Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  The moment, then, that Wemyss found himself once more doing the usual things among the usual surroundings, he felt so exactly as he used to that he wouldn’t have remembered Lucy at all if it hadn’t been for that layer of indignation at the bottom of his mind. Going up the steps of his club he was conscious of a sense of hard usage, and searching for its cause remembered Lucy. His wife now wasn’t Vera, and yet he was to dine at his club exactly as if she were. His wife was Lucy; who, instead of being where she ought to be, eagerly awaiting his return to Lancaster Gate — it was one of his legitimate grievances against Vera that she didn’t eagerly await — she was having a cold at Strorley. And why was she having a cold at Strorley? And why was he, a newly-married man, deprived of the comfort of his wife and going to spend the evening exactly as he had spent all the evenings for months past?

  Wemyss was very indignant, but he was also very desirous of bridge. If Lucy had been waiting for him he would have had to leave off bridge before his desire for it had been anything like sated, — whatever wives one had they shackled one, — and as it was he could play as long as he wanted to and yet at the same time remain justly indignant. Accordingly he wasn’t nearly as unhappy as he thought he was; not, at any rate, till the moment came for going solitary to bed. He detested sleeping by himself. Even Vera had always slept with him.

  Altogether Wemyss felt that he had had a bad day, what with the disappointment of its beginning, and the extra work at the office, and no decent lunch ‘Positively only time to snatch a bun and a glass of milk,’ he announced, amazed, to the first acquaintance he met in the club. ‘Just fancy, only time to snatch — —’ but the acquaintance had melted away and losing rather heavily at bridge, and going back to Lancaster Gate to find from the message left by Twite that that annoying aunt of Lucy’s had cropped up already.

  Usually Wemyss was amused by Twite’s messages, but nothing about this one amused him. He threw down the wrong number one impatiently, — Twite was really a hopeless imbecile; he would dismiss him; but the other one he read again. ‘Wanted to know all about us, did she. Said it was very strange, did she. Like her impertinence,’ he thought. She had lost no time in cropping up, he thought. Of how completely Miss Entwhistle had, in fact, cropped he was of course unaware.

  Yes, he had had a bad day, and he was going to have a lonely night. He went upstairs feeling deeply hurt, and winding his watch.

  But after much solid sleep he felt better; and at breakfast he said to Twite, who always jumped when he addressed him, ‘Mrs. Wemyss will be coming up to-day.’

  Twite’s brain didn’t work very fast owing to the way it spent most of its time dormant in a basement, and for a moment he thought — it startled him that his master had forgotten the lady was dead. Ought he to remind him? What a painful dilemma.... However, he remembered the new Mrs. Wemyss just in time not to remind him, and to say ‘Yes sir,’ without too perceptible a pause. His mind hadn’t room in it to contain much, and it assimilated slowly that which it contained. He had only been in Wemyss’s service three months before the Mrs. Wemyss he found there died. He was just beginning to assimilate her when she ceased to be assimilatable, and to him and his wife in their quiet subterraneous existence it had seemed as if not more than a week had passed before there was another Mrs. Wemyss. Far was it from him to pass opinions on the rapid marriages of gentlemen, but he couldn’t keep up with these Mrs. Wemysses. His mind, he found, hadn’t yet really realised the new one. He knew she was there somewhere, for he had seen her briefly on the Saturday morning, and he knew she would presently begin to disturb him by needing meals, but he easily forgot her. He forgot her now, and consequently for a moment had the dreadful thought described above.

  ‘I shall be in to dinner,’ said Wemyss.

  ‘Yes sir,’ said Twite.

  Dinner. There usedn’t to be dinner. His master hadn’t been in once to dinner since Twite knew him. A tray for the lady, while there was a lady; that was all. Mrs. Twite could just manage a tray. Since the lady had left off coming up to town owing to her accident, there hadn’t been anything. Only quiet.

  He stood waiting, not having been waved out of the room, and anxiously watching Wemyss’s face, for he was a nervous man.

  Then the telephone bell rang.

