Mistress of Brown Furrows (4 page)

Her smile was obviously for him alone, for she had not even noticed Carol, and it was a slow, enchanting smile. Her age might have been somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, but was possibly nearer thirty.

“Why didn’t you let me know you were back?” There was almost an accusing note in her soft voice as she put the question. “Why didn’t you, Timothy?”

“My dear Viola,” he returned, “I’ve only been back a very short while.” He paused. “Let me introduce my ward.

Carol—” and Carol came shyly forward, “—this is Mrs. Featherstone, our nearest neighbor at Brown Furrows. You will probably see quite a lot of one another very soon now. And won’ t you present me to your young friend, Viola? His face seems vaguely familiar.”

“And so it should,” Mrs. Featherstone returned, after a somewhat protracted and particularly cool scrutiny of the younger girl’ s face, and the barest touching of her fingers with her own scarlet-tipped hand, escaping from an elbow-length glove. “Brian Winslow is my cousin, and used to make himself a perfect nuisance at our house during the holidays, but the last time you were home he was at the University. He is now trying to carve himself out a career as a journalist.”

“Very nice, too,” Timothy murmured.

“It will be if I succeed,” the young man opined with a faintly whimsical air. He had a shock of fair curly hair and the most disarming blue eyes in the world, and—Carol thought—a particularly nice mouth. “But it won’ t surprise me in the least if I don’t,” he added frankly.

Carol smiled at him, as if drawn to do so, and it was a far more natural smile than the one she had accorded Mrs. Featherstone. He smiled back, with an engaging lift to one corner of his mouth.

“I didn’t know you had a ward,” Viola Featherstone remarked suddenly to Carrington, turning her great dark eyes upon him.

“Didn’ t you?” he replied.

“You never said anything about it before.”

“No,” he murmured, non-committally.

They stood for a few moments chatting upon unimportant subjects, and then the brief interval was over, and they had to return to their seats. But before they said goodbye Viola informed Timothy:

“I am giving a dance on the twenty-fifth of this month, and I shall expect to see both you and Meg.” She said nothing about seeing Carol. “And don’ t forget to look me up as soon as you are back at Brown Furrows! ”

After the theatre her guardian took Carol out to supper, and since it was something of an occasion he ordered a bottle of light wine. He also debated the wisdom of allowing her one small glass of sherry beforehand.

“Have you ever partaken of strong liquor before?” he inquired.

“I once had a glass of champagne,” she confessed. “It was at a friend’ s sister’ s wedding, and I thought it was wonderful stuff. ”

“Oh, you did, did you?” He eyed her with amusement. “And what sort of effect did it have on you?”

“No effect at all,” she answered, a little wonderingly, “except that I felt awfully happy for quite a long while afterwards. ”

He smiled, and he was still smiling as he met the wine-waiter’s glance.

“A small, dry sherry,” he ordered, “for the lady, and an outsize in lagers—iced!—for myself.”

He turned again to his ward.

“Are you happy now?” he asked, somewhat abruptly.

“Oh,
yes.”
Her very sincerity made her voice ring, and the brilliance of her grey eyes was like the sudden beam of a searchlight on a sheet of still, clear water.

They were rather silent during the early part of the meal. Carol, peeping occasionally at her guardian across the flower-decked supper table, was thinking about Mrs. Featherstone, and the superb elegance of her gown, and the extraordinary brilliance of her dark eyes. Mrs. Featherstone, she felt, had not been tremendously drawn towards her. Carrington crumbled bread abstractedly, and was plainly occupied with his own thoughts, until all at once he started to talk to her, and after that the slight tension was eased, and conversation flowed along naturally.

He told her about his travels abroad, his love of the sharp color contrasts of the East and the Near East, the fascination of big game hunting, his orange-farm in Rhodesia. Apparently he was torn between the warmth and the sunshine, the hard toil and the tsetse flies, the magic blue distances and the loneliness of Africa, and the gentler charm of Brown Furrows, his home in the north of England.

