‘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 insi
st 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 t
hem, 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.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 245