  Wemyss, without looking up, waved him out to it and went on with his breakfast; and after a minute, noticing that he neither came back nor could be heard saying anything beyond a faint, propitiatory ‘‘Ullo,’ called out to him.

  ‘What is it?’ Wemyss called out.

  ‘I can’t hear, sir,’ Twite’s distressed voice answered from the hall.

  ‘Fool,’ said Wemyss, appearing, table-napkin in hand.

  ‘Yes sir,’ said Twite.

  He took the receiver from him, and then the Twites — Mrs. Twite from the foot of the kitchen stairs and Twite lingering in the background because he hadn’t yet been waved away — heard the following:

  ‘Yes yes. Yes, speaking. Hullo. Who is it?’

  ‘What? I can’t hear. What?’

  ‘Miss who? En — oh, good-morning, How distant your voice sounds.’

  ‘What? Where? Where?’

  ‘Oh really.’

  Here the person at the other end talked a great deal.

  ‘Yes. Quite. But then you see she wasn’t.’

  More prolonged talk from the other end.

  ‘What? She isn’t coming up? Indeed she is. She’s expected. I’ve ordered — —’

  ‘What? I can’t hear. The doctor? You’re sending for the doctor?’

  ‘I daresay. But then you see I consider it isn’t.’

  ‘I daresay, I daresay. No, of course I can’t. How can I leave my work — —’

  ‘Oh, very well, very well. I daresay. No doubt. She’s to come up for all that as arranged, tell her, and if she needs doctors there are more of them here anyhow than — what? Can’t possibly?’

  ‘I suppose you know you’re taking a great deal upon yourself unasked — —’

  ‘What? What?’

  A very rapid clear voice cut in. ‘Do you want another three minutes?’ it asked.

  He hung up the receiver with violence. ‘Oh, damn the woman, damn the woman,’ he said, so loud that the Twites shook like reeds to hear him.

  At the other end Miss Entwhistle was walking away lost in thought. Her position was thoroughly unpleasant. She disliked extraordinarily that she should at that moment contain an egg and some coffee which had once been Wemyss’s. She would have breakfasted on a cup of tea only, if it hadn’t been that Lucy was going to need looking after that day, and the looker-after must be nourished. As she went upstairs again, a faint red spot on each cheek, she couldn’t help being afraid that she and Everard would have to exercise patience before they got to be fond of each other. On the telephone he hardly did himself justice, she thought.

  Lucy hadn’t had a good night. She woke up suddenly from what was apparently a frightening dream soon after Miss Entwhistle had composed herself on the sofa, and had been very restless and hot for a long time. There seemed to be a great many things about the room that she didn’t like. One of them was the bed. Probably the poor little thing was bemused by her dream and her feverishness, but she said several things about the bed which showed that it was on her mind. Miss Entwhistle had warmed some milk on a spirit-lamp provided by Lizzie, and had given it to her and soothed her and petted her. She didn’t mention the window, for which Miss Entwhistle was thankful; but when first she woke up from her frightening dream and her aunt hurried across to her, she had stared at her and actually called her Everard — her, in her meek plaits. When this happened Miss Entwhistle made up her mind that the doctor should be sent for the first thing in the morning. About six she tumbled into an uncomfortable sleep again, and Miss Entwhistle crept out of the room and dressed. Certainly she was going to have a doctor round, and hear what he had to say; and as soon as she was strengthened by breakfast she would do her duty and telephone to Everard.

 
; This she did, with the result that she returned to Lucy’s room with a little red spot on each cheek; and when she looked at Lucy, still uneasily sleeping and breathing as though her chest were all sore, the idea that she was to get up and travel to London made the red spots on Miss Entwhistle’s cheeks burn brighter. She calmed down, however, on remembering that Everard couldn’t see how evidently poorly the child was, and told herself that if he could he would be all tenderness. She told herself this, but she didn’t believe it; and then she was vexed that she didn’t believe it. Lucy loved him. Lucy had looked perfectly pleased and content yesterday before she became so ill. One mustn’t judge a man by his way with a telephone.

