His second venture

Chapter I

R ITA KNIGHT sighed and stirred reluctantly among her close-wrapped furs as the outline of the coast of Dover grew distinct through the sleet. She was, in some directions, a clever woman; all her life she had succeeded in obtaining the thing she wanted; but her present desire—the offer of Colonel Caron’s heart and hand—she had not achieved, although nobody could, or in fact did, accuse her of not having tried.

She could not plead lack of opportunity, since they had travelled together from India, and there existed between them that link of old acquaintance and old regard which is so strong among Anglo- Indians. She was now journeying to England, widowed, to rejoin the little daughter whom she had not seen for ten years. The colonel, a newlymade widower, was on leave, but due to return to the East as soon as he should have set his house in order.

With all her mind, soul and strength, Rita was determined to get back to India if she could. When she envisaged her future in England, living as a io His Second Venture

nobody, on narrow means, either in a maisonette in West Kensington or in the remote country village wherein her young daughter now awaited her, her heart turned to water within her.

Colonel Caron was distinctly well-to-do. His Martershire home was within easy distance of town . . . and before he settled down therein, would in¬ tervene two or three more blissful years in India, with money enough to live in real luxury. . . .

Of course, three ready-made children constitute a bit of a handicap, particularly when they are the children of so detestable a woman as Blanche Caron. Rita had already decided that this should be her answer if any friends were spiteful enough to hint surprise that nothing definite had resulted from the intimacy of the voyage. “Oh, yes, Carfrae Caron is a dear; but three of them—and my own girlie as well! These mixed families are diffi¬ cult. . .

What a mercy for poor Carfrae that Blanche was dead! One never expects a woman of that kind to die. These nerve cases usually live for ever. It was some years since the lady in question had accompanied her husband to India. After the birth of her third child she had retired to Martershire and the sofa, giving, as she told her friends, all her time and attention to the wonderful task of training young minds. Her death was quite unexpected, the result of an accident; everyone surmised that the feelings of the widower must have been those of pure relief.

ii

It was, however, very recent—even more recent than Mrs. Knight’s own bereavement. Perhaps, even in these unsentimental days, it was too soon for an actual proposal of marriage.

Rita had sincerely mourned Jack Knight, not merely because he had been a most indulgent hus¬ band, but because his death left her shorn of almost all that made life pleasant. A heartfelt sigh escaped her as she watched her ayah tying up a bundle on a seat near. Hired for the voyage, this woman was taking the next boat back with another lady in charge; and Rita was dolefully considering the misery of putting on her own boots and arranging her own hair.

Colonel Caron came strolling towards her, his coat collar turned up, his manner preoccupied.

“Well”—he winced from the wind-driven, icy sleet—“old England welcomes us in her own in¬ imitable style, doesn’t she?”

There was something very moving in the appeal¬ ing gaze of the beautiful eyes lifted to his. Rita was, in fact, three years older than the youthful colonel, rapidly promoted during the war; but she did not look her age. They made an elegant, har¬ monious pair; her slim height could be seen as he raised her to her feet, steadying her against the gusts with light fingers on her arm. Her thirtyeight years might well have passed for twenty-eight, so unlined was her face, so wavy and brown her thick hair.

“So it’s over,” she said. Her voice, always musical, quivered on a note of touching poignancy. “The warm, sunny chapter of my Indian life has passed! Now for the rigours of an English winter in the north!”

“You are going straight to Grendon?” he asked with a touch of compunction. A shade of softness veiled his usually hard light-grey eyes.

“Oh, I must! My little girlie will be counting the minutes-”

His jaw set grimly. “That so? I don’t see my own little lot yearning for my company. However, we must hope for the best. Ah! We’ve stopped! Here, ayah!”

“No, don’t call her, please; find me a porter. She is going to Folkestone to find the memsahib with whom she returns to Calcutta.”

“Why, but that leaves you alone for all that long, cold journey.”

“I must get accustomed to being alone,” she replied, averting her face and flinging into her voice that brave quiet which makes so strong an appeal to the mere man.

