“I don’t want the whole bally house, thank you very much,” said Felicity politely, “but I should like the vase, if you really feel like that.”
“I do,” protested Percy. “I couldn’t possibly tell you how much I feel like that. I’m just glad that there’s something I can give you. I’d never sleep a wink till I’d done something to prove my gratitude, anyway.”
“Well, I’d hate you to do that,” said Felicity, “and I really do want the vase for a friend of mine. But I’m perfectly willing to pay what I can for it.”
“Nonsense!” said Percy.
And he wrapped up the vase for her.
And she took it home.
It was dusk when she reached the Hall.
Franklin was limping across the hall.
“Hello, Pins,” he greeted her cheerfully. “Had a jolly day with Sheila?”
“I’ve had an awfully jolly day,” said Felicity happily, “but not with Sheila. I’ve not been to Sheila’s.”
“Haven’t you? I thought that was the programme to-day.”
“It was, but I altered it. I’ve been over to Fairdene.” Proudly she unwrapped her parcel. “I’ve got the other vase for Mr. Mellor, Frankie, so it’s all right now, isn’t it?”
Chapter Ten
Mrs. Fanning’s Psychic Experience
Ronald and Sheila were engaged.
Sheila was rapturously happy. There was only one cloud over her brightness.
“It’s Daddy,” she confided to Felicity. “I can’t bear to think of leaving him. He does so hate doing things alone. It isn’t,” she added humbly, “that I’m intelligent or anything like that. He doesn’t want that. He just wants someone to do things with. Gardening and walks. Walks are the things he likes doing most. And it isn’t as if he wants someone to talk to. He’s generally thinking out his book and doesn’t want to talk. He just wants someone to be with him, and he feels—sort of lost and unhappy if no one’s there. He doesn’t enjoy his walks at all if he has to go alone.”
“But—there’s your aunt, isn’t there?” said Felicity.
Sheila sighed.
“Have you met Aunt Hester?” she said.
“Not often,” said Felicity. “She’s generally not well, or lying down, when I’ve been to your house. But she seemed all right when I did see her.”
“She’s awfully nice,” said Sheila. “If only—–” she sighed again.
“If only what?” prompted Felicity.
“You see, she thinks she’s an invalid,” said Sheila. “She won’t take any exercise. She won’t even go out-of-doors. And she hardly eats anything at all. It’ll be horrid for poor Daddy. She’s perfectly well, really. All the doctors know that she’s perfectly well, really, but if ever any of them dares to say so to her she simply stops having him and calls in someone else. It’s just as bad as if she were a real invalid. Worse in a way. She’ll be no company at all for poor Daddy when I’m married.
She’s always weighing herself and, of course, she gets thinner and thinner with eating nothing and with never going out. She always feels tired and limp . . . It’ll be miserable for Daddy with only her. I try not to feel worried about it, but I can’t help it. And the pity of it is that really—really, if only she wouldn’t imagine herself an invalid she’d be quite jolly.”
“You’re all coming to us next month, aren’t you?” said Felicity, thoughtfully. “That might wake her up.”
“It won’t, said Sheila, gloomily, “it can’t possibly. She’ll eat nothing and lie down all day as usual. Your aunt, of course, will encourage her. People who belong to the Victorian age love chronic invalids. It was everyone’s ambition in those days to be a chronic invalid. They adored them. And the next best thing to being a chronic invalid yourself was ministering to one. Oh, no . . . your aunt, I’m afraid, will only make things worse.”
There were a good many people staying at Bridgeways Hall. Rosemary, of course, was there, and several of her friends—in particular, a dark and very handsome young man who was reputed to be enormously wealthy, and who was quite evidently deeply in love with her. Rosemary did not treat him any differently from her other admirers. She was, as usual, cold and distant and rather insolent, and yet Felicity suspected—she didn’t know why—that she was going to accept him when he proposed. He was nice-looking, but there was something about his smile and about his eyes that Felicity didn’t like.
“Do you like him, Rosemary?” she said tentatively, on one of the rare occasions when they were alone together.
