The Spring of the Tiger Page 7

  I talked seriously to my mother. She was in bed. I had insisted she stay there because she looked so wan.

  "I don't know what we're going to do," she said. "I couldn't

  afford to go on paying Meg and Janet. We'll have to give up this house."

  "My school fees must have been a terrible burden!" I cried.

  She laughed lightly. "Not to me. It was your aunts who paid for them."

  I stared at her. So those two years when I had acquired an education and had lived my carefree life I owed to them!

  I felt a deep sense of obligation and shame.

  I said: "I shan't go back. How can I? We'll have to do something."

  "What?" asked my mother.

  What did girls in my position do? If they were alone they became governesses or companions—a far from inviting prospect, for the children were usually unmanageable and the elderly ladies disagreeable.

  But I was not alone. I had a mother to support.

  I said: "The first thing I must do is write to Aunt Martha and Aunt Mabel and tell them that I must leave school. I will explain the position."

  "I can just imagine their satisfaction," said my mother grimly.

  I wrote to them that day.

  It was not necessary for the aunts to point out to me the diflBcult position in which we were placed. I knew it well enough and after a good many hours of discussion in their suite at Browns' Hotel, my mother and I accepted the only solution to our troubles.

  "When all is said and done," said Aunt Martha, "Irene is Mrs. Ashington and you, Sarah, are our brother's daughter."

  Ashington Grange was the family home and if it were not for the tea plantation my father would be living there. The house, they pointed out to me, was theirs. Their father had seen to that, but had Ralph had a son it would naturally have gone to him. Irene must come to Ashington Grange where she would be well looked after and I should return to school.

  My mother at last agreed that she had no alternative. She was suffering from acute depression, I believed. She found it hard to exist without the adulation and admiration which she had always

  looked for as her due. There would be little of that at Ashington Grange.

  She said she would not be able to endure it without me and I could well believe that. The aunts despised her and she disliked them. To have to live on their charity was distasteful to her—but slightly less so than starving in a garret. Also, she said, she had to think of me. The idea of my having to work in some way was more than she could endure. It was not as though there was any kind of work that I could do. Whichever way we looked at it there was only one way out and that was to go to Ashington Grange.

  I realized very quickly that I was the reason for the aunts' concern. I think they were excited at the prospect of having a young relative in the house. They were planning for me and Aunt Martha was a passionate planner. I could see that a niece's future could be of greater interest than the church bazaar or the yearly garden party which was held on the lawns of the Grange for the good of the church steeple.

  I was firm about not returning to school.

  "Absurd!" cried Aunt Martha. "Ashington girls always remained until they were eighteen."

  "I must be with my mother," I insisted. "She is not well."

  "Fiddlesticks! It's a mope, nothing more."

  "She has suffered a great tragedy," I pointed out.

  "Her just rewards," murmured Aunt Mabel, "after all this . . .'*

  "You will have to understand," I replied, "that if I am coming to live at Ashington Grange my mother will have to be welcomed there too."

  I was amazed to find myself giving orders to these two formida' ble ladies, but that was how it was and I felt a little tender towards them for wanting me so much that they agreed to my demands.

  "It will be necessary then," said Aunt Martha, "to engage a governess."

  "I am too old for that," I protested.

  "Your education has been cut short for a . . . whim!" said Aunt Martha. "A governess there must be. Our sister Margaret was too

  delicate for school and had a governess ... in fact many of them.

  She died.'' "Not of a surfeit of governesses," I said with a giggle, for I was

  discovering an uncontrollable desire to tease these aunts, which I

  realized I should have to suppress. "You are far too frivolous, Sarah, and this is a serious matter." No one knew better than I how serious. However, they gave in.

  The arrangements were made. We gave up the lease of the Denton

  Square house and went to Ashington Grange.

  Footsteps

  In spite of the circumstances which had brought me to Ashington Grange, I could not help but be thrilled when confronted by it.

  At Epleigh Station we had left the train and found a coachman eagerly looking out for us. He was taking us to the house in the brougham, he explained, and our baggage would be brought along later by the wagonette.

  Epleigh was a village in the heart of the forest—typically English with a green in front of a Norman church and a few houses scattered round. We came along the road through the forest and suddenly there we were in this delightful oasis, so peaceful on that lovely September afternoon. The cottage gardens were ablaze with starry Michaelmas daisies, bronze chrysanthemums and stately dahlias. In the center of the green was a pond; beside it was a wooden seat on which sat two men talking. They looked up with interest as the brougham went by. We passed the graveyard with its headstones, some new, some lopsided with age, and then on past a general shop and post office combined. We took a road from the green and soon were before the gates of the Grange. They were wide open and a woman stood at the door of the lodge and curtsied as we drove past. We went along a drive for about a quarter of a mile before we made a turn and were confronted by the house.

  It was beautiful—gray stone mellowed by the years. There was an archway in the center and at the end of the west wing was a tower with battlements and long narrow slits of windows which looked rather definitely out of place with the rest of the house, which was clearly of a later period. I learned in due course that

  the only part left of the Norman fortress which had once stood on this site was the tower. The rest of the house had been built during the reign of Charles I and had miraculously escaped the holocaust of the civil war. Aunt Mabel, who was very proud of the house, told me all this when she realized how interested I was.

