Felicity—Stands By Read online

  Title

  Richmal Crompton

  FELICITY—

  STANDS BY

  Contents

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter One

  Felicity Procures a Secretary

  Norma Felicity Montague Harborough (known to her immediate friends as “Pins,” which tradition asserted to have been her earliest attempt at the pronunciation of her own name) leant back in the corner of a third-class railway carriage with a sigh of content. Upon her lips was a smile which would have conveyed only sweetness and innocence to anyone unacquainted with her character. To anyone acquainted with her character it would have conveyed the simple fact that she had successfully brought off some unusually outrageous piece of devilry.

  Felicity had the face that goes with a stained-glass window saint of the Middle Ages. She had a complexion of smooth ivory faintly tinged with rose. Her exquisite lips drooped wistfully at the corners except when they quivered in sudden mischief. Her eyes—of vivid, speedwell blue—held an engaging, childlike candour except when they twinkled demurely behind their fringe of black lashes. Her hair—of a rich red-gold—curled softly about her face and fell in a thick plait down her back.

  At the end of about half an hour’s close observation a very, very careful observer would have come to the conclusion that Felicity was not quite as saintlike as at first sight she looked. Felicity was not. Yet she appreciated to the full and extracted the utmost value from those wistfully drooping lips and clear, candid eyes with which an all-seeing Providence had endowed her.

  Felicity had (within the last hour) left school. She had attained the age of sixteen, and a family conclave consisting of Sir Digby Harborough, her grandfather, Lady Montague, her aunt, and John, her elder brother, had decided that her education had now reached the stage when she might leave school and continue her studies quietly at home with suitable instructors until she came out. Felicity quite approved of the decision that she should leave school. With regard to the quiet study at home she had her own ideas.

  The journey home from school at the end of the term was generally in the nature of solemn ceremonial. Those youthful scions of the British aristocracy whose education was entrusted to Miss Barlow, of Minter House, Eastbourne (the oldest-established institution of its kind in England, where the scholars are supplied with an extensive knowledge of Culture in all its branches and prepared to take their place in Society with a capital S—vide the prospectus passim), were guarded and treasured with a thoroughness worthy of the time of Victoria the Great and Good. Always one of Miss Barlow’s trusted underlings accompanied Felicity to the London terminus and handed her over in person to Lady Montague, that overpoweringly stately and condescending being who was Felicity’s aunt.

  This term Felicity had represented to Miss Barlow that, having left school, she had no need of the “escort” which the prospectus advertised as being provided for every member of the school on the journey to and from Minter House. Miss Barlow waved Felicity’s representation aside with an august and indignant hand. Felicity, nowise daunted, wrote to her aunt to suggest that as she had now left school she should come on home from the London terminus by herself. Felicity’s aunt had merely replied that she was surprised and shocked at Felicity’s suggestion and that she would go to the London terminus as usual to receive Felicity in person from the hands of the Minter House underling. She added that it had never yet been said that a niece of hers had travelled down from London alone. Felicity, inspired solely by an inborn wilfulness and a desire of issuing a declaration of independence, decided that it was time it should be said.

  It was not easy to arrange, but Felicity, when her mind was set on her own purpose, did not grudge time or thought or trouble.

  In the typed notice of the time of her arrival that she was given to enclose in her last letter home Felicity deliberately altered the time of the train to a later one.

  She arrived with the underling at the London terminus. Fate was on Felicity’s side. It was the underling’s last term, as it was Felicity’s. The underling, who was soon to enter the bonds of holy matrimony, was met at the London terminus by a roseate male. Forthwith, to the underling, Felicity ceased to exist. She received Felicity’s demure explanation that “Aunt would be coming a little later and it was all right and please don’t wait,” almost as in a trance, and after pressing Felicity’s hand with her eyes fixed ecstatically on the roseate male’s and saying absently that she’d got her ticket, hadn’t she, she drifted away clinging ecstatically to the arm of the male, whose roseateness glowed to a glorious vermilion at the touch of the underling’s clinging arm.

  Felicity was thrilled to find herself upon the London terminus alone, unchaperoned, unescorted, unguarded. It was a delightful experience. The blue eyes danced, the wistful lips quivered. Felicity felt really and truly grown up at last. It was a gorgeous feeling.

  She was roused from her dream by a respectful porter with a flowing moustache, who had put her luggage on to a truck and now told her it was time to be going to the train. Felicity didn’t want to be bothered with luggage. She scribbled a note on a piece of paper which she found in her bag: “Gone on home by earlier train.—F.,” folded it across, wrote “Lady Montague” on the outside, and handed it to the porter, telling him to give it to a tall stout lady in a large black hat and furs (Lady Montague always wore large black hats and furs, whatever the weather or the time of year), who would come later to claim the luggage and demand Felicity.

  The delivering of messages to ladies in large black hats and furs was not the porter’s work, and to anyone else he would have said so. It was not the half-crown that Felicity gave him from her purse that persuaded him to undertake it. It was the glance that Felicity gave him from her speedwell-blue eyes. Life had already taught Felicity in more crises than one the proper use of speedwell-blue eyes.

