VII
THE DRIVE HOME
Under the grey autumnal sky Miss Cicely Farmond drove out of the town wrapped in Ned Cromarty's overcoat. He assured her he never felt cold, and as she glanced a little shyly up at the strapping figure by her side, she said to herself that he certainly was the toughest looking man of her acquaintance, and she felt a little less contrition for the loan. She was an independent young lady and from no one else would she have accepted such a favour, but the laird of Stanesland had such an off-hand authoritative way with him that, somewhat to her own surprise, she had protested—and submitted.
The trap was a high dog cart and the mare a flier.
"What a splendid horse!" she exclaimed as they spun up the first hill.
"Isn't she?" said Ned. "And she can go all the way like this, too."
Cicely was therefore a little surprised when at the next hill this flier was brought to a walk.
"I thought we were going all the way like that!" she laughed.
Ned glanced down at her.
"Are you in a hurry?" he enquired.
"Not particularly," she admitted.
"No more am I," said he, and this time he smiled down at her in a very friendly way.
So far they had talked casually on any indifferent subject that came to hand, but now his manner grew a little more intimate.
"Are you going to stay on with the Cromartys long?" he asked.
"I am wondering myself," she confessed.
"I hope you will," he said bluntly.
"It is very kind of you to say so," she said smiling at him a little shyly.
"I mean it. The fact is, Miss Farmond, you are a bit of a treat."
The quaintness of the phrase was irresistible and she laughed outright.
"Am I?"
"It's a fact," said he, "you see I live an odd lonely kind of life here, and for most of my career I've lived an odd lonely kind of life too, so far as girls were concerned. It may sound rum to you to hear a backwood hunks of my time of life confessing to finding a girl of your age a bit of a treat, but it's a fact."
"Yes," she said. "I should have thought I must seem rather young and foolish."
"Lord, I don't mean that!" he exclaimed. "I mean that I must seem a pretty uninteresting bit of elderly shoe-leather."
"Uninteresting? Oh no!" she cried in protest, and then checked herself and her colour rose a little.
He smiled humorously.
"I can't see you out of this glass eye unless I turn round, so whether you're pulling my leg or not I don't know, but I was just saying to old Simon that the only kind of lady likely to take an interest in me was a female collector of antique curiosities, and you don't seem that sort, Miss Farmond."
She said nothing for a moment, and then asked:
"Were you discussing ladies then with Mr. Rattar?"
He also paused for a moment before replying.
"Incidentally in the course of a gossip, as the old chap hadn't got my business ready for me. By the way, did you get much change out of him?"
She shook her head a little mournfully.
"Nothing at all. He just asked questions instead of answering them."
"So he did with me! Confound the man. I fancy he has made too much money and is beginning to take it easy. That's one advantage of not being too rich, Miss Farmond; it keeps you from waxing fat."
"I'm not likely to wax fat then!" she laughed, and yet it was not quite a cheerful laugh.
He turned quickly and looked at her sympathetically.
"That your trouble?" he enquired in his outspoken way.
Cicely was not by way of giving her confidences easily, but this straight-forward, friendly attack penetrated her reserve.
"It makes one so dependent," she said, her voice even lower than usual.
"That must be the devil," he admitted.
"It is!" said she.
He whipped up the mare and ruminated in silence. Then he remarked:
"I'm just wondering."
Cicely began to smile.
"Wondering what?"
"What the devil there can be that isn't utterly uninteresting about me—assuming you weren't pulling my leg."
"Oh," she said, "no man can be uninteresting who has seen as much and done as much as you have."
"The Lord keep you of that opinion!" he said, half humorously, but only half, it seemed. "It's true I've knocked about and been knocked about, but I'd have thought you'd have judged more by results."
She laughed a little low laugh.
"Do you think yourself the results are very bad?"
"Judging by the mirror, beastly! Judging by other standards—well, one can't see one's self in one's full naked horror, thank Heaven for it too! But I'm not well read, and I'm not—but what's the good in telling you? You're clever enough to see for yourself."
For a man who had no intention of paying compliments, Ned Cromarty had a singular gift for administering the pleasantest—because it was so evidently the most genuine—form of flattery. In fact, had he but known it, he was a universal favourite with women, whenever he happened to meet them; only he had not the least suspicion of the fact—which made him all the more favoured.
"I don't know very many men," said Cicely, with her serious expression and a conscientious air, "and so perhaps I am not a good judge, but certainly you seem to me quite unlike all the others."
"I told you," he laughed, "that the female would have to be a bit of a collector."
"Oh," she cried, quite serious still, "I don't mean that in the least. I don't like freaks a bit myself. I only mean—well, people do differ in character and experience, don't they?"
"I guess you're pretty wise," said he simply. "And I'm sized up right enough. However, the trouble at present is this blamed mare goes too fast!"
On their left, the chimneys and roof of a large mansion showed through the surrounding trees. In this wind-swept seaboard country, its acres of plantation were a conspicuous landmark and marked it as the seat of some outstanding local magnate. These trees were carried down to the road in a narrow belt enclosing an avenue that ended in a lodge and gates. At the same time that the lodge came into view round a bend in the road, a man on a bicycle appeared ahead of them, going in the same direction, and bent over his handle-bars against the wind.
"Hullo, that's surely Malcolm Cromarty!" said Ned.
"So it is!" she exclaimed, and there was a note of surprise in her voice. "I wonder where he has been."
The cyclist dismounted at the lodge gates a few moments before the trap pulled up there too, and the young man turned and greeted them. Or rather he greeted Miss Farmond, for his smile was clearly aimed at her alone.
"Hullo! Where have you been?" he cried.
"Where have you?" she retorted as she jumped out and let him help her off with the driving coat.