“Whom?” drawled Rosemary.
“Sir Bertram.”
“No,” said Rosemary.
“I’m so glad,” said Felicity, relieved.
“Why?”
“I’d been so afraid you were going to get engaged to him.”
“I probably am,” drawled Rosemary. “I hate all men, but that’s no reason for not marrying. I told you that once before, didn’t I? He’s rich. He’s in love with me. He’s probably as much a beast as any other man, but—well,” she shrugged her shoulders, “I’ve always told you that I was going to marry a rich man. It might as well be he as any other. It will be quite a fair bargain. I want money. He wants me. I’ll get the worst of it probably, but the woman always gets the worst of it whatever she does.”
Felicity shook her red-gold head firmly.
“I don’t think that people or things are half as horrid as you make out they are,” she said.
“Don’t you?” said Rosemary. “Wait till you know a bit more of the world.”
“I know a lot of the world,” said Felicity with dignity, then she added wistfully, “Rosemary—–”
“Yes?”
“You always seem, somehow, as if you were—were covering up your real nice self by an—unreal horrid self—as if—just because you’d met—perhaps one horrid person you were trying to make yourself believe that everyone was horrid—but I wish you wouldn’t treat me like a baby, Rosemary. I wish you’d let me—help.”
Rosemary looked down at Felicity’s lovely wistful face, and suddenly her blue eyes lost their hardness.
“You’re a darling, Felicity,” she said. “It’s hateful to think of your being let down by people and—finding out how beastly things are—–”
Suddenly, as if by an illuminating vision, Felicity saw behind Rosemary’s coldness and arrogance something sweet and trusting that had been hurt and had gone there to hide.
“Oh, Rosemary,” she said eagerly. “I’m sure it isn’t like that. I’m sure that people aren’t—–”
She stopped. Rosemary had drawn her defences of disdainfulness about her again. Her eyes were hard and mocking.
“What a very interesting conversation it is, isn’t it?” she drawled, “but I’m afraid I haven’t time to continue it. Good-bye, Infant.”
And she went out.
Felicity bit her lip. It always made her angry when Rosemary called her “infant.” And yet she couldn’t really feel angry with Rosemary. There was something about Rosemary that made her heart ache with pity. But, still—she hadn’t really much time or thought to spare for Rosemary.
She had other things to think of just now.
Sheila’s aunt had arrived and Lady Montague, as Sheila had prophesied, was encouraging her. Lady Montague enjoyed ministering to a chronic invalid.
“Don’t get up, dear, till tea-time,” she would say every morning, “I know how delicate you are. You eat nothing, my dear, and you look so frail.”
She seemed to take almost a personal pride in Mrs. Fanning’s lack of appetite and pallor, as if in some way it lent distinction to the house-party.
For Mrs. Fanning, being continually informed with evident admiration by Lady Montague that she ate nothing, seemed to feel it incumbent upon her to eat nothing. She lay about on a sofa, all day, looking pale and eating nothing.
But Sheila hadn’t very much time to worry about it, because Ronald was there and she couldn’t really worry over anything with Ronald there. It was F
elicity who worried.
For Mr. Partridge, Sheila’s father, did seem a little lost and wistful. Sheila was always out with Ronald and he’d no one to go walks with and he hated having no one to go walks with. Felicity went with him whenever she could, but, of course, she couldn’t always go with him.
She couldn’t even tell Franklin why she was worried, because Franklin was just as he always was when Rosemary was at home-—grim and tense, and silent, and looking older than he really was. He always looked wretched when Rosemary was in the house. And no wonder, thought Felicity indignantly. For Rosemary was hateful to him. It made Felicity go hot with shame to hear the way Rosemary spoke to him on those few occasions when she did speak to him. She was deliberately rude to him . . .
In fact, there were just now quite a lot of things in Felicity’s world to worry her, but she was concentrating on Sheila’s aunt.