Caron’s well-cut face looked hard, and he had the reputation of being difficult to handle, though during the voyage he had, as people said, eaten out of Rita Knight’s hand. Yet she had failed, and she knew it. What she did not know was by how narrow a margin she had failed. Her words and her smile moved the man horribly. His exterior might be adamant. Within he was a mere mush of sentiment. Had there been time—had the two had privacy at that moment—this story might never have been written.

The gangway was, however, down and the firstclass passengers already surging forward. The two moved along in the crowd, and each with different feelings knew it to be too late. Her regret, his relief, were alike silent.

Mrs. Knight’s large quantities of personal lug¬ gage and effects were all registered through to Charing Cross. She had nothing to do but to secure a corner in the train, which the colonel did for her, and brought her a cup of tea and the first English newspaper. Then he shut her into her compart¬ ment and strolled away, murmuring that he must travel up with a certain General Cobb, who was an influential friend of his.

That was final. As the train ran through the murky February landscape her spirits sank and sank. She was plunged in depression when at last she saw the mean platform of Charing Cross loom¬ ing dimly through an unwashed kind of atmosphere, yellow and stagnant.

On that platform was a man whose face she knew well. He was Lyndsay Eldrid, an artist who had spent a cold weather at the station where her hus¬ band was in the Woods and Forests Department. He was running eagerly beside the train, his face alight with welcome; and suddenly she remembered that he was brother to Blanche Caron, and was obviously there to meet his brother-in-law. She had seen a good deal of him during his visit to India, and he had acknowledged her hospitality with the gift of a beautiful water-colour sketch of her bunga¬ low and garden. She remembered his having told her that when in England he lived with his sister at Archwood, Caron’s house in Martershire, not far from Marterstead.

As he ran beside the train he was waving his hat, and his mop of fair hair, worn rather longer than is usual, struck a note of gaiety in the gloom. It seemed hard to Rita that Caron, a man, should have this jocund greeting at his journey’s end, when she, the woman, was so utterly alone.

She was standing up, reaching for her bags in the netting and wondering whether, with the train so full, a lone female stood any chance of a porter, when she heard a merry voice, “Hallo, Mrs. Knight!” and saw both Caron and Eldrid at the door of her compartment.

“Carfrae tells me you came over in his boat! Lucky blighter! There’s never a really charming woman on the boat I travel by! It’s awfully nice to see you again! Give us those things. What time’s your train? We want you to come and lunch with us, won’t you?”

Her spirits rose. She had a gleam of hope. Caron, she thought, could hardly commit himself until he had been home and had reviewed the position of things at Archwood. But he did not mean to let her slip. She smiled, the pretty smile not too wide, carefully calculated, which men thought so womanly, and looked wistfully at him.

“But, dear man—this moment off a journey— look at me!”

“I do, and I like looking,” cried Eldrid, declar¬ ing that they would take no refusal.

She suffered herself to be persuaded. “I’ve two hours before my train leaves Euston,” she owned, “time enough to be thoroughly miserable all by myself. So if you’ll let me have ten minutes before a looking-glass, and if you’ll swear not to land me at the Ritz, but in some small nook in Soho where daylight never penetrates, I’ll risk it!”

“Off to your mirror, dear lady, but don’t det it keep you too long, as I should certainly do in its place,” laughed Eldrid, who seemed extraordinarily exhilarated. And in a quarter of an hour she found herself in a taxi with the two of them, being driven towards a certain Italian restaurant which was the young man’s special fancy.

“And where is it you’re bound for?” he wished to know. “I forget exactly where your country place is.”

Rita laughed softly. “My country place I Doesn’t that sound nice and important? Unfor¬ tunately my cottage at Grendon is an unmarketable white elephant. It is in Westmorland, but not in the lake district. Nothing can more forcibly explain its hopelessness. If we could but move it twelve miles nearer Ulleswater we could let it for fabulous sums in the summer. But it is nowhere near any place you ever heard of. You could hardly fancy there was so lonely a place in England. It belonged to an old aunt of Jack’s, and she left it to him with a few hundreds a year. I wanted to sell it, but he had memories of childhood there, and always looked forward to ending his days in it; and cer¬ tainly it has proved an ideal spot for Val to be brought up in.”