Brown Furrows to him was the very personification of all that a house should be, reeking of age-old loveliness, redolent of history, a house that had slumbered peacefully throughout many centuries, and been scarcely touched by any of them. A home first and foremost, a farmhouse since the latter half of the eighteenth century, and although set down amidst some of the wildest scenery in England, a gem in a perfect setting!

He spoke of Meg, his sister, and her abilities as a housekeeper, the way she always ran things as if on oiled wheels, her natural instinct for home-making, although she had never married, her intense love of animals, particularly dogs and horses.

Meg actually owned a couple of hunters, as many as five dogs, a Siamese cat, and a parrot which talked far too freely, and was known as the Captain. She was a year or two older than her brother, and it was quite evident that he was very fond of her.

Carol could not have told why, but this talk of Meg did not affect her in the same way as his talk of the house. She wanted to see the house—she was quite sure it was perfect—but Meg— Meg sounded so terribly efficient.

Would such an able woman, such a model housekeeper, such a responsible and excellent organizer, welcome one who was none of these things, and only eighteen? And an outsider, besides! She might if she was devoted to her brother, and wanted to be of assistance to him.

Carol suddenly found herself confessing—intending to amuse him a little—that long ago she had decided that when her guardian did make up his mind to claim her and remove her from her school she was going to repay him for all his trouble by acting as his housekeeper.

“And a pretty poor housekeeper I would have made,” she finished, laughing a little. “Not the sort your sister would have approved of at Brown Furrows, to say nothing of depriving her of her job.”

“Nonsense,” he said, looking at her rather curiously. “But you’re rather young for a housekeeper, aren’ t you?”

“Am I?” looking, unconsciously, decidedly wistful.

“A trifle, I should say,” with that quizzical quirk of a smile.

“Of course, I know it all sounds very silly, but when you’re at school you say and do silly things.” She clasped her hands in slight embarrassment, flushing rather pink under his closely watchful eyes. “It was a foolish idea, of course, for naturally you must feel that I am not much more than a rather stupid schoolgirl, and that I know nothing at all about housekeeping. Perhaps you think I can’t even boil an egg?—but I can!” with a touch of childish pride. “And cook quite a lot of other things as well. ”

“I’m quite sure you can,” he told her very gently.

“We had a Domestic Science course at Selbourne, and I took it. Actually I’ m really quite a good cook, and I know quite a lot about home-making and house-running and—and that sort of thing. ”

“Do you?” he inquired, quite gravely.

Her grey eyes peeped at him shyly.

“But, naturally, a home like yours—a big country house requires skillful running, and your sister has had a lot of experience. Of course, I wouldn’ t wish to interfere. I wouldn’ t dream of interfering.”

He leaned across the table to her and touched her slim hand very lightly, capturing the tips of her slender fingers.

“But you would like to run my home, wouldn’ t you, Carol?”

She remained silent.

“Carol, if I asked you to marry me, and to go back with me to Brown Furrows as its mistress, would you—say yes?”

CHAPTER FIVE

CAROL’ S face went absolutely white, and her eyes darkened so much that they appeared to become all pupil. For a moment he wondered anxiously whether his sudden proposal had actually horrified her.

“Marry you?” she gasped. “But—but you hardly know me! ”

“True,” he admitted, “and you hardly know me! But we could get to know one another, couldn’ t we? And I’ m not asking you to do more than join me in a kind of partnership”—trying to get his meaning across to her without upsetting any of her youthful sensibilities—“such as would be approved by the legal authorities. At your age, and, as you rightly point out, after such a brief acquaintance as ours, we wouldn’t expect it to be a sentimental partnership—in fact, sentiment wouldn’ t enter into it at all! But you could, as you said just now, run my home and that sort of thing, and it would solve the problem of this guardianship business and your future.”

