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Vera

by Elizabeth Von Arnim · English · Gutenberg #34366 · 452,213 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Vera

Author: Elizabeth Von Arnim


        
Release date: November 18, 2010 [eBook #34366]
                Most recently updated: July 12, 2026

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VERA ***

VERA



BY THE AUTHOR OF "ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN"



MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1921



I


When the doctor had gone, and the two women from the village he had been
waiting for were upstairs shut in with her dead father, Lucy went out
into the garden and stood leaning on the gate staring at the sea.

Her father had died at nine o'clock that morning, and it was now twelve.
The sun beat on her bare head; and the burnt-up grass along the top of
the cliff, and the dusty road that passed the gate, and the glittering
sea, and the few white clouds hanging in the sky, all blazed and glared
in an extremity of silent, motionless heat and light.

Into this emptiness Lucy stared, motionless herself, as if she had been
carved in stone. There was not a sail on the sea, nor a line of distant
smoke from any steamer, neither was there once the flash of a bird's
wing brushing across the sky. Movement seemed smitten rigid. Sound
seemed to have gone to sleep.

Lucy stood staring at the sea, her face as empty of expression as the
bright blank world before her. Her father had been dead three hours, and
she felt nothing.

It was just a week since they had arrived in Cornwall, she and he, full
of hope, full of pleasure in the pretty little furnished house they had
taken for August and September, full of confidence in the good the pure
air was going to do him. But there had always been confidence; there
had never been a moment during the long years of his fragility when
confidence had even been questioned. He was delicate, and she had taken
care of him. She had taken care of him and he had been delicate ever
since she could remember. And ever since she could remember he had been
everything in life to her. She had had no thought since she grew up for
anybody but her father. There was no room for any other thought, so
completely did he fill her heart. They had done everything together,
shared everything together, dodged the winters together, settled in
charming places, seen the same beautiful things, read the same books,
talked, laughed, had friends,--heaps of friends; wherever they were her
father seemed at once to have friends, adding them to the mass he had
already. She had not been away from him a day for years; she had had no
wish to go away. Where and with whom could she be so happy as with him?
All the years were years of sunshine. There had been no winters; nothing
but summer, summer, and sweet scents and soft skies, and patient
understanding with her slowness--for he had the nimblest mind--and love.
He was the most amusing companion to her, the most generous friend, the
most illuminating guide, the most adoring father; and now he was dead,
and she felt nothing.

Her father. Dead. For ever.

She said the words over to herself. They meant nothing.

She was going to be alone. Without him. Always.

She said the words over to herself. They meant nothing.

Up in that room with its windows wide open, shut away from her with the
two village women, he was lying dead. He had smiled at her for the last
time, said all he was ever going to say to her, called her the last of
the sweet, half-teasing names he loved to invent for her. Why, only a
few hours ago they were having breakfast together and planning what they
would do that day. Why, only yesterday they drove together after tea
towards the sunset, and he had seen, with his quick eyes that saw
everything, some unusual grasses by the road-side, and had stopped and
gathered them, excited to find such rare ones, and had taken them back
with him to study, and had explained them to her and made her see
profoundly interesting, important things in them, in these grasses
which, till he touched them, had seemed just grasses. That is what he
did with everything,--touched it into life and delight. The grasses lay
in the dining-room now, waiting for him to work on them, spread out
where he had put them on some blotting-paper in the window. She had seen
them as she came through on her way to the garden; and she had seen,
too, that the breakfast was still there, the breakfast they had had
together, still as they had left it, forgotten by the servants in the
surprise of death. He had fallen down as he got up from it. Dead. In an
instant. No time for anything, for a cry, for a look. Gone. Finished.
Wiped out.

What a beautiful day it was; and so hot. He loved heat. They were lucky
in the weather....

Yes, there were sounds after all,--she suddenly noticed them; sounds
from the room upstairs, a busy moving about of discreet footsteps, the
splash of water, crockery being carefully set down. Presently the women
would come and tell her everything was ready, and she could go back to
him again. The women had tried to comfort her when they arrived; and so
had the servants, and so had the doctor. Comfort her! And she felt
nothing.

Lucy stared at the sea, thinking these things, examining the situation
as a curious one but unconnected with herself, looking at it with a kind
of cold comprehension. Her mind was quite clear. Every detail of what
had happened was sharply before her. She knew everything, and she felt
nothing,--like God, she said to herself; yes, exactly like God.

Footsteps came along the road, which was hidden by the garden's fringe
of trees and bushes for fifty yards on either side of the gate, and
presently a man passed between her eyes and the sea. She did not notice
him, for she was noticing nothing but her thoughts, and he passed in
front of her quite close, and was gone.

But he had seen her, and had stared hard at her for the brief instant it
took to pass the gate. Her face and its expression had surprised him.
He was not a very observant man, and at that moment was even less so
than usual, for he was particularly and deeply absorbed in his own
affairs; yet when he came suddenly on the motionless figure at the gate,
with its wide-open eyes that simply looked through him as he went by,
unconscious, obviously, that any one was going by, his attention was
surprised away from himself and almost he had stopped to examine the
strange creature more closely. His code, however, prevented that, and he
continued along the further fifty yards of bushes and trees that hid the
other half of the garden from the road, but more slowly, slower and
slower, till at the end of the garden where the road left it behind and
went on very solitarily over the bare grass on the top of the cliffs,
winding in and out with the ins and outs of the coast for as far as one
could see, he hesitated, looked back, went on a yard or two, hesitated
again, stopped and took off his hot hat and wiped his forehead, looked
at the bare country and the long twisting glare of the road ahead, and
then very slowly turned and went past the belt of bushes towards the
gate again.

He said to himself as he went: 'My God, I'm so lonely. I can't stand it.
I must speak to some one. I shall go off my head----'

For what had happened to this man--his name was Wemyss--was that public
opinion was forcing him into retirement and inactivity at the very time
when he most needed company and distraction. He had to go away by
himself, he had to withdraw for at the very least a week from his
ordinary life, from his house on the river where he had just begun his
summer holiday, from his house in London where at least there were his
clubs, because of this determination on the part of public opinion that
he should for a space be alone with his sorrow. Alone with sorrow,--of
all ghastly things for a man to be alone with! It was an outrage, he
felt, to condemn a man to that; it was the cruellest form of solitary
confinement. He had come to Cornwall because it took a long time to get
to, a whole day in the train there and a whole day in the train back,
clipping the week, the minimum of time public opinion insisted on for
respecting his bereavement, at both ends; but still that left five days
of awful loneliness, of wandering about the cliffs by himself trying not
to think, without a soul to speak to, without a thing to do. He couldn't
play bridge because of public opinion. Everybody knew what had happened
to him. It had been in all the papers. The moment he said his name they
would know. It was so recent. Only last week....

No, he couldn't bear this, he must speak to some one. That girl,--with
those strange eyes she wasn't just ordinary. She wouldn't mind letting
him talk to her for a little, perhaps sit in the garden with her a
little. She would understand.

Wemyss was like a child in his misery. He very nearly cried outright
when he got to the gate and took off his hat, and the girl looked at him
blankly just as if she still didn't see him and hadn't heard him when he
said, 'Could you let me have a glass of water? I--it's so hot----'

He began to stammer because of her eyes. 'I--I'm horribly thirsty--the
heat----'

He pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead. He certainly
looked very hot. His face was red and distressed, and his forehead
dripped. He was all puckered, like an unhappy baby. And the girl looked
so cool, so bloodlessly cool. Her hands, folded on the top bar of the
gate, looked more than cool, they looked cold; like hands in winter,
shrunk and small with cold. She had bobbed hair, he noticed, so that it
was impossible to tell how old she was, brown hair from which the sun
was beating out bright lights; and her small face had no colour except
those wide eyes fixed on his and the colour of her rather big mouth; but
even her mouth seemed frozen.

'Would it be much bother----' began Wemyss again; and then his situation
overwhelmed him.

'You would be doing a greater kindness than you know,' he said, his
voice trembling with unhappiness, 'if you would let me come into the
garden a minute and rest.'

At the sound of the genuine wretchedness in his voice Lucy's blank eyes
became a little human. It got through to her consciousness that this
distressed warm stranger was appealing to her for something.

'Are you so hot?' she asked, really seeing him for the first time.

'Yes, I'm hot,' said Wemyss. 'But it isn't that. I've had a
misfortune--a terrible misfortune----'

He paused, overcome by the remembrance of it, by the unfairness of so
much horror having overtaken him.

'Oh, I'm sorry,' said Lucy vaguely, still miles away from him, deep in
indifference. 'Have you lost anything?'

'Good God, not that sort of misfortune!' cried Wemyss. 'Let me come in a
minute--into the garden a minute--just to sit a minute with a human
being. You would be doing a great kindness. Because you're a stranger I
can talk to you about it if you'll let me. Just because we're strangers
I could talk. I haven't spoken to a soul but servants and official
people since--since it happened. For two days I haven't spoken at all to
a living soul--I shall go mad----'

His voice shook again with his unhappiness, with his astonishment at his
unhappiness.

Lucy didn't think two days very long not to speak to anybody in, but
there was something overwhelming about the strange man's evident
affliction that roused her out of her apathy; not much,--she was still
profoundly detached, observing from another world, as it were, this
extreme heat and agitation, but at least she saw him now, she did with a
faint curiosity consider him. He was like some elemental force in his
directness. He had the quality of an irresistible natural phenomenon.
But she did not move from her position at the gate, and her eyes
continued, with the unwaveringness he thought so odd, to stare into his.

'I would gladly have let you come in,' she said, 'if you had come
yesterday, but to-day my father died.'

Wemyss looked at her in astonishment. She had said it in as level and
ordinary a voice as if she had been remarking, rather indifferently, on
the weather.

Then he had a moment of insight. His own calamity had illuminated him.
He who had never known pain, who had never let himself be worried, who
had never let himself be approached in his life by a doubt, had for the
last week lived in an atmosphere of worry and pain, and of what, if he
allowed himself to think, to become morbid, might well grow into a most
unfair, tormenting doubt. He understood, as he would not have understood
a week ago, what her whole attitude, her rigidity meant. He stared at
her a moment while she stared straight back at him, and then his big
warm hands dropped on to the cold ones folded on the top bar of the
gate, and he said, holding them firmly though they made no attempt to
move, 'So that's it. So that's why. Now I know.'

And then he added, with the simplicity his own situation was putting
into everything he did, 'That settles it. We two stricken ones must talk
together.'

And still covering her hands with one of his, with the other he
unlatched the gate and walked in.




II


There was a seat under a mulberry tree on the little lawn, with its back
to the house and the gaping windows, and Wemyss, spying it out, led Lucy
to it as if she were a child, holding her by the hand.

She went with him indifferently. What did it matter whether she sat
under the mulberry tree or stood at the gate? This convulsed
stranger--was he real? Was anything real? Let him tell her whatever it
was he wanted to tell her, and she would listen, and get him his glass
of water, and then he would go his way and by that time the women would
have finished upstairs and she could be with her father again.

'I'll fetch the water,' she said when they got to the seat.

'No. Sit down,' said Wemyss.

She sat down. So did he, letting her hand go. It dropped on the seat,
palm upwards, between them.

'It's strange our coming across each other like this,' he said, looking
at her while she looked indifferently straight in front of her at the
sun on the grass beyond the shade of the mulberry tree, at a mass of
huge fuchsia bushes a little way off. 'I've been going through hell--and
so must you have been. Good God, what hell! Do you mind if I tell you?
You'll understand because of your own----'

Lucy didn't mind. She didn't mind anything. She merely vaguely wondered
that he should think she had been going through hell. Hell and her
darling father; how quaint it sounded. She began to suspect that she was
asleep. All this wasn't really happening. Her father wasn't dead.
Presently the housemaid would come in with the hot water and wake her to
the usual cheerful day. The man sitting beside her,--he seemed rather
vivid for a dream, it was true; so detailed, with his flushed face and
the perspiration on his forehead, besides the feel of his big warm hand
a moment ago and the small puffs of heat that came from his clothes when
he moved. But it was so unlikely ... everything that had happened since
breakfast was so _unlikely_. This man, too, would resolve himself soon
into just something she had had for dinner last night, and she would
tell her father about her dream at breakfast, and they would laugh.

She stirred uneasily. It wasn't a dream. It was real.

'The story is unbelievably horrible,' Wemyss was saying in a high
aggrievement, looking at her little head with the straight cut hair, and
her grave profile. How old was she? Eighteen? Twenty-eight? Impossible
to tell exactly with hair cut like that, but young anyhow compared to
him; very young perhaps compared to him who was well over forty, and so
much scarred, so deeply scarred, by this terrible thing that had
happened to him.

'It's so horrible that I wouldn't talk about it if you were going to
mind,' he went on, 'but you can't mind because you're a stranger, and it
may help you with your own trouble, because whatever you may suffer I'm
suffering much worse, so then you'll see yours isn't so bad. And besides
I must talk to some one I should go mad----'

This was certainly a dream, thought Lucy. Things didn't happen like this
when one was awake,--grotesque things.

She turned her head and looked at him. No, it wasn't a dream. No dream
could be so solid as the man beside her. What was he saying?

He was saying in a tormented voice that he was Wemyss.

'You are Wemyss,' she repeated gravely.

It made no impression on her. She didn't mind his being Wemyss.

'I'm the Wemyss the newspapers were full of last week,' he said, seeing
that the name left her unmoved. 'My God,' he went on, again wiping his
forehead, but as fast as he wiped it more beads burst out, 'those
posters to see one's own name staring at one everywhere on posters!'

'Why was your name on posters?' said Lucy.

She didn't want to know; she asked mechanically, her ear attentive only
to the sounds from the open windows of the room upstairs.

'Don't you read newspapers here?' was his answer.

'I don't think we do,' she said, listening. 'We've been settling in. I
don't think we've remembered to order any newspapers yet.'

A look of some, at any rate, relief from the pressure he was evidently
struggling under came into Wemyss's face. 'Then I can tell you the real
version,' he said, 'without you're being already filled up with the
monstrous suggestions that were made at the inquest. As though I hadn't
suffered enough as it was! As though it hadn't been terrible enough
already----'

'The inquest?' repeated Lucy.

Again she turned her head and looked at him. 'Has your trouble anything
to do with death?'

'Why, you don't suppose anything else would reduce me to the state I'm
in?'

'Oh, I'm sorry,' she said; and into her eyes and into her voice came a
different expression, something living, something gentle. 'I hope it
wasn't anybody you--loved?'

'It was my wife,' said Wemyss.

He got up quickly, so near was he to crying at the thought of it, at the
thought of all he had endured, and turned his back on her and began
stripping the leaves off the branches above his head.

Lucy watched him, leaning forward a little on both hands. 'Tell me about
it,' she said presently, very gently.

He came back and dropped down heavily beside her again, and with many
interjections of astonishment that such a ghastly calamity could have
happened to him, to him who till now had never----

'Yes,' said Lucy, comprehendingly and gravely, 'yes--I know----'

--had never had anything to do with--well, with calamities, he told her
the story.

They had gone down, he and his wife, as they did every 25th of July, for
the summer to their house on the river, and he had been looking forward
to a glorious time of peaceful doing nothing after months of London,
just lying about in a punt and reading and smoking and resting--London
was an awful place for tiring one out--and they hadn't been there
twenty-four hours before his wife--before his wife----

The remembrance of it was too grievous to him. He couldn't go on.

'Was she--very ill?' asked Lucy gently, to give him time to recover. 'I
think that would almost be better. One would be a little at least one
would be a little prepared----'

'She wasn't ill at all,' cried Wemyss. 'She just--died.'

'Oh like father!' exclaimed Lucy, roused now altogether. It was she now
who laid her hand on his.

Wemyss seized it between both his, and went on quickly.

He was writing letters, he said, in the library at his table in the
window where he could see the terrace and the garden and the river; they
had had tea together only an hour before; there was a flagged terrace
along that side of the house, the side the library was on and all the
principal rooms; and all of a sudden there was a great flash of shadow
between him and the light; come and gone instantaneously; and
instantaneously then there was a thud; he would never forget it, that
thud; and there outside his window on the flags----

'Oh don't--oh don't----' gasped Lucy.

'It was my wife,' Wemyss hurried on, not able now to stop, looking at
Lucy while he talked with eyes of amazed horror. 'Fallen out of the top
room of the house her sitting-room because of the view--it was in a
straight line with the library window--she dropped past my window like a
stone--she was smashed--smashed----'

'Oh, don't--oh----'

'Now can you wonder at the state I'm in?' he cried. 'Can you wonder if
I'm nearly off my head? And forced to be by myself--forced into
retirement for what the world considers a proper period of mourning,
with nothing to think of but that ghastly inquest.'

He hurt her hand, he gripped it so hard.

'If you hadn't let me come and talk to you,' he said, 'I believe I'd
have pitched myself over the cliff there this afternoon and made an end
of it.'

'But how--but why--how could she fall?' whispered Lucy, to whom poor
Wemyss's misfortune seemed more frightful than anything she had ever
heard of.

She hung on his words, her eyes on his face, her lips parted, her whole
body an agony of sympathy. Life--how terrible it was, and how
unsuspected. One went on and on, never dreaming of the sudden dreadful
day when the coverings were going to be dropped and one would see it was
death after all, that it had been death all the time, death pretending,
death waiting. Her father, so full of love and interests and
plans,--gone, finished, brushed away as if he no more mattered than some
insect one unseeingly treads on as one walks; and this man's wife, dead
in an instant, dead so far more cruelly, so horribly....

'I had often told her to be careful of that window,' Wemyss answered in
a voice that almost sounded like anger; but all the time his tone had
been one of high anger at the wanton, outrageous cruelty of fate. 'It
was a very low one, and the floor was slippery. Oak. Every floor in my
house is polished oak. I had them put in myself. She must have been
leaning out and her feet slipped away behind her. That would make her
fall head foremost----'

'Oh--oh----' said Lucy, shrinking. What could she do, what could she say
to help him, to soften at least these dreadful memories?

'And then,' Wemyss went on after a moment, as unaware as Lucy was that
she was tremblingly stroking his hand, 'at the inquest, as though it
hadn't all been awful enough for me already, the jury must actually get
wrangling about the cause of death.'

'The cause of death?' echoed Lucy. 'But--she fell.'

'Whether it were an accident or done on purpose.'

'Done on----?'

'Suicide.'

'Oh----'

She drew in her breath quickly.

'But--it wasn't?'

'How could it be? She was my wife, without a care in the world,
everything done for her, no troubles, nothing on her mind, nothing wrong
with her health. We had been married fifteen years, and I was devoted to
her--devoted to her.'

He banged his knee with his free hand. His voice was full of indignant
tears.

'Then why did the jury----'

'My wife had a fool of a maid--I never could stand that woman--and it
was something she said at the inquest, some invention or other about
what my wife had said to her. You know what servants are. It upset
some of the jury. You know juries are made up of anybody and
everybody--butcher, baker, and candle-stick-maker--quite uneducated most
of them, quite at the mercy of any suggestion. And so instead of a
verdict of death by misadventure, which would have been the right one,
it was an open verdict.'

'Oh, how terrible--how terrible for you,' breathed Lucy, her eyes on
his, her mouth twitching with sympathy.

'You'd have seen all about it if you had read the papers last week,'
said Wemyss, more quietly. It had done him good to get it out and talked
over.

He looked down at her upturned face with its horror-stricken eyes and
twitching mouth. 'Now tell me about yourself,' he said, touched with
compunction; nothing that had happened to her could be so horrible as
what had happened to him, still she too was newly smitten, they had met
on a common ground of disaster, Death himself had been their introducer.

'Is life all--only death?' she breathed, her horror-stricken eyes on
his.

Before he could answer--and what was there to answer to such a question
except that of course it wasn't, and he and she were just victims of a
monstrous special unfairness,--he certainly was; her father had probably
died as fathers did, in the usual way in his bed--before he could
answer, the two women came out of the house, and with small discreet
steps proceeded down the path to the gate. The sun flooded their spare
figures and their decent black clothes, clothes kept for these occasions
as a mark of respectful sympathy.

One of them saw Lucy under the mulberry tree and hesitated, and then
came across the grass to her with the mincing steps of tact.

'Here's somebody coming to speak to you,' said Wemyss, for Lucy was
sitting with her back to the path.

She started and looked round.

The woman approached hesitatingly, her head on one side, her hands
folded, her face pulled into a little smile intended to convey
encouragement and pity.

'The gentleman's quite ready, miss,' she said softly.