“Val? Your child? I thought she was a girl?”

“So she is. My husband’s mother was called Valeria. That seemed to me too alarming a name, so we compromised on Valery. She has been at Grendon most of her life, in charge of a devoted Miss Kirby who used to be Jack’s governess and adores the Knight family. We thought her a heaven-sent boon when we were faced by the neces¬ sity to leave Val in England.”

“Well you might! You probably have no idea how lucky you are! My poor sister could never find anyone strong enough to cope successfully with our young devils; and now that she is gone chaos is come again! I tell you I never was so pleased in my life as when I saw this old chap’s ugly mug grinning at me through the carriage window.”

“Yes, you looked absurdly pleased.”

“Pleased! It isn’t the word. I’ve been carrying on here the whole winter. Picture it! The bachelor uncle! I can tell you, those imps of darkness have put it across me! I had to engage a governess; thought I’d be careful, and took one who said her age was forty—owned to forty, mark you! I con¬ sidered that safe. But not a bit of it! She waves her hair and powders her nose, and wears jade jumpers and skirts to her knees! She expects one to provide her with chocolates and flowers, and would like to be taken out to dinner and a theatre! I tell you, I tremble for Carfrae.”

“I don’t think he’ll be in much danger, from your description,” laughed Rita. “He can take care of himself as well as you can, I should think.”

“Nevertheless, the lady sounds perilous,” said Caron gravely. “I think I shall dismiss her and send the whole lot to school.”

“If you can get any school to take ’em,” said their candid uncle. “They are the limit, I tell you! Poor Blanche was bitten with all this Montessori stuff, and the consequence is they can hardly read; you never saw such ignoramuses. Aster, the eldest, is nearly eleven, and she told me she had never heard of Julius Caesar!”

“You are not concerned to praise your nephews and niece,” observed the colonel with a wry smile.

“Oh, I believe they’d have been quite decent average kids if they hadn’t been brought up to con¬ sider themselves youthful prodigies and to believe they are the centre of the universe. They have been told that they must be a law unto themselves! They want taking in hand, that’s all. Why, Lance is nine, but if you sent him to a good prep, school he’d have to go in the bottom form with kids of seven. That’s why I thought they’d better have a governess first; but she can’t make ’em learn!” He chuckled to himself. “Aster says that Miss Lane’s aura is an¬ tagonistic to her,” he said mischievously.

Rita smiled gently, looking sympathetic, but not too much so. “They are evidently very original children,” she said, “as one might expect with such a mother. Well, you might do worse than take on my dear old Kirby, for I don’t suppose I shall be able to afford to keep her. I suppose she is a bit old-fashioned now, but she was first-rate. My hus¬ band’s sister, Esther Knight, is Principal of St. Frideswide’s, the newest Women’s College in Ox¬ ford, and Miss Kirby educated her until she matric¬ ulated. . . . But I expect Colonel Caron will soon reduce things to order. ... At any rate, colonel, if things get too tiresome, you can always come to Grendon for a little rest. Whatever faults the place may have, it is at least full of tranquillity; and I would love you to see my little girlie.”

CHAPTER II rita’s daughter

S O Valery’s mother is coming home at last I Arrives to-night, so Miss Kirby tells me,” remarked Mrs. Hudson as she entered the vicarage dining-room and pulled off her gardening gloves in preparation for helping the vicar to cold mutton.

“To-day? Dear, dear! We must go round to-morrow and pay our respects,” replied the vicar, lean, elderly and stringy-looking. “Well, she’ll find her daughter a good, sensible, well-brought-up girl, won’t she?”

“Just what old Miss Knight would have wished her great-niece to be,” was the almost defiant answer. “Not many of that type to be found nowadays.”

The vicar cleared his throat. “I do trust that Mrs. Knight may settle down here. When last I saw her she seemed to me regrettably frivolous; but since then she has known bereavement by the inscrutable decree of Providence.”

“Humph! Let us hope for the best!” broke in his wife absent-mindedly. She was gazing from the window, out beyond the imperfectly tended garden, across a little valley to the lift of a wooded hill on whose southern slope stood an unassuming white 19 house with a green veranda and green shutters. It was placed near the top of the hill, on whose flank the trees had been cut away to make open spaces of park land, with a few clumps. The figure of a tall woman could be seen, clad in a long rusty old coat, moving upwards from the valley towards the white house.

