Len was worried about Nigel and Janey, and usually devoted these evenings and their pipely inspiration to thinking them out in a blundering way. He was not a man given to problems, and hitherto life had held but few. It was an added bitterness that now his problem should be that brother and sister who had always stood to him for all that was simple and beloved.
Nigel, in his strange fears, his subcurrents of emotion, and quickly changing moods, reminded Len of a horse; he did not object to drawing upon his knowledge of horses and their ways for the management of his brother. He humoured him, bore with him, but kept at the same time a tight hand—especially when the boy\'s seething restiveness and pain found vent in harsh words to Janey. Janey could not bear harsh words now—she had used to be able to pick them off and throw them back in the true sisterly style, but now she winced[Pg 146] and let them stick. Janey perplexed Len as much as Nigel, and worried him far more. Her eyes seemed to be growing very large, and her cheeks very hollow. When she smiled her lips twitched in a funny way, and when she laughed it grated. Janey cost Len many pipes.
The explanation of Janey was, of course, at Redpale Farm, sitting glumly by his winter fireside, just as she sat by hers. The love of Janet Furlonger and Quentin Lowe had entered on a new phase. Quentin was beginning to be dissatisfied. At first Janey had imagined that she would welcome this, but it did not come as she had expected. It brought their love into spasmodic silences. Up till then Quentin and she had always been writing and meeting, but now he wrote to her and met her in strange, sudden jerks of feeling. Sometimes he left her for days without even a line, but she could never doubt him, because when at last they met, his love seemed to burn with even greater torment and fierceness than in the months of its more regular expression. He began to give her presents, too—a locket, a ring, a book, which she shrank from, but forced herself to accept because of the evident delight he found in giving.
Once more he was rambling restlessly and ineffectively on a quest for independence. His efforts always came to nothing, partly through his own incapacity, but always, too, through a sheer perverseness of fate, thwarting developments, wrecking coincidences—so there really seemed truth in his cry that the stars fought against him.
She began to realise that, much as she had[Pg 147] deplored what looked like his permanent satisfaction with a makeshift, she had found in it a kind of vicarious rest. When anxiety and disillusion lay like stones at the bottom of her heart, she had comforted herself with the thought of the lightness of his. Now she could do so no longer—she had the burden of his sorrow as well as her own to bear, and for a woman like Janey, this was bound much more than to double her load.
Her anxiety about Nigel was also a pain that bruised through the weeks. He was decidedly "queer," and she could not understand his new craze for fiddling to children. Sometimes, too, he would be terribly sentimental, and have fits of more or less maudlin affection for her and Leonard. At other times he would be surly, and during his attacks of surliness he would work with desperation, almost with greed, as if he longed to wear himself out. Then he would come in, and throw himself down in a chair, and sleep the sleep of utter exhaustion with wide-flung limbs—or he would have a bath by the fire, regardless of any cooking operations she might have on hand, or the difficulty of heating gallons of ice-cold water in a not over-large kettle. Len would be furious with him on these occasions, and tell him that if he wanted a Turkish bath built on to Sparrow Hall he had better say so at once.
"I hope we\'ll have a happy Christmas," remarked Janey rather plaintively to Len one evening late in December.
"Why shouldn\'t we?" he asked; he was kneeling on the hearthstone, cleaning her boots.
[Pg 148]
"Well, we\'ve been counting on it so. You remember last Christmas, when I said that next time we\'d have Nigel with us...."
"And we\'ve got him, haven\'t we?"
"Yes."
She was silent then, and the next minute he lifted his eyes from the blacking and laughed up at her.
"There\'s the rub, Janey. We don\'t know how Nigel will take Christmas."
"No—he\'ll probably be frightfully sentimental at breakfast, and kiss us both—and then he\'ll have a boiling bath—and then he\'ll take his fiddle and go out for hours to play to those wretched kids."
"A pretty fair prophecy, I should think."
"He\'s just like a kid himself," sighed Janey.
"Yes—I think he\'s getting soft in that way. At any rate, he\'s taken an uncommon fancy to kids. By the bye, that girl he rescued at Grinstead station, Strife\'s girl, has come home for Christmas. I saw her out with her father this morning, and she\'d got her hair up, and looked years older. I expect she\'ll be getting married soon. Her people will see that she settles down early—they don\'t want two like her sister."
"What was that?" cried Janey.
"What?"
"I thought I heard some one in the room."
"There\'s nobody—look, quite empty, except for you and me. You\'re getting nervy, old girl."
"Perhaps I am."
He stood up, and looked at her closely and[Pg 149] rather anxiously. Then he put his arms round her.