III


All that day and all the next day Wemyss was Lucy's tower of strength
and rock of refuge. He did everything that had to be done of the
business part of death--that extra wantonness of misery thrown in so
grimly to finish off the crushing of a mourner who is alone. It is true
the doctor was kind and ready to help, but he was a complete stranger;
she had never seen him till he was fetched that dreadful morning; and he
had other things to see to besides her affairs,--his own patients,
scattered widely over a lonely countryside. Wemyss had nothing to see
to. He could concentrate entirely on Lucy. And he was her friend, linked
to her so strangely and so strongly by death. She felt she had known him
for ever. She felt that since the beginning of time she and he had been
advancing hand in hand towards just this place, towards just this house
and garden, towards just this year, this August, this moment of
existence.

Wemyss dropped quite naturally into the place a near male relative would
have been in if there had been a near male relative within reach; and
his relief at having something to do, something practical and immediate,
was so immense that never were funeral arrangements made with greater
zeal and energy,--really one might almost say with greater gusto. Fresh
from the horrors of those other funeral arrangements, clouded as
they had been by the silences of friends and the averted looks of
neighbours--all owing to the idiotic jurors and their hesitations, and
the vindictiveness of that woman because, he concluded, he had refused
to raise her wages the previous month--what he was arranging now was so
simple and straightforward that it positively was a pleasure. There were
no anxieties, there were no worries, and there was a grateful little
girl. After each fruitful visit to the undertaker, and he paid several
in his zeal, he came back to Lucy and she was grateful; and she was not
only grateful, but very obviously glad to get him back.

He saw she didn't like it when he went away, off along the top of the
cliff on his various business visits, purpose in each step, a different
being from the indignantly miserable person who had dragged about that
very cliff killing time such a little while before; he could see she
didn't like it. She knew he had to go, she was grateful and immensely
expressive of her gratitude--Wemyss thought he had never met any one so
expressively grateful--that he should so diligently go, but she didn't
like it. He saw she didn't like it; he saw that she clung to him; and it
pleased him.

'Don't be long,' she murmured each time, looking at him with eyes of
entreaty; and when he got back, and stood before her again mopping his
forehead, having triumphantly advanced the funeral arrangements another
stage, a faint colour came into her face and she had the relieved eyes
of a child who has been left alone in the dark and sees its mother
coming in with a candle. Vera usedn't to look like that. Vera had
accepted everything he did for her as a matter of course.

Naturally he wasn't going to let the poor little girl sleep alone in
that house with a dead body, and the strange servants who had been hired
together with the house and knew nothing either about her or her father
probably getting restive as night drew on, and as likely as not bolting
to the village; so he fetched his things from the primitive hotel down
in the cove about seven o'clock and announced his intention of sleeping
on the drawing-room sofa. He had lunched with her, and had had tea with
her, and now was going to dine with her. What she would have done
without him Wemyss couldn't think.

He felt he was being delicate and tactful in this about the drawing-room
sofa. He might fairly have claimed the spare-room bed; but he wasn't
going to take any advantage, not the smallest, of the poor little girl's
situation. The servants, who supposed him to be a relation and had
supposed him to be that from the first moment they saw him, big and
middle-aged, holding the young lady's hand under the mulberry tree,
were surprised at having to make up a bed in the drawing-room when there
were two spare-rooms with beds already in them upstairs, but did so
obediently, vaguely imagining it had something to do with watchfulness
and French windows; and Lucy, when he told her he was going to stay
the night, was so grateful, so really thankful, that her eyes, red
from the waves of grief that had engulfed her at intervals during the
afternoon--ever since, that is, the sight of her dead father lying
so remote from her, so wrapped, it seemed, in a deep, absorbed
attentiveness, had unfrozen her and swept her away into a sea of
passionate weeping--filled again with tears.

'Oh,' she murmured, 'how _good_ you are----'

It was Wemyss who had done all the thinking for her, and in the spare
moments between his visits to the undertaker about the arrangements, and
to the doctor about the certificate, and to the vicar about the burial,
had telegraphed to her only existing relative, an aunt, had sent the
obituary notice to _The Times_, and had even reminded her that she had
on a blue frock and asked if she hadn't better put on a black one; and
now this last instance of his thoughtfulness overwhelmed her.

She had been dreading the night, hardly daring to think of it so much
did she dread it; and each time he had gone away on his errands, through
her heart crept the thought of what it would be like when dusk came and
he went away for the last time and she would be alone, all alone in the
silent house, and upstairs that strange, wonderful, absorbed thing that
used to be her father, and whatever happened to her, whatever awful
horror overcame her in the night, whatever danger, he wouldn't hear, he
wouldn't know, he would still lie there content, content....

'How _good_ you are!' she said to Wemyss, her red eyes filling. 'What
would I have done without you?'

'But what would I have done without _you_?' he answered; and they stared
at each other, astonished at the nature of the bond between them, at its
closeness, at the way it seemed almost miraculously to have been
arranged that they should meet on the crest of despair and save each
other.

Till long after the stars were out they sat together on the edge of the
cliff, Wemyss smoking while he talked, in a voice subdued by the night
and the silence and the occasion, of his life and of the regular healthy
calm with which it had proceeded till a week ago. Why this calm should
have been interrupted, and so cruelly, he couldn't imagine. It wasn't as
if he had deserved it. He didn't know that a man could ever be justified
in saying he had done good, but he, Wemyss, could at least fairly say
that he hadn't done any one any harm.

'Oh, but you have done good,' said Lucy, her voice, too, dropped into
more than ordinary gentleness by the night, the silence, and the
occasion; besides which it vibrated with feeling, it was lovely with
seriousness, with simple conviction. 'Always, always I know that you've
been doing good,' she said, 'being kind. I can't imagine you anything
else but a help to people and a comfort.'

And Wemyss said, Well, he had done his best and tried, and no man could
say more, but judging from what--well, what people had said to him, it
hadn't been much of a success sometimes, and often and often he had been
hurt, deeply hurt, by being misunderstood.

And Lucy said, How was it possible to misunderstand him, to
misunderstand any one so transparently good, so evidently kind?

And Wemyss said, Yes, one would think he was easy enough to understand;
he was a very natural, simple sort of person, who had only all his life
asked for peace and quiet. It wasn't much to ask. Vera----

'Who is Vera?' asked Lucy.

'My wife.'

'Ah, don't,' said Lucy earnestly, taking his hand very gently in hers.
'Don't talk of that to-night please don't let yourself think of it. If I
could only, only find the words that would comfort you----'

And Wemyss said that she didn't need words, that just her being there,
being with him, letting him help her, and her not having been mixed up
with anything before in his life, was enough.

'Aren't we like two children,' he said, his voice, like hers, deepened
by feeling, 'two scared, unhappy children, clinging to each other alone
in the dark.'

So they talked on in subdued voices as people do who are in some holy
place, sitting close together, looking out at the starlit sea, darkness
and coolness gathering round them, and the grass smelling sweetly after
the hot day, and the little waves, such a long way down, lapping lazily
along the shingle, till Wemyss said it must be long past bedtime, and
she, poor girl, must badly need rest.

'How old are you?' he asked suddenly, turning to her and scrutinising
the delicate faint outline of her face against the night.

'Twenty-two,' said Lucy.

'You might just as easily be twelve,' he said, 'except for the sorts of
things you say.'

'It's my hair,' said Lucy. 'My father liked--he liked----'

'Don't,' said Wemyss, in his turn taking her hand. 'Don't cry again.
Don't cry any more to-night. Come--we'll go in. It's time you were in
bed.'

And he helped her up, and when they got into the light of the hall he
saw that she had, this time, successfully strangled her tears.

'Good-night,' she said, when he had lit her candle for her, 'good-night,
and--God bless you.'

'God bless _you_' said Wemyss solemnly, holding her hand in his great
warm grip.

'He has,' said Lucy. 'Indeed He has already, in sending me you.' And she
smiled up at him.

For the first time since he had known her--and he too had the feeling
that he had known her ever since he could remember--he saw her smile,
and the difference it made to her marred, stained face surprised him.

'Do that again,' he said, staring at her, still holding her hand.

'Do what?' asked Lucy.

'Smile,' said Wemyss.

Then she laughed; but the sound of it in the silent, brooding house was
shocking.

'_Oh_,' she gasped, stopping short, hanging her head appalled by what it
had sounded like.

'Remember you're to go to sleep and not think of anything,' Wemyss
ordered as she went slowly upstairs.

And she did fall asleep at once, exhausted but protected, like some
desolate baby that had cried itself sick and now had found its mother.




IV


All this, however, came to an end next day when towards evening Miss
Entwhistle, Lucy's aunt, arrived.

Wemyss retired to his hotel again and did not reappear till next
morning, giving Lucy time to explain him; but either the aunt was
inattentive, as she well might be under the circumstances in which she
found herself so suddenly, so lamentably placed, or Lucy's explanations
were vague, for Miss Entwhistle took Wemyss for a friend of her dear
Jim's, one of her dear, dear brother's many friends, and accepted his
services as natural and himself with emotion, warmth, and reminiscences.

Wemyss immediately became her rock as well as Lucy's, and she in her
turn clung to him. Where he had been clung to by one he was now clung to
by two, which put an end to talk alone with Lucy. He did not see Lucy
alone again once before the funeral, but at least, owing to Miss
Entwhistle's inability to do without him, he didn't have to spend any
more solitary hours. Except breakfast, he had all his meals up in the
little house on the cliff, and in the evenings smoked his pipe under the
mulberry tree till bedtime sent him away, while Miss Entwhistle in the
darkness gently and solemnly reminisced, and Lucy sat silent, as close
to him as she could get.

The funeral was hurried on by the doctor's advice, but even so the short
notice and the long distance did not prevent James Entwhistle's friends
from coming to it. The small church down in the cove was packed; the
small hotel bulged with concerned, grave-faced people. Wemyss, who had
done everything and been everything, disappeared in this crowd. Nobody
noticed him. None of James Entwhistle's friends happened--luckily, he
felt, with last week's newspapers still fresh in the public mind--to be
his. For twenty-four hours he was swept entirely away from Lucy by this
surge of mourners, and at the service in the church could only catch a
distant glimpse, from his seat by the door, of her bowed head in the
front pew.

He felt very lonely again. He wouldn't have stayed in the church a
minute, for he objected with a healthy impatience to the ceremonies of
death, if it hadn't been that he regarded himself as the stage-manager,
so to speak, of these particular ceremonies, and that it was in a
peculiarly intimate sense his funeral. He took a pride in it.
Considering the shortness of the time it really was a remarkable
achievement, the way he had done it, the smooth way the whole thing was
going. But to-morrow,--what would happen to-morrow, when all these
people had gone away again? Would they take Lucy and the aunt with them?
Would the house up there be shut, and he, Wemyss, left alone again with
his bitter, miserable recollections? He wouldn't, of course, stay on in
that place if Lucy were to go, but wherever he went there would be
emptiness without her, without her gratefulness, and gentleness, and
clinging. Comforting and being comforted,--that is what he and she had
been doing to each other for four days, and he couldn't but believe she
would feel the same emptiness without him that he knew he was going to
feel without her.

In the dark under the mulberry tree, while her aunt talked softly and
sadly of the past, Wemyss had sometimes laid his hand on Lucy's, and she
had never taken hers away. They had sat there, content and comforted to
be hand in hand. She had the trust in him, he felt, of a child; the
confidence, and the knowledge that she was safe. He was proud and
touched to know it, and it warmed him through and through to see how her
face lit up whenever he appeared. Vera's face hadn't done that. Vera had
never understood him, not with fifteen years to do it in, as this girl
had in half a day. And the way Vera had died,--it was no use mincing
matters when it came to one's own thoughts, and it had been all of a
piece with her life: the disregard for others and of anything said to
her for her own good, the determination to do what suited her, to lean
out of dangerous windows if she wished to, for instance, not to take the
least trouble, the least thought.... Imagine bringing such horror on
him, such unforgettable horror, besides worries and unhappiness without
end, by deliberately disregarding his warnings, his orders indeed,
about that window. Wemyss did feel that if one looked at the thing
dispassionately it would be difficult to find indifference to the wishes
and feelings of others going further.

Sitting in the church during the funeral service, his arms folded on his
chest and his mouth grim with these thoughts, he suddenly caught sight
of Lucy's face. The priest was coming down the aisle in front of the
coffin on the way out to the grave, and Lucy and her aunt were following
first behind it.

_Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full
of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it
were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay...._

The priest's sad, disillusioned voice recited the beautiful words as he
walked, the afternoon sun from the west window and the open west door
pouring on his face and on the faces of the procession that seemed all
black and white,--black clothes, white faces.

The whitest face was Lucy's, and when Wemyss saw the look on it his
mouth relaxed and his heart went soft within him, and he came
impulsively out of the shadow and joined her, boldly walking on her
other side at the head of the procession, and standing beside her at the
grave; and at the awful moment when the first earth was dropped on to
the coffin he drew her hand, before everybody, through his arm and held
it there tight.

Nobody was surprised at his standing there with her like that. It was
taken quite for granted. He was evidently a relation of poor Jim's. Nor
was anybody surprised when Wemyss, not letting her go again, took her
home up the cliff, her arm in his just as though he were the chief
mourner, the aunt following with some one else.

He didn't speak to her or disturb her with any claims on her attention,
partly because the path was very steep and he wasn't used to cliffs, but
also because of his feeling that he and she, isolated together by their
sorrows, understood without any words. And when they reached the house,
the first to reach it from the church just as if, he couldn't help
thinking, they were coming back from their wedding, he told her in his
firmest voice to go straight up to her room and lie down, and she obeyed
with the sweet obedience of perfect trust.

'Who is that?' asked the man who was helping Miss Entwhistle up the
cliff.

'Oh, a _very_ old friend of darling Jim's,' she sobbed,--she had been
sobbing without stopping from the first words of the burial service, and
was quite unable to leave off. 'Mr.--Mr.--We--We--Wemyss----'

'Wemyss? I don't remember coming across him with Jim.'

'Oh, one of his--his _oldest_--f--fr--friends,' sobbed poor Miss
Entwhistle, got completely out of control.

Wemyss, continuing in his rôle of chief mourner, was the only person who
was asked to spend the evening up at the bereaved house.

'I don't wonder,' said Miss Entwhistle to him at dinner, still with
tears in her voice, 'at my dear brother's devotion to you. You have been
the greatest help, the greatest comfort----'

And neither Wemyss nor Lucy felt equal to explanation.

What did it matter? Lucy, fatigued by emotions, her mind bruised by the
violent demands that had been made on it the last four days, sat
drooping at the table, and merely thought that if her father had known
Wemyss it would certainly have been true that he was devoted to him. He
hadn't known him; he had missed him by--yes, by just three hours; and
this wonderful friend of hers was the very first good thing that she and
her father hadn't shared. And Wemyss's attitude was simply that if
people insist on jumping at conclusions, why, let them. He couldn't
anyhow begin to expound himself in the middle of a meal, with a
parlourmaid handing dishes round and listening.

But there was an awkward little moment when Miss Entwhistle tearfully
wondered--she was eating blanc-mange, the last of a series of cold and
pallid dishes with which the imaginative cook, a woman of Celtic origin,
had expressed her respectful appreciation of the occasion--whether when
the will was read it wouldn't be found that Jim had appointed Mr. Wemyss
poor Lucy's guardian.

'I am--dear me, how very hard it is to remember to say I was--my dear
brother's only relative. We belong--belonged--to an exiguous family, and
naturally I'm no longer as young as I was. There is only--was only--a
year between Jim and me, and at any moment I may be----'

Here Miss Entwhistle was interrupted by a sob, and had to put down her
spoon.

'--taken,' she finished after a moment, during which the other two sat
silent.

'When this happens,' she went on presently, a little recovered, 'poor
Lucy will be without any one, unless Jim thought of this and has
appointed a guardian. You, Mr. Wemyss, I hope and expect.'

Neither Lucy nor Wemyss spoke. There was the parlourmaid hovering, and
one couldn't anyhow go into explanations now which ought to have been
made four days ago.

A dead-white cheese was handed round,--something local probably, for it
wasn't any form of cheese with which Wemyss was acquainted, and the meal
ended with cups of intensely black cold coffee. And all these carefully
thought-out expressions of the cook's sympathy were lost on the three,
who noticed nothing; certainly they noticed nothing in the way the cook
had intended. Wemyss was privately a little put out by the coffee being
cold. He had eaten all the other clammy things patiently, but a man
likes his after-dinner coffee hot, and it was new in his experience to
have it served cold. He did notice this, and was surprised that neither
of his companions appeared to. But there,--women were notoriously
insensitive to food; on this point the best of them were unintelligent,
and the worst of them were impossible. Vera had been awful about it; he
had had to do all the ordering of the meals himself at last, and also
the engaging of the cooks.

He got up from the table to open the door for the ladies feeling
inwardly chilled, feeling, as he put it to himself, slabby inside; and,
left alone with a dish of black plums and some sinister-looking wine in
a decanter, which he avoided because when he took hold of it ice
clinked, he rang the bell as unobtrusively as he could and asked the
parlourmaid in a subdued voice, the French window to the garden being
open and in the garden being Lucy and her aunt, whether there were such
a thing in the house as a whisky and soda.

The parlourmaid, who was a nice-looking girl and much more at home, as
she herself was the first to admit, with gentlemen than with ladies,
brought it him, and inquired how he had liked the dinner.

'Not at all,' said Wemyss, whose mind on that point was clear.

'No sir,' said the parlourmaid, nodding sympathetically. 'No sir.'

She then explained in a discreet whisper, also with one eye on the open
window, how the dinner hadn't been an ordinary dinner and it wasn't
expected that it should be enjoyed, but it was the cook's tribute to her
late master's burial day,--a master they had only known a week, sad to
say, but to whom they had both taken a great fancy, he being so
pleasant-spoken and all for giving no trouble.

Wemyss listened, sipping the comforting drink and smoking a cigar.

Very different, said the parlourmaid, who seemed glad to talk, would the
dinner have been if the cook hadn't liked the poor gentleman. Why, in
one place where she and the cook were together, and the lady was taken
just as the cook would have given notice if she hadn't been because she
was such a very dishonest and unpunctual lady, besides not knowing her
place--no lady, of course, and never was--when she was taken, not sudden
like this poor gentleman but bit by bit, on the day of her funeral the
cook sent up a dinner you'd never think of,--she was like that, all
fancy. Lucky it was that the family didn't read between the lines, for
it began with fried soles----

The parlourmaid paused, her eye anxiously on the window. Wemyss sat
staring at her.

'Did you say fried soles?' he asked, staring at her.

'Yes sir. Fried soles. I didn't see anything in that either at first.
It's how you spell it makes the difference, Cook said. And the next
course was'--her voice dropped almost to inaudibleness--'devilled
bones.'

Wemyss hadn't so much as smiled for nearly a fortnight, and now to his
horror, for what could it possibly sound like to the two mourners on the
lawn, he gave a sudden dreadful roar of laughter. He could hear it
sounding hideous himself.

The noise he made horrified the parlourmaid as much as it did him. She
flew to the window and shut it. Wemyss, in his effort to strangle the
horrid thing, choked and coughed, his table-napkin up to his face, his
body contorted. He was very red, and the parlourmaid watched him in
terror. He had seemed at first to be laughing, though what Uncle Wemyss
(thus did he figure in the conversations of the kitchen) could see to
laugh at in the cook's way of getting her own back, the parlourmaid,
whose flesh had crept when she first heard the story, couldn't
understand; but presently she feared he wasn't laughing at all but was
being, in some very robust way, ill. Dread seized her, deaths being on
her mind, lest perhaps here in the chair, so convulsively struggling
behind a table-napkin, were the beginnings of yet another corpse. Having
flown to shut the window she now flew to open it, and ran out
panic-stricken into the garden to fetch the ladies.

This cured Wemyss. He got up quickly, leaving his half-smoked cigar and
his half-drunk whisky, and followed her out just in time to meet Lucy
and her aunt hurrying across the lawn towards the dining-room window.

'I choked,' he said, wiping his eyes, which indeed were very wet.

'Choked?' repeated Miss Entwhistle anxiously. 'We heard a most strange
noise----'

'That was me choking,' said Wemyss. 'It's all right--it's nothing at
all,' he added to Lucy, who was looking at him with a face of extreme
concern.

But he felt now that he had had about as much of the death and funeral
atmosphere as he could stand. Reaction had set in, and his reactions
were strong. He wanted to get away from woe, to be with normal, cheerful
people again, to have done with conditions in which a laugh was the most
improper of sounds. Here he was, being held down by the head, he felt,
in a black swamp,--first that ghastly business of Vera's, and now this
woebegone family.

