“Jenny, don’t look like that. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Jenny sat up straight. She said in a voice which she tried to keep quite steady,
“It’s nothing.” She looked at her watch. “I-I think we ought to go home now-I really do.”
“No! I won’t do it again, I promise. Look, you can see the spire of Chiselton Church. There. No, a little more to the left-straight in line with the thorn trees. You can only see it when the weather is going to be very fine, and then only in the middle of the day.”
Jenny said, “Oh, why?” She didn’t really want to go home. She was quite ready to talk about a distant church spire. It seemed a very safe subject.
“Because-” said Richard, “because there’s a spell on it. If you see it with someone in the middle of the day and the sun is shining and you don’t tell anyone, it makes a spell.”
“Richard!” She looked at him between laughter and disbelief.
“It does. If you don’t believe it you must wait and see.”
Jenny turned back to her spider.
“I don’t believe a word of it,” she said.
Chapter XVIII
Miriam Richardson sat in the train and thought. She didn’t really want to go to Hazeldon. She didn’t want to stay at home either. She had told Jimmy she was going, and he hadn’t exactly said that he would come down and see her, but she thought she could count on it. She could make things very unpleasant for him if he failed her. Oh, yes, they might be unpleasant for her too, but she could certainly guarantee that they wouldn’t be pleasant for him. Mr. and Mrs. Mottingley were very strict. They belonged to the local church, and Jimmy had been brought up to belong to it, too. Miriam’s lip curled a little as she thought of what the Mottingley family would say if they knew. Well, they were going to know, unless Jimmy came to heel.
She thought about that. They would have to get married at once. Yes, that would be best-a register office, and then break it to the parents on both sides. If they wanted a church wedding they could have one. She didn’t mind. What she wanted was to tie Jimmy up so that he couldn’t get out of it, and whether it was church or register office that did it was nothing to her. All she wanted was to make things safe.
Underneath this smooth flow of efficient planning there were terrifying currents. She hardly knew what they were, but she felt the drag of them every now and then-the drag and the pitiless horror that it brought. She made a great effort, and was aware that every time she fought the realization of what would happen if Jimmy let her down-every time the effort was greater, and the realization of it was clearer. She turned away from it with a determined effort and thought about a plan of campaign.
Mrs. Merridew met her at the station. Unusually gracious, she kissed the air in the neighbourhood of Miriam’s cheek, summoned a porter with a peremptory wave of her parasol, and accompanied Miriam to the luggage van to pick out and claim her shabby little box. Miriam stood by with an impatience thinly disguised.
“Is that your box? Atkins, it’s that one! Dear me, Miriam, hadn’t your mother a better box to send you with than this? That strap is quite dangerous, I declare. It looks as if it might come off at any moment.”
Miriam hated her fiercely. She knew very well that her luggage was fairly shabby. If you looked as if it didn’t really belong to you you could carry that sort of thing off with a high hand, but Cousin Laura had no sense at all. She hated her, and if it hadn’t been for Jimmy she wouldn’t have come.
Chattering all the time, Mrs. Merridew superintended the collection of the box, repeating all she had said before about its shabbiness, and interspersing her remarks with a perfunctory enquiry about Mrs. Richardson’s health and well-being and a passing query as to what Eleanor and Lilian were doing now that, she supposed, they had left school.
“They haven’t left,” said Miriam shortly.
“Dear me!”
Mrs. Merridew got into the taxi and made room for Miriam beside her.
“No, Atkins, the box can come in here perfectly well! What were you saying, Miriam?”
“I said that neither Eleanor nor Lilian had left school,” said Miriam in a bored tone of voice. She was thinking that Cousin Laura was the absolute end.
As they drove away from the station Mrs. Merridew said brightly,
“Now, I want you to make a special effort to be friendly with the girl whom Miss Danesworth has got staying with her just now. I have a particular reason for wanting you to be friends.”
She began to explain the particular reason, but until she mentioned Richard Forbes, Miriam’s attention was of a very haphazard nature.
“He actually turned up with her at half past six on Sunday morning!”
Miriam came out of her thoughts.
“Who did?”
“My dear, you weren’t listening! I was telling you! Why, Richard Forbes, to be sure. You remember he was here when you were before, and I thought-”
Miriam’s shoulder gave a twitch of exasperation. She could have done very well with Richard Forbes, but she knew that he had no use for her. She didn’t put it quite as baldly as this, but that was what it had amounted to. All the same, she might be able to use him. If Jimmy could be made jealous… She gratified Mrs. Merridew by paying a good deal more attention.
They got back to Hazeldon in good time for tea, and as soon as they had finished Mrs. Merridew led the way next door. Miss Danesworth discovered them without pleasure. Then her heart smote her and she went out of her way to be kind.
Richard heard the change in her voice and groaned inwardly. There was nothing to be done about it either, for the front door gave directly into the passage which divided the house. Left to himself, he could have escaped through the back window, but he was not quite mean enough to abandon Jenny. Or was he? The moment of indecision was fatal, but he might have known that it would be. Miss Danesworth turned, preceded her guests down the passage, and stood aside for them to enter the sitting-room. Miriam saw Jenny, and Jenny saw Miriam. Both disliked the impression they received. Mrs. Merridew’s voice, which had not been silent for more than a moment, took up its tale again.
“Well, here we are. Richard, you remember Miriam? But of course you do. You met her here in the spring. You saw a good deal of each other, I remember. And Jenny-you haven’t met Miriam before, have you? This is my cousin’s daughter, Miriam Richardson. I hope you will be great friends. This is not a place where there is a great deal going on, but I always say that if young people can’t amuse one another, well, what is the world coming to? I’m sure I don’t know.”
Jenny did not like Miriam, but that was no reason for not being polite. She did what she could without much help from Miriam herself. Miriam was bored. She hadn’t come here to talk to Jenny. She showed her boredom so visibly that conversation became very difficult. But when Richard joined in, impelled by a pleading look from Jenny, Miriam’s manner changed. She flashed into a spirited and not unamusing account of her journey.
“There were two dreadful children,” she announced. “The sticky sort -they positively oozed peppermint drops. I do think there’s something sickening about children who eat in trains, and these were thoroughly nasty little toads.”
“You don’t like children?” said Jenny.
“I like properly brought up children. But these were horrid little brats -the sort you would like to drop out of the window and leave behind on the railway track.”
Richard had an amiable smile for that.
“You weren’t tempted to oblige?”
“Well, I was. But of course it wouldn’t have done. Their mother obviously didn’t mind, and she’d have been peeved with me.”