“There goes Valery; been down to feed the fowls. She’s a quarter of an hour late to-day. Most unusual! How excited she must be feeling!”

Mr. Hudson adjusted his glasses and gazed pen¬ sively at the homely figure. “Ten years since they met, and Miss Kirby says Mrs. Knight still writes as to the little girl she left behind her.” He chuckled guiltily. “Won’t it be a bit of a shock?”

“It’s very certain,” rejoined the lady frigidly, “that the girl’s size can’t be altered.”

The subject of these remarks had now reached home. She pushed open the door of the gardenroom with her knee, shut it behind her with her heel, and proceeded to lay down her empty dishes, to pull off her old coat and her goloshes, and to hasten away upstairs with an impetuosity which made the banisters rattle. Having reached the square landing at the top she paused, a smile hov¬ ering on her lips, and pushed open the door of the best bedroom.

It was ready for its guest. In all its Early Vic¬ torian primness it stood there, its great mahogany “tester” bed covered with a dazzlingly white mar-

Rita’s Daughter

cella quilt, its serviceable brussels carpet swept to the final pitch of dustlessness, its wardrobe giving back each gleam of light and scenting the air with beeswax and turpentine.

Valery looked at the bed. It seemed incredible that “mother”—her beautiful dream mother— would that very night lay her head upon that pillow. Would she perhaps—who knew?—suggest that her “girlie” should share her bed? There was plenty of room!

Val took off her spectacles and polished them, for her eyes were misty. Almost timidly she approached the dressing-table and scrutinized its spotless cover, its bare appointments. What did it lack? Why, flowers, of course. When lunch was over she would run down the park to the Holt Clumps and gather snowdrops.

As she stood motionless, rapt in happy antici¬ pation, all was so still that she could hear the singing of the beck in the hollow. It did not strike her as lonely. It was her life, and she had been always happy—perhaps the happier for the possession of two dream parents and the treasured hope of a life of glorious reunion. Upon her love for these par¬ ents, and theirs for her, all her simple philosophy of life was based. But they had never formed part of her experience, and her grief for her father had been chiefly a grief of the imagination.

When she and the faithful old Miss Kirby had eaten their rabbit and rice pudding, they went to¬ gether into the drawing-room—a room only used by them on very rare occasions—to light the fire that the room might be thoroughly warm for the traveller.

As the governess’s gaze wandered round, the apartment struck her suddenly as being both ugly and cheerless. All at once she saw it, as it were, with Mrs. Knight’s eyes; and as she wondered how it would appear to her, she also* for the very first time, wondered what impression Valery herself would make upon a stranger, and a little pang con¬ stricted her kind heart.

Valery was stoutish and clumsy and big. Her spectacles made her look older than her age. Her thick mane, plaited in one long rope and coiled in a lump behind, was taken too abruptly off a forehead that needed shading. She wore a flannel blouse, short serge skirt, thick stockings, square-toed shoes. . . .

No thought that anything in her own appearance could lessen her mother’s love had ever crossed the daughter’s limpid mind. She was not at all shy, eminently sociable in fact, and she beamed through her glasses as though she found in the universe something new, something splendid, because of her coming joy.

“I know what this house wants—flowers!” cried she. “Why, Kirdles, there are genistas and primulas in the greenhouse. I’m going to bring some ini” She dashed off, with Josh, her Aberdeen terrier, barking at her heels, and Miss Kirby stared after her with furrowed brow. She had done her best for

Rita’s Daughter 23

her charge. Why was she now, for the first time, assailed by the thought that a whole generation had elapsed since her last post, and that her present pupil had been modelled not upon to-day, but yes¬ terday?

Such was the daughter who swooped down upon the slim, sealskin-dad figure which alighted that night on the platform of the lonely moorland station, enveloping her in an embrace which seemed to be that of a giantess.