  At ten o’clock the doctor came. He had been in Strorley for years, and was its only doctor. He was one of those guests who used to dine at The Willows in the early days of Wemyss’s possession of it. Occasionally he had attended the late Mrs. Wemyss; and the last time he had been in the house was when he was sent for suddenly on the day of her death. He, in common with the rest of Strorley, had heard of Wemyss’s second marriage, and he shared the general shocked surprise. Strorley, which looked such an unconscious place, such a torpid, unconscious riverside place, was nevertheless intensely sensitive to shocks, and it hadn’t at all recovered from the shock of that poor Mrs. Wemyss’s death and the very dreadful inquest, when the fresh shock of another Mrs. Wemyss arriving on the scene made it, as it were, reel anew, and made it reel worse. Marriage so quickly on the heels of that terrible death? The Wemysses were only week-enders and summer holiday people, so that it wasn’t quite so scandalous to have them in Strorley as it would have been if they were unintermittent residents, yet it was serious enough. That inquest had been in all the newspapers. To have a house in one’s midst which produced doubtful coroner’s verdicts was a blot on any place, and the new Mrs. Wemyss couldn’t possibly be anything but thoroughly undesirable. Of course no one would call on her. Impossible. And when the doctor was rung up and asked to come round, he didn’t tell his wife where he was going, because he didn’t wish for trouble.

  Chesterton — how well he remembered Chesterton; but after all, it was only the other day that he was there last — ushered him into the library, and he was standing gloomily in front of the empty grate, looking neither to the right nor to the left for he disliked the memories connected with the flags outside the window, and wishing he had a partner because then he would have sent him instead, when a spare little lady, bland and pleasant, came in and said she was the patient’s aunt. An educated little lady; not at all the sort of relative he would have expected the new Mrs. Wemyss to have.

  There was a general conviction in Strorley that the new Mrs. Wemyss must have been a barmaid, a typist, or a nursery governess, — was, that is, either very bold, very poor, or very meek. Else how could she have married Wemyss? And this conviction had reached and infected even the doctor, who was a busy man off whom gossip usually slid. When, however, he saw Miss Entwhistle he at once was sure that there was nothing in it. This wasn’t the aunt of either the bold, the poor, or the meek; this was just a decent gentlewoman. He shook hands with her, really pleased to see her. Everybody was always pleased to see Miss Entwhistle, except Wemyss.

  ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ asked the doctor.

  Miss Entwhistle said she didn’t think there was, but that her nephew ——

  ‘You mean Mr. Wemyss?’

  She bowed her head. She did mean Mr. Wemyss. Her nephew. Her nephew, that is, by marriage.

  ‘Quite,’ said the doctor.

  Her nephew naturally wanted his wife to go up and join him in London.

  ‘Naturally,’ said the doctor.

  And she wanted to know when she would be fit to go.

  ‘Then let us go upstairs and I’ll tell you,’ said the doctor.

  This was a very pleasant little lady, he thought as he followed her up the well-known stairs, to have become related to Wemyss immediately on the top of all that affair. Now he would have said himself that after such a ghastly thing as that most women ——

  But here they arrived in the bedroom and his sentence remained unfinished, because on seeing the small head on the pillow of the treble bed he thought, ‘Why, he’s married a child. What an extraordinary thing.’

  ‘How old is she?’ he asked Miss Entwhistle, for Lucy was still uneasily sleeping; and when she told him he was surprised.

  ‘It’s because she’s out of proportion to the bed,’ explained Miss Entwhistle in a whisper. ‘She doesn’t usually look so inconspicuous.’

  The whispering and being looked at woke Lucy, and the doctor sat down beside her and got to business. The result was what Miss Entwhistle expected: she had a very violent feverish cold, which might turn into anything if she were not kept in bed. If she were, and with proper looking after, she would be all right in a few days. He laughed at the idea of London.

  ‘How did you come to get such a violent chill?’ he asked Lucy.

  ‘I don’t — know,’ she answered.

  ‘Well, don’t talk,’ he said, laying her hand down on the quilt — he had been holding it while his sharp eyes watched her — and giving it a brief pat of farewell. ‘Just lie there and get better. I’ll send something for your throat, and I’ll look in again to-morrow.’