“Why is that such a problem?” she asked, when she had digested and accepted the fact that he was not making any declaration of love to her. And yet, how could he ... ? A mere child of eighteen, no great beauty, without any particular charm save her naivete.... He who had met so many women, who had probably loved more than one, who was a near neighbor of Viola Featherstone!...

And then he decided that it would be best to have a straight talk with her, to put the position to her clearly, at the risk of destroying any of her probably precious illusions, and wounding, perhaps badly, her youthful pride.

“I don’t know whether you are aware, Carol,” he began, in a very quiet voice, leaning a little towards her across the table, “that at the time of your father’s death he was not in a very— prosperous condition, shall we say? By that I mean that although he was one of the most charming and well-meaning individuals I ever met, he had very little worldly wisdom, and no money sense at all. Therefore the little money he succeeded in making during his lifetime he was never able to keep, and what little he did try to hang on to others less scrupulous than himself seized every opportunity to relieve him of.”

He paused, and Carol regarded him with wide, surprised eyes. Her lips had fallen a little apart, and she was gripping the stem of her wineglass with slim fingers grown suddenly tense.

“I don’ t suppose you remember your father very well, do you, Carol? I mean, you saw so little of him.”

“1 was sent home from Africa when I was about five or six,” she admitted.

“When your mother died?”

She nodded.

“And your father arranged for you to go to school at Selbourne?”

Again the barely perceptible little nod.

He removed the glass of wine from her fingers and pushed it a little nearer to her across the table, inviting her to take a sip.

“You look a bit pale,” he remarked. “I’m afraid my sudden proposal shocked you.”

“Oh, no, not—not really,” she assured him, blushing in spite of herself. “But I can’t believe that you really meant it,” she added, with a simplicity that appealed to him.

“Can’t you? Well, wait until you’ve heard what I’m trying to tell you. ”

His blue eyes looked directly into hers, and she tried to prevent her grey ones from wavering. At the same time a tiny, quite noticeable pulse beat like the wings of a small, anxious bird at the base of her delicate, cream-colored throat.

“Your father died suddenly as a result of being stabbed in the back by a native who mistook him for his own partner—a gentleman highly unpopular in the district at that time. I was the only one near enough to do anything at all for your father, and I was the one to whom he entrusted the future well-being and upbringing of his daughter—you. He begged me to do all I could for you, and because I had always esteemed him highly—and liked him as much as I suppose I have ever liked any man—I didn’t let him down. I did and have done as much as it lay within my power to do for you, although I have never been legally responsible for you. It was a debt of honor, if you like, which I discharged because your father at one time was also good to me.”

There was complete silence between them for a moment, and then he said rather abruptly:

“And now I am asking you to marry me!”

“Why?” she got out, in a fluttering whisper.

There was a touch of compassion in his look this time.

“Because, my child, otherwise you will have to support yourself by the sweat of your brow—or by tapping a typewriter, or something of the sort—and I don’ t think you are quite fitted for that sort of thing just yet. Although I have no doubt in time you could do so with ease.”

“You mean,” she asked painfully, “that I have no money?”

“None at all,” he informed her. “And, as a matter of fact, you never had.”

She tried to realize all he meant by that.

“Then you—you paid my school fees—you paid for me at Selbourne? And for my clothes, and—and everything—?”

“It wasn’t such a tremendous expenditure,” he assured her carelessly. “And don’t forget,” he added, deliberately teasing her, “that you had very little pocket-money! ”

She colored quite brilliantly.

“Oh, why did I say that?” It was almost a wail of despair. “If only I had known! ”

“But you didn’t,” he remarked calmly. “And neither did Miss Hardcastle. She always understood I was your legitimate guardian, otherwise I am quite sure she would never have allowed you to come away from Selbourne with me without going very thoroughly into the correctness of the proceedings. At one time, I’ ll admit, I intended to take her into my confidence, and ask her advice about your future. But when I arrived at the Abbey and found you waiting for me on the steps, complete with all your luggage, I hadn’ t the heart to disappoint the hopes you had so plainly built up.”