Rita gasped. Heavens! Could this be true? Was this her girlie, this strapping woman in spec¬ tacles, choking with emotion, trying to speak, hang¬ ing upon her with absolutely no doubt whatever that her joy in the meeting was reciprocated?

Rita was feeling low enough to have responded gladly to any advance had it come from the charm¬ ing flapper whom she expected to see; but this great Flanders mare. . . .

“Never!” was her cry. “I can’t believe it! My wee girlie . . . it’s like a nightmare!”

Poor Miss Kirby’s voice, repeating piteously “a nightmare!” recalled her to herself, and she did her best to play up to the occasion, to return the tearful kisses, to express joy in this reunion; but the effort exhausted her last remnant of fortitude, and when at last she entered the Grange she was conscious of nothing but a fatigue so vast as to be like annihilation.

There was a blazing fire in her room, and the quality of the hot coffee and sandwiches provided left nothing to be desired. She pleaded headache, the necessity to be alone; and when Valery, crushed and disappointed, had unwillingly retired, she sank down in the cavernous arm-chair in which old Miss Knight had died, and tried to face this final disaster which had overtaken her.

This was her daughter. She was saddled with her for life. No husband would ever take this mistake of nature off her hands. “And she used to be quite a pretty child!” she murmured, as if expostulating with an invisible tyrant.

The word encumbrance was the only term of description which would come to her. What man would be likely to marry Rita, if at the price of having Valery as an inmate of his household?

When at last the returned traveller sank to sleep in the convolutions of the feather bed, it was with a despair that was ready to throw up the sponge altogether. Life had grown too ugly.

Breakfast-time filled the little house with wintry sunshine, an odour of hot bacon, new bread and coffee.

Certainly English food is delicious! Under its influence Rita began to find something humorous in the situation. Gazing ruefully upon the uncom¬ promising proportions of the ungainly girl, she re¬ marked: “You should have been a boy, Val. You are absurdly like your father.” b s “Yes, indeed, she is like darling Jack,” eagerly put in Miss Kirby. “She is like him in disposition,

Rita’s Daughter 25

too; I can’t give her higher praise. I loved him better than anybody in the world.”

“What a dear, faithful friend you are, Kirby,” murmured the fair widow. “What would many people give to have a creature like you to leave in charge of their darlings! My old friend Colonel Caron, for instance. He has to go back to India; has lost his wife; his children are being ruined for want of a firm hand.”

“But Kirdles,” said Val quickly, “can’t be spared from here, can she, mother?”

Rita sighed. “We shall have to count our pennies, darling. Things will be different now that father is gone.” A dismayed silence followed this bomb-shell. Val, cruelly conscious of her mother’s disappointment in her, now felt that if the steady and unfailing love and approval of Kirdles were to be taken away from her, life was going to be a hard thing.

“By the way, Kirby,” went on Rita, “tell me something about a man who lives somewhere here¬ abouts—a tall, untidy man, not very young, with the initials O. J. ?”

“O. J. ?” queried Kirdles. “Why, that must be Sir Otho Jerrold, the M.F.H.”

“Ah! He looked like an M.F.H. somehow. What’s his wife like?”

“He isn’t married. Such a pity! If he had been, he might have had children, and Val would have had someone to play with. He lives at Grendon Manor, our only neighbour within miles.”

“He tumbled into my carriage at Oxenholme,” said Rita thoughtfully, “and we had some talk. He is good company.”

Miss Kirby looked doubtful. “The vicar doesn’t get on with him at all,” she volunteered. “Mr. Hudson fears his views are lax.”

“Meaning that he can’t be bothered to go to church, I expect,” said Rita abstractedly, little knowing the shock of this remark to the listening girl. “Well, we must ask him here. How are we off for servants, Kirby? Could we invite a man to lunch? What is there in the cellar?”

Miss Kirby, crimson, dare not glance at Val, whom she had warned that her mother’s mourning must preclude all gaiety for a while. The fact that Rita wore nothing remotely resembling weeds had, as it were, hit the good lady in the eye to begin with.

“I’ve never been into the cellar since we came,” she owned. “Whatever was there is there still, I suppose. As to service, we have Mr. and Mrs. Pearce and Nellie-”

“The child who brought my early tea?”