Sudden and violent was Wemyss's reaction, let loose by the parlourmaid's
story. Miss Entwhistle's swollen eyes annoyed him. Even Lucy's pathetic
face made him impatient. It was against nature, all this. It shouldn't
be allowed to go on, it oughtn't to be encouraged. Heaven alone knew how
much he had suffered, how much more he had suffered than the Entwhistles
with their perfectly normal sorrow, and if he could feel it was high
time now to think of other things surely the Entwhistles could. He was
tired of funerals. He had carried this one through really brilliantly
from start to finish, but now it was over and done with, and he wished
to get back to naturalness. Death seemed to him highly unnatural. The
mere fact that it only happened once to everybody showed how exceptional
it was, thought Wemyss, thoroughly disgusted with it. Why couldn't he
and the Entwhistles go off somewhere to-morrow, away from this place
altogether, go abroad for a bit, to somewhere cheerful, where nobody
knew them and nobody would expect them to go about with long faces all
day? Ostend, for instance? His mood of sympathy and gentleness had
for the moment quite gone. He was indignant that there should be
circumstances under which a man felt as guilty over a laugh as over a
crime. A natural person like himself looked at things wholesomely. It
was healthy and proper to forget horrors, to dismiss them from one's
mind. If convention, that offspring of cruelty and hypocrisy, insisted
that one's misfortunes should be well rubbed in, that one should be
forced to smart under them, and that the more one was seen to wince the
more one was regarded as behaving creditably,--if convention insisted
on this, and it did insist, as Wemyss had been experiencing himself
since Vera's accident, why then it ought to be defied. He had found he
couldn't defy it by himself, and came away solitary and wretched in
accordance with what it expected, but he felt quite different now that
he had Lucy and her aunt as trusting friends who looked up to him, who
had no doubts of him and no criticisms. Health of mind had come back to
him,--his own natural wholesomeness, which had never deserted him in his
life till this shocking business of Vera's.

'I'd like to have some sensible talk with you,' he said, looking down at
the two small black figures and solemn tired faces that were growing dim
and wraith-like in the failing light of the garden.

'With me or with Lucy?' asked Miss Entwhistle.

By this time they both hung on his possible wishes, and watched him with
the devout attentiveness of a pair of dogs.

'With you and with Lucy,' said Wemyss, smiling at the upturned faces. He
felt very conscious of being the male, of being in command.

It was the first time he had called her Lucy. To Miss Entwhistle it
seemed a matter of course, but Lucy herself flushed with pleasure, and
again had the feeling of being taken care of and safe. Sad as she was at
the end of that sad day, she still was able to notice how nice her very
ordinary name sounded in this kind man's voice. She wondered what his
own name was, and hoped it was something worthy of him,--not Albert, for
instance.

'Shall we go into the drawing-room?' asked Miss Entwhistle.

'Why not to the mulberry tree?' said Wemyss, who naturally wished to
hold Lucy's little hand if possible, and could only do that in the dark.

So they sat there as they had sat other nights, Wemyss in the middle,
and Lucy's hand, when it got dark enough, held close and comfortingly in
his.

'This little girl,' he began, 'must get the roses back into her cheeks.'

'Indeed, indeed she must,' agreed Miss Entwhistle, a catch in her voice
at the mere reminder of the absence of Lucy's roses, and consequently of
what had driven them away.

'How do you propose to set about it?' asked Wemyss.

'Time,' gulped Miss Entwhistle.

'Time?'

'And patience. We must wait we must both wait p-patiently till time has
s-softened----'

She hastily pulled out her handkerchief.

'No, no,' said Wemyss, 'I don't at all agree. It isn't natural, it isn't
reasonable to prolong sorrow. You'll forgive plain words, Miss
Entwhistle, but I don't know any others, and I say it isn't right to
wallow--yes, wallow--in sorrow. Far from being patient one should be
impatient. One shouldn't wait resignedly for time to help one, one
should up and take time by the forelock. In cases of this kind, and
believe me I know what I'm talking about'--it was here that his hand,
the one on the further side from Miss Entwhistle, descended gently on
Lucy's, and she made a little movement closer up to him--'it is due to
oneself to refuse to be knocked out. Courage, spirit, is what one must
aim at,--setting an example.'

Ah, how wonderful he was, thought Lucy; so big, so brave, so simple, and
so tragically recently himself the victim of the most awful of
catastrophes. There was something burly about his very talk. Her darling
father and his friends had talked quite differently. Their talk used to
seem as if it ran about the room like liquid fire, it was so quick and
shining; often it was quite beyond her till her father afterwards, when
she asked him, explained it, put it more simply for her, eager as he
always was that she should share and understand. She could understand
every word of Wemyss's. When he spoke she hadn't to strain, to listen
with all her might; she hardly had to think at all. She found this
immensely reposeful in her present state.

'Yes,' murmured Miss Entwhistle into her handkerchief, 'yes--you're
quite right, Mr. Wemyss--one ought--it would be more--more heroic. But
then if one--if one has loved some one very tenderly--as I did my dear
brother--and Lucy her most precious father----'

She broke off and wiped her eyes.

'Perhaps,' she finished, 'you haven't ever loved anybody very--very
particularly and lost them.'

'Oh,' breathed Lucy at that, and moved still closer to him.

Wemyss was deeply injured. Why should Miss Entwhistle suppose he had
never particularly loved anybody? He seemed, on looking back, to have
loved a great deal. Certainly he had loved Vera with the utmost devotion
till she herself wore it down. He indignantly asked himself what this
maiden lady could know of love.

But there was Lucy's little hand, so clinging, so understanding,
nestling in his. It soothed him.

There was a pause. Then he said, very gravely, 'My wife died only a
fortnight ago.'

Miss Entwhistle was crushed. 'Ah,' she cried, 'but you must forgive
me----'




V


Nevertheless he was not able to persuade her to join him, with Lucy, in
a trip abroad. She was tirelessly concerned to do and say everything she
could that showed her deep sympathy with him in his loss--he had told
her nothing beyond the bare fact, and she was not one to read about
inquests--and her deep sense of obligation to him that he, labouring
under so great a burden of sorrow of his own, should have helped them
with such devotion and unselfishness in theirs; but she wouldn't go
abroad. She was going, she said, to her little house in London with
Lucy.

'What, in August?' exclaimed Wemyss.

Yes, they would be quiet there, and indeed they were both worn out and
only wished for solitude.

'Then why not stay here?' asked Wemyss, who now considered Lucy's aunt
selfish. 'This is solitary enough, in all conscience.'

No, they neither of them felt they could bear to stay in that house.
Lucy must go to the place least connected in her mind with her father.
Indeed, indeed it was best. She did so understand and appreciate Mr.
Wemyss's wonderful and unselfish motives in suggesting the continent,
but she and Lucy were in that state when the idea of an hotel and
waiters and a band was simply impossible to them, and all they wished
was to creep into the quiet and privacy of their own nest,--'Like
wounded birds,' said poor Miss Entwhistle, looking up at him with much
the piteous expression of a dog lifting an injured paw.

'It's very bad for Lucy to be encouraged to think she's a wounded bird,'
said Wemyss, controlling his disappointment as best he could.

'You must come and see us in London and help us to feel heroic,' said
Miss Entwhistle, with a watery smile.

'But I can come and see you much better and easier if you're here,'
persisted Wemyss.

Miss Entwhistle, however, though watery, was determined. She refused to
stay where she so conveniently was, and Wemyss now considered Lucy's
aunt obstinate as well as selfish. Also he thought her very ungrateful.
She had made use of him, and now was going to leave him, without
apparently giving him a thought, in the lurch.

He was having a good deal of Miss Entwhistle, because during the two
days that came after the funeral Lucy was practically invisible, engaged
in collecting and packing her father's belongings. Wemyss hung about the
garden, not knowing when these activities mightn't suddenly cease and
not wishing to miss her if she did come out, and Miss Entwhistle, who
couldn't help Lucy in this--no one could help her in the heart-breaking
work--naturally joined him.

He found these two days long. Miss Entwhistle felt there was a great
bond between herself and him, and Wemyss felt there wasn't. When she
said there was he had difficulty in not contradicting her. Not only,
Miss Entwhistle felt, and also explained, was there the bond of their
dear Jim, whom both she and Mr. Wemyss had so much loved, but there was
this communion of sorrow,--the loss of his wife, the loss of her
brother, within the same fortnight.

Wemyss shut his mouth tight at this and said nothing.

How natural for her, feeling so sorry for him, feeling so grateful to
him, when from a window during those two days she beheld him sitting
solitary beneath the mulberry tree, to go down and sit there with him;
how natural that, when he got up, made restless, she supposed, by
his memories, and began to pace the lawn, she should get up and
sympathetically pace it too. She could not let this kind, tender-hearted
man--he must be that, or Jim wouldn't have been fond of him, besides she
had seen it for herself in the way he had helped her and Lucy--she could
not let him be alone with his sad thoughts. And he had a double burden
of sad thoughts, a double loss to bear, for he had lost her dear brother
as well as his poor wife.

All Entwhistles were compassionate, and as she and Wemyss sat together
or together paced, she kept up a flow of gentle loving-kindness.
Wemyss smoked his pipe in practically unbroken silence. This was his way
when he was holding on to himself. Miss Entwhistle of course didn't
know he was holding on to himself, and taking his silence for the
inarticulateness of deep unhappiness was so much touched that she would
have done anything for him, anything that might bring this poor, kind,
suffering fellow-creature comfort--except go to Ostend. From that
dreadful suggestion she continued to shudder away; nor, though he tried
again, even after all arrangements for leaving Cornwall had been made,
would she be persuaded to stay where she was.

Therefore Wemyss was forced to conclude that she was obstinate as well
as selfish; and if it hadn't been for the brief moments at meals when
Lucy appeared, and through her unhappiness--what she was doing was
obviously depressing her very much--smiled faintly at him and always
went and sat as near him as she could, he would have found these two
days intolerable.

How atrocious, he thought, while he smoked in silence and held on to
himself, that Lucy should be taken away from him by a mere maiden lady,
an aunt, an unmarried aunt,--weakest and most negligible, surely, of all
relatives. How atrocious that such a person should have any right to
come between him and Lucy, to say she wouldn't do this, that, or the
other that Wemyss proposed, and thus possess the power to make him
unhappy. Miss Entwhistle was so little that he could have brushed her
aside with the back of one hand; yet here again the strong monster
public opinion stepped in and forced him to acquiesce in any plan she
chose to make for Lucy, however desolate it left him, merely because she
stood to her in the anæmic relationship of aunt.

During two mortal days, as he waited about in that garden so grievously
infested by Miss Entwhistle, sounds of boxes being moved and drawers
being opened and shut came through the windows, but except at meals
there was no Lucy. He could have borne it if he hadn't known they were
the very last days he would be with her, but as things were it seemed
cruel that he should be left like that to be miserable. Why should he be
left like that to be miserable, just because of a lot of clothes and
papers? he asked himself; and he felt he was getting thoroughly tired of
Jim.

'Haven't you done yet?' he said at tea on the second afternoon of this
sorting out and packing, when Lucy got up to go indoors again, leaving
him with Miss Entwhistle, even before he had finished his second cup of
tea.

'You've no idea what a lot there is,' she said, her voice sounding worn
out; and she lingered a moment, her hand on the back of her aunt's
chair. 'Father brought all his notes with him, and heaps and heaps of
letters from people he was consulting, and I'm trying to get them
straight--get them as he would have wished----'

Miss Entwhistle put up her hand and stroked Lucy's arm.

'If you weren't in this hurry to go away you'd have had more time and
done it comfortably,' said Wemyss.

'Oh, but I don't want more time,' said Lucy quickly.

'Lucy means she couldn't bear it drawn out,' said Miss Entwhistle,
leaning her thin cheek against Lucy's sleeve. 'These things--they tear
one's heart. And nobody can help her. She has to go through with it
alone.' And she drew Lucy's face down to hers and held it there a
moment, gently stroking it, the tears brimming up again in the eyes of
both.

Always tears, thought Wemyss. Yes, and there always would be tears as
long as that aunt had hold of Lucy. She was the arch-wallower, he told
himself, filling his pipe in silence after Lucy had gone in.

He got up and went out at the gate and crossed the road and stood
staring at the evening sea. Should he hear steps coming after him and
Miss Entwhistle were to follow him even beyond the garden, he would
proceed without looking round down to the cove and to the inn, where she
must needs leave him alone. He had had enough. That Miss Entwhistle
should explain to him what Lucy meant, he considered to be the last
straw of her behaviour. Barging in, he said indignantly to himself;
barging in when nobody had asked her opinion or explanation of anything.
And she had stroked Lucy's face as though Lucy and her face and
everything about her belonged to her, merely because she happened to be
her aunt. Fancy explaining to him what Lucy really meant, taking upon
herself the functions of interpreter, of go-between, when for a whole
day and a half before she appeared on the scene--and she had only
appeared on it at all thanks to his telegram--Lucy and he had been in
the closest fellowship, the closest communion....

Well, things couldn't go on like this. He was not the man to be
dominated by a relative. If he had lived in those sensible ancient days
when people behaved wholesomely, he would have flung Lucy over his
shoulder and walked off with her to Ostend or Paris and laughed at such
insects as aunts. He couldn't do that unfortunately, though where the
harm would be in two mourners like himself and Lucy going together in
search of relief he must say he was unable to see. Why should they be
condemned to search for relief separately? Their sorrows, surely, would
be their chaperone, especially his sorrow. Nobody would object to Lucy's
nursing him, supposing he were dangerously ill; why should she not be
equally beyond the reach of tongues if she nursed the bitter wounds of
his spirit?

He heard steps coming down the garden path to the gate. There, he
thought, was the aunt again, searching for him, and he stood squarely
and firmly with his back to the road, smoking his pipe and staring at
the sea. If he heard the gate open and she dared to come through it he
would instantly walk away. In the garden he had to endure being joined
by her, because there he was in the position of guest; but let her try
to join him on the King's highway!

Nobody opened the gate, however, and, as he heard no retreating
footsteps either, after a minute he began to want to look round. He
struggled against this wish, because the moment Miss Entwhistle caught
his eye she would come out to him, he felt sure. But Wemyss was not much
good at struggling against his wishes,--he usually met with defeat; and
after briefly doing so on this occasion he did look round. And what a
good thing he did, for it was Lucy.

There she was, leaning on the gate just as she had been that first
morning, but this time her eyes instead of being wide and blank were
watching him with a deep and touching interest.

He got across the road in one stride. 'Lucy!' he exclaimed. 'You? Why
didn't you call me? We've wasted half an hour----'

'About two minutes,' she said, smiling up at him as he, on the other
side of the gate, folded both her hands in his just as he had done that
first morning; and the relief it was to Wemyss to see her again alone,
to see that smile of trust and--surely--content in getting back to him!

Then her face went grave again. 'I've finished father's things now,' she
said, 'and so I came to look for you.'

'Lucy, how can you leave me,' was Wemyss's answer to that, his voice
vibrating, 'how can you go away from me to-morrow and hand me over again
to the torments--yes, torments, I was in before?'

'But I have to go,' she said, distressed. 'And you mustn't say that. You
mustn't let yourself be like that again. You won't be, I know--you're so
brave and strong.'

'Not without you. I'm nothing without you,' said Wemyss; and his eyes,
as he searched hers, were full of tears.

At this Lucy flushed, and then, staring at him, her face went slowly
white. These words of his, the way he said them, reminded her--oh no, it
wasn't possible; he and she stood in a relationship to each other like
none, she was sure, that had ever yet been. It was an intimacy arrived
at at a bound, with no preliminary steps. It was a holy thing, based on
mutual grief, protected from everything ordinary by the great wings of
Death. He was her wonderful friend, big in his simplicity, all care for
her and goodness, a very rock of refuge and shelter in the wilderness
she had been flung into when he found her. And that he, bleeding as he
was himself from the lacerations of the violent rending asunder from
his wife to whom he had been, as he had told her, devoted, that he
should--oh no, it wasn't possible; and she hung her head, shocked at her
thoughts. For the way he had said those words, and the words themselves
had reminded her--no, she could hardly bear to think it, but they _had_
reminded her of the last time she had been proposed to. The man--he
was a young man; she had never been proposed to by any one even
approximately Wemyss's age--had said almost exactly that: Without you I
am nothing. And just in that same deep, vibrating voice.

How dreadful thoughts could be, Lucy said to herself, overcome that such
a one at such a moment should thrust itself into her mind. Hateful of
her, hateful....

She hung her head in shame; and Wemyss, looking down at the little
bobbed head with its bright, thick young hair bent over their folded
hands as though it were saying its prayers,--Wemyss, not having his pipe
in his mouth to protect him and help him to hold on to himself, for he
had hastily stuffed it in his pocket, all alight as it was, when he saw
her at the gate, and there at that moment it was burning holes,--Wemyss,
after a brief struggle with his wishes, in which as usual he was
defeated, stooped and began to kiss Lucy's hair. And having begun, he
continued.

She was horrified. At the first kiss she started as if she had been hit,
and then, clinging to the gate, she stood without moving, without being
able to think or lift her head, in the same attitude bowed over his and
her own hands, while this astonishing thing was being done to her hair.
Death all round them, death pervading every corner of their lives, death
in its blackest shape brooding over him, and--kisses. Her mind, if
anything so gentle could be said to be in anything that sounds so loud,
was in an uproar. She had had the complete, guileless trust in him of a
child for a tender and sympathetic friend,--a friend, not a father,
though he was old enough to be her father, because in a father, however
much hidden by sweet comradeship as it had been in hers, there always at
the back of everything was, after all, authority. And it had been even
more than the trust of a child in its friend: it had been the trust of a
child in a fellow-child hit by the same punishment,--a simple
fellowship, a wordless understanding.

She hung on to the gate while her thoughts flew about in confusion
within her. These kisses--and his wife just dead--and dead so
terribly--how long would she have to stand there with this going on--she
couldn't lift up her head, for then she felt it would only get
worse--she couldn't turn and run into the house, because he was holding
her hands. He oughtn't to have--oh, he oughtn't to have--it wasn't
fair....

Then--what was he saying? She heard him say, in an absolutely broken
voice, laying his head on hers, 'We two poor things--we two poor
things'--and then he said and did nothing more, but kept his head like
that, and presently, thick though her hair was, through it came wetness.

At that Lucy's thoughts suddenly stopped flying about and were quite
still. Her heart went to wax within her, melted again into pity, into a
great flood of pitiful understanding. The dreadfulness of lonely
grief.... Was there anything in the world so blackly desolate as to be
left alone in grief? This poor broken fellow-creature--and she herself,
so lost, so lost in loneliness--they were two half-drowned things,
clinging together in a shipwreck--how could she let him go, leave him to
himself--how could she be let go, left to herself....

'Lucy,' he said, 'look at me----'

She lifted her head. He loosed her hands, and put his arms round her
shoulders.

'Look at me,' he said; for though she had lifted her head she hadn't
lifted her eyes.

She looked at him. Tears were on his face. When she saw them her mouth
began to quiver and twitch. She couldn't bear that.

'Lucy----' he said again.

She shut her eyes. 'Yes'--she breathed, 'yes.' And with one hand she
felt along up his coat till she reached his face, and shakingly tried to
brush away its tears.




VI


After that, for the moment anyhow, it was all over with Lucy. She was
engulfed. Wemyss kissed her shut eyes, he kissed her parted lips, he
kissed her dear, delightful bobbed hair. His tears dried up; or rather,
wiped away by her little blind, shaking hand, there were no more of
them. Death for Wemyss was indeed at that moment swallowed up in
victory. Instantly he passed from one mood to the other, and when she
finally did open her eyes at his orders and look at him, she saw bending
over her a face she hardly recognised, for she had not yet seen him
happy. Happy! How could he be happy, as happy as that all in a moment?
She stared at him, and even through her confusion, her bewilderment, was
frankly amazed.

Then the thought crept into her mind that it was she who had done this,
it was she who had transformed him, and her stare softened into a gaze
almost of awe, with something of the look in it of a young mother when
she first sees her new-born baby. 'So that is what it is like,' the
young mother whispers to herself in a sort of holy surprise, 'and I have
made it, and it is mine'; and so, gazing at this new, effulgent Wemyss,
did Lucy say to herself with the same feeling of wonder, of awe at her
own handiwork, 'So that is what he is like.'

Wemyss's face was indeed one great beam. He simply at that moment
couldn't remember that he had ever been miserable. He seemed to have his
arms round Love itself; for never did any one look more like the very
embodiment of his idea of love than Lucy then as she gazed up at him, so
tender, so resistless. But there were even more wonderful moments after
dinner in the darkening garden, while Miss Entwhistle was upstairs
packing ready to start by the early train next morning, and they hadn't
got the gate between them, and Lucy of her own accord laid her cheek
against his coat, nestling her head into it as though there indeed she
knew that she was safe.

'My baby--my baby,' Wemyss murmured, in an ecstasy of passionate
protectiveness, in his turn flooded by maternal feeling. 'You shall
never cry again never, never.'

