V

Linda (suffering Caroline as one suffers boils) would have been thankful could she have shut up so much as her mother's mouth. Round and round Linda had run happily in her squirrel-cage, but she had to run in zigzags now. And Emily had been so selfish, riding about in page 408 a fine new blue habit nearly sweeping the ground and a tall hat with a veil, and never asking mamma even on a visit. We can't afford it, said Emily. After all I've done for her, too, thought Linda, running to see what Janet was crying about now.

“She has been reading poetry again,” announced Caroline, dropping a stitch in her knitting and handing it to Linda to pick up. “I am sure there is something wrong with that child. You don't drench her enough.”

“I … it was only the ‘Idylls,’ “sobbed Janet, looking piteously with wet blue eyes out of a fair flushed face.

“You idle enough without reading about it. Give her brimstone, Linda.”

Linda had small patience with romantic Janet herself. With a mind mildly opaque to new ideas, she never considered her children as individuals, endeavouring to fill them all to capacity with equal quantities of obedience, duty, and diligence. Janet, struggling to swallow these virtues, while keeping her secret dreams, was usually in trouble. Prue smiled faintly with her dark red mouth or went out behind the new plantation and comforted her soul with derisive imaginary conversations in which mamma and grandma got very much the worst of it. And Deb, blundering about like an eager puppy, so distracted Linda by italicizing her teaching everywhere that Linda consulted Tiffany, who said it would be much better to send them to boarding-school, like the boys.

“Prue is clever,” said Tiffany, who had been teaching them, “and they really should have regular lessons, Linda.”

“No, thank you,” said Linda, bridling. “What do you suppose I had daughters for if not to wait on me? They are very useful in the house already, and girls don't need lessons. I didn't.”

“Don't Andrew think….?”

“It's not his business,” said Linda, who was always page 409 superior to Andrew about the children, being conscious that she had done something there which he couldn't do.

Out in the sunshine Roddy was chasing the little girls round the great pile of driftwood hauled from the riverbed for firing. “You laughing rogue,” said Roddy, catching Prue's slender little body in his arms, thinking how her sleek black head and graceful neck had more than a hint of Andalusia. With a flower as red as her lips behind her ear…. But Prue's red lips asked awkward questions.

“Why do gentlemen ring their wives the way they do pigs, only in another place, Cousin Rod? I've always wanted to know.”

“For the same reason,” said Roddy gravely. “To keep them from nosing where they shouldn't.”

“It don't keep grandma from it. A ring in her nose wouldn't.”

“Oh, Prue,” reproved Janet. Cousin Rod, so like King Arthur and Galahad, should not have to hear such things. But when he plays his guitar he's a troubadour and I do love him most dreadfully, thought Janet, who loved all the gentlemen passing through Durdans and would have died with shame to have it guessed that she so much as knew them apart.

“Even rings can't achieve the impossible,” said Roddy, going in to pass the time of day with Caroline, who hoped there would be plenty of the gentry at Tiffany's wedding.

“The vulgar people I have had to consort with down here you wouldn't believe,” said Caroline. “But I hope I never forget what I was born to.”

Caroline remembering what she was born to supplied a constant proof of how the mighty were fallen. She had filled the two rooms built for her by Andrew with such a multitude of crochet-mats and mantel-drapes having bright woollen balls and tassels, such an infinity of horsehair chairs and sofas (“the latest fashion”), such an army of fretwork brackets holding vases and little statuettes page 410 and framed photographs that Linda trembled every time she had to dust them and often wondered what happened when mamma retired there in dudgeon (as she did whenever Darien came to Durbans), mamma seeming so very large at these times and the rooms being so small.

There was a wave of prosperity in New Zealand now, and Darien rushed on the crest of it, letting everybody know.

“I didn't think much of that last draft of horses for India,” said Darien, who had just been down to Christ-church to see them shipped. “My Lamplighter colts are better, Andrew. Lord, I'm glad I bought that stallion, though I had to pay through the nose for him. But I can afford it.”

“In my day,” remarked Caroline, whose red cheeks seemed the redder for being supported by grey hair instead of black, “ladies knew nothing of such unladylike matters.”

“If you had you might be able to earn your own keep now,” retorted Darien, winking at Andrew, sitting with crossed legs and her red head bare.

An eccentric woman, but undoubtedly clever, thought Andrew, unaware how often these qualities had to go together in women, since there was no other way of getting their cleverness out.

“A lady who has done as much as I have might be allowed a small corner somewhere without being submitted to insinuations,” said Caroline haughtily.

“What use would a small corner be to you?” inquired Darien, looking Caroline over with a critical eye.

So there was little wonder that Caroline (accompanied by reticule, fan, gloves, knitting, and other necessities) immediately left the room.

“That person is mad,” she told Andrew later. “Do you know that she rode over the other day in green satin slippers?”

“She said Nick Flower would like her to wear them,” page 411 put in Linda, who spent anxious days trying to protect Andy.

“Shocking! If you ask me I think there was a good deal more in that legacy than people know. A Lovel, even if we could not acknowledge him, should leave his money to Lovels, not to deranged females.”