“I do hope she did it right?”

“Oh, yes; but I should think we need another maid—someone who could wait on me.”

“Oh, mother, let me wait on you!” burst out Val, aching with devotion and loyalty. “I simply love waiting on people.”

“But, my child, I hope you’ll be otherwise occu¬ pied; besides, I think you need someone to wait on

Rita’s Daughter 27

you —especially to do your hair.” She tried to speak playfully, but the criticism with which her eyes wan¬ dered over the unsightly head was to Val all the more excruciating because unspoken. “Some girls can never do their hair—temperament, I suppose,” with a deep sigh.

Miss Kirby, bristling with championship for her nursling, interposed: “Val hasn’t had much practice yet. She has only just put up her hair. I am sure she could arrange it better if she were shown how.”

“Only tell me,” sobbed the big creature, casting herself at her mother’s feet. “I’d do anything in the world to please you.”

“Well, girlie, that’s everything,” was the gay rejoinder, as Rita’s fingers removed half a dozen rather horrible hair-pins and let a shower of light hazel-brown hair, clean and silky, fall about the heaving shoulders.

“Straight as string,” she muttered. “All the Knight women had straight hair. It’s a pity, be¬ cause you are doomed to wave it all your life, poor child! ... So, then, the first things that need at¬ tention are the cellar, the parlourmaid, and my daughter’s hair. How far is it to Manchester? Girlie, I think we shall have to buy a little car. Do you suppose you could learn to drive?”

Val’s doleful face broke into wide smiles. “Oh, mother, do you mean it? Why, I’d sooner drive a car than almost anything.”

“Darling,” her mother repeated mirthfully, “you certainly ought to have been a boy!”

Chapter III

widowers’ houses

I T was April. A tearing madcap wind was rol¬ licking over the ploughed lands, buffeting the coppices and shaking the red buds on the burgeoning trees. In the sunshine two horses stood on the gravel sweep in front of the house known as Arch¬ wood, a Georgian house of good type, built of sober, plum-coloured brick, with red window dressings, and a charming pedimented doorway.

Lyndsay Eldrid, already mounted, awaited his brother-in-law. His brows were knit as he tried not to listen to the sounds from the hall within of raised voices, of screams of temper, and then of cries of a different quality, evidently those of a child under¬ going punishment.

Presently through the open doorway came strid¬ ing Carfrae Caron. His jaw was set, his face hag¬ gard; he looked both enraged and ashamed. As he flung himself on his horse Lyndsay noticed that he was trembling slightly.

Neither man spoke a word, but they turned their horses and rode off down the drive, past the planta¬ tion, out upon the Winstable road, which they soon abandoned for a lane debouching on the other side, among whose windings they speedily found them- 28

Widowers’ Houses 29

selves out of sight and sound of earth-shaking lor¬ ries and hurtling cars, in a deep and rural solitude.

At last Caron broke silence. “It’s enough to drive one to drink. Life’s not worth living. And what am I to do? I’ve got to go out again in June. I shall have to shut up this place and send those mis¬ managed imps to some home for the derelict young who are cursed with fathers in India.”

“They want a thoroughly good woman to handle ’em,” sighed Eldrid. “They’re not bad kiddies if someone could put the fear of the Lord into ’em.”

“Yes, but where are you going to find her? How many thoroughly good women are there left in this worn-out country? Nice specimens we have man¬ aged to collect, anyway. If they even had a nurse one could trust!”

“Blanche sent away old Nannie because she said her methods were too completely reactionary.”

“Reactionary be d-d! She’d have kept ’em

clean, seen that their habits were regular, drilled ’em into some kind of routine! I’m helpless!”

“This daily governess—Mrs. Jennings—is not so bad.”

“No, but the house is pandemonium the moment she turns her back! If I forbid anything, they tell me that their mother never forbade them to do any¬ thing. I went into the library last night, past eleven o’clock, and there, if you please, was Aster curled up on the sofa reading Anne Veronica. Said her mother always let her sleep downstairs if she pre¬ ferred it. That I believe to be a lie. I don’t think even Blanche would have gone to bed leaving the children strewn about all over the house.”