  At this time I merely had an impression of gracious charm which the Dutch gable style, so symmetrically designed with its decorations of scrolls, whorls and classical figures, seemed to produce so effortlessly. It was not so much a large house as a beautiful one. Having been built in the early part of the seventeenth century when architects were just beginning to come into their own, it was in the traditional shape with pediment windows, wooden mullions and lead lattices.

  I was filled with a sudden pride to bear the same name as such a noble edifice.

  We went under the arch and into a courtyard. From there, when we had alighted, we stepped straight into the hall where the aunts were waiting to receive us, looking more formidable in their own setting than they ever had in Denton Square and Browns' Hotel.

  "Welcome to your home, Sarah," said Aunt Martha, taking my hand and giving me a cool peck on the cheek.

  "It's a good thing that you are here at last. . ." began Mabel.

  They were less cordial to my mother.

  I said: "The house is fascinating."

  Nothing could have pleased them more. Aunt Mabel was faintly pink with pleasure.

  "We like it," she said. "It's been in the family for over two hundred years."

  "You must be weary from the journey," added Aunt Martha. "Jennings can show them to their rooms, Mabel. Will you call her? Your things will be arriving now. Then you can wash and change and we will talk."

  There was a certain triumph in the manner of both aunts. They quite pointedly extended their welcome to me and it was clear that my mother was there
on sufferance. I wondered how long a woman who had been petted and pampered as she had would en-

  dure that. Fortunately she seemed to be rather dazed at the moment and not to notice it.

  Jennings appeared and prepared to conduct us up the wooden staircase with its beautifully carved newel post and banisters.

  On the first floor was the long gallery, which was the width of the house and hung with pictures of Ashingtons. I promised myself I would explore that later. My ancestors! It was exciting to come face to face with them after having lived in ignorance of them all my life until now. At one end of the gallery was a balcony, which I guessed was where the minstrels played when they had a ball. I could not imagine my aunts at a ball and the image that conjured up made me smile.

  My room was on the next floor. It was spacious with a high ceiling painted with cherubs and decorated with flowers. There was a four-poster bed hung with blue material and matching blue rugs on the floor. There were heavy blue curtains and a window seat. I gave a cry of pleasure as I went to look out. Below me were well-kept lawns with flower beds now aglow with autumn flowers. I saw the shrubbery and an enclosed garden where roses still bloomed; I saw the kitchen gardens and away in the distance the trees of the forest. I thought I had never seen such a beautiful view. Ashington! My family home, I thought, and I was filled with an intense excitement until I turned and looked at my mother. She was pale, and a great deal of her charm had been due to her animation; she seemed a different person from Irene Rushton of Denton Square who had been the center of our lives.

  I was being selfish. Of course she was remembering. She and my father had come here soon after their marriage.

  "Let us see your room," I said.

  It was on the next floor and much smaller. It contained a single bed with a half canopy. I thought it charming even though it lacked the grandeur of the one allotted to me. I was angry with the aunts for making the distinction. They should have given me this room and mine to my mother. Perhaps I would suggest the change.

  "Thank you," I said to Jennings, for I felt a great need to be alone with my mother. "I will find my way back to my room."

  When Jennings left, my mother threw herself into my arms.

  "Don't cry," I said, "It'll show."

  That was the best preventative. It reminded her of her appearance and she composed her face.

  "It's hateful!" she cried. "They're hateful. Oh, Siddons, I loathe it here. Anything . . . anything would be better."

  "But you agreed we couldn't stay in Denton Square and where else could we go?"

  "They hate me," she said. "They always did. Right at the beginning I felt it. I hated this house. It gives me the creeps. Do you feel it, Siddons?"

  "No," I said. "It's no more creepy than other old houses. Any ghosts here would be relations. That's a comforting thought."

  "Not to me. I'd still be an in-law even to them."

  She laughed wanly then. "It won't last," she went on. "It's only a respite, I'll get a part. When Tom knows that I really have gone he'll be after me. That's the way of the world."

  Her eyes sparkled now. Euphoria had set in. She was already seeing Tom aniving at Ashington Grange, contracts bulging his pockets, herself having to be wooed. Her public was clamoring for her. Well, let it clamor. She hadn't forgiven it yet.

  I left her and when I reached my room I found that some of my baggage had arrived. Jennings asked if she should help me unpack. I declined her help and sent her along to my mother.

  Aunt Martha was not a woman to (as she would say) let the grass grow under her feet. Tlie very next day she broached the matter of the governess.

  "Really, Aunt Martha," I cried, "I am far too old for a governess. I shall be seventeen at the end of November."

  "And only two of those seventeen years spent at school!"

  "I had a tutor before." I smiled, remembering Toby with a rush of sadness. I missed him sorely. "He was very good," I added wistfully.