Sheila’s aunt came down for tea about a week after the beginning of her visit. She was, as usual, the perfect invalid—pale, fragile, drooping, dressed to suit the part in a clinging tea-gown. Lady Montague hovered about her like the priestess of some sacred rite—arranging her on the sofa, lowering her voice to ask her how she was, murmuring in hushed admiration, “No tea? Nothing to eat? My dear, how do you manage to keep alive at all?”
Felicity watched them with a little worried frown.
The conversation had turned on ghosts.
“Is Bridgeways Hall haunted?” Sheila was saying. “If it isn’t, it ought to be.’’
“It is supposed to be,” said Ronald carelessly. “The Lady Georgia Harborough, whose portrait is in the hall, is supposed to haunt it, but none of us have ever seen her.”
Felicity noticed that a flicker of interest came over the invalid’s face.
“Do tell me about it,” she said breathlessly, “I’m so much interested in anything psychic.”
But, of course, the drawback of having a faint, frail invalid’s whisper is that often no one hears it, and as Lady Montague had now gone to the other end of the room no one heard Mrs. Fanning’s remark except Felicity, who pretended not to have heard it, and the conversation drifted naturally from ghosts to beet-sugar and the government.
Then the party split up. Ronnie and Sheila went out to play tennis, Matthew and Marcia went out for a walk, Rosemary and Sir Bertram went into the morning-room, Sir Digby and Franklin and Mr. Mellor went into the library. Lady Montague went to interview the house keeper and Mr. Partridge went out for a walk by himself. He looked rather pathetically at Felicity before he went out. She knew that he wanted her to come with him, and so tender was Felicity’s heart that it was very difficult to steel it against that look.
The door closed behind him.
She was left alone with Mrs. Fanning.
“Did you say,” murmured Felicity softly, “that you were interested in psychic things?”
So eager was Mrs. Fanning that she quite forgot to use her invalid’s whisper.
“Oh, frightfully, my dear,” she said, “I had a book out of the library, just before I came away, I’ve forgotten what it was called, but it was full—full of authenticated cases of ghostly visitations and—er—messages and that sort of thing. Most extraordinary, and all authenticated. No room for doubt at all. You know, dear,” she sunk her voice, “I’ve always been convinced that I’m psychic. I’ve never yet actually seen anything, but I’ve never ceased to hope. I can feel my psychic powers, though, as I told you, they have never yet been actually put to the test. But,” she sank her voice to a yet more thrilling whisper, “I know people personally who’ve actually seen things.”
“What have they seen?” said Felicity.
The invalid was sitting up on the couch, entirely forgetting her fragile droop.
“One of them—a friend of a friend of mine—was once staying in a house where an old treasure was supposed to have been buried for centuries, and in the middle of the night an apparition appeared, beckoned her out into the garden, and pointed to a certain spot, and told her to dig. This friend of my friend’s dug, and what do you think she found?”
“What?” asked Felicity, obligingly.
“The treasure, my dear,” said Mrs. Fanning impressively. “The treasure; wasn’t it wonderful? I didn’t know her personally, as I told you before, but my friend knew her—or rather it was, I believe, a friend of my friend’s who knew her, but it’s an absolutely authenticated case. And now, my dear, do tell me about the ghost that haunts this house.”
During this recital Felicity’s eyes had danced, then hidden themselves under their thick tawny lashes.
“Well, it’s the most curious case,” said Felicity slowly, “because it’s almost the same as the one you just told me of—the buried treasure, you know.”
“No, my dear,” said Mrs. Fanning, deeply impressed. “No! Do tell me!”
“Well,” went on Felicity, with a look of innocence in her eyes that would have put those who knew her on their guard. “It was a Lady Georgia Harborough, you know.”
“Yes, yes . . . that was the name they said at tea. I remember.”
“She was supposed to have hidden a treasure—no one knows exactly where—when she died, and she left a paper, saying that she would come back when the right time came and reveal its hiding-place.”
“When the right time came,” repeated Mrs. Fanning. “What did she mean by that?”
“I don’t know,” said Felicity.
“I expect she meant,” said Mrs. Fanning eagerly, “when she could get into contact with anyone really psychic staying in the house.”