It irked him that their engagement--Lucy demurred at first to the word
engagement, but Wemyss, holding her tight in his arms, said he would
very much like to know, then, by what word she would describe her
position at that moment--it irked him that it had to be a secret. He
wanted instantly to shout out to the whole world his glory and his
pride. But this under the tragic circumstances of their mourning was
even to Wemyss clearly impossible. Generally he brushed aside the word
impossible if it tried to come between him and the smallest of his
wishes, but that inquest was still too vividly in his mind, and the
faces of his so-called friends. What the faces of his so-called friends
would look like if he, before Vera had been dead a fortnight, should
approach them with the news of his engagement even Wemyss, a person not
greatly imaginative, could picture. And Lucy, quite overwhelmed, first
by his tears and then by his joy, no longer could judge anything. She no
longer knew whether it were very awful to be love-making in the middle
of death, or whether it were, as Wemyss said, the natural glorious
self-assertiveness of life. She knew nothing any more except that he and
she, shipwrecked, had saved each other, and that for the moment nothing
was required of her, no exertion, nothing at all, except to sit passive
with her head on his breast, while he called her his baby and softly,
wonderfully, kissed her closed eyes. She couldn't think; she needn't
think; oh, she was tired--and this was rest.

But after he had gone that night, and all the next day in the train
without him, and for the first few days in London, misgivings laid hold
of her.

That she should be being made love to, be engaged, as Wemyss insisted,
within a week of her father's death, could not, she thought, be called
anything worse than possibly and at the outside an irrelevance. It did
no harm to her father's dear memory; it in no way encroached on her
adoration of him. He would have been the first to be pleased that
she should have found comfort. But what worried her was that
Everard--Wemyss's Christian name was Everard--should be able to think of
such things as love and more marriage when his wife had just died so
awfully, and he on the very spot, and he the first to rush out and
see....

She found that the moment she was away from him she couldn't get over
this. It went round and round in her head as a thing she was unable, by
herself, to understand. While she was with him he overpowered her into a
torpor, into a shutting of her eyes and her thoughts, into just giving
herself up, after the shocks and agonies of the week, to the blessedness
of a soothed and caressed semi-consciousness; and it was only when his
first letters began to come, such simple, adoring letters, taking the
situation just as it was, just as life and death between them had
offered it, untroubled by questioning, undimmed by doubt, with no
looking backward but with a touching, thankful acceptance of the
present, that she gradually settled down into that placidity which was
at once the relief and the astonishment of her aunt. And his letters
were so easy to understand. They were so restfully empty of the
difficult thoughts and subtle, half-said things her father used to write
and all his friends. His very handwriting was the round, slow
handwriting of a boy. Lucy had loved him before; but now she fell in
love with him, and it was because of his letters.




VII


Miss Entwhistle lived in a slim little house in Eaton Terrace. It was
one of those little London houses where you go in and there's a
dining-room, and you go up and there's a drawing-room, and you go up
again and there's a bedroom and a dressing-room, and you go up yet more
and there's a maid's room and a bathroom, and then that's all. For one
person it was just enough; for two it was difficult. It was so difficult
that Miss Entwhistle had never had any one stay with her before, and the
dressing-room had to be cleared out of all her clothes and toques, which
then had nowhere to go to and became objects that you met at night
hanging over banisters or perched with an odd air of dashingness on the
ends of the bath, before Lucy could go in.

But no Entwhistle ever minded things like that. No trouble seemed to any
of them too great to take for a friend; while as for one's own dear
niece, if only she could have been induced to take the real bedroom and
let her aunt, who knew the dressing-room's ways, sleep there instead,
that aunt--on such liberal principles was this family constructed--would
have been perfectly happy.

Lucy, of course, only smiled at that suggestion, and inserted herself
neatly into the dressing-room, and the first weeks of their mourning,
which Miss Entwhistle had dreaded for them both, proceeded to flow by
with a calm, an unruffledness, that could best be described by the word
placid.

In that small house, unless the inhabitants were accommodating and
adaptable, daily life would be a trial. Miss Entwhistle well knew Lucy
would give no trouble that she could help, but their both being in such
trouble themselves would, at such close quarters, she had been afraid,
inevitably keep their sorrow raw by sheer rubbing against each other.

To her surprise and great relief nothing of the sort happened. There
seemed to be no rawness to rub. Not only Lucy didn't fret--her white
face and heavy eyes of the days in Cornwall had gone--but she was almost
from the first placid. Just on leaving Cornwall, and for a day or two
after, she was a little _bouleversée_, and had a curious kind of
timidity in her manner to her aunt, and crept rather than walked about
the house, but this gradually disappeared; and if Miss Entwhistle hadn't
known her, hadn't known of her terrible loss, she would have said that
here was some one who was quietly happy. It was subdued, but there it
was, as if she had some private source of confidence and warmth. Had she
by any chance got religion? wondered her aunt, who herself had never had
it, and neither had Jim, and neither had any Entwhistles she had ever
heard of. She dismissed that. It was too unlikely for one of their
breed. But even the frequent necessary visits to the house in Bloomsbury
she and her father had lived in so long didn't quite blot out the odd
effect Lucy produced of being somehow inwardly secure. Presently, when
these sad settlings up were done with, and the books and furniture
stored, and the house handed over to the landlord, and she no longer had
to go to it and be among its memories, her face became what it used to
be,--delicately coloured, softly rounded, ready to light up at a word,
at a look.

Miss Entwhistle was puzzled. This serenity of the one who was, after
all, chief mourner, made her feel it would be ridiculous if she outdid
Lucy in grief. If Lucy could pull herself together so marvellously--and
she supposed it must be that, it must be that she was heroically pulling
herself together--she for her part wouldn't be behindhand. Her darling
Jim's memory should be honoured, then, like this: she would bless God
for him, bless God that she had had him, and in a high thankfulness
continue cheerfully on her way.

Such were some of Miss Entwhistle's reflections and conclusions as she
considered Lucy. She seemed to have no thought of the future,--again to
her aunt's surprise and relief, who had been afraid she would very soon
begin to worry about what she was to do next. She never talked of it;
she never apparently thought of it. She seemed to be--yes, that was the
word, decided Miss Entwhistle observing her--resting. But resting on
what? A second time Miss Entwhistle dismissed the idea of religion.
Impossible, she thought, that Jim's girl,--yet it did look very like
religion.

There was, it appeared, enough money left scraped together by Jim for
Lucy in case of his death to produce about two hundred pounds a year.
This wasn't much; but Lucy apparently didn't give it a thought. Probably
she didn't realise what it meant, thought her aunt, because of her life
with her father having been so easy, surrounded by all those necessities
for an invalid which were, in fact, to ordinary people luxuries. No one
had been appointed her guardian. There was no mention of Mr. Wemyss in
the will. It was a very short will, leaving everything to Lucy. This,
as far as it went, was admirable, thought Miss Entwhistle, but
unfortunately there was hardly anything to leave. Except books;
thousands of books, and the old charming furniture of the Bloomsbury
house. Well, Lucy should live with her for as long as she could endure
the dressing-room, and perhaps they might take a house together a little
less tiny, though Miss Entwhistle had lived in the one she was in for so
long that it wouldn't be very easy for her to leave it.

Meanwhile the first weeks of mourning slid by in an increasing serenity,
with London empty and no one to intrude on what became presently
distinctly recognisable as happiness. She and Lucy agreed so perfectly.
And they weren't altogether alone either, for Mr. Wemyss came regularly
twice a week, coming on the same days, and appearing so punctually on
the stroke of five that at last she began to set her clocks by him.

He, too, poor man, seemed to be pulling himself together. He had none of
the air of the recently bereaved, either in his features or his clothes.
Not that he wore coloured ties or anything like that, but he certainly
didn't produce an effect of blackness. His trousers, she observed, were
grey; and not a particularly dark grey either. Well, perhaps it was no
longer the fashion, thought Miss Entwhistle, eyeing these trousers with
some doubt, to be very unhappy. But she couldn't help thinking there
ought to be a band on his left arm to counteract the impression of
light-heartedness in his legs; a crape band, no matter how narrow, or a
band of black anything, not necessarily crape, such as she was sure it
was usual in these circumstances to wear.

However, whatever she felt about his legs she welcomed him with the
utmost cordiality, mindful of his kindness to them down in Cornwall and
of how she had clung to him there as her rock; and she soon got to
remember the way he liked his tea, and had the biggest chair placed
comfortably ready for him--the chairs were neither very big nor numerous
in her spare little drawing-room--and did all she could in the way of
hospitality and pleasant conversation. But the more she saw of him, and
the more she heard of his talk, the more she wondered at Jim.

Mr. Wemyss was most good-natured, and she was sure, and as she knew from
experience, was most kind and thoughtful; but the things he said were so
very unlike the things Jim said, and his way of looking at things was so
very unlike Jim's way. Not that there wasn't room in the world for
everybody, Miss Entwhistle reminded herself, sitting at her tea-table
observing Wemyss, who looked particularly big and prosperous in her
small frugal room, and no doubt one star differed from another in glory;
still, she did wonder at Jim. And if Mr. Wemyss could bear the loss of
his wife to the extent of grey trousers, how was it he couldn't bear
Jim's name so much as mentioned? Whenever the talk got on to Jim--it
couldn't be kept off him in a circle composed of his daughter and his
sister and his friend--she noticed that Mr. Wemyss went silent. She
would have taken this for excess of sensibility and the sign of a deep
capacity for faithful devotion if it hadn't been for those trousers.
Faced by them, it perplexed her.

While Miss Entwhistle was thinking like this and observing Wemyss, who
never observed her at all after a first moment of surprise that she
should look and behave so differently from the liquid lady of the
cottage in Cornwall, that she should sit so straight and move so
briskly, he and Lucy were, though present in the body, absent in love.
Round them was drawn that magic circle through which nobody and nothing
can penetrate, and within it they sat hand in hand and safe. Lucy's
whole heart was his. He only had to come into the room for her to feel
content. There was a naturalness, a bigness about his way of looking at
things that made intricate, tormenting feelings shrink away in his
presence ashamed. Quite apart from her love for him, her gratitude, her
longing that he should go on now being happy and forget his awful
tragedy, he was so very comfortable. She had never met any one so
comfortable to lean on mentally. Bodily, on the few occasions on which
her aunt was out of the room, he was comfortable too; he reminded her of
the very nicest of sofas,--expensive ones, all cushions. But mentally he
was more than comfortable, he was positively luxurious. Such perfect
rest, listening to his talk. No thinking needed. Things according to him
were either so, or so. With her father things had never been either so,
or so; and one had had to frown, and concentrate, and make efforts to
follow and understand his distinctions, his infinitely numerous,
delicate, difficult distinctions. Everard's plain division of everything
into two categories only, snow-white and jet-black, was as reposeful as
the Roman church. She hadn't got to strain or worry, she had only to
surrender. And to what love, to what safety! At night she couldn't go to
bed for thinking of how happy she was. She would sit quite still in the
little dressing-room, her hands in her lap, and a proverb she had read
somewhere running in her head:

     When God shuts the door He opens the window.

Not for a moment, hardly, had she been left alone to suffer. Instantly,
almost, Everard had come into her life and saved her. Lucy had indeed,
as her aunt had twice suspected, got religion, but her religion was
Wemyss. Ah, how she loved him! And every night she slept with his last
letter under her pillow on the side of her heart.

As for Wemyss, if Lucy couldn't get over having got him he couldn't get
over having got Lucy. He hadn't had such happiness as this, of this
quality of tenderness, of goodness, in his life before. What he had felt
for Vera had not at any time, he was sure, even at the beginning, been
like this. While for the last few years--oh, well. Wemyss, when he found
himself thinking of Vera, pulled up short. He declined to think of her
now. She had filled his thoughts enough lately, and how terribly. His
little angel Lucy had healed that wound, and there was no use in
thinking of an old wound; nobody healthy ever did that. He had explained
to Lucy, who at first had been a little morbid, how wrong it is, how
really wicked, besides being intensely stupid, not to get over things.
Life, he had said, is for the living; let the dead have death. The
present is the only real possession a man has, whatever clever people
may say; and the wise man, who is also the natural man of simple healthy
instincts and a proper natural shrinking from death and disease, does
not allow the past, which after all anyhow is done for, to intrude upon,
much less spoil, the present. That is what, he explained, the past will
always do if it can. The only safe way to deal with it is to forget it.

'But I don't want to forget mine,' Lucy had said at that, opening her
eyes, which as usual had been shut, because the commas of Wemyss's talk
with her when they chanced to be alone were his soothing, soporific
kisses dropped gently on her closed eyelids. 'Father----'

'Oh, you may remember yours,' he had answered, smiling tenderly down at
the head lying on his breast. 'It's such a little one. But you'll see
when you're older if your Everard wasn't right.'

To Wemyss in his new happiness it seemed that Vera had belonged to
another life altogether, an elderly, stale life from which, being
healthy-minded, he had managed to unstick himself and to emerge born
again all new and fresh and fitted for the present. She was forty when
she died. She had started life five years younger than he was, but had
quickly caught him up and passed him, and had ended, he felt, by being
considerably his senior. And here was Lucy, only twenty-two anyhow, and
looking like twelve. The contrast never ceased to delight him, to fill
him with pride. And how pretty she was, now that she had left off
crying. He adored her bobbed hair that gave her the appearance of a
child or a very young boy, and he adored the little delicate lines of
her nose and nostrils, and her rather big, kind mouth that so easily
smiled, and her sweet eyes, the colour of Love-in-a-Mist. Not that he
set any store by prettiness, he told himself; all he asked in a woman
was devotion. But her being pretty would make it only the more exciting
when the moment came to show her to his friends, to show his little girl
to those friends who had dared slink away from him after Vera's death,
and say, 'Look here--look at this perfect little thing--_she_ believes
in me all right!'




VIII


London being empty, Wemyss had it all his own way. No one else was there
to cut him out, as his expression was. Lucy had many letters with offers
of every kind of help from her father's friends, but naturally she
needed no help and had no wish to see anybody in her present condition
of secret contentment, and she replied to them with thanks and vague
expressions of hope that later on they might all meet. One young man--he
was the one who often proposed to her--wasn't to be put off like that,
and journeyed all the way from Scotland, so great was his devotion, and
found out from the caretaker of the Bloomsbury house that she was living
with her aunt, and called at Eaton Terrace. But that afternoon Lucy and
Miss Entwhistle were taking the air in a car Wemyss had hired, and at
the very moment the young man was being turned away from the Eaton
Terrace door Lucy was being rowed about the river at Hampton Court--very
slowly, because of how soon Wemyss got hot--and her aunt, leaning on the
stone parapet at the end of the Palace gardens, was observing her. It
was a good thing the young man wasn't observing her too, for it wouldn't
have made him happy.

'What is Mr. Wemyss?' asked Miss Entwhistle unexpectedly that evening,
just as they were going to bed.

Lucy was taken aback. Her aunt hadn't asked a question or said a thing
about him up to then, except general comments on his kindness and
good-nature.

'What is Mr. Wemyss?' she repeated stupidly; for she was not only taken
aback, but also, she discovered, she had no idea. It had never occurred
to her even to wonder what he was, much less to ask. She had been, as it
were, asleep the whole time in a perfect contentment on his breast.

'Yes. What is he besides being a widower?' said Miss Entwhistle. 'We
know he's that, but it is hardly a profession.'

'I--don't think I know,' said Lucy, looking and feeling very stupid.

'Oh well, perhaps he isn't anything,' said her aunt kissing her
good-night. 'Except punctual,' she added, smiling, pausing a moment at
her bedroom door.

And two or three days later, when Wemyss had again hired a car to take
them for an outing to Windsor, while she and Lucy were tidying
themselves for tea in the ladies' room of the hotel she turned from the
looking-glass in the act of pinning back some hair loosened by motoring,
and in spite of having a hairpin in her mouth said, again suddenly,
'What did Mrs. Wemyss die of?'

This unnerved Lucy. If she had stared stupidly at her aunt at the other
question she stared aghast at her at this one.

'What did she die of?' she repeated, flushing.

'Yes. What illness was it?' asked her aunt, continuing to pin.

'It--wasn't an illness,' said Lucy helplessly.

'Not an illness?'

'I--believe it was an accident.'

'An accident?' said Miss Entwhistle, taking the hairpin out of her mouth
and in her turn staring. 'What sort of an accident?'

'I think a rather serious one,' said Lucy, completely unnerved.

How could she bear to tell that dreadful story, the knowledge of which
seemed somehow so intimately to bind her and Everard together with a
sacred, terrible tie?

At that her aunt remarked that an accident resulting in death would
usually be described as serious, and asked what its nature, apart from
its seriousness, had been; and Lucy, driven into a corner, feeling
instinctively that her aunt, who had already once or twice expressed
what she said was her surprised admiration for Mr. Wemyss's heroic way
of bearing his bereavement, might be too admiringly surprised altogether
if she knew how tragically much he really had to bear, and might begin
to inquire into the reasons of this heroism, took refuge in saying what
she now saw she ought to have begun by saying, even though it wasn't
true, that she didn't know.

'Ah,' said her aunt. 'Well--poor man. It's wonderful how he bears
things.' And again in her mind's eye, and with an increased doubt, she
saw the grey trousers.

That day at tea Wemyss, with the simple naturalness Lucy found so
restful, the almost bald way he had of talking frankly about things more
sophisticated people wouldn't have mentioned, began telling them of the
last time he had been at Windsor.

It was the summer before, he said, and he and his wife--at this Miss
Entwhistle became attentive--had motored down one Sunday to lunch in
that very room, and it had been so much crowded, and the crowding had
been so monstrously mismanaged, that positively they had had to go away
without having had lunch at all.

'Positively without having had any lunch at all,' repeated Wemyss,
looking at them with a face full of astonished aggrievement at the mere
recollection.

'Ah,' said Miss Entwhistle, leaning across to him, 'don't let us revive
sad memories.'

Wemyss stared at her. Good heavens, he thought, did she think he was
talking about Vera? Any one with a grain of sense would know he was only
talking about the lunch he hadn't had.

He turned impatiently to Lucy, and addressed his next remark to her. But
in another moment there was her aunt again.

'Mr. Wemyss,' she said, 'I've been dying to ask you----'

Again he was forced to attend. The pure air and rapid motion of the
motoring intended to revive and brace his little love were apparently
reviving and bracing his little love's aunt as well, for lately he had
been unable to avoid noticing a tendency on her part to assert herself.
During his first eight visits to Eaton Terrace--that made four weeks
since his coming back to London and six since the funeral in
Cornwall--he had hardly known she was in the room; except, of course,
that she _was_ in the room, completely hindering his courting. During
those eight visits his first impression of her remained undisturbed in
his mind: she was a wailing creature who had hung round him in Cornwall
in a constant state of tears. Down there she had behaved exactly like
the traditional foolish woman when there is a death about,--no common
sense, no grit, crying if you looked at her, and keeping up a continual
dismal recital of the virtues of the departed. Also she had been
obstinate; and she had, besides, shown unmistakable signs of
selfishness. When he paid his first call in Eaton Terrace he did notice
that she had considerably, indeed completely, dried up, and was
therefore to that extent improved, but she still remained for him just
Lucy's aunt,--somebody who poured out the tea, and who unfortunately
hardly ever went out of the room; a necessary, though luckily a
transitory, evil. But now it was gradually being borne in on him that
she really existed, on her own account, independently. She asserted
herself. Even when she wasn't saying anything--and often she said hardly
a word during an entire outing--she still somehow asserted herself.

And here she was asserting herself very much indeed, and positively
asking him across a tea-table which was undoubtedly for the moment his,
asking him straight out what, if anything, he did in the way of a trade,
profession or occupation.

She was his guest, and he regarded it as less than seemly for a guest to
ask a host what he did. Not that he wouldn't gladly have told her if it
had come from him of his own accord. Surely a man has a right, he
thought, to his own accord. At all times Wemyss disliked being asked
questions. Even the most innocent, ordinary question appeared to him to
be an encroachment on the right he surely had to be let alone.

Lucy's aunt between sips of tea--his tea--pretended, pleasantly it is
true, and clothing what could be nothing but idle curiosity in words
that were not disagreeable, that she was dying to know what he was. She
could see for herself, she said, smiling down at the leg nearest her,
that he wasn't a bishop, she was sure he wasn't either a painter,
musician or writer, but she wouldn't be in the least surprised if he
were to tell her he was an admiral.

Wemyss thought this intelligent of the aunt. He had no objection to
being taken for an admiral; they were an honest, breezy lot.

Placated, he informed her that he was on the Stock Exchange.