  Miss Entwhistle went downstairs with him feeling as if she had buckled him on as a shield, and would be able, clad in such armour, to face anything Everard might say.

  ‘She likes that room?’ he asked abruptly, pausing a moment in the hall.

  ‘I can’t quite make out,’ said Miss Entwhistle. ‘We haven’t had any talk at all yet. It was from that window, wasn’t it, that —— ?’

  ‘No. The one above;’

  ‘The one above? Oh really.’

  ‘Yes. There’s a sitting-room. But I was thinking whether being in the same bed — well, good-bye. Cheer her up. She’ll want it when she’s better. She’ll feel weak. I’ll be round to-morrow.’

  He went out pulling on his gloves, followed to the steps by Miss Entwhistle.

  On the steps he paused again. ‘How does she like being here?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Miss Entwhistle. ‘We haven’t talked at all yet.’

  She looked at him a moment, and then added, ‘She’s very much in love.’

  ‘Ah. Yes. Really. I see. Well, good-bye.’

  He turned to go.

  ‘It’s wonderful, wonderful,’ he said, pausing once more.

  ‘What is wonderful?’

  ‘What love will do.’

  ‘It is indeed,’ agreed Miss Entwhistle, thinking of all it had done to Lucy.

  He seemed as if he were going to say something more, but thought better of it and climbed into his dogcart and was driven away.

  XXIX

  Two days went by undisturbed by the least manifestation from Wemyss. Miss Entwhistle wrote to him on each of the afternoons, telling him of Lucy’s progress and of what the doctor said about her, and on each of the evenings she lay down on the sofa to sleep feeling excessively insecure, for how very likely that he would come down by some late train and walk in, and then there she would be. In spite of that, she would have been very glad if he had walked in, it would have seemed more natural; and she couldn’t help wondering whether the little thing in the bed wasn’t thinking so too. But nothing happened. He didn’t come, he didn’t write, he made no sign of any sort. ‘Curious,’ said Miss Entwhistle to herself; and forbore to criticise further.

  They were peaceful days. Lucy was getting better all the time, though still kept carefully in bed by the doctor, and Miss Entwhistle felt as much justified in being in the house as Chesterton or Lizzie, for she was performing duties under a doctor’s directions. Also the weather was quiet and sunshiny. In fact, there was peace.

  On Thursday the doctor said Lucy might get up for a few hours and sit on the sofa; and there, its asperities softened by pillows, she sat and had tea, and through the open window came the sweet smells of April. Th
e gardener was mowing the lawn, and one of the smells was of the cut grass; Miss Entwhistle had been out for a walk, and found some windflowers and some lovely bright green moss, and put them in a bowl; the doctor had brought a little bunch of violets out of his garden; the afternoon sun lay beautifully on the hills across the river; the river slid past the end of the garden tranquilly; and Miss Entwhistle, pouring out Lucy’s tea and buttering her toast, felt that she could at that moment very nearly have been happy, in spite of its being The Willows she was in, if there hadn’t, in the background, brooding over her day and night, been that very odd and disquieting silence of Everard’s.

  As if Lucy knew what she was thinking, she said — it was the first time she had talked of him— ‘You know, Aunt Dot, Everard will have been fearfully busy this week, because of having been away so long.’

  ‘Oh of course,’ agreed Miss Entwhistle with much heartiness. ‘I’m sure the poor dear has been run off his legs.’

  ‘He didn’t — he hasn’t — —’

  Lucy flushed and broke off.

  ‘I suppose,’ she began again after a minute, ‘there’s been nothing from him? No message, I mean? On the telephone or anything?’

  ‘No, I don’t think there has — not since our talk the first day,’ said Miss Entwhistle.

  ‘Oh? Did he telephone the first day?’ asked Lucy quickly. ‘You never told me.’

  ‘You were asleep nearly all that day. Yes,’ said Miss Entwhistle, clearing her throat, ‘we had a — we had quite a little talk.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Well, he naturally wanted you to be well enough to go up to London, and of course he was very sorry you couldn’t.’