Eustace and Hilda (15 page)

Looking frightened and hypnotised, she entrusted hers to it.

“So you'll let me know when to expect you, Miss Cherrington. We'll fetch you and bring you back. Don't let it be too long.”

He was gone and romance with him.

“Good riddance!” said Hilda.

“You mustn't say that, when he's been so kind.”

“Oh, I don't know,” said Hilda wearily. “Look, there's a ladder in my stocking. I only hope he saw it.”

The excitement of the prospective visit to Anchorstone Hall carried Eustace gaily over the next few days. Besides the delicious sensations of convalescence, he now had something definitely to look forward to. The colour returned to his cheeks; he was allowed to get up in his bedroom, next he would be downstairs wrapped in his brown dressing-gown.

Eustace was accustomed to being ill, though not so ill as this: and he dwelt with exquisite, lingering satisfaction on the successive stages of his recovery. He savoured them in prospect even more keenly than in actuality, yet he was loth, too, to let them go, loth to put off the special privileges and immunities of illness and to assume the responsibilities and above all the liability to criticism that went with good health. But now something disturbed, though it by no means destroyed, his ecstatic visions of the immediate future. Always, in the past, they had worked up to one invariable climax: his first visit, with Hilda, to the pond. Dick Staveley's invitation had troubled this image of perfect felicity and constituted itself a substitute, a rival. Like a man in love with two people, Eustace tried to reconcile them, dwelling on each in turn. But it wouldn't do: they injured each other. Eustace could not help remembering how petty and trivial the pond—indeed all the aspects of life on the beach—had seemed when Dick Staveley spoke of riding the other way to avoid those beastly rocks. Eustace's old loyalty was being severely tested, and it did not emerge unscathed from the ordeal. Every time he asked Hilda—and he asked her in season and out of season—whether she had written to Dick to name a day for their visit, the pond, the rocks, the sand, the cliffs seemed to lose their magic. When he invoked them, he had to pretend to himself that Dick had never been to Cambo, trailing alien clouds of glory, otherwise they sulked and would not quicken his imagination.

But on the whole he rather enjoyed the war between the two futures. The announcement that Hilda did not mean to go to Anchorstone Hall came like a bombshell. It was presented to Eustace as a
fait accompli
. She did not tell him till the letter of refusal had been sent. It was in vain for Eustace to weep and declare with customary exaggeration that now he had nothing to get well for. Hilda had apparently won over both her father and her aunt. She had produced arguments. What was the good of learning to ride when they would never be able to afford a horse of their own? Furthermore, she astonished Eustace by saying that she did not possess the right clothes, an objection that, so far as he remembered, she had never found occasion to put forward before. “And anyhow I don't want to go,” she had added. Eustace was quite prepared to believe this. What was his surprise, then, to find her, shortly afterwards, in tears, a thing so unusual with her that his own dried at the sight. He besought her to tell him what was the matter, but she answered, between sobs, that she didn't know, but he wasn't to tell anyone.

Comforted himself by the effort to comfort Hilda, Eustace looked about for pleasant thoughts further to allay his disappointment, and soon found one. Why had it not occurred to him before? From being a mere hope it quickly grew into a certainty. Hilda had indeed refused Dick Staveley's invitation, but that was no reason why he, Eustace, shouldn't go to Anchorstone Hall. Dick had asked him first; he only asked Hilda (so Eustace reasoned) as a second thought, and because she happened to be there. When he found she couldn't go, he would naturally ask Eustace to go without her. There were still six days before the fatal twenty-first; Dick would probably not trouble to write, he would just send over a message, as being quicker. To-morrow Eustace was to be allowed out for half an hour in the sun, so there could be no objection to his going to Anchorstone Hall, say, the day after to-morrow. He had become vividly day-conscious.... How splendid it would be to drive in the dog-cart, with a large and no doubt friendly dog. Eustace had never travelled in any but a hired conveyance, and the prospect of going in a private one intoxicated him. He would find it waiting for him at the top of the road, opposite Boa Vista, perhaps; they would all come to see him start, the groom would help him in, the dog would wag its tail, a flick of the whip and they would be off, Eustace waving his red silk handkerchief. They would drive smartly through the park, which would be quite empty, as the public, poor creatures, were not admitted that day. They would cross the moat, and there at the front door would be Dick and Sir John Staveley and Lady Staveley, and perhaps a lot of servants, and they would run out to welcome him and say how glad they were that he was well again. Then they would have tea and after that ...