  So, though Miss Barlow had provided Felicity with a first-class ticket, Felicity, singing to herself and treading on air, free, unchaperoned, having left school, with all the world before her, and the delicious sensation of defiant lawlessness that her escapade had given her, leapt lightly into a third-class carriage. Third-class carriages, being forbidden ground, were much more exciting than first-class ones.

  The train steamed out of the station. In her mind’s eye was a pleasant vision of Aunt Marcella, dignified but furious, searching the platform for her errant niece and finally receiving the note from the obliging porter with the flowing moustache. Then—then—Felicity’s blue eyes danced and she gave a delicious little gurgle.

  “Nebuchadnezzar in his rage and fury won’t be in it,” she said aloud.

  “I beg your pardon,” said a voice from the other corner of the carriage.

  Felicity turned with a start. She had been so lost in her dreams that she had not heard anyone enter the carriage.

  A young man sat on the seat by the other window. He was neither handsome, nor well dressed, but he had an unmistakable air of breeding. And Felicity decided that though he was ugly it was a nice kind of ugliness. He looked like a rough-haired fox terrier, and Felicity liked rough-haired fox terriers. His eyes were honest and kindly and humorous, and he had a nice smile. Felicity summed people up quickly. Despite her youth no one could be more haughtily chilling than Miss Norma Felicity Montague Harbor
ough when she liked. But the look she turned on the young man was friendly.

  “What did you say?” she said.

  “I thought you spoke to me,” said the young man.

  “No. I was speaking to myself,” said Felicity. “I didn’t know you were there. I said: ‘Nebuchadnezzar in his rage and fury won’t be in it.’ I was thinking about Aunt Marcella.”

  “Oh!” said the young man.

  “You see,” said Felicity, becoming expansive under the influence of her late successful coup and the kindly amused sympathy in the young man’s eyes, “I’ve just entered into another stage. A new chapter of my life opens to-day. I have put away childish things, as Shakespeare says.”

  “Not Shakespeare,” said the young man. “St. Paul.”

  “Well, St. Paul then,” said Felicity impatiently. “I knew it was someone beginning with S.”

  “Paul doesn’t begin with S,” said the young man.

  “No, but Saint does,” said Felicity. “Anyway, that’s why I feel so excited. I’ve done Aunt Marcella in the eye and I’ve begun a fresh chapter in my life all on the same day.”

  “You know, that’s a strange coincidence,” said the young man. “Because I, too, am beginning a new chapter of my life to-day.”

  Felicity looked him up and down.

  “You’re too old to be just leaving school,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve just got a job.”

  “Your first?” said Felicity with interest.

  He laughed.

  “Lord, no! My first was the War. I went to it straight from school. I just got in for the tail end of it. Got off with a gammy leg. I’d meant to go to Cambridge, but— well, I won’t bore you with my life story.”

  “Oh, please go on,” said Felicity, leaning forward, her elbow on her crossed knee, her exquisite little face resting on her hands, her glorious plait over her shoulder. “Please go on. I love hearing the stories of people’s lives.”

  “Well—–.” The young man looked out of the window.

  “You see, my father had been killed in the War, and my mother’s income considerably messed up, also through the War. So Cambridge was out of the question. I took a secretarial training, but”—he gave her his pleasant boyish smile—“there were thousands of men a jolly sight better than I, and without gammy legs, after all the jobs. I gave it up in the end, and got a job on the Gold Coast.”

  “What fun!” said Felicity. “Did you find gold?” He smiled.

  “Far from it. I crocked up and the doctor sent me-home. I’ve been tramping round ever since trying to find someone ass enough to take me on as a secretary.”

  “I think you’d make a very good secretary,” said Felicity, with an air of deep wisdom.

  “Oh, I’m not bad,” said the young man modestly.

  “Anyway,” said Felicity fervently, “I’m so glad you found someone.”

  The young man blushed, and for the first time looked a little confused.

  “Well, I haven’t—exactly,” he said. “I mean—I’ve got a job, but it’s not a secretarial job. It’s—well, it’s a job as a valet, but it’s better than nothing.”

  Felicity again looked him up and down.

  “You’re too good for that,” she said solemnly.

  He laughed and bowed. His slight constraint had disappeared at once.

  “Thank you for those kind words,” he said. Then he went on cheerfully: “It’s a job, anyway, with a real live salary—I mean wages. I’m too bucked for words to get it. You don’t know what it’s like cadging about after jobs day after day, especially when he stopped as though he had said more than he meant.

  “Please go on,” said Felicity earnestly. “Please tell me everything.’’

  He laughed again.

  “You’re too sympathetic,” he said. “You shouldn’t draw people’s life stories from them like this. It’s bad for them. It makes them egotistical.”

  “Do you think I am sympathetic?” said Felicity seriously. “I’d love to know, because now I’ve left school I’ve got to decide what sort of a person to be. I’m torn between the intellectual sort and the sympathetic sort of person. They seldom go together. But it takes so much trouble being intellectual, don’t you think? It’s heaps easier to be sympathetic than it is to be intellectual.”