"You\'re not well, sis—I\'ve noticed it for a long time. I say—there\'s nothing the matter, is there? You\'d tell us if there was, wouldn\'t you?"
"Of course ... there\'s nothing," she whispered, as his rough hand stroked her hair. He held her to him very tenderly, he was always gentler and less exacting with her than Nigel. Yet, somehow, when she was unhappy it was Nigel she wanted to cling to, whose strong arms she liked to feel round her, whose suffering face she wanted close to hers. She wanted Nigel now.
But Nigel had gone out.
He walked heavily, his arms folded over his chest, his head hanging.
So she was back—and she was grown up—and she would soon be married.
These three contingencies had never struck him before. She had gone so inevitably out of his life, that he had never troubled to consider her return to Shovelstrode. She had stood so inevitably for adolescence, unformed and free, that he had never thought of her growing up. And as for marriage, it had seemed a thing alien and incongruous, her girlhood had been virgin to his timidest desire.
But she was grown up. She was ready for marriage, and most likely would soon be married. He realised that to some other man would be given, probably readily enough, what he had not dared even think about. A shudder passed through him, but the next minute he flung up his head almost triumphantly. He had had from Tony what she[Pg 150] would never give to another—he had had her free thoughtless comradeship, and she would never give it again. She was grown up now, and unconsciously she would realise her womanhood, put up little barriers, put on little airs. He—he alone—would have the memory of her heedless girlhood innocently displayed—he had what no other man had had, or could have ever.
Christmas came, a moist day, warm and rather hazy. Janey had decorated Sparrow Hall with holly and evergreens, and had even compounded an ominous-looking plum-pudding. She was desperately anxious that their first Christmas together for four years should be a success—she even ventured to hint the same to Nigel.
"Why," he drawled, "do we keep Christmas? Is it because Christ was born in a manger?"
"Of course not—how queerly you talk!"
"Because that was why we kept it in prison."
"But we aren\'t in prison here."
"Aren\'t we?—aren\'t we, Janey?—would there be any good keeping Christmas if we weren\'t?"
She laughed uneasily.
"Nigel, you\'re balmy. Come along and help me make mince-pies. It\'s all you\'re good for."
In spite of her fears, Christmas morning passed happily enough, and though the dinner was culinarily a failure, socially it was a huge success. The pudding, having triumphantly defeated the onslaughts of knives, forks and teeth, was accorded a hero\'s death in the kitchen fire, to the accompaniment of the Dead March on Nigel\'s fiddle, and[Pg 151] various ritual acts extemporised by Len from memories both military and ecclesiastical. He was preparing a ceremonial funeral for the mince-pies, when he and Janey suddenly realised that Nigel had left the room.
"Now where the devil has he gone?"
Janey sighed.
"Some silly game of his. I hope he\'ll be back soon."
"Not he!—he\'s probably off for the day, to fiddle to those blasted kids, if they\'re not too full of plum-pudding to dance. By Christopher, Janey—he\'s mad."
The dark was gathering stealthily—crawling up from the Kent country in the east, burying the wet winter meadows of Surrey and Sussex in damp and dusk and fogs. In the west a crimson furnace smouldered, showing up a black outline of hills. Moisture was everywhere—the roads gleamed with mud, the banks were sticky with damp tangled grass, and drops quivered and glistened on the bare twigs of the hedges.
A great sense of disheartenment was everywhere. It was Christmas day, and hundreds of hearths were bright—but outside, away from humanity and its cheerful dreams, all Nature mourned, in the curse of the winter solstice, drowned in the water-flood. Furlonger had left his hearth with its cheery flames and loved faces and warm, sweet dreams of goodwill, and was out alone with Nature, who had no warmth nor love[Pg 152] nor make-believe, only wet winds and winter desolation.
He came to Dormans Land. The blinds were down, and through the chinks he saw the leap and spurt of firelight. He stood where three roads met, and the wind swept up from Lingfield, where the first stars had hung their lanterns. He began to play—a dreary, springless tune, that struck cold into the hearts of the few it reached through their closed windows. He played the song of Christmas as Nature keeps it—the festival of life\'s drowning and despair.
No children came to dance. They were happy beside their parents, with sweets and crackers and fun. They were keeping Christmas as man keeps it, and drew down the blinds on Nature keeping it outside, and the lone fiddler who felt it more congenial to keep it with Nature than to keep it with men.
Nigel stopped playing and looked around him into the gloom. He felt disappointed because the children had not come to dance. He had broken away from his brother and sister because he wanted those dancing children so badly—and they had not come. Perhaps he had better go further up into the village, since the children were not playing in the street as usual, but in their homes.
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