'Ah,' nodded Miss Entwhistle, looking wise because on this subject she
so completely wasn't, the Stock Exchange being an institution whose
nature and operations were alien to anything the Entwhistles were
familiar with; 'ah yes. Quite. Bulls and bears. Now I come to look at
it, you have the Stock Exchange eye.'

'Foolish woman,' thought Wemyss, who for some reason didn't like being
told before Lucy that he had the Stock Exchange eye; and he dismissed
her impatiently from his mind and concentrated on his little love,
asking himself while he did so how short he could, with any sort of
propriety, cut this unpleasant time of restricted courting, of never
being able to go anywhere with her unless her tiresome aunt came too.

Nearly two months now since both those deaths; surely Lucy's aunt might
soon be told now of the engagement. It was after this outing that he
began in his letters, and in the few moments he and she were alone, to
urge Lucy to tell her aunt. Nobody else need know, he wrote; it could go
on being kept secret from the world; but the convenience of her aunt's
knowing was so obvious,--think of how she would then keep out of the
way, think of how she would leave them to themselves, anyhow indoors,
anyhow in the house in Eaton Terrace.

Lucy, however, was reluctant. She demurred. She wrote begging him to be
patient. She said that every week that passed would make their
engagement less a thing that need surprise. She said that at present it
would take too much explaining, and she wasn't sure that even at the end
of the explanation her aunt would understand.

Wemyss wrote back brushing this aside. He said her aunt would have to
understand, and if she didn't what did it matter so long as she knew?
The great thing was that she should know. Then, he said, she would
leave them alone together, instead of for ever sticking; and his little
love must see how splendid it would be for him to come and spend happy
hours with her quite alone. What was an aunt after all? he asked. What
could she possibly be, compared to Lucy's own Everard? Besides, he
disliked secrecy, he said. No honest man could stand an atmosphere of
concealment. His little girl must make up her mind to tell her aunt, and
believe that her Everard knew best; or, if she preferred it, he would
tell her himself.

Lucy didn't prefer it, and was beginning to feel worried, because as the
days went on Wemyss grew more and more persistent the more he became
bored by Miss Entwhistle's development of an independent and inquiring
mind, and she hated having to refuse or even to defer doing anything he
asked, when her aunt one morning at breakfast, in the very middle of
apparent complete serene absorption in her bacon, looked up suddenly
over the coffee-pot and said, 'How long had your father known Mr.
Wemyss?'

This settled things. Lucy felt she could bear no more of these shocks. A
clean breast was the only thing left for her.

'Aunt Dot,' she stammered--Miss Entwhistle's Christian name was
Dorothy,--'I'd like--I've got--I want to tell you----'

'After breakfast,' said Miss Entwhistle briskly. 'We shall need lots of
time, and to be undisturbed. We'll go up into the drawing-room.'

And immediately she began talking about other things.

Was it possible, thought Lucy, her eyes carefully on her toast and
butter, that Aunt Dot suspected?




IX


It was not only possible, but the fact. Aunt Dot had suspected, only she
hadn't suspected anything like all that was presently imparted to her,
and she found great difficulty in assimilating it. And two hours later
Lucy, standing in the middle of the drawing-room, was still passionately
saying to her, and saying it for perhaps the tenth time, 'But don't you
_see_? It's just _because_ what happened to him was so awful. It's
nature asserting itself. If he couldn't be engaged now, if he couldn't
reach up out of such a pit of blackness and get into touch with living
things again and somebody who sympathises and--is fond of him, he would
die, die or go mad; and oh, what's the _use_ to the world of somebody
good and fine being left to die or go mad? Aunt Dot, what's the _use_?'

And her aunt, sitting in her customary chair by the fireplace, continued
to assimilate with difficulty. Also her face was puckered into folds of
distress. She was seriously upset.

Lucy, looking at her, felt a kind of despair that she wasn't being able
to make her aunt, whom she loved, see what she saw, understand what she
understood, and so be, as she was, filled with confidence and happiness.
Not that she was happy at that moment; she, too, was seriously upset,
her face flushed, her eyes bright with effort to get Wemyss as she knew
him, as he so simply was, through into her aunt's consciousness.

She had made her clean breast with a completeness that had included the
confession that she did know what Mrs. Wemyss's accident had been, and
she had described it. Her aunt was painfully shocked. Anything so
horrible as that hadn't entered her mind. To fall past the very window
her husband was sitting at ... it seemed to her dreadful that Lucy
should be mixed up in it, and mixed up so instantly on the death of her
natural protector,--of her two natural protectors, for hadn't Mrs.
Wemyss as long as she existed also been one? She was bewildered, and
couldn't understand the violent reactions that Lucy appeared to look
upon as so natural in Wemyss. She would have concluded that she didn't
understand because she was too old, because she was out of touch with
the elasticities of the younger generation, but Wemyss must be very
nearly as old as herself. Certainly he was of the same generation; and
yet behold him, within a fortnight of his wife's most shocking death,
able to forget her, able to fall in love----

'But that's _why_--that's _why_,' Lucy cried when Miss Entwhistle said
this. 'He _had_ to forget, or die himself. It was beyond what anybody
could bear and stay sane----'

'I'm sure I'm very glad he should stay sane,' said Miss Entwhistle, more
and more puckered, 'but I can't help wishing it hadn't been you, Lucy,
who are assisting him to stay it.'

And then she repeated what at intervals she had kept on repeating with a
kind of stubborn helplessness, that her quarrel with Mr. Wemyss was that
he had got happy so very quickly.

'Those grey trousers,' she murmured.

No; Miss Entwhistle couldn't get over it. She couldn't understand it.
And Lucy, expounding and defending Wemyss in the middle of the room with
all the blaze and emotion of what was only too evidently genuine love,
was to her aunt an astonishing sight. That little thing, defending that
enormous man. Jim's daughter; Jim's cherished little daughter....

Miss Entwhistle, sitting in her chair, struggled among other struggles
to be fair, and reminded herself that Mr. Wemyss had proved himself to
be most kind and eager to help down in Cornwall,--though even on this
there was shed a new and disturbing light, and that now that she knew
everything, and the doubts that had made her perhaps be a little unjust
were out of the way and she could begin to consider him impartially, she
would probably very soon become sincerely attached to him. She hoped so
with all her heart. She was used to being attached to people. It was
normal to her to like and be liked. And there must be something more in
him than his fine appearance for Lucy to be so very fond of him.

She gave herself a shake. She told herself she was taking this thing
badly; that she ought not, just because it was an unusual situation, be
so ready to condemn it. Was she really only a conventional spinster,
shrinking back shocked at a touch of naked naturalness? Wasn't there
much in what that short-haired child was so passionately saying about
the rightness, the saneness, of reaction from horror? Wasn't it nature's
own protection against too much death? After all, what was the good of
doubling horror, of being so much horrified at the horrible that you
stayed rooted there and couldn't move, and became, with your starting
eyes and bristling hair, a horror yourself?

Better, of course, to pass on, as Lucy was explaining, to get on with
one's business, which wasn't death but life. Still--there were the
decencies. However desolate one would be in retirement, however much one
would suffer, there was a period, Miss Entwhistle felt, during which the
bereaved withdrew. Instinctively. The really bereaved _would_ want to
withdraw----

'Ah, but don't you _see_,' Lucy once more tried despairingly to explain,
'this wasn't just being bereaved--this was something simply too awful.
Of course Everard would have behaved in the ordinary way if it had been
an ordinary death.'

'So that the more terrible one's sorrow the more cheerfully one goes out
to tea,' said Miss Entwhistle, the remembrance of the light trousers at
one end of Wemyss and the unmistakably satisfied face at the other being
for a moment too much for her.

'Oh,' almost moaned Lucy at that, and her head drooped in a sudden
fatigue.

Miss Entwhistle got up quickly and put her arms round her. 'Forgive me,'
she said. 'That was just stupid and cruel. I think I'm hide-bound. I
think I've probably got into a rut. Help me out of it, Lucy. You shall
teach me to take heroic views----'

And she kissed her hot face tenderly, holding it close to her own.

'But if I could only make you _see_,' said Lucy, clinging to her, tears
in her voice.

'But I do see that you love him very much,' said Miss Entwhistle gently,
again very tenderly kissing her.

That afternoon when Wemyss appeared at five o'clock, it being his
bi-weekly day for calling, he found Lucy alone.

'Why, where----? How-----?' he asked, peeping round the drawing-room as
though Miss Entwhistle must be lurking behind a chair.

'I've told,' said Lucy, who looked tired.

Then he clasped her with a great hug to his heart. 'Everard's own little
love,' he said, kissing and kissing her. 'Everard's own good little
love.'

'Yes, but----' began Lucy faintly. She was, however, so much muffled and
engulfed that her voice didn't get through.

'Now wasn't I right?' he said triumphantly, holding her tight. 'Isn't
this as it should be? Just you and me, and nobody to watch or
interfere?'

'Yes, but----' began Lucy again.

'What do you say? "Yes, but?"' laughed Wemyss, bending his ear. 'Yes
without any but, you precious little thing. Buts don't exist for
us--only yeses.'

And on these lines the interview continued for quite a long time before
Lucy succeeded in telling him that her aunt had been much upset.

Wemyss minded that so little that he didn't even ask why. He was
completely incurious about anything her aunt might think. 'Who cares?'
he said, drawing her to his heart again. 'Who cares? We've got each
other. What does anything else matter? If you had fifty aunts, all being
upset, what would it matter? What can it matter to us?'

And Lucy, who was exhausted by her morning, felt too as she nestled
close to him that nothing did matter so long as he was there. But the
difficulty was that he wasn't there most of the time, and her aunt was,
and she loved her aunt and did very much hate that she should be upset.

She tried to convey this to Wemyss, but he didn't understand. When it
came to Miss Entwhistle he was as unable to understand Lucy as Miss
Entwhistle was unable to understand her when it came to Wemyss. Only
Wemyss didn't in the least mind not understanding. Aunts. What were
they? Insects. He laughed, and said his little love couldn't have it
both ways; she couldn't eat her cake, which was her Everard, and have it
too, which was her aunt; and he kissed her hair and asked who was a
complicated little baby, and rocked her gently to and fro in his arms,
and Lucy was amused at that and laughed too, and forgot her aunt, and
forgot everything except how much she loved him.

Meanwhile Miss Entwhistle was spending a diligent afternoon in the
newspaper room of the British Museum. She was reading _The Times_ report
of the Wemyss accident and inquest; and if she had been upset by what
Lucy told her in the morning she was even more upset by what she read in
the afternoon. Lucy hadn't mentioned that suggestion of suicide. Perhaps
he hadn't told her. Suicide. Well, there had been no evidence. There was
an open verdict. It had been a suggestion made by a servant, perhaps a
servant with a grudge. And even if it had been true, probably the poor
creature had discovered she had some incurable disease, or she may have
had some loss that broke her down temporarily, and--oh, there were many
explanations; respectable, ordinary explanations.

Miss Entwhistle walked home slowly, loitering at shop windows, staring
at hats and blouses that she never saw, spinning out her walk to its
utmost, trying to think. Suicide. How desolate it sounded on that
beautiful afternoon. Such a giving up. Such a defeat. Why should she
have given up? Why should she have been defeated? But it wasn't true.
The coroner had said there was no evidence to show how she came by her
death.

Miss Entwhistle walked slower and slower. The nearer she got to Eaton
Terrace the more unwillingly did she advance. When she reached Belgrave
Square she went right round it twice, lingering at the garden railings
studying the habits of birds. She had been out all the afternoon, and,
as those who have walked it know, it is a long way from the British
Museum to Eaton Terrace. Also it was a hot day and her feet ached, and
she very much would have liked to be in her own chair in her cool
drawing-room having her tea. But there in that drawing-room would
probably still be Mr. Wemyss, no longer now to be Mr. Wemyss for
her--would she really have to call him Everard?--or she might meet him
on the stairs--narrow stairs; or in the hall--also narrow, which he
would fill up; or on her doorstep she might meet him, filling up her
doorstep; or, when she turned the corner into her street, there, coming
towards her, might be the triumphant trousers.

No, she felt she couldn't stand seeing him that day. So she lingered
forlornly watching the sparrows inside the garden railings of Belgrave
Square, balancing first on one and then on the other of those feet that
ached.

This was only the beginning, she thought; this was only the first of
many days for her of wandering homelessly round. Her house was too small
to hold both herself and love-making. If it had been the slender
love-making of the young man who was so doggedly devoted to Lucy, she
felt it wouldn't have been too small. He would have made love
youthfully, shyly. She could have sat quite happily in the dining-room
while the suitably paired young people dallied delicately together
overhead. But she couldn't bear the thought of being cramped up so near
Mr. Wemyss's--no, Everard's; she had better get used to that at
once--love-making. His way of courting wouldn't be,--she searched about
in her uneasy mind for a word, and found vegetarian. Yes; that word
sufficiently indicated what she meant: it wouldn't be vegetarian.

Miss Entwhistle drifted away from the railings, and turning her back on
her own direction wandered towards Sloane Street. There she saw an
omnibus stopping to let some one out. Wanting very much to sit down she
made an effort and caught it, and squeezing herself into its vacant seat
gave herself up to wherever it should take her.

It took her to the City; first to the City, and then to strange places
beyond. She let it take her. Her clothes became steadily more
fashionable the farther the omnibus went. She ended by being conspicuous
and stared at. But she was determined to give the widest margin to the
love-making and go the whole way, and she did.

For an hour and a half the omnibus went on and on. She had no idea
omnibuses did such things. When it finally stopped she sat still; and
the conductor, who had gradually come to share the growing surprise of
the relays of increasingly poor passengers, asked her what address she
wanted.

She said she wanted Sloane Street.

He was unable to believe it, and tried to reason with her, but she sat
firm in her place and persisted.

At nine o'clock he put her down where he had taken her up. She
disappeared into the darkness with the movements of one who is stiff,
and he winked at the passenger nearest the door and touched his
forehead.

But as she climbed wearily and hungrily up her steps and let herself in
with her latchkey, she felt it had been well worth it; for that one day
at least she had escaped Mr. We---- no, Everard.




X


Miss Entwhistle, however, made up her mind very firmly that after this
one afternoon of giving herself up to her feelings she was going to
behave in the only way that is wise when faced by an inevitable
marriage, the way of sympathy and friendliness.

Too often had she seen the first indignation of disappointed parents at
the marriages of their children harden into a matter of pride, a matter
of doggedness and principle, and finally become an attitude unable to be
altered, long after years had made it ridiculous. If the marriages
turned out happy, how absurd to persist in an antiquated disapproval; if
they turned out wretched, then how urgent the special need for love.

Thus Miss Entwhistle reasoned that first sleepless night in bed, and
on these lines she proceeded during the next few months. They were
trying months. She used up all she had of gallantry in sticking to
her determination. Lucy's instinct had been sound, that wish to keep
her engagement secret from her aunt for as long as possible. Miss
Entwhistle, always thin, grew still more thin in her constant daily and
hourly struggle to be pleased, to enter into Lucy's happiness, to make
things easy for her, to protect her from the notice and inquiry of their
friends, to look hopefully and with as much of Lucy's eyes as she could
at Everard and at the future.

'She isn't simple enough,' Wemyss would say to Lucy if ever she said
anything about her aunt's increasing appearance of strain and overwork.
'She should take things more naturally. Look at us.' For it was the
one fly in Lucy's otherwise perfect ointment, this intermittent
consciousness that her aunt wasn't altogether happy.

And then he would ask her, laying his head on hers as he stood with his
arms about her, who had taught his little girl to be simple; and they
would laugh, and kiss, and talk of other things.

Miss Entwhistle was unable to be simple in Wemyss's sense. She tried
to; for when she saw his fresh, unlined face, his forehead without a
wrinkle on it, and compared it in the glass with her own which was
only three years older, she thought there must be a good deal to be
said for single-mindedness. It was Lucy who told her Everard was so
single-minded. He took one thing at a time, she said, concentrating
quietly. When he had completely finished it off then, and not till then,
he went on to the next. He knew his own mind. Didn't Aunt Dot think it
was a great thing to know one's own mind? Instead of wobbling about,
wasting one's thoughts and energies on side-shows?

This was the very language of Wemyss; and Miss Entwhistle, after having
been listening to him in the afternoon--for every time he came she put
in a brief appearance just for the look of the thing, and on the
Saturday and Sunday outings she was invariably present the whole
time--felt it a little hard that when at last she had reached the end of
the day and the harbour of her empty drawing-room she should, through
the mouth of Lucy, have to listen to him all the evening as well.

But she always agreed, and said Yes, he was a great dear; for when an
only and much-loved niece is certainly going to marry, the least a wise
aunt can call her future nephew is a great dear. She will make this
warmer and more varied if she can, but at least she will say that much.
Miss Entwhistle tried to think of variations, afraid Lucy might notice a
certain sameness, and once with an effort she faltered out that he
seemed to be a--a real darling; but it had a hollow sound, and she
didn't repeat it. Besides, Lucy was quite satisfied with the other.

She used, sitting at her aunt's feet in the evenings--Wemyss never came
in the evenings because he distrusted the probable dinner--sometimes to
make her aunt say it again, by asking a little anxiously, 'But you _do_
think him a great dear, don't you, Aunt Dot?' Whereupon Miss Entwhistle,
afraid her last expression of that opinion may have been absent-minded,
would hastily exclaim with almost excess of emphasis, 'Oh, a _great_
dear.'

Perhaps he was a dear. She didn't know. What had she against him? She
didn't know. He was too old, that was one thing; but the next minute,
after hearing something he had said or laughed at, she thought he wasn't
old enough. Of course what she really had against him was that he had
got over his wife's shocking death so quickly. Yet she admitted there
was much in Lucy's explanation of this as a sheer instinctive gesture of
self-defence. Besides, she couldn't keep it up as a grudge against him
for ever; with every day it mattered less. And sometimes Miss Entwhistle
even doubted whether it was this that mattered to her at all,--whether
it was not rather some quite small things that she really objected to: a
want of fastidiousness, for instance, a forgetfulness of the minor
courtesies,--the objections, in a word, she told herself smiling, of an
old maid. Lucy seemed not to mind his blunders in these directions in
the least. She seemed positively, thought her aunt, to take a kind of
pride in them, delighting in everything he said or did with the adoring
tenderness of a young mother watching the pranks of her first-born. She
laughed gaily; she let him caress her openly. She too, thought Miss
Entwhistle, had become what she no doubt would say was single-minded.
Well, perhaps all this was a spinster's way of feeling about a type not
previously met with, and she had got--again she reproached herself--into
an elderly groove. Jim's friends,--well, they had been different, but
not necessarily better. Mr. Wemyss would call them, she was sure, a
finicking lot.

When in October London began to fill again, and Jim's friends came to
look her and Lucy up and showed a tendency, many of them, to keep on
doing it, a new struggle was added to her others, the struggle to
prevent their meeting Wemyss. He wouldn't, she was convinced, be able to
hide his proprietorship in Lucy, and Lucy wouldn't ever get that look of
tenderness out of her eyes when they rested on him. Questions as to who
he was would naturally be asked, and one or other of Jim's friends would
be sure to remember the affair of Mrs. Wemyss's death; indeed, that day
she went to the British Museum and read the report of it she had been
amazed that she hadn't seen it at the time. It took up so much of the
paper that she was bound to have seen it if she had seen a paper at all.
She could only suppose that as she was visiting friends just then, she
chanced that day to have been in the act of leaving or arriving, and
that if she bought a paper on the journey she had looked, as was
sometimes her way in trains, not at it but out of the window.

She felt she hadn't the strength to support being questioned, and in her
turn have to embark on the explanation and defence of Wemyss. There was
too much of him, she felt, to be explained. He ought to be separated
into sections, and taken gradually and bit by bit,--but far best not to
produce him, to keep him from meeting her friends. She therefore
arranged a day in the week when she would be at home, and discouraged
every one from the waste of time of trying to call on her on other days.
Then presently the afternoon became an evening once a week, when whoever
liked could come in after dinner and talk and drink coffee, because the
evening was safer; made safe by Wemyss's conviction--he hadn't concealed
it--that the dinners of maiden ladies were notoriously both scanty and
bad.

Lucy would have preferred never to see a soul except Wemyss, who was all
she wanted, all she asked for in life; but she did see her aunt's point,
that only by pinning their friends to a day and an hour could the risk
of their overflowing into precious moments be avoided. This is how Miss
Entwhistle put it to her, wondering as she said it at her own growing
ability in artfulness.

She had an old friend living in Chesham Street, a widow full of that
ripe wisdom that sometimes comes at the end to those who have survived
marriage; and to her, when the autumn brought her back to London, Miss
Entwhistle went occasionally in search of comfort.