“Darien's derangements take her further than most people's sense,” said Andrew, quite ready to protect himself. “She is the cleverest woman I know, and I don't remember asking you anything about her legacy.”

“I think, Linda,” said Caroline, “that Andy needs a dose.”

Once Andrew had looked round from his sheep and cattle and tentative ploughland which nor'westers had such a habit of filling the house with, and, surprised at seeing so many tall young heads and bright observant faces round him, ordered a governess, much as he ordered tons of flour and sugar from the store-room. Prue had flung herself so savagely at learning that Miss Dobby, whose inventive powers were almost as unequal to demand as her knowledge, had to resort to daily punishments instead; and what with Deb constantly upsetting the ink over her copy-book and Lady Lovel treating her like a housemaid, Miss Dobby was moved to go weeping to Andrew, who suddenly discovered that soft dark eyes and hair were intended by Providence for flirtations … and who was he to deny Providence?

Yet Providence denied him; presenting him shortly with a red-eyed Miss Dobby, fluttering with shawls and umbrellas, climbing into the spring-cart, to be driven by the stable-boy into vast distant realms of the unattainable, while Linda waved her good-bye with smiling face and turned to pat Andrew's cheek with a plump little hand.

Prue had her own idea of that, lying in bed with Janet, who always feared to sleep alone.

“It's as well papa didn't want Dobby to teach him page 412 anything but flirting, for that's all she knows anything about,” remarked Prue.

“Oh, Prue!” Why Durdans didn't fall and crush Prue at least once a week Janet could never understand. “Oh, how can you speak like that of dear papa. Parents are sac-sacrosant,” said Janet, having got that out of a Sunday at Home … or perhaps it was Little Pillows, which Linda still read to her daughters every bedtime, unheeding lengthening legs and arms and minds.

Prue began to laugh, repented and kissed the soft little cheek instead. “I do love you, Jan,” said Prue. There would be no more governesses, and so she would have to learn what she could for herself … and she was so tumbled and torn already with all the great things she meant to do. “You're the same kind of Lovel as Cousin Rod and myself, Prue,” Tiffany had told her once. “Always trying to hitch your wagon to a star and bogging it in a quicksand.”

Yet Tiffany's new quicksand had become for her an exultation. Here was something worth fighting for, suffering for. Brant would not have let her go that night, whatever she had told him. So seldom roused, he had been roused beyond calculation then. But he would have calculated after, felt for ever after that sword which would destroy. So she had chosen to sheathe the sword in her own flesh, to bog her feet in her own quicksand, to live the lie that it had been innocence and not guilt which Sackville had cast away. And what matter if her shirt of Nessus, more scratchy than poor Sophy's jute shirt, was to be her wear for always, so long as this dear man of hers went whole and happy? Tiffany laughed at Nessus, at the sunshine, at the nor'wester blowing her skirts over her head until Roddy (coming to sit on her bed as he had been used to do) inquired if she were writing poetry again.

“Love-songs, eh?” suggested Roddy. “Let me set 'em to music, Tiffy.”

“I have, I think. In my heart. Oh, Roddy, I'm so page 413 happy. I've got something to really fight for now…. I wish you had, dear.”

“Fighting don't suit my features. They were formed entirely for love and dalliance, as many ladies have told me.” Roddy considered Tiffy sitting with arms round her drawn-up knees under the coverlet, her bronze hair ruffled round her glowing face. A good fighter, Tiffy, though what her special fight might be with the excellent (if somewhat solid) Hutton he couldn't guess. Roddy thought that possibly their education explained himself and Tiffy. Both trained that it was a sin to think for themselves, and both knowing that they must do it or perish. So they did it, and Tiffy had nearly perished. Yet here she was plunging in again, shaking the spray from face and hair like a happy diver, ready to swim off again into the unknown which (he suspected) would remain unknown to Hutton.

“Possibly our progenitors were too respectable,” he said. “Look at our pater, cursing England in the best polemics of his day, yet eternally doing his damnedest to create another England out here. Look at Corny Fleete, defying all his English blood and tradition to set up house with a Maori, yet wanting to kill his sons because they wouldn't be English. Neither of 'em can get away from what they were born to … and neither can we. But ours was a very different bearing, my Tiffy.”

“Earth floors,” said Tiffany, “and playing with Maori children round the cooking-trench. Your flute and my little Tane god in the fern-gully. I know.” She sighed a little. Earth sets her stern limits on the body, but we must set our own upon our souls. “We shall never have such good days again, even if there were morning prayers and daily whippings. But we can't always be children, Roddy.”

“I mean to be.” He was smiling now, debonairly gay in the candle-light. “A pity to grow up and father families. Let Jerry and Brant Hutton do that. I am the in-between generation, I think. I shall never cease wanting page 414 to find out what this smug persistent promenade of the generations is for … But I never shall, probably. So….” He crooked his arm as though for a guitar, sang lightly:

Though Wisdom oft has sought me,
I scorned the lore she brought me,
My only books
Were women's looks,
And folly's all they've taught me.

He went on: “Too many women, dead and alive, my Tiffy … bless you all. And perhaps you have the keys to the problem among you. But so few of you will ever guess it.”