  "A tutor is not suitable for a young girl. Our elder sister, Margaret, had a governess. That was because she was too delicate to go to school. She died when she was eighteen."

  "How very sad to die so young."

  "She was never strong. It was sad, as you say. Don't listen to

  the servants. They will tell you that she walks the gallery at certain nights looking for her lover. It's the most arrant and romantic nonsense."

  "Had she lost her lover?"

  "She was about to marry. Death, of course, separated them. As I was saying, she had a governess. I should prefer you to return to school, but I have been talking this over with Mabel and we think that perhaps while your mother is here you should be too. She will need a certain amount of . . . restraint. You will be the best one to give her that."

  "Restraint! You talk as though she might go raving mad and qualify for a strait jacket."

  "She was always frivolous and the life she has led has not strengthened her character. It was a disastrous marriage from our brother's point of view. But let us not stray from the point. I shall begin my search for the governess immediately. You may rest assured that I shall choose her with the utmost care."

  How I should have liked to return to school, but I did realize I should not be happy leaving my mother with the aunts.

  It was Mabel who showed me the house. She seemed different when Aunt Martha was not present and even sometimes finished her sentences. The elder sister was certainly the dominating character.

  Mabel was delighted with my interest in the house. She showed me the drawing room, the salon, the dining room, the winter parlor and all the bedrooms as well as that part behind the screens where there was a commodious kitchen presided over by a cook and numerous underlings. I wondered how I should remember all their names.

  They displayed a great curiosity toward me. That was natural enough. I was an Ashington who, at the mature age of seventeen, had just arrived on the scene. I daresay many of them—for only a few were young—remembered the hasty marriage of Ralph Ashington with the London actress which had caused such consternation to his sisters. I wondered how many of them had heard of the scandal. Mabel led me through the wash houses with their coppers of bubbling water and the smell of damp clothes, to the

  butteries and brewing houses. It was a considerable estate and bigger than it had at first appeared.

  What interested me most was the gallery, for it was lined with portraits of the Ashingtons. I noticed that several of the women had been painted wearing pearls which looked remarkably like those I had seen about my mother's neck in the picture she had shown me.

  "What magnificent-looking pearls," I said. "They have a special sort of luster."

  "The Ashington Pearls," said Mabel. "They are a part of the family's history."

  She then told me the story of how they had come into the family and it corresponded exactly with what I had heard from my mother.

  "They must be kept in the family or there will be an end of it," she said. "That's one legend grown up around them. One of our ancestors . . . this one . . ." She pointed to a man in a Regency cravat, frogged coat and fringed waistcoat. It was a full-length portrait. His breeches were striped and the buckles in his shoes very elaborate. "This one gambled, got into debt and disposed of the pearls to a money lender. The family had to retrieve them."

  "They belong to the family."

  "They must never go out of the family. The wife of the eldest son has them until her eldest son marries. Then his wife has them until her son marries. They are always in the possession of an Ashington."

  "What if there is not a son?"

  "It has never happened before this. It is so distressing. There has always been a son until now."

  "What will happen to the pearls now, then?"

  "No one is quite sure."

  I was puzzled. If my father was going to have a son, who would in time get a wife and provide an owner for the pearls—though a temporary one—many things would have to happen. My mother would either have to ret
urn to him or die so that he could take another wife. Even Aunt Martha was not clever enough to anange that.

  "It has turned out to be most unfortunate," said Mabel.

  "Fate has been very disobliging," I said. "If I had been a boy how different it would have been."

  "You will have to curb your frivolous way of speaking, Sarah. Martha does not like that at all."

  "I'm sorry, Aunt Mabel," I said demurely.

  I turned to the portrait of my father. He was handsome and there was a jaunty look in his eyes.

  "He was too adventurous," commented Mabel, clasping her hands together and shaking her head at the portrait. "If he had not been so . . . headstrong, so impulsive ... if he had considered marriage more seriously, all this might not have happened."

  "What of his first wife?"

  "We never saw her. When she died he came back to England and we believed God was giving him another chance. Then he married your mother. He was a gambler. It is one of the family faults. That's why Martha will have none of it in the house. I agree with her. If any of the servants are discovered playing cards they are sent packing."

  "Was my father successful in his gambling?"

  "People are always unsuccessful in their gambling, Martha says. Our father was a strictly religious man. He deplored that in Ralph. That is why the Grange is left in trust to us, but of course if Ralph had a son it would go to him. It's a sad thing but the name will die out, of course, unless Ralph has a son. It is most disappointing. Two daughters! Martha would have been so pleased i£ you had been a boy. . . and so should I."

  "I am sorry," I said, "but there is nothing I can do about it, I'm afraid."

  "Martha said you had inherited your father's lack of seriousness."

  "Martha likes to arrange everything as she wants it," I said, "and she wants everyone to adjust to the character she thinks most suitable. Life doesn't work like that. Aunt Mabel, except in a play where the playwright just sends his characters in whatever direction he wants."

  "I shouldn't talk too much about plays if I were you now you have finished with that way of life. Martha will not like it . . . and nor shall I."