'What in the whole world puts such a gulf between two affections and
comprehensions as a new love?' she asked one day, freshly struck,
because of something Lucy had said, by the distance she had travelled.
Lucy was quite a tiny figure now, so far away from her had she moved;
she couldn't even get her voice to carry to her, much less still hold on
to her with her hands.

And the friend, made brief of speech by wisdom, said: 'Nothing.'

About Wemyss's financial position Miss Entwhistle could only judge from
appearances, for it wouldn't have occurred to him that it might perhaps
be her concern to know, and she preferred to wait till later, when the
engagement could be talked about, to ask some old friend of Jim's to
make the proper inquiries; but from the way he lived it seemed to be an
easy one. He went freely in taxis, he hired cars with a reasonable
frequency, he inhabited one of the substantial houses of Lancaster Gate,
and also, of course, he had The Willows, the house on the river near
Strorley where his wife had died. After all, what could be better than
two houses, Miss Entwhistle thought, congratulating herself, as it were,
on Lucy's behalf that this side of Wemyss was so satisfactory. Two
houses, and no children; how much better than the other way about. And
one day, feeling almost hopeful about Lucy's prospects, on the
advantages of which she had insisted that her mind should dwell, she
went round again to the widow in Chesham Street and said suddenly to
her, who was accustomed to these completely irrelevant exclamatory
inquiries from her friend, and who being wise was also incurious, 'What
can be better than two houses?'

To which the widow, whose wisdom was more ripe than comforting, replied
disappointingly: 'One.'

Later, when the marriage loomed very near, Miss Entwhistle, who found
that she was more than ever in need of reassurance instead of being, as
she had hoped to become, more reconciled, went again, in a kind of
desperation this time, to the widow, seeking some word from her who was
so wise that would restore her to tranquillity, that would dispel her
absurd persistent doubts. 'After all,' she said almost entreatingly,
'what can be better than a devoted husband?'

And the widow, who had had three and knew what she was talking about,
replied with the large calm of those who have finished and can in
leisure weigh and reckon up: 'None.'




XI


The Wemyss-Entwhistle engagement proceeded on its way of development
through the ordinary stages of all engagements: secrecy complete,
secrecy partial, semi-publicity, and immediately after that entire
publicity, with its inevitable accompanying uproar. The uproar, always
more or less audible to the protagonists, of either approval or
disapproval, was in this case one of unanimous disapproval. Lucy's
father's friends protested to a man. The atmosphere at Eaton Terrace was
convulsed; and Lucy, running as she always did to hide from everything
upsetting into Wemyss's arms, was only made more certain than ever that
there alone was peace.

This left Miss Entwhistle to face the protests by herself. There was
nothing for it but to face them. Jim had had so many intimate, devoted
friends, and each of them apparently regarded his daughter as his
special care and concern. One or two of the younger ones, who had been
disciples rather than friends, were in love with her themselves, and
these were specially indignant and vocal in their indignation. Miss
Entwhistle found herself in the position she had tried so hard to
avoid, that of defending and explaining Wemyss to a highly sceptical,
antagonistic audience. It was as if, forced to fight for him, she was
doing so with her back to her drawing-room wall.

Lucy couldn't help her, because though she was distressed that her aunt
should be being worried because of her affairs, yet she did feel that
Everard was right when he said that her affairs concerned nobody in the
world but herself and him. She, too, was indignant, but her indignation
was because her father's friends, who had been ever since she could
remember always good and kind, besides perfectly intelligent and
reasonable, should with one accord, and without knowing anything about
Everard except that story of the accident, be hostile to her marrying
him. The ready unfairness, the willingness immediately to believe the
worst instead of the best, astonished and shocked her. And then the way
they all talked! Everlasting arguments and reasoning and hair-splitting;
so clever, so impossible to stand up against, and yet so surely, she was
certain, if only she had been clever too and able to prove things,
wrong. All their multitudinous points of view,--why, there was only one
point of view about a thing, Everard said, and that was the right one.
Ah, but what a woman wanted wasn't this; she didn't want this endless
thinking and examining and dissecting and considering. A woman--her very
thoughts were now dressed in Wemyss's words--only wanted her man. '"Hers
not to reason why,"' Wemyss had quoted one day, and both of them had
laughed at his parody, '"hers but to love and--not die, but live."'

The most that could be said for her father's friends was that they
meant well; but oh, what trouble the well-meaning could bring into an
otherwise simple situation! From them she hid--it was inevitable--in
Wemyss's arms. Here were no arguments; here were no misgivings
and paralysing hesitations. Here was just simple love, and the
feeling--delicious to her whose mother had died in the very middle of
all the sweet early petting, and whose whole life since had been spent
entirely in the dry and bracing company of unusually inquisitive-minded,
clever men--of being a baby again in somebody's big, comfortable,
uncritical lap.

The engagement hadn't leaked out so much as flooded out. It would have
continued secret for quite a long time, known only to the three and to
the maids--who being young women themselves, and well acquainted with
the symptoms of the condition, were sure of it before Miss Entwhistle
had even begun to suspect,--if Wemyss hadn't taken to dropping in,
contrary to expectations, on the Thursday evenings. Lucy's descriptions
of these evenings and of the people who came, and of how very kind they
were to her aunt and herself, and how anxious they were to help her,
they of course supposing that she was, actually, the lonely thing she
would have been if she hadn't had Everard as the dear hidden background
to her life--at this point they embraced,--at first amused him, then
made him curious, and finally caused him to come and see for himself.

He didn't tell Lucy he was coming, he just came. It had taken him five
Thursday evenings of playing bridge as usual at his club, playing it
with one hand, as he said to her afterwards, and thinking of her with
the other--'You know what I mean,' he said, and they laughed and
embraced--before it slowly oozed into and pervaded his mind that there
was his little girl, rounded by people fussing over her and making love
to her (because, said Wemyss, everybody would naturally want to make
love to her), and there was he, the only person who had a right to do
this, somewhere else.

So he walked in; and when he walked in, the group standing round Lucy
with their backs to the door saw her face, which had been gently
attentive, suddenly flash into colour and light; and turning with one
accord to see what it was she was looking at behind them with parted
lips and eyes of startled joy, beheld once more the unknown chief
mourner of the funeral in Cornwall.

Down there they had taken for granted that he was a relation of Jim's,
the kind of relative who in a man's life appears only three times, the
last of which is his funeral; here in Eaton Terrace they were
immediately sure he was not, anyhow, that, because for relatives who
only appear those three times a girl's face doesn't change in a flash
from gentle politeness to tremulous, shining life. They all stared at
him astonished. He was so different from the sorts of people they had
met at Jim's. For one thing he was so well dressed,--in the mating
season, thought Miss Entwhistle, even birds dress well,--and in his
impressive evening clothes, with what seemed a bigger and more spotless
shirt-front than any shirt-front they could have imagined, he made them
look and feel what they actually were, a dingy, shabby lot.

Wemyss was good-looking. He might be middle-aged, but he was
good-looking enough frequently to eclipse the young. He might have a
little too much of what tailors call a fine presence, but his height
carried this off. His features were regular, his face care-free and
healthy, his brown hair sleek with no grey in it, he was clean-shaven,
and his mouth was the kind of mouth sometimes described by journalists
as mobile, sometimes as determined, but always as well cut. One could
visualise him in a fur-lined coat, thought a young man near Lucy,
considering him; and one couldn't visualise a single one of the others,
including himself, in the room that evening in a fur-lined coat. Also,
thought this same young man, one could see railway porters and
taxi-drivers and waiters hurrying to be of service to him; and one not
only couldn't imagine them taking any notice that wasn't languid and
reluctant of the others, including himself, but one knew from personal
distressing experience that they didn't.

'My splendid lover!' Lucy's heart cried out within her when the door
opened and there he stood. She had not seen him before in the evening,
and the contrast between him and the rest of the people there was really
striking.

Miss Entwhistle had been right: there was no hiding the look in Lucy's
eyes or Wemyss's proprietary manner. He hadn't meant to take any but the
barest notice of his little girl, he had meant to be quite an ordinary
guest--just shake hands and say 'Hasn't it been wet to-day'--that sort
of thing; but his pride and love were too much for him, he couldn't hide
them. He thought he did, and was sure he was behaving beautifully and
with the easiest unconcern, but the mere way he looked at her and stood
over her was enough. Also there was the way she looked at him. The
intelligences in that room were used to drawing more complicated
inferences than this. They were outraged by its obviousness. Who was
this middle-aged, prosperous outsider who had got hold of Jim's
daughter? What had her aunt been about? Where had he dropped from? Had
Jim known?

Miss Entwhistle introduced him. 'Mr. Wemyss,' she said to them
generally, with a vague wave of her hand; and a red spot appeared and
stayed on each of her cheekbones.

Wemyss held forth. He stood on the hearthrug filling his pipe--he was
used to smoking in that room when he came to tea with Lucy, and forgot
to ask Miss Entwhistle if it mattered--and told everybody what he
thought. They were talking about Ireland when he came in, and after the
disturbance of his arrival had subsided he asked them not to mind him
but to go on. He then proceeded to go on himself, telling them what he
thought; and what he thought was what _The Times_ had thought that
morning. Wemyss spoke with the practised fluency of a leading article.
He liked politics and constantly talked them at his club, and it created
vacancies in the chairs near him. But Lucy, who hadn't heard him on
politics before and found that she could understand every word, listened
to him with parted lips. Before he came in they had been saying things
beyond her quickness in following, eagerly discussing Sinn Fein,
Lloyd George, the outrageous cost of living--it was the autumn of
1920--turning everything inside out, upside down, being witty, being
surprising, being tremendously eager and earnest. It had been a kind of
restless flashing round and catching fire from each other,--a kind of
kick, and flick, and sparks, and a burst of laughter, and then on to
something else just as she was laboriously getting under weigh to follow
the last sentence but six. She had been missing her father, who took her
by the hand on these occasions when he saw her lagging behind, and
stopped a moment to explain to her, and held up the others while she got
her breath.

But now came Everard, and in a minute everything was plain. He had the
effect on her of a window being thrown open and fresh air and sunlight
being let in. He was so sensible, she felt, compared to these others; so
healthy and natural. The Government, he said, only had to do this and
that, and Ireland and the cost of living would immediately, regarded as
problems, be solved. He explained the line to be taken. It was a very
simple line. One only needed goodwill and a little common sense. Why,
thought Lucy, unconsciously nodding proud agreement, didn't people have
goodwill and a little common sense?

At first there was a disposition to interrupt, to heckle, but it grew
fainter and soon gave way to complete silence. The other guests might
have been stunned, Miss Entwhistle thought, so motionless did they
presently sit. And when they went away, which they seemed to do earlier
than usual and in a body, Wemyss was still standing on the hearthrug
explaining the points of view of the ordinary, sensible business man.

'Mind you,' he said, pointing at them with his pipe, 'I don't pretend to
be a great thinker. I'm just a plain business man, and as a plain
business man I know there's only one way of doing a thing, and that's
the right way. Find out what that way is, and go and do it. There's too
much arguing altogether and asking other people what they think. We
don't want talk, we want action. I agree with Napoleon, who said
concerning the French Revolution, _"Il aurait fallu mitrailler cette
canaille."_ We're not simple enough.'

This was the last the others heard as they trooped in silence down the
stairs. Outside they lingered for a while in little knots on the
pavement talking, and then they drifted away to their various homes,
where most of them spent the rest of the evening writing to Miss
Entwhistle.

The following Thursday evening, her letters in reply having been vague
and evasive, they came again, each hoping to get Lucy's aunt to himself,
and on the ground of being Jim's most devoted friend ask her straight
questions such as who and what was Wemyss. Also, more particularly, why.
Who and what he was was of no sort of consequence if he would only be
and do it somewhere else; but they arrived determined to get an answer
to the third question: Why Wemyss? And when they got there, there he was
again; there before them this time, standing on the hearthrug as if he
had never moved off it since the week before and had gone on talking
ever since.

This was the end of the Thursday evenings. The next one was unattended,
except by Wemyss; but Miss Entwhistle had been forced to admit the
engagement, and from then on right up to the marriage her life was a
curse to her and a confusion. Just because Jim had appointed no guardian
in his will for Lucy, every single one of his friends felt bound to fill
the vacancy. They were indignant when they discovered that almost before
they had begun Lucy was being carried off, but they were horrified when
they discovered what Wemyss it was who was carrying her off. Most of
them quite well remembered the affair of Mrs. Wemyss's death a few weeks
before, and those who did not went, as Miss Entwhistle had gone, to the
British Museum and read it up. They also, though they themselves were
chiefly unworldly persons who lost money rather than made it, instituted
the most searching private inquiries into Wemyss's business affairs,
hoping that he might be caught out as such a rascal or so penniless, or,
preferably, both, that no woman could possibly have anything to do with
him. But Wemyss's business record, the solicitor they employed informed
them, was quite creditable. Everything about it was neat and in order.
He was not what the City would call a wealthy man, but if you went out
say to Ealing, said the solicitor, he would be called wealthy. He was
solid, and he was certainly more than able to support a wife and family.
He could have been quite wealthy if he had not adopted a principle to
which he had adhered for years of knocking off work early and leaving
his office at an hour when other men did not,--the friends were obliged
to admit that this, at least, seemed sensible. There had been, though, a
very sad occurrence recently in his private life,--'Oh, thank you,'
interrupted the friends, 'we have heard about that.'

But however good Wemyss's business record might be, it couldn't alter
their violent objection to Jim's daughter marrying him. Apart from the
stuff he talked, there was the inquest. They were aware that in this
they were unreasonable, but they were all too much attached to Jim's
memory to be able to be reasonable about a man they felt so certain he
wouldn't have liked. Singly and in groups they came at safe times, such
as after breakfast, to Eaton Terrace to reason with Lucy, too much
worried to remember that you cannot reason with a person in love. Less
wise than Miss Entwhistle, they tried to dissuade her from marrying this
man, and the more they tried the tighter she clung to him. To the
passion of love was added, by their attitudes, the passion of
protectiveness, of flinging her body between him and them. And all the
while, right inside her innermost soul, in spite of her amazement at
them and her indignation, she was smiling to herself; for it was really
very funny, the superficial judgments of these clever people when set
side by side with what she alone knew,--the tenderness, the simple
goodness of her heart's beloved.

Lucy laughed to herself in her happy sureness. She had miraculously
found not only a lover she could adore and a guide she could follow and
a teacher she could look up to and a sufferer who without her wouldn't
have been healed, but a mother, a nurse, and a playmate. In spite of his
being so much older and so extraordinarily wise, he was yet her
contemporary,--sometimes hardly even that, so boyish was he in his talk
and jokes. Lucy had never had a playmate. She had spent her life
sitting, as it were, bolt upright mentally behaving, and she hadn't
known till Wemyss came on the scene how delicious it was to relax.
Nonsense had delighted her father, it is true, but it had to be of a
certain kind; never the kind to which the adjective 'sheer' would apply.
With Wemyss she could say whatever nonsense came into her head, sheer or
otherwise. He laughed consumedly at her when she talked it. She loved to
make him laugh. They laughed together. He understood her language. He
was her playmate. Those people outside, old and young, who didn't know
what playing was and were trying to get her away from him, might beat at
the door behind which he and she sat listening, amused, as long as they
liked.

'How they all try to separate us,' she said to him one day, sitting as
usual safe in the circle of his arm, her head on his breast.

'You can't separate unity,' remarked Wemyss comfortably.

She wanted to tell them that answer, confront them with it next time
they came after breakfast, as a discouragement to useless further
effort, but she had learned that they somehow always knew when what she
said was Everard's and not hers, and then, of course, prejudiced as they
were, they wouldn't listen.

'Now, Lucy, that's pure Wemyss,' they would say. 'For heaven's sake say
something of your own.'

At Christmas Wemyss had an encounter with Miss Entwhistle, who ever
since she had been told of the engagement had been so quiet and
inoffensive that he quite liked her. She had seemed to recognise her
position as a side-show, and had accepted it without a word. She no
longer asked him questions, and she made no difficulties. She left him
alone with Lucy in Eaton Terrace, and though she had to go with them on
the outings she asserted herself so little that he forgot she was there.
But when towards the middle of December he remarked one afternoon that
he always spent Christmas at The Willows, and what day would she and
Lucy come down, Christmas Eve or the day before, to his astonishment she
looked astonished, and after a silence said it was most kind of him, but
they were going to spend Christmas where they were.

'I had hoped you would join us,' she said. 'Must you really go away?'

'But----' began Wemyss, incredulous, doubting his ears.

It was, however, the fact that Miss Entwhistle wouldn't go to The
Willows; and of course if she wouldn't Lucy couldn't either. Nothing
that he said could shake her determination. Here was a repetition, only
how much worse--fancy spoiling his Christmas--of her conduct in Cornwall
when she insisted on going away from that nice little house where they
were all so comfortably established, and taking Lucy up to London. He
had forgotten, so acquiescent had she been for weeks, that down there he
had discovered she was obstinate. It was a shock to him to realise that
her obstinacy, the most obstinate obstinacy he had ever met, might be
going to upset his plans. He couldn't believe it. He couldn't believe he
wasn't going to be able to have what he wished, and only because an old
maid said 'No.' Was the story of Balaam to be reversed, and the angel be
held up by the donkey? He refused to believe such a thing possible.

Wemyss, who made his plans first and talked about them afterwards,
hadn't mentioned Christmas even to Lucy. It was his habit to settle what
he wished to do, arrange all the details, and then, when everything was
ready, inform those who were to take part. It hadn't occurred to him
that over the Christmas question there would be trouble. He had
naturally taken it for granted that he would spend Christmas with his
little girl, and of course as he always spent it at The Willows she
would spend it there too. All his arrangements were made, and the
servants, who looked surprised, had been told to get the spare-rooms
ready for two ladies. He had begun to feel seasonable as early as the
first week in December, and had bespoken two big turkeys instead of one,
because this was to be his first real Christmas at The Willows--Vera had
been without the Christmas spirit--and he felt it couldn't be celebrated
lavishly enough. Two where there had in previous years been one,--that
was the turkeys; four where there had been two,---that was the plum
puddings. He doubled everything. Doubling seemed the proper, even the
symbolic expression of his feelings, for wasn't he soon going to be
doubled himself? And how sweetly.

Then suddenly, having finished his preparations and proceeding, the
time being ripe, to the question of the day of arrival, he found
himself up against opposition. Miss Entwhistle wouldn't go to The
Willows--incredible, impossible, and insufferable,--while Lucy, instead
of instantly insisting and joining with him in a compelling majority,
sat as quiet as a mouse.

'But Lucy----' Wemyss having stared speechless at her aunt, turned to
her. 'But of course we must spend Christmas together.'

'Oh yes,' said Lucy, leaning forward, 'of course----'

'But of course you must come down. Why, any other arrangement is
unthinkable. My house is in the country, which is the proper place for
Christmas, and it's your Everard's house, and you haven't seen it
yet--why, I would have taken you down long ago, but I've been saving up
for this.'

'We hoped,' said Miss Entwhistle, 'you would join us here.'

'Here! But there isn't room to swing a turkey here. I've ordered two,
and each of them is twice too big to get through your front door.'

'Oh, Everard--have you actually ordered turkeys?' said Lucy.

She wanted to laugh, but she also wanted to cry. His simplicity was too
wonderful. In her eyes it set him apart from criticism and made him
sacred, like the nimbus about the head of a saint.

That he should have been secretly busy making preparations, buying
turkeys, planning a surprise, when all this time she had been supposing
that why he never mentioned The Willows was because he shrank both for
himself and for her from the house of his tragedy! There had never been
any talk of showing it to her, as there had about the house in Lancaster
Gate, and she had imagined he would never go near it again and was
probably quietly getting rid of it. He would want to get rid of it, of
course,--that house of unbearable memories. To the other one, the house
in Lancaster Gate, he had insisted on taking them to tea, and in spite
of a great desire not to go, plainly visible on her aunt's face and felt
too by herself, it had seemed after all a natural and more or less
inevitable thing, and they had gone. At least that poor Vera had only
lived there, and not died there. It was a gloomy house, and Lucy had
wanted him to give it up and start life with her in a place without
associations, but he had been so much astonished at the idea--'Why,' he
had cried, 'it was my father's house and I was born in it!'--that she
couldn't help laughing at his dismay, and was ashamed of herself for
having thought of uprooting him. Besides, she hadn't known he had been
born in it.

The Willows, however, was different. Of that he never spoke, and Lucy
had been sure of the pitiful, the delicate reason. Now it appeared that
all this time he had just been saving it up as a Christmas treat.

'Oh, Everard----!' she said, with a gasp. She hadn't reckoned with The
Willows. That The Willows should still be in Everard's life, and
actively so, not just lingering on while house agents were disposing of
it, but visited and evidently prized, came upon her as an immense shock.