  The young man was watching her with twinkling eyes.

  “And much nicer,” he said.

  “And more interesting,” said Felicity. “Well, you’d got to ‘especially when—–’ and then you stopped.’’

  “I was going to tell you about my mother.”

  “Do tell me about your mother,” said Felicity.

  “Well—only that I’ve felt the vilest sort of a worm for living on her while I’ve been job hunting. She’s an angel. I could talk all night and never make you understand what an angel she is. You—well, you know what mothers are.”

  “No, I don’t,” said Felicity, and the wistfulness of voice and eyes was real this time. “My mother died when I was born and my father died soon after. I’ve only got Aunt Marcella, who’s more like an ostrich than an aunt, let alone a mother. Marcia was rather nice. She’s my eldest sister. But now she’s married, of course, she’s more or less lost to us. I’ve got another sister, Rosemary, but she tries to boss me, and, of course, I can’t put up with that.”

  “Of course,” agreed the young man gravely.

  “She’s too pretty, too,” said Felicity thoughtfully. “It makes them awfully conceited, you know.”

  “I suppose it does,” said the young man.

  “Then I’ve got a married brother, John, who’s rather stuffy, and an unmarried brother, Ronnie, who’s very nice, and that’s all my family; but do go on about your mother.”

  “Well,” said the young man, “she’s not been well, and you know how you long to get them things when they’re not well—grapes, and flowers, and wine, and nourishing things. It’s been pretty rotten living on her when I ought to be cosseting her up, and when I got this job I nearly danced all the way home. With my first salary—I mean wage—I’m jolly well going to buy her all the ridiculous and extravagant and unnecessary things I can think of. You can understand the feeling, can’t you?”

  “Rather!” breathed Felicity. “Do go on.”

  The train was slowing down at Marleigh. The young man began to collect his bags.

  “I get out at this station,” he said.

  “So do I,” said Felicity.

  “My job’s here,” said the young man. “I’m valet to Sir Digby Harborough, at Bridgeways Hall.”

  “What’s your name?” said Felicity.

  “Franklin,” said the young man.

  She held out her hand.

  “Sir Digby Harborough’s my grandfather, Mr. Franklin,” she said. “I hope that we shall now see a lot of each other, and be real friends.”

  The look of amazement in his face gave place to amusement, and then to the whimsical seriousness with which he had treated most of her statements.

  “We can’t, Miss Harborough,” he said. “You’ll play the game by your grandfather, and so shall I. It wouldn’t be cricket on either of our parts to be friends. But,” he took her hand and grinned at her out of his friendly grey eyes, “you’re a real sport.”

  He helped her down on to the platform. She looked round, and her speedwell-blue eyes twinkled demurely.

  “I shall have to walk,” she said. “There’s nothing to meet me. You see, I gave Aunt Marcella the slip. At this moment she’s probably having all sorts of hysterics on Paddington Station.”

  “Oh, yes—she’s the one to whom Nebuchadnezzar in his rage and fury was nothing?”

  “Yes.”

  “I gather,” he said, “that you’re in for a bad time when she returns.”

  “That all depends,” sai
d Felicity. Then she went on with great dignity: “One must show people that one is no longer a child. Well, we’ll walk to the Hall, Mr. Franklin. Leave your bags to be sent on.”

  “We’ll walk, Miss Harborough,” he said, “but not together. I don’t want to be unsociable, but neither do I want to lose my job.”

  The wistful corners of her pretty mouth hardened into obstinacy.

  “You’ll have to walk,” she said firmly, “and I don’t see how you can possibly prevent my walking with you. When all’s said and done it’s a free country.”

  “All right,” he said; “but I see myself scanning the advert, pages of the Daily Telegraph before another sun has set. You know, I think the walls of Hades must be plastered with the advert, pages of the Daily Telegraph.”

  They had left the station and were swinging along a country lane.

  “I’m a Socialist,” said Felicity suddenly.

  “Since when?”

  “Since I met you.”

  “Oh, you mustn’t let me influence you. I’m not a Socialist myself, but—–”

  “Oh, help!” said Felicity. “Here’s Rosemary.”

  Two riders were coming down the lane, a young man with a weak chin and a small, cherished-looking moustache, and a girl who sat her gleaming chestnut mare superbly.

  Felicity’s prettiness may be described. Not so Rosemary’s. No words could describe the gleam of the golden hair beneath the hard riding hat, the alabaster whiteness of the beautiful proud face, the deep blue of the eyes, the queenly carriage of the shapely head.

  She had reined in her horse.

  ‘‘Hallo, kid!” she called down to Felicity.

  Then she turned to Franklin, looked at him with delicate eyebrows raised in disdainful surprise, seemed about to speak, changed her mind and cantered on with her companion.

  Franklin looked after her. He had gone rather pale. Felicity, who was watching, said suddenly:

  “Don’t fall in love with Rosemary. It’s such a painfully ordinary thing to do. Everyone does it.”

  He gave a short laugh. For the first time something bitter crept into his face as though for the first time he realised fully his position and all it entailed.