“I expect so,” said Felicity carelessly, “anyway, none of us have ever seen her. . . . Oh, and she also said in the paper she left that the person to whom she appeared to reveal the hiding-place of the treasure must find it herself—or himself, and mustn’t breathe a word of her—er—visit, or else some evil would befall her—or him.”
“How interesting!” said Mrs. Fanning. “How wonderful!”
“That’s all I know about it,” said Felicity carelessly. “You—er—you won’t mention it to any of the others, will you? They don’t like it mentioned. It—er—upsets them.”
Mrs. Fanning nodded her head understandingly.
“Of course,” she said, “people who aren’t psychic generally shrink from such things. They’re repelled by them. Now I, on the other hand, am attracted. The psychic always attracts me. I feel no shrinking at all from a visitant from another world.”
“No,” said Felicity soothingly, “but I’m sure you ought to rest now, oughtn’t you?”
“Rest?” said Mrs. Fanning, then remembering that she was an invalid who found the slightest movement an effort and who could not raise her voice above a whisper, she sank back upon her sofa and said faintly, “Yes, dear child, you’re right. I have been exerting myself too much. I will rest a little now.”
Felicity crept away and left her.
She went to the morning-room, where Rosemary sat with Sir Bertram.
Sir Bertram was talking ardently, and Rosemary was working at a piece of tapestry and looking very beautiful and aloof.
“Rosemary,” said Felicity, “will you lend me that Lady Georgia costume you had for the fancy dress dance?”
“What on earth do you want it for?”
“Oh, just to try on,” said Felicity.
“If you like,” said Rosemary. “Marie will tell you where it is. The wig’s with it, too, I believe.”
“Thanks, awfully,” said Felicity.
She went out and met Mr. Partridge in the hall, just coming in from his walk.
“I’m so sorry I couldn’t go with you,” she said.
He smiled.
“It’s foolish of me, isn’t it?” he said, “to want company on my walks, because, as you know, I don’t talk. It’s just that I like to have someone with me and, of course, my sister isn’t strong enough to walk. I shall miss Sheila very much indeed when she leaves me.”
“Mrs. Fanning’s health may improve,
” suggested Felicity brightly.
He shook his head.
“I doubt it,” he said, “I very much doubt it.”
The moonlight was pouring into Mrs. Fanning’s room when she woke with a start and looked about her. She sat up in bed and stared at the open French window leading on to the balcony.
Her eyes opened wider, and wider, and wider, and wider.
There, at the window, in a shaft of moonlight, stood Lady Georgia Harborough, exactly as she was pictured in the portrait downstairs, the elaborately-dressed dark-brown hair, the white face, the billowing, flowered, silk dress.
A smile of rapture came to Mrs. Fanning’s face.
At last the dearest wish of her heart was being gratified.
At last the dream of her life was being fulfilled.
At last she was having a psychic experience.
The visitant took a step forward, put up a white finger and beckoned—very slowly and impressively.
Without a word Mrs. Fanning got out of bed, put on a big coat and her shoes and stockings, and prepared to follow the ghostly visitant. The ghostly visitant led her out on to the balcony, down the fire-escape steps, and into the moonlit garden. It led her through the moonlit garden to a bed next to the kitchen garden, pointed to it, wrung its hands, then disappeared.
Mrs. Fanning looked about her. A spade stood conveniently near the bed. Mrs. Fanning seized this and set to work with a will.
She dug for two hours, but did not find any hidden treasure.
Then, still feeling thrilled and uplifted, despite her failure to locate the treasure, she went back to bed and fell at once into a dreamless sleep.
She awoke next morning aching in every limb and feeling very hungry.
When the maid came in with her usual breakfast— a pot of tea and a quarter of a slice of dry toast—she looked at it indignantly, and said:
“I’d like something more than this, please.”
The maid looked surprised.
“You generally say this is too much, mum,” she said, “shall I bring you an egg?”
“An egg and bacon, please,” said Mrs Fanning very firmly.
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