There were a great many versions of what was to happen after tea. Eustace's imagination had never been more fertile than in devising incidents with which to glorify his new friendship. Often Dick rescued him from a violent death, from a mad bull, perhaps, which had long haunted the park and terrorised its owners. Sometimes their respective rôles were reversed and Eustace saved Dick's life. But this would be a less sensational occurrence, and consisted, as often as not, in his nursing Dick through a long illness contracted in Central Africa. Or he would throw himself into the jaws of a lion, thus giving Dick time to free himself and shoot it. Eustace often perished in these encounters and had an affecting death-bed scene, in which Dick acknowledged all he owed him and sometimes asked forgiveness for some long-forgiven injury. But Dick never died; Eustace had not the heart to kill him.

Not all their adventures together, however, entailed death or danger of death. Often they would simply stroll about the park, and Dick would jump a wide chasm, which conveniently opened at their feet, instructing Eustace how to do the same, or shin up a perpendicular tree, supporting Eustace with his left hand. At nightfall they would return scratched and scarred. Lady Staveley (whom Eustace, in spite of dim memories to the contrary, had fashioned in the likeness of Queen Alexandra) would shake his hand affectionately and say, ‘I'm very glad Dick has made such a nice friend.' Any version of the visit was incomplete without this parting scene.

The precious days passed but no message came from Anchorstone Hall. Eustace could no longer get his day-dreams in focus: their golden glow faded in the grey light of reality. On the seventeenth he wrote a letter.

Hope surged up in Eustace's breast after the dispatch of this letter and the day-dreams became more frequent and more intoxicating than ever. But when the morning of the twentieth came he was still waiting for an answer.

M
R. CHERRINGTON
and his sister were sitting together in the drawing-room, he with his pipe, she with her knitting. Her brows were furrowed and she looked at her brother, who was making no effort to conceal the sense of relaxation he felt after a day's work, with a certain irritation. This care-free humour must not continue.

“I can't think what's come over Eustace,” she said; “he's been so difficult this last day or two. The fact is, since he got ill, we've all combined to spoil him.”

“Well, we were only acting on the doctor's orders,” replied her brother, placidly puffing at his pipe.

“I know; I always wondered if they were wise. Anyhow we can't go on like this, or the boy will become perfectly impossible.”

“What's he been doing?” Mr. Cherrington asked.

“Well, you know how fond he used to be of playing on the sands with Hilda? And it's the best thing in the world for him, especially after an attack like this. Well, to-day I said he might go down. It's the first time, mind you, since he's been out, and I expected he would be wild with delight.”

“And wasn't he?”

“Far from it. He actually told me he didn't want to go; he said, if you please, he was tired of the beach—tired, when he hasn't been near it for two months. So I took him at his word and made him go for a walk along the cliffs instead. I told him he'd be sorry afterwards, and when he came back to dinner I could see he was.”

“Well, that doesn't sound very serious,” said Eustace's father, smoking comfortably.

“Not to you, perhaps. But listen. On the cliffs they met Miss Fothergill, who was so distressed when Eustace ran away; and all the time he was ill, you remember, she sent to ask how he was getting on and gave him that lovely bunch of grapes.”

“The half-paralysed old lady who goes about in a bath-chair?”

“Yes. Hilda made Eustace stop and speak to her—he didn't even want to do that—and she was so pleased to see him and asked Eustace if he would push her bath-chair for her. He did that once before, perhaps you remember? And Eustace actually said he wouldn't because he wasn't supposed to exert himself since he'd been ill! And whose fault was it that he was ill, I should like to know?”

“His own, of course.”

“I should think so. And then she asked him to go to tea the day after to-morrow, and Hilda couldn't make him say yes, he said he must ask us first, though he knew perfectly well we should be delighted for him to go.”

“I suppose he oughtn't to have said that.”