'I think we can achieve a happy little Christmas for you here,' said her
aunt, smiling the smile she smiled when she found difficulty in smiling.
'Of course you and Lucy would want to be together. I ought to have told
you earlier that we were counting on you, but somehow Christmas comes on
one so unexpectedly.'

'Perhaps you'll tell me why you won't come to The Willows,' said Wemyss,
holding on to himself as she used to make him hold on to himself in
Cornwall. 'You realise, of course, that if you persist you spoil both
Lucy's and my Christmas.'

'Ah, but you mustn't put it that way,' said Miss Entwhistle, gentle but
determined. 'I promise you that you and Lucy shall be very happy here.'

'You haven't answered my question,' said Wemyss, slowly filling his
pipe.

'I don't think I'm going to,' said Miss Entwhistle, suddenly flaring up.
She hadn't flared up since she was ten, and was instantly ashamed of
herself, but there was something about Mr. Wemyss----

'I think,' she said, getting up and speaking very gently, 'you'll like
to be alone together now.' And she crossed to the door.

There she wavered, and turning round said more gently still, even
penitentially, 'If Lucy wishes to go to The Willows I'll--I'll accept
your kind invitation and take her. I leave it to her.'

Then she went out.

'That's all right then,' said Wemyss with a great sigh of relief,
smiling broadly at Lucy. 'Come here, little love,--come to your Everard,
and we'll fix it all up. Lord, what a kill-joy that woman is!'

And he put out his arms and drew her to him.




XII


But Christmas was spent after all at Eaton Terrace, and they lived on
Wemyss's turkeys and plum puddings for a fortnight.

It was not a very successful Christmas, because Wemyss was so profoundly
disappointed, and Miss Entwhistle had the apologeticness of those who
try to make up for having got their own way, and Lucy, who had shrunk
from The Willows far more than her aunt, wished many times before it was
over that they had after all gone there. It would have been much simpler
in the long run, and much less painful than having to look on at Everard
being disappointed; but at the time, and taken by surprise, she had felt
that she couldn't have borne festivities, and still less could she have
borne seeing Everard bearing festivities in that house.

'This is morbid,' he said, when in answer to his questioning she at last
told him it was poor Vera's dreadful death there that made her feel she
couldn't go; and he explained, holding her in his arms, how foolish it
was to be morbid, and how his little girl, who was marrying a healthy,
sensible man who, God knew, had had to fight hard enough to keep so--she
pressed closer--and yet had succeeded, must be healthily sensible too.
Otherwise, if she couldn't do this and couldn't do that because it
reminded her of something sad, and couldn't go here and couldn't go
there because of somebody's having died, he was afraid she would make
both herself and him very unhappy.

'Oh, Everard----' said Lucy at that, holding him tight, the thought of
making him unhappy, him, her own beloved who had been through such
terrible unhappiness already, giving her heart a stab.

His little girl must know, he continued, speaking with the grave voice
that was natural to him when he was serious, the voice not of the
playmate but of the man she adored, the man she was in love with, in
whose hands she could safely leave her earthly concerns,--his little
girl must know that somebody had died everywhere. There wasn't a spot,
there wasn't a house, except quite new ones----

'Oh yes, I know--but----' Lucy tried to interrupt.

And The Willows was his home, the home he had looked forward to and
worked for and had at last been able to afford to rent on a long lease,
a lease so long that it made it practically his very own, and he had
spent the last ten years developing and improving it, and there wasn't a
brick or a tree in it in which he didn't take an interest, really an
almost personal interest, and his one thought all these months had been
the day when he would show it to her, to its dear future mistress.

'Oh, Everard--yes--you shall--I want to----' said Lucy incoherently, her
cheek against his, 'only not yet--not festivities--please--I won't be so
morbid--I promise not to be morbid--but--please----'

And just when she was wavering, just when she was going to give in, not
because of his reasoning, for her instincts were stronger than his
reasoning, but because she couldn't bear his disappointment, Miss
Entwhistle, sure now of Lucy's dread of Christmas at The Willows,
suddenly turned firm again and announced that they would spend it in
Eaton Terrace.

So Wemyss was forced to submit. The sensation was so new to him that he
couldn't get over it. Once it was certain that his Christmas was, as he
insisted, spoilt, he left off talking about it and went to the other
extreme and was very quiet. That his little love should be so much under
the influence of her aunt saddened him, he told her. Lucy tried to bring
gaiety into this attitude by pointing out the proof she was giving him
of how very submissive she was to the person she happened to live
with,--'And presently all my submissiveness will be concentrated on
you,' she said gaily.

But he wouldn't be gay. He shook his head in silence and filled his
pipe. He was too deeply disappointed to be able to cheer up. And the
expression 'happen to live with,' jarred a little. There was an airy
carelessness about the phrase. One didn't happen to live with one's
husband; yet that had been the implication.

Every year in April Wemyss had a birthday; that is, unlike most people
of his age, he regularly celebrated it. Christmas and his birthday were
the festivals of the year for Him, and were always spent at The Willows.
He regarded his birthday, which was on the 4th of April, as the first
day of spring, defying the calendar, and was accustomed to find certain
yellow flowers in blossom down by the river on that date supporting his
contention. If these flowers came out before his birthday he took no
notice of them, treating them as non-existent, nor did he ever notice
them afterwards, for he did not easily notice flowers; but his gardener
had standing orders to have a bunch of them on the table that one
morning in the year to welcome him with their bright shiny faces when he
came down to his birthday breakfast, and coming in and seeing them he
said, 'My birthday and Spring's'; whereupon his wife--up to now it had
been Vera, but from now it would be Lucy--kissed him and wished him many
happy returns. This was the ritual; and when one year of abnormal cold
the yellow flowers weren't there at breakfast, because neither by the
river's edge nor in the most sheltered of the swamps had the
increasingly frantic gardener been able to find them, the entire
birthday was dislocated. He couldn't say on entering the room and
beholding them, 'My birthday and Spring's,' because he didn't behold
them; and his wife--that year Vera--couldn't kiss him and wish him many
happy returns because she hadn't the cue. She was so much used to the
cue that not having it made her forget her part,--forget, indeed, his
birthday altogether; and consequently it was a day of the extremest
spiritual chill and dinginess, matching the weather without. Wemyss had
been terribly hurt. He hoped never to spend another birthday like it.
Nor did he, for Vera remembered it after that.

Birthdays being so important to him, he naturally reflected after Miss
Entwhistle had spoilt his Christmas that she would spoil his birthday
too if he let her. Well, he wasn't going to let her. Not twice would he
be caught like that; not twice would he be caught in a position of
helplessness on his side and power on hers. The way to avoid it was very
simple: he would marry Lucy in time for his birthday. Why should they
wait any longer? Why stick to that absurd convention of the widower's
year? No sensible man minded what people thought. And who were the
people? Surely one didn't mind the opinions of those shabby weeds he had
met on the two Thursday evenings at Lucy's aunt's. The little they had
said had been so thoroughly unsound and muddled and yet dangerous, that
if they one and all emigrated to-morrow England would only be the
better. After meeting them he had said to Lucy, who had listened in some
wonder at this new light thrown on her father's friends, that they were
the very stuff of which successful segregation was made. In an island by
themselves, he told her, they would be quite happy undermining each
other's backbones, and the backbone of England, which consisted of plain
unspoilt patriots, would be let alone. They, certainly, didn't matter;
while as for his own friends, those friends who had behaved badly to him
on Vera's death, not only didn't he care twopence for their criticisms
but he could hardly wait for the moment when he would confound them by
producing for their inspection this sweetest of little girls, so young,
so devoted to him, Lucy his wife.

He accordingly proceeded to make all the necessary arrangements for
being married in March, for going for a trip to Paris, and for returning
to The Willows for the final few days of his honeymoon on the very day
of his birthday. What a celebration that would be! Wemyss, thinking of
it, shut his eyes so as to dwell upon it undisturbed. Never would he
have had a birthday like this next one. He might really quite fairly
call it his First, for he would be beginning life all over again, and
entering on years that would indeed be truthfully described as tender.

So much was it his habit to make plans privately and not mention them
till they were complete, that he found it difficult to tell Lucy of this
one in spite of the important part she was to play in it. But, after
all, some preparing would, he admitted to himself, be necessary even for
the secret marriage he had decided on at a registrar's office. She would
have to pack a bag; she would have to leave her belongings in order.
Also he might perhaps have to use persuasion. He knew his little girl
well enough to be sure she would relinquish church and white satin
without a murmur at his request, but she might want to tell her aunt of
the marriage's imminence, and then the aunt would, to a dead certainty,
obstruct, and either induce her to wait till the year was out, or, if
Lucy refused to do this, make her miserable with doubts as to whether
she had been right to follow her lover's wishes. Fancy making a girl
miserable because she followed her lover's wishes! What a woman, thought
Wemyss, filling his pipe. In his eyes Miss Entwhistle had swollen since
her conduct at Christmas to the bulk of a monster.

Having completed his preparations, and fixed his wedding day for the
first Saturday in March, Wemyss thought it time he told Lucy; so he did,
though not without a slight fear at the end that she might make
difficulties.

'My little love isn't going to do anything that spoils her Everard's
plans after all the trouble he has taken?' he said, seeing that with her
mouth slightly open she gazed at him in an obvious astonishment and
didn't say a word.

He then proceeded to shut the eyes that were gazing up into his, and the
surprised parted lips, with kisses, for he had discovered that gentle,
lingering kisses hushed Lucy quiet when she was inclined to say,
'But----' and brought her back quicker than anything to the mood of
tender, half-asleep acquiescence in which, as she lay in his arms, he
most loved her; then indeed she was his baby, the object of the
passionate protectiveness he felt he was naturally filled with, but for
the exercise of which circumstances up to now had given him no scope.
You couldn't passionately protect Vera. She was always in another room.

Lucy, however, did say, 'But----' when she recovered from her first
surprise, and did presently--directly, that is, he left off kissing her
and she could speak--make difficulties. Her aunt; the secrecy; why
secrecy; why not wait; it was so necessary under the circumstances to
wait.

And then he explained about his birthday.

At that she gazed at him again with a look of wonder in her eyes, and
after a moment began to laugh. She laughed a great deal, and with her
arm tight round his neck, but her eyes were wet. 'Oh, Everard,' she
said, her cheek against his, 'do you think we're really old enough to
marry?'

This time, however, he got his way. Lucy found she couldn't bring
herself to spoil his plans a second time; the spectacle of his prolonged
silent disappointment at Christmas was still too vividly before her. Nor
did she feel she could tell her aunt. She hadn't the courage to face her
aunt's expostulations and final distressed giving in. Her aunt, who
loomed so enormous in Wemyss's eyes, seemed to Lucy to be only half the
size she used to be. She seemed to have been worried small by her
position, like a bone among contending dogs, in the middle of different
indignations. What would be the effect on her of this final blow? The
thought of it haunted Lucy and spoilt all the last days before her
marriage, days which she otherwise would have loved, because she very
quickly became infected by the boyish delight and excitement over their
secret that made Wemyss hardly able to keep still in his chair. He
didn't keep still in it. Once at least he got up and did some slow steps
about the room, moving with an apparent solemnity because of not being
used to such steps, which he informed her presently were a dance. Till
he told her this she watched him too much surprised to say anything. So
did penguins dance in pictures. She couldn't think what was the matter
with him. When he had done, and told her, breathing a little hard, that
it was a dance symbolic of married happiness, she laughed and laughed,
and flew to hug him.

'Baby, oh, baby!' she said, rubbing her cheek up and down his coat.

'Who's another baby?' he asked, breathless but beaming.

Such was their conversation.

But poor Aunt Dot....

Lucy couldn't bear to think of poor little kind Aunt Dot. She had been
so wonderful, so patient, and she would be deeply horrified by a runaway
marriage. Never, never would she understand the reason for it. She
didn't a bit understand Everard, didn't begin to understand him, and
that his birthday should be a reason for breaking what she would regard
as the common decencies would of course only seem to her too childish to
be even discussed. Lucy was afraid Aunt Dot was going to be very much
upset, poor darling little Aunt Dot. Conscience-stricken, she couldn't
do enough for Aunt Dot now that the secret date was fixed. She watched
for every possible want during their times alone, flew to fetch things,
darted at dropped handkerchiefs, kissed her not only at bedtime and in
the morning but whenever there was the least excuse and with the utmost
tenderness; and every kiss and every look seemed to say, 'Forgive me.'

'Are they going to run away?' wondered Miss Entwhistle presently.

Lucy would have been immensely taken aback, and perhaps, such is one's
perversity, even hurt, if she could have seen the ray of hope which at
this thought lit her Aunt Dot's exhausted mind; for Miss Entwhistle's
life, which had been a particularly ordered and calm one up to the day
when Wemyss first called at Eaton Terrace, had since then been nothing
but just confused clamour. Everybody was displeased with her, and each
for directly opposite reasons. She had fallen on evil days, and they had
by February been going on so long that she felt worn out. Wemyss, she
was quite aware, disliked her heartily; her Jim was dead; Lucy, her one
living relation, so tenderly loved, was every day disappearing further
before her very eyes into Wemyss's personality, into what she sometimes
was betrayed by fatigue and impatience into calling to herself the
Wemyss maw; and her little house, which had always been so placid, had
become, she wearily felt, the cockpit of London. She used to crawl back
to it with footsteps that lagged more and more the nearer she got, after
her enforced prolonged daily outings--enforced and prolonged because the
house couldn't possibly hold both herself and Wemyss except for the
briefest moments,--and drearily wonder what letters she would find from
Jim's friends scolding her, and what fresh arrangements in the way of
tiring motor excursions, or invitations to tea at that dreadful house in
Lancaster Gate, would be sprung upon her. Did all engagements pursue
such a turbulent course? she asked herself,--she had given up asking the
oracle of Chesham Street anything because of her disconcerting answers.
How glad she was she had never been engaged; how glad she was she had
refused the offers she had had when she was a girl. Quite recently she
had met one of those would-be husbands in an omnibus, and how glad she
was when she looked at him that she had refused him. People don't keep
well, mused Miss Entwhistle. If Lucy would only refuse Wemyss now, how
glad she would be that she had when she met him in ten years' time in an
omnibus.

But these, of course, were merely the reflections of a tired-out
spinster, and she still had enough spirit to laugh at them to herself.
After all, whatever she might feel about Wemyss Lucy adored him, and
when anybody adores anybody as much as that, Miss Entwhistle thought,
the only thing to do is to marry and have done with it. No; that was
cynical. She meant, marry and not have done with it. Ah, if only the
child were marrying that nice young Teddy Trevor, her own age and so
devoted, and with every window-sill throughout his house in Chelsea the
proper height....

Miss Entwhistle was very unhappy all this time, besides having feet that
continually ached. Though she dreaded the marriage, yet she couldn't
help feeling that it would be delicious to be able once more to sit
down. How enchanting to sit quietly in her own empty drawing-room, and
not to have to walk about London any more. How enchanting not to make
any further attempts to persuade herself that she enjoyed Battersea
Park, and liked the Embankment, and was entertained by Westminster
Abbey. What she wanted with an increasing longing that amounted at last
to desperation as the winter dragged on, was her own chair by the fire
and an occasional middle-aged crony to tea. She had reached the time of
life when one likes sitting down. Also she had definitely got to the
period of cronies. One's contemporaries--people who had worn the same
kinds of clothes as oneself in girlhood, who remembered bishop's sleeves
and could laugh with one about bustles--how very much one longed for
one's contemporaries.

When, then, Lucy's behaviour suddenly became so markedly attentive and
so very tender, when she caught her looking at her with wistful
affection and flushing on being caught, when her good-nights and
good-mornings were many kisses instead of one, and she kept on jumping
up and bringing her teaspoons she hadn't asked for and sugar she didn't
want, Miss Entwhistle began to revive.

'Is it possible they're going to run away?' she wondered; and so much
reduced was she that she very nearly hoped so.




XIII


Lucy had meant to do exactly as Wemyss said and keep her marriage
secret, creeping out of the house quietly, going off with him abroad
after the registrar had bound them together, and telegraphing or writing
to her aunt from some safe distant place _en route_ like Boulogne; but
on saying good-night the evening before the wedding day, to her very
great consternation her aunt, whom she was in the act of kissing,
suddenly pushed her gently a little away, looked at her a moment, and
then holding her by both arms said with conviction, 'It's to-morrow.'

Lucy could only stare. She stared idiotically, open-mouthed, her face
scarlet. She looked and felt both foolish and frightened. Aunt Dot was
uncanny. If she had discovered, how had she discovered? And what was she
going to do? But had she discovered, or was it just something she
chanced to remember, some engagement Lucy had naturally forgotten, or
perhaps only somebody coming to tea?

She clutched at this straw. 'What is to-morrow?' she stammered, scarlet
with fright and guilt.

And her aunt made herself perfectly clear by replying, 'Your wedding.'

Then Lucy fell on her neck and cried and told her everything, and her
wonderful, unexpected, uncanny, adorable little aunt, instead of being
upset and making her feel too wicked and ungrateful to live, was full of
sympathy and understanding. They sobbed together, sitting on the sofa
locked in each other's arms, but it was a sweet sobbing, for they both
felt at this moment how much they loved each other. Miss Entwhistle
wished she had never had a single critical impatient thought of the man
this darling little child so deeply loved, and Lucy wished she had never
had a single secret from this darling little aunt Everard so blindly
didn't love. Dear, dear little Aunt Dot. Lucy's heart was big with
gratitude and tenderness and pity,--pity because she herself was so
gloriously happy and surrounded by love, and Aunt Dot's life seemed,
compared to hers, so empty, so solitary, and going to be like that till
the end of her days; and Miss Entwhistle's heart was big with yearning
over this lamb of Jim's who was giving herself with such fearlessness,
all lit up by radiant love, into the hands of a strange husband.
Presently, of course, he wouldn't be a strange husband, he would be a
familiar husband; but would he be any the better for that, she wondered?
They sobbed, and kissed, and sobbed again, each keeping half her
thoughts to herself.

This is how it was that Miss Entwhistle walked into the registrar's
office with Lucy next morning and was one of the witnesses of the
marriage.

Wemyss had a very bad moment when he saw her come in. His heart gave a
great thump, such as it had never done in his life before, for he
thought there was to be a hitch and that at the very last minute he was
somehow not going to get his Lucy. Then he looked at Lucy and was
reassured. Her face was like the morning of a perfect day in its
cloudlessness, her Love-in-a-Mist eyes were dewy with tenderness as they
rested on him, and her mouth was twisted up by happiness into the
sweetest, funniest little crooked smile. If only she would take off her
hat, thought Wemyss, bursting with pride, so that the registrar could
see how young she looked with her short hair,--why, perhaps the old boy
might think she was too young to be married and start asking searching
questions! What fun that would be.

He himself produced the effect on Miss Entwhistle, as he stood next to
Lucy being married, of an enormous schoolboy who has just won some
silver cup or other for his House after immense exertions. He had
exactly that glowing face of suppressed triumph and pride; he was red
with delighted achievement.

'Put the ring on your wife's finger,' ordered the registrar when, having
got through the first part of the ceremony, Wemyss, busy beaming down at
Lucy, forgot there was anything more to do. And Lucy stuck up her hand
with all the fingers spread out and stiff, and her face beamed too with
happiness at the words, 'Your wife.'

'"Nothing is here for tears,"' quoted Miss Entwhistle to herself,
watching the blissful absorption with which they were both engaged in
getting the ring successfully over the knuckle of the proper finger. 'He
really _is_ a--a dear. Yes. Of course. But how queer life is. I wonder
what he was doing this day last year, he and that poor other wife of
his.'

When it was over and they were outside on the steps, with the taxi
Wemyss had come in waiting to take them to the station, Miss Entwhistle
realised that here was the place and moment of good-bye, and that not
only could she go no further with Lucy but that from now on she could do
nothing more for her. Except love her. Except listen to her. Ah, she
would always be there to love and listen to her; but happiest of all it
would be for the little thing if she never, from her, were to need
either of those services.

At the last moment she put her hand impulsively on Wemyss's breast and
looked up into his triumphant, flushed face and said, 'Be kind to her.'

'Oh, Aunt Dot!' laughed Lucy, turning to hug her once more.

'Oh, Aunt Dot!' laughed Wemyss, vigorously shaking her hand.

They went down the steps, leaving her standing alone on the top, and she
watched the departing taxi with the two heads bobbing up and down at the
window and the four hands waving good-byes. That taxi window could never
have framed in so much triumph, so much radiance before. Well, well,
thought Aunt Dot, going down in her turn when the last glimpse of them
had disappeared, and walking slowly homeward; and she added, after a
space of further reflection, 'He really _is_ a--a dear.'




