelt on the window-seat to look at the grey house among the trees.

^^And who owns the place ? Are they pleasant people ? Because if they aren% it won’t be very comfortable for you to be so near them, almost in their lap.”

^^Well,” said Kirsty, ^^there isn’t any ^they.’ I mean to say the owner is a single man—Colonel Archibald Home.”

^^Oh, what a dull tale your life is going to be! I can see the end from the beginning. Of course you will marry Colonel Home. What is he like ?”

Kirsty flicked the cord of the blind impatiently.

^'Blanche, you really are absurd. Vulgar, too. You’ve read so many silly novels on those constant voyages of yours to and from India that your mind has gone quite mushy. . . . I’ve never seen Colonel Home. He’s prob¬ ably seventy, and crippled with gout. I gather that he has a pretty bad temper from the way the factor spoke, and his desire to make sure that I was a harmless person. I told you that I described myself as a spinster without encumbrances to satisfy him. I don’t suppose he will trouble me, and I certainly shan’t trouble him. I am too happy simply to be allowed to live in Little Phantasy.” She stopped, and after a moment said rather wistfully, You don’t know what all this means to me, you who have always had a home. It’s what I’ve dreamed of all my life, a little plain house in an old-fashioned garden near running water. . . . Always my life has been full of rich things—great purring cars, expensive shops, meals with out-of-season dainties, show, glitter. N^ow I want the exact opposite. I want life at its simplest: plain meals, no smart servants ...”

Blanche nodded and patted Kirsty’s hand.

^^I know, and I’m glad your dreams have come true. I believe you are one of the people who really love sim¬ plicity. ... By the way, what kind of servants have you ? That was a stern virgin who waited on us at lunch¬ eon.”

^That was Miss Wotherspoon,” Kirsty said.

Blanche raised surprised eyebrows. ^‘Mtss Wotherspoon ?”

Kirsty explained. “You must know she isn’t an ordi¬ nary parlour-maid. She kept house for her brother, who is a minister, until he married, and then she had no home. She feels it a dreadful come-down after being mistress of a manse to come here as parlour-maid. She stipulated that I would call her ‘Miss.’ I feel as guilty, when I see her wearing a cap, as if I had branded her as a slave.”

“Touching, do you find it? No, but seriously, is she an educated woman ?”

“I’m afraid not, poor dear. It was only that her brother was clever and educated himself. But Miss Wotherspoon feels that her short reign in a manse so gentled her condition that she can now afiord to look down on Easie Orphoot, decent woman—”

“Who is that ?”

“Easie is the cook. She has lost three husbands; at least, two died, and one went off to Canada and has sent no address. But, as Miss Wotherspoon says (rather bitterly), ‘it has never ca’ed the down off her,’ meaning that her losses have left her quite calm and cheerful. Easie is the most imperturbable creature in a house, large, laugh¬ ing, and easy. And we have a young girl called NTellie Sym, who is supposed to help both Miss Wotherspoon and Easie. Her energy is positively destroying. The way she goes panting about her work reminds me always of a goods train coming out of a tunnel, and her words come out like small explosions, but she is a most willing child. I have nothing to complain of.—It sounds a most ridicu¬ lous thing to say, but you don’t know how envious I was when people I met travelling with Marmeo regaled me with tales of their servant-troubles. I actually longed to have servant-troubles.”

^^My dear Kirsty, if any one heard you they would re¬ fuse to believe you sane. Servant-troubles are as little desired by ordinary mortals as a near view of Jerusalemthe-Golden.”

^^Yes,” said Kirsty, ‘T know Fm daft. I was daft for a home, and now that I’ve got it I’m daft with joy. To have had no roots all my life—just a weed floating on the stream; and now to And myself at home, in Scotland! The blind fury that used to fill me when I heard people talking lightly about going to Scotland, and making jokes about the awful weather they were likely to have—^mere English people who should have been thankful for the chance of seeing Scotland in any weather! What right had they to go to my Scotland at all when I was shut out ?”

Blanche looked at her friend and shook her head.

^^What a child you are, Kirsty, in spite of your thirty years! You make me think of my niece Barbara, Isla’s I wrote to you about Isla’s illness and death.”

Oh, my dear, you did. I was so dreadfully sorry for you, but I didn’t like to speak about it first—every one takes trouble differently, and I didn’t know whether you would want—”

was glad of the letters you wrote me. No, I don’t care to talk about things that come very near to me, except to the one or two who understand. There were only the two of us, and distance didn’t separate us at all. I can hardly bear the thought of India without Isla’s letters. But I was with her at the end, that is something to be thankful for. . . . She was only thirty-five, and she had a lot to leave—three small children and her husband. What is to be done with the children I don’t know. If only it had been five years later, Tom and I would have been settled at home, and only too glad to have them.”

^^But what about the father ? Doesn’t he want them ?”

‘^Oh, poor Alan! He is absolutely lost without Isla. She mothered him as much as she did the children. He is a charming fellow, a most likeable fellow, but he needs somebody to lean up against. He will marry again—I hope he will marry again—^but one can hardly expect that he will find another Isla, and I can’t bear the thought of Isla’s children— However, what I was going to say was that your passion for Scotland is shared by my niece and nephew. Barbara and Specky love Scotland with a quite pathetic intensity, and at present they are living in Clapham with an old governess of ours who has a house on the Common. It is a pleasant, airy place, and they are most comfortable, but they regard having to live in London as a studied insult.”