“Of course not, and it's unlike him too; usually he's so docile. He was quite nasty to Hilda about it, she told me afterwards, and she doesn't often complain of him.”

“He doesn't give her much to complain of, as a rule.”

“Oh, doesn't he? You don't know. Well, then he came to me, and said quite defiantly, Why was it that Nancy Steptoe had never been to see him, he felt sure we'd kept her away, and it wasn't fair that we should expect him to have tea with Miss Fothergill who was old and ugly and dreadful and a lot more—stories he's picked up somewhere—when we wouldn't let him see Nancy who was all that was perfect—really, if he wasn't such a little boy you might have thought he was in love with her. Thereupon, doctor or no doctor, I told him a little of what we thought about Nancy and the dance she'd led him.”

“No, I don't think she's a good influence for him. But what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to talk to him seriously. There's no need to frighten the child, only it's quite time he realised that all the anxiety and expense we've had from his illness is entirely his fault. It's all owing to his stupid trick of running away that day. We never punished him for it, he was too ill, for one thing, and the doctor said not; but he's well enough to be told now what a trial he has been to us. Unless we do, he'll think he's done something rather fine and his whole character will be ruined, if it isn't already.”

“All right,” said Mr. Cherrington. “Don't get tragic about it. I'll have a word with the boy to-morrow.”

Like many amiable and easy-going people, Mr. Cherrington made the business of administering discipline far more painful to the culprit than it need have been. He opened in such a mild and conciliatory manner that a much older boy than Eustace would have had no inkling of what was in his mind. Accordingly Eustace put forward his case, such as it was, quite expecting sympathy. He explained more fully than he had ever done except to Hilda, that he was frightened of Miss Fothergill, and that was partly why he had run away on the day of the paper-chase. But he was too reserved and perhaps too shy to tell his father the true measure of his terror. Again, when asked why he had not been nice to Hilda he tried to make him realise how disappointed he had been when she refused Dick's invitation; and his father listened so attentively that he even began to draw aside the veil from the less extravagant of the Staveley–Anchorstone Hall fantasies. The mistake he made was not to let his confessions go far enough. Mr. Cherrington was not a stupid man and had a good deal of the child left in him still; he might have understood, had not Eustace's shyness checked his self-revelation half-way, that the boy lived in his imagination and that the fancied horror of Miss Fothergill's, like the untested delights of Dick Staveley's society, were more real to him than any actual experience, as yet, could be. Instead, he got the impression that Eustace was exaggerating his fancies and trying to substitute them for arguments. He found his son's eloquence unconvincing largely because Eustace was self-conscious and unsure of himself from the effort to make the ruling forces of his inner life plain to the limited capacities of the adult mind. Aware of this, Eustace grew more nervous and would gladly have resumed the natural reticence out of which his father's sympathetic attitude had surprised him.

“You see,” he said, fidgeting in his chair, “the beach hasn't seemed the same after what Dick said about it, and whenever I remember how we should have been friends only Hilda didn't want to I feel angry with her and don't want to play with her.”

“Your sister can do what she pleases,” said Mr. Cherrington. “It's very sensible of her not to want to break her neck. It's a pity that you didn't feel the same way about the paper-chase.”

Eustace was silent, unhappily conscious of the change in his father's mood. Listening to Eustace's apologia he had adopted the rôle of father-confessor. This is weakness, he thought. I promised Sarah to give the boy a good talking-to. So, venting on Eustace his irritation with his own inadequacy, he said, with an alarming transition into sternness: “I don't want to hear any more of your being rude to Hilda, Eustace. She's backed you up through thick and thin. She's been like a mother to you.” He stopped. Resentment at having been betrayed into mentioning his wife in such a trivial connection as this surged up in him. “You seem to have forgotten,” he said still more angrily, “all the trouble and anxiety and expense you've given us this summer. Without telling anyone, you deliberately ran away and nearly frightened us all to death.” He paused to make certain that his indignation was still functioning. “And then on top of it all you must needs fall ill. I don't say you actually meant to, but you were quite old enough to know what might happen if you overtaxed your strength in such a stupid way. You're not a baby now. How old are you?”