XIV


Marriage, Lucy found, was different from what she had supposed; Everard
was different; everything was different. For one thing she was always
sleepy. For another she was never alone. She hadn't realised how
completely she would never be alone, or, if alone, not sure for one
minute to the other of going on being alone. Always in her life there
had been intervals during which she recuperated in solitude from any
strain; now there were none. Always there had been places she could go
to and rest in quietly, safe from interruption; now there were none. The
very sight of their room at the hotels they stayed at, with Wemyss's
suitcases and clothes piled on the chairs, and the table covered with
his brushes and shaving things, for he wouldn't have a dressing-room,
being too natural and wholesome, he explained, to want anything separate
from his own woman--the very sight of this room fatigued her. After a
day of churches, pictures and restaurants--he was a most conscientious
sightseer, besides being greatly interested in his meals--to come back
to this room wasn't rest but further fatigue. Wemyss, who was never
tired and slept wonderfully--it was the soundness of his sleep that kept
her awake, because she wasn't used to hearing sound sleep so
close--would fling himself into the one easy-chair and pull her on to
his knee, and having kissed her a great many times he would ruffle her
hair, and then when it was all on ends like a boy's coming out of a
bath, look at her with the pride of possession and say, 'There's a wife
for a respectable British business man to have! Mrs. Wemyss, aren't you
ashamed of yourself?' And then there would be more kissing,--jovial,
gluttonous kisses, that made her skin rough and chapped.

'Baby,' she would say, feebly struggling, and smiling a little wearily.

Yes, he was a baby, a dear, high-spirited baby, but a baby now at very
close quarters and one that went on all the time. You couldn't put him
in a cot and give him a bottle and say, 'There now,' and then sit down
quietly to a little sewing; you didn't have Sundays out; you were never,
day or night, an instant off duty. Lucy couldn't count the number of
times a day she had to answer the question, 'Who's my own little wife?'
At first she answered it with laughing ecstasy, running into his
outstretched arms, but very soon that fatal sleepiness set in and
remained with her for the whole of her honeymoon, and she really felt
too tired sometimes to get the ecstasy she quickly got to know was
expected of her into her voice. She loved him, she was indeed his own
little wife, but constantly to answer this and questions like it
satisfactorily was a great exertion. Yet if there was a shadow of
hesitation before she answered, a hair's-breadth of delay owing to her
thoughts having momentarily wandered, Wemyss was upset, and she had to
spend quite a long time reassuring him with the fondest whispers and
caresses. Her thoughts mustn't wander, she had discovered; her thoughts
were to be his as well as all the rest of her. Was ever a girl so much
loved? she asked herself, astonished and proud; but, on the other hand,
she was dreadfully sleepy.

Any thinking she did had to be done at night, when she lay awake because
of the immense emphasis with which Wemyss slept, and she hadn't been
married a week before she was reflecting what a bad arrangement it was,
the way ecstasy seemed to have no staying power. Also it oughtn't to
begin, she considered, at its topmost height and accordingly not be able
to move except downwards. If one could only start modestly in marriage
with very little of it and work steadily upwards, taking one's time,
knowing there was more and more to come, it would be much better she
thought. No doubt it would go on longer if one slept better and hadn't,
consequently, got headaches. Everard's ecstasy went on. Perhaps by
ecstasy she really meant high spirits, and Everard was beside himself
with high spirits.

Wemyss was indeed the typical bridegroom of the Psalms, issuing forth
rejoicing from his chamber. Lucy wished she could issue forth from it
rejoicing too. She was vexed with herself for being so stupidly sleepy,
for not being able to get used to the noise beside her at night and go
to sleep as naturally as she did in Eaton Terrace, in spite of the horns
of taxis. It wasn't fair to Everard, she felt, not to find a wife in the
morning matching him in spirits. Perhaps, however, this was a condition
peculiar to honeymoons, and marriage, once the honeymoon was over, would
be a more tranquil state. Things would settle down when they were back
in England, to a different, more separated life in which there would be
time to rest, time to think; time to remember, while he was away at his
office, how deeply she loved him. And surely she would learn to sleep;
and once she slept properly she would be able to answer his loving
questions throughout the day with more real _élan_.

But,--there in England waiting for her, inevitable, no longer to be put
off or avoided, was The Willows. Whenever her thoughts reached that
house they gave a little jump and tried to slink away. She was ashamed
of herself, it was ridiculous, and Everard's attitude was plainly the
sensible one, and if he could adopt it surely she, who hadn't gone
through that terrible afternoon last July, could; yet she failed to see
herself in The Willows, she failed altogether to imagine it. How, for
instance, was she going to sit on that terrace,--'We always have tea in
fine weather on the terrace,' Wemyss had casually remarked, apparently
quite untouched by the least memory--how was she going to have tea on
the very flags perhaps where.... Her thoughts slunk away; but not before
one of them had sent a curdling whisper through her mind, '_The tea
would taste of blood_.'

Well, this was sleeplessness. She never in her life had had that sort of
absurd thought. It was just that she didn't sleep, and so her brain was
relaxed and let the reins of her thinking go slack. The day her father
died, it's true, when it began to be evening and she was afraid of the
night alone with him in his mysterious indifference, she had begun
thinking absurdly, but Everard had come and saved her. He could save her
from this too if she could tell him; only she couldn't tell him. How
could she spoil his joy in his home? It was the thing he loved next best
to her.

As the honeymoon went on and Wemyss's ecstasies a little subsided, as he
began to tire of so many trains--after Paris they did the châteaux
country--and hotels and waiters and taxis and restaurants, and the
cooking which he had at first enjoyed now only increased his longing at
every meal for a plain English steak and boiled potatoes, he talked more
and more of The Willows. With almost the same eagerness as that which
had so much enchanted and moved her before their marriage when he talked
of their wedding day, he now talked of The Willows and the day when he
would show it to her. He counted the days now to that day. The 4th of
April; his birthday; on that happy day he would lead his little wife
into the home he loved. How could she, when he talked like that, do
anything but pretend enthusiasm and looking forward? He had apparently
entirely forgotten what she had told him about her reluctance to go
there at Christmas. She was astonished that, when the first bliss of
being married to her had worn off and his thoughts were free for this
other thing he so much loved, his home, he didn't approach it with more
care for what he must know was her feeling about it. She was still more
astonished when she realised that he had entirely forgotten her feeling
about it. It would be, she felt, impossible to shadow his happiness at
the prospect of showing her his home by any reminder of her reluctance.
Besides, she was certainly going to have to live at The Willows, so what
was the use of talking?

'I suppose,' she did say hesitatingly one day when he was describing it
to her for the hundredth time, for it was his habit to describe the same
thing often, 'you've changed your room----?'

They were sitting at the moment, resting after the climb up, on one of
the terraces of the Château of Amboise, with a view across the Loire of
an immense horizon, and Wemyss had been comparing it, to its
disadvantage, when he recovered his breath, with the view from his
bedroom window at The Willows. It wasn't very nice weather, and they
both were cold and tired, and it was still only eleven o'clock in the
morning.

'Change my room? What room?' he asked.

'Your--the room you and--the room you slept in.'

'My bedroom? I should think not. It's the best room in the house. Why do
you think I've changed it?' And he looked at her with a surprised face.

'Oh, I don't know,' said Lucy, taking refuge in stroking his hand. 'I
only thought----'

An inkling of what was in her mind penetrated into his, and his voice
went grave.

'You mustn't think,' he said. 'You mustn't be morbid. Now Lucy, I can't
have that. It will spoil everything if you let yourself be morbid. And
you promised me before our marriage you wouldn't be. Have you
forgotten?'

He turned to her and took her face in both his hands and searched her
eyes with his own very solemn ones, while the woman who was conducting
them over the castle went to the low parapet, and stood with her back to
them studying the view and yawning.

'Oh, Everard--of course I haven't forgotten. I've not forgotten anything
I promised you, and never will. But--have I got to go into that bedroom
too?'

He was really astonished. 'Have you got to go into that bedroom too?' he
repeated, staring at the face enclosed in his two big hands. It looked
extraordinarily pretty like that, like a small flower in its delicate
whiteness next to his discoloured, middle-aged hands, and her mouth
since her marriage seemed to have become an even more vivid red than it
used to be, and her eyes were young enough to be made more beautiful
instead of less by the languor of want of sleep. 'Well, I should think
so. Aren't you my wife?'

'Yes,' said Lucy. 'But----'

'Now, Lucy, I'll have no buts,' he said, with his most serious air,
kissing her on the cheek, she had discovered that just that kind of kiss
was a rebuke. 'Those buts of yours butt in----'

He stopped, struck by what he had said.

'I think that was rather amusing--don't you?' he asked, suddenly
smiling.

'Oh yes--very,' said Lucy eagerly, smiling too, delighted that he should
switch off from solemnity.

He kissed her again,--this time a real kiss, on her funny, charming
mouth.

'I suppose you'll admit,' he said, laughing and squeezing up her face
into a quaint crumpled shape, 'that either you're my wife or not my
wife, and that if you're my wife----'

'Oh, I'm _that_ all right,' laughed Lucy.

'Then you share my room. None of these damned new-fangled notions for
me, young woman.'

'Oh, but I didn't mean----'

'What? Another but?' he exclaimed, pouncing down on to her mouth and
stopping it with an enormous kiss.

'_Monsieur et Madame se refroidiront_,' said the woman, turning round
and drawing her shawl closer over her chest as a gust of chilly wind
swept over the terrace.

They were honeymooners, poor creatures, and therefore one had patience;
but even honeymooners oughtn't to wish to embrace in a cold wind on an
exposed terrace of a château round which they were being conducted by a
woman who was in a hurry to return to the preparation of her Sunday
dinner. For such purposes hotels were provided, and the shelter of a
comfortable warm room. She had supposed them to be _père et fille_ when
first she admitted them, but was soon aware of their real relationship.
'_Il doit être bien riche_,' had been her conclusion.

'Come along, come along,' said Wemyss, getting up quickly, for he too
felt the gust of cold wind. 'Let's finish the château or we'll be late
for lunch. I wish they hadn't preserved so many of these places--one
would have been quite enough to show us the sort of thing.'

'But we needn't go and look at them all,' said Lucy.

'Oh yes we must. We've arranged to.'

'But Everard----' began Lucy, following after him as he followed after
the conductress, who had a way of darting out of sight round corners.

'This woman's like a lizard,' panted Wemyss, arriving round a corner
only to see her disappear through an arch. 'Won't we be happy when it's
time to go back to England and not have to see any more sights.'

'But why don't we go back now, if you feel like it?' asked Lucy,
trotting after him as he on his big legs pursued the retreating
conductress, and anxious to show him, by eagerness to go sooner to The
Willows than was arranged, that she wasn't being morbid.

'Why, you know we can't leave before the 3rd of April,' said Wemyss,
over his shoulder. 'It's all settled.'

'But can't it be unsettled?'

'What, and upset all the plans, and arrive home before my birthday?' He
stopped and turned round to stare at her. 'Really, my dear----' he said.

She had discovered that my dear was a term of rebuke.

'Oh yes--of course,' she said hastily, 'I forgot about your birthday.'

At that Wemyss stared at her harder than ever; incredulously, in fact.
Forgot about his birthday? _Lucy_ had forgotten? If it had been Vera,
now--but Lucy? He was deeply hurt. He was so much hurt that he stood
quite still, and the conductress was obliged, on discovering that she
was no longer being followed, to wait once more for the honeymooners;
which she did, clutching her shawl round her abundant French chest and
shivering.

What had she said, Lucy hurriedly asked herself, nipping over her last
words in her mind, for she had learned by now what he looked like when
he was hurt. Oh yes,--the birthday. How stupid of her. But it was
because birthdays in her family were so unimportant, and nobody had
minded whether they were remembered or not.

'I didn't mean that,' she said earnestly, laying her hand on his breast.
'Of course I hadn't forgotten anything so precious. It only had--well,
you know what even the most wonderful things do sometimes--it--it had
escaped my memory.'

'Lucy! Escaped your memory? The day to which you owe your husband?'

Wemyss said this with such an exaggerated solemnity, such an immense
pomposity, that she thought he was in fun and hadn't really minded about
the birthday at all; and, eager to meet every mood of his, she laughed.
Relieved, she was so unfortunate as to laugh merrily.

To her consternation, after a moment's further stare he turned his back
on her without a word and walked on.

Then she realised what she had done, that she had laughed--oh, how
dreadful!--in the wrong place, and she ran after him and put her arm
through his, and tried to lay her cheek against his sleeve, which was
difficult because of the way their paces didn't match and also because
he took no notice of her, and said, 'Baby--baby--were his dear feelings
hurt, then?' and coaxed him.

But he wouldn't be coaxed. She had wounded him too deeply,--laughing, he
said to himself, at what was to him the most sacred thing in life, the
fact that he was her husband, that she was his wife.

'Oh, Everard,' she murmured at last, withdrawing her arm, giving up,
'don't spoil our day.'

Spoil their day? He? That finished it.

He didn't speak to her again till night. Then, in bed, after she had
cried bitterly for a long while, because she couldn't make out what
really had happened, and she loved him so much, and wouldn't hurt him
for the world, and was heart-broken because she had, and anyhow was
tired out, he at last turned to her and took her to his arms again and
forgave her.

'I can't live,' sobbed Lucy, 'I can't live--if you don't go on loving
me--if we don't understand----'

'My little Love,' said Wemyss, melted by the way her small body was
shaking in his arms, and rather frightened, too, at the excess of her
woe. 'My little Love don't. You mustn't. Your Everard loves you, and you
mustn't give way like this. You'll be ill. Think how miserable you'd
make him then.'

And in the dark he kissed away her tears, and held her close till her
sobbing quieted down; and presently, held close like that, his kisses
shutting her smarting eyes, she now the baby comforted and reassured,
and he the soothing nurse, she fell asleep, and for the first time since
her marriage slept all night.




XV


Early in their engagement Wemyss had expounded his theory to Lucy that
there should be the most perfect frankness between lovers, while as for
husband and wife there oughtn't to be a corner anywhere about either of
them, mind, body, or soul, which couldn't be revealed to the other one.

'You can talk about everything to your Everard,' he assured her. 'Tell
him your innermost thoughts, whatever they may be. You need no more be
ashamed of telling him than of thinking them by yourself. He _is_ you.
You and he are one in mind and soul now, and when he is your husband you
and he will become perfect and complete by being one in body as well.
Everard--Lucy. Lucy--Everard. We shan't know where one ends and the
other begins. That, little Love, is real marriage. What do you think of
it?'

Lucy thought so highly of it that she had no words with which to express
her admiration, and fell to kissing him instead. What ideal happiness,
to be for ever removed from the fear of loneliness by the simple
expedient of being doubled; and who so happy as herself to have found
the exactly right person for this doubling, one she could so perfectly
agree with and understand? She felt quite sorry she had nothing in her
mind in the way of thoughts she was ashamed of to tell him then and
there, but there wasn't a doubt, there wasn't a shred of anything a
little wrong, not even an unworthy suspicion. Her mind was a chalice
filled only with love, and so clear and bright was the love that even at
the bottom, when she stirred it up to look, there wasn't a trace of
sediment.

But marriage--or was it sleeplessness?--completely changed this, and
there were perfect crowds of thoughts in her mind that she was
thoroughly ashamed of. Remembering his words, and whole-heartedly
agreeing that to be able to tell each other everything, to have no
concealments, was real marriage, the day after her wedding she first of
all reminded him of what he had said, then plunged bravely into the
announcement that she'd got a thought she was ashamed of.

Wemyss pricked up his ears, thinking it was something interesting to do
with sex, and waited with an amused, inquisitive smile. But Lucy in such
matters was content to follow him, aware of her want of experience and
of the abundance of his, and the thought that was worrying her only had
to do with a waiter. A waiter, if you please.

Wemyss's smile died away. He had had occasion to reprimand this waiter
at lunch for gross negligence, and here was Lucy alleging he had done so
without any reason that she could see, and anyhow roughly. Would he
remove the feeling of discomfort she had at being forced to think her
own heart's beloved, the kindest and gentlest of men, hadn't been kind
and gentle but unjust, by explaining?

Well, that was at the very beginning. She soon learned that a doubt in
her mind was better kept there. If she brought it out to air it and
dispel it by talking it over with him, all that happened was that he was
hurt, and when he was hurt she instantly became perfectly miserable.
Seeing, then, that this happened about small things, how impossible it
was to talk with him of big things; of, especially, her immense doubt in
regard to The Willows. For a long while she was sure he was bearing her
feeling in mind, since it couldn't have changed since Christmas, and
that when she arrived there she would find that he had had everything
altered and all traces of Vera's life there removed. Then, when he began
to talk about The Willows, she found that such an idea as alterations
hadn't entered his head. She was to sleep in the very room that had been
his and Vera's, in the very bed. And positively, so far was it from true
that she could tell him every thought and talk everything over with him,
when she discovered this she wasn't able to say more than that
hesitating remark on the château terrace at Amboise about supposing he
was going to change his bedroom.

Yet The Willows haunted her, and what a comfort it would have been to
tell him all she felt and let him help her to get rid of her growing
obsession by laughing at her. What a comfort if, even if he had thought
her too silly and morbid to be laughed at, he had indulged her and
consented to alter those rooms. But one learns a lot on a honeymoon,
Lucy reflected, and one of the things she had learned was that Wemyss's
mind was always made up. There seemed to be no moment when it was in a
condition of becoming, and she might have slipped in a suggestion or
laid a wish before him; his plans were sprung upon her full fledged, and
they were unalterable. Sometimes he said, 'Would you like----?' and if
she didn't like, and answered truthfully, as she answered at first
before she learned not to, there was trouble. Silent trouble. A retiring
of Wemyss into a hurt aloofness, for his question was only decorative,
and his little Love should instinctively, he considered, like what he
liked; and there outside this aloofness, after efforts to get at him
with fond and anxious questions, she sat like a beggar in patient
distress, waiting for him to emerge and be kind to her.

Of course as far as the minor wishes and preferences of every day went
it was all quite easy, once she had grasped the right answer to the
question, 'Would you like?' She instantly did like. 'Oh yes--_very_
much!' she hastened to assure him; and then his face continued content
and happy instead of clouding with aggrievement. But about the big
things it wasn't easy, because of the difficulty of getting the right
flavour of enthusiasm into her voice, and if she didn't get it in he
would put his finger under her chin and turn her to the light and repeat
the question in a solemn voice,--precursor, she had learned, of the
beginning of the cloud on his face.

How difficult it was sometimes. When he said to her, 'You'll like the
view from your sitting-room at The Willows,' she naturally wanted to cry
out that she wouldn't, and ask him how he could suppose she would like
what was to her a view for ever associated with death? Why shouldn't she
be able to cry out naturally if she wanted to, to talk to him frankly,
to get his help to cure herself of what was so ridiculous by laughing at
it with him? She couldn't laugh all alone, though she was always trying
to; with him she could have, and so have become quite sensible. For he
was so much bigger than she was, so wonderful in the way he had
triumphed over diseased thinking, and his wholesomeness would spread
over her too, a purging, disinfecting influence, if only he would let
her talk, if only he would help her to laugh. Instead, she found herself
hurriedly saying in a small, anxious voice, 'Oh yes--_very_ much!'

'Is it possible,' she thought, 'that I am abject?'

Yes, she was extremely abject, she reflected, lying awake at night
considering her behaviour during the day. Love had made her so. Love did
make one abject, for it was full of fear of hurting the beloved. The
assertion of the Scriptures that perfect love casteth out fear only
showed, seeing that her love for Everard was certainly perfect, how
little the Scriptures really knew what they were talking about.

Well, if she couldn't tell him the things she was feeling, why couldn't
she get rid of the sorts of feelings she couldn't tell him, and just be
wholesome? Why couldn't she be at least as wholesome about going to that
house as Everard? If anybody was justified in shrinking from The Willows
it was Everard, not herself. Sometimes Lucy would be sure that deep in
his character there was a wonderful store of simple courage. He didn't
speak of Vera's death, naturally he didn't wish to speak of that awful
afternoon, but how often he must think of it, hiding his thoughts even
from her, bearing them altogether alone. Sometimes she was sure of this,
and sometimes she was equally sure of the very opposite. From the way he
looked, the way he spoke, from those tiny indications that one somehow
has noticed without knowing that one has noticed and that are so far
more revealing and conclusive than any words, she sometimes was sure he
really had forgotten. But this was too incredible. She couldn't believe
it. What had perhaps happened, she thought, was that in self-defence,
for the preservation of his peace, he had made up his mind never to
think of Vera. Only by banishing her altogether from his mind would he
be safe. Yet that couldn't be true either, for several times on the
honeymoon he had be

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