They made a remarkably good-looking young couple standing together there on the road and their manner to one another was evidently that of two people who knew each other well. Sitting on his high driving seat, Ned Cromarty turned his head well round so as to bring his sound eye to bear and looked at them in silence. When she handed him his coat and thanked him afresh, he merely laughed, told her, in his outspoken way, that all the fun had been his, and whipped up his mare.
"That's more the sort of fellow!" he said to himself gloomily, and for a little the thought seemed to keep him depressed. And then as he let the recollections of their drive have their own way undisturbed, he began to smile again, and kept smiling most of the way home.
The road drew ever nearer to the sea, trees and hedgerows grew even rarer and more stunted, and then he was driving through a patch of planting hardly higher than a shrubbery up to an ancient building on the very brink of the cliffs. The sea crashed white below and stretched grey and cold to the horizon, the wind whistled round the battlements and sighed through the stunted trees, and Ned (who had been too absorbed to remember his coat) slapped his arms and stamped his feet as he descended before a nail-studded front door with a battered coat of arms above it.
"Lord, what a place!" he said to himself, half critically, half affectionately.
The old castle of Stanesland was but a small house as castles, or even mansions, go, almost devoid of architectural ornament and evidently
built in a sterner age simply for security, and but little embellished by the taste of more degenerate times. As a specimen of a small early 15th Century castle it was excellent; as a home it was inconvenience incarnate. How so many draughts found their way through such thick walls was a perennial mystery, and how to convey dishes from the kitchen to the dining room without their getting cold an almost insoluble problem.
The laird and his sister sat down to lunch and in about ten minutes Miss Cromarty remarked.
"So you drove Cicely Farmond home?"
Her brother nodded. He had mentioned the fact as soon as he came in, and rather wondered why she referred to it again.
Miss Cromarty smiled her own peculiar shrewd worldly little smile, and said:
"You are very silent, Ned."
Lilian Cromarty was a few years older than her brother; though one would hardly have guessed it. Her trim figure, bright eyes, vivacity of expression when she chose to be vivacious, and quick movements might have belonged to a woman twenty years younger. She had never been pretty, but she was always perfectly dressed and her smile could be anything she chose to make it. Until her youngest brother came into the property, the place had been let and she had lived with her friends and relations. She had had a good time, she always frankly confessed, but as frankly admitted that it was a relief to settle down at last.
"I was thinking," said her brother.
"About Cicely?" she asked in her frankly audacious way.
He opened his eyes for a moment and then laughed.
"You needn't guess again, Lilian," he admitted.
"Funny little thing," she observed.
"Funny?" he repeated, and his tone brought an almost imperceptible change of expression into his sister's eye.
"Oh," she said as though throwing the subject aside, "she is nice and quite pretty, but very young, and not very sophisticated; is she? However, I should think she would be a great success as a man's girl. That low voice and those eyes of hers are very effective. Pass me the salt, Ned."
Ned looked at her in silence, and then over her shoulder out through the square window set in the vast thickness of the wall, to the grey horizon line.
"I guess you've recommended me to marry once or twice, Lilian," he observed.
"Don't 'guess' please!" she laughed, "or I'll stick my bowie knife or gun or something into you! Yes, I've always advised you to marry—if you found the right kind of wife."
She took some credit to herself for this disinterested advice, since, if he took it, the consequences would be decidedly disconcerting to herself; but she had never pointed out any specific lady yet, or made any conspicuous effort to find one for him.
"Well" he began, and then broke off.
"You're not thinking of Cicely, are you?" she asked, still in the same bright light way, but with a quick searching look at him.
"It seems a bit absurd. I don't imagine for an instant she'd look at me."
"Wouldn't look!" she began derisively, and then pulled herself up very sharply, and altered her tactics on the instant. "She might think you a little too old for her," she said in a tone of entire agreement with him.
"And also that I've got one too few eyes, and in fact several other criticisms."
His sister shrugged her shoulders.
"A girl of that age might think those things," she admitted, "but it seems to me that the criticism ought to be on the other side. Who is she?"
Ned looked at her and she broke into a laugh.
"Well," she said, "I suppose we both have a pretty good idea. She's somebody's something—Alfred Cromarty's, I believe; though of course her mother may have fibbed, for she doesn't look much like the Cromartys. Anyhow that pretty well puts her out of the question."
"Why?"
"If you were a mere nobody, it mightn't make so much difference, but your wife must have some sort of a family behind her. One needn't be a snob to think that one mother and a guess at the father is hardly enough!"
"After all, that's up to me. I wouldn't be wanting to marry her great-mothers, even if she had any."
She shrugged her shoulders again.
"My dear Ned, I'm no prude, but there's always some devilment in the blood in these cases."
"Rot!" said he.
"Well, rot if you like, but I know more than one instance."
He said nothing for a moment and as he sat in silence, a look of keen anxiety came into her eye. She hid it instantly and compressed her lips, and then abruptly her brother said:
"I wonder whether she's at all taken up with Malcolm Cromarty!"
She ceased to meet his eye, and her own became expressionless.
"They have spent some months in the same house. At their age the consequences seem pretty inevitable."
She had contrived to suggest a little more than she said, and he started in his chair.
"What do you know?" he demanded.
"Oh, of course, there would be a dreadful row if anything was actually known abroad. Sir Reginald has probably other ideas for his heir."
"Then there is something between them?"
She nodded, and though she still did not meet his eye, he accepted the nod with a grim look that passed in a moment into a melancholy laugh.
"Well," he said, rising, "it was a pretty absurd idea anyhow. I'll go and have a look at myself in the glass and try to see the funny side of it!"
His sister sat very still after he had left the room.