The Soldier and the Gentlewoman

by Hilda Vaughan

  “And get drunk with him, I suppose?” she said, “as you have to-night. And play cards for stakes you can’t afford? And fling away money on racing? And give him seventy pounds a year, for seven years, so that he may sponge on you and teach you to destroy your child’s inheritance.”

  “Oh shut up!” Dick said, “and get out of my way.”

  She let him stumble down the dark passage to his dressing-room, then went swiftly into her own bedroom and locked the communicating door.

  Chapter IV

  SHE MAKES SURE OF THE INHERITANCE

  It was neither light nor yet quite dark when she became aware of the bedclothes’ pallor, and of the ceiling, luminous, grey, unearthly, over her upturned face. Shadows and firelight had been chasing across the walls when she fell asleep in the afternoon. Now only a faint glow, dull red and sullen, lit the room. How deathly still it was! She began to count her heart-beats and the tickings of the clock. Was the world without still muffled in the heavy white of a sea fog? Or had night fallen, turning it to impenetrable darkness? Something ominous, of which she was afraid, had hung over her all day in the clammy unmoving air. Before long it would have to be faced. But she was scarcely awake yet. Her body was warm and craved for more repose after so many sleepless nights. She was sorry for her body, and her pity for it was dimly connected with her fear. Had not her flesh suffered enough two years ago, she asked in a vague rebellion against she knew not what? She did not want to be awakened by forebodings of further pain. Let the fear rest, whatever it might be, for just a little while longer. The pillow was soft. Her head sank back upon it; and she allowed memories of the past week to flicker across her slackened mind, as the firelight had been flickering when the Doctor sent her to bed.

  “Won’t you take my word for it?” he had growled, “the child’s perfectly all right now. One would think no youngster had ever had croup before. Can’t you trust me, or your excellent nurse here, for a single minute?”

  For answer she had squeezed his big kind hand and tried to smile at Nannie. Of course she trusted them both. Dear old Dr. Roberts could not have been more skilful nor Nannie more untiring. But what did they know of the importance of her son’s life to her? To them he was a sick child, like another, to be saved if possible. To her he was the only hope and reason for her future, the sole justification for her self-suppression, her suffering of mind and body in the past. If he should die, who had been so dearly borne, the story of her struggle to save and keep Plâs Einon would never make the epic she had planned. It would degenerate into the sordid tale of a woman who denied herself to no purpose, refusing the man she loved, marrying late in life one whom she despised, for the sake of a property and a house of which, in the end, he would rob her. For if I lost my only child, thought Gwenllian, beginning to turn and toss on her bed, I should lose the strength and courage to fight Dick’s extravagance.

  Her battle had been continuous since she had begun to wage it fourteen months ago. Led by Major Stansbury, Dick had been the winner. He had spent faster than she could save: not much faster, but fast enough to imperil her position. All her energies had been given to devising new economies, and she had finally wrested the management of the home-farm and the estate from his incompetent hands. As long as he stayed at Plâs Einon she had been able to check his expenditure. But the stem rule she found it necessary to exercise was driving him more often away from home, and when he was safe from her in his London club, he drew more money out of the bank than her labour and contriving could pay into it. And the better I keep him in order here, the oftener he will escape, she told herself in despair, as she flung back the hair that was fallen over her eyes. She had made a mistake when she cut Major Stansbury and refused to entertain him. Subtler methods of attack might have done more to undermine his influence over Dick. If only she had not been too angry to disguise her feelings! And sitting up in bed, she said to herself with weary conviction; I must learn to act a part. I must contrive to keep Dick here. He’s not safe except at my apron-strings.

  She lowered her feet over the edge of the bed and began to grope with her toes for her slippers. Nothing was ever quite where she expected it to be in this room. She was not accustomed to it yet, though she had slept in it alone for a twelvemonth and more. It was a bleak room. The woodwork, painted white, chilled her, but she would not spare money to change it. In the midst of the empty floor stood a prim little bed. Here the widows and the spinster ladies, who came to visit, had been wont to sleep, for the White room was considered too large and imposing for bachelors. It was at the foot of the nursery stairs, thus giving Gwenllian a decorous excuse for her removal into it after her first violent quarrel with her husband. “In case Master Illtyd should be ill in the night,” she had told the servants last winter. And since Christmas, pretence had ceased to be pretence. She had been creeping up those steps continually, candle in hand. The icy terror of losing her child had made her spirit shudder with her flesh in the small chill hours of morning, when the wind moaned in the chimneys and cold draughts slid along the dark passages. The old house seemed then to be quick with ghostly sighs and voices of foreboding. “Not strong! Not strong!” Gwenllian had heard them whisper. The heir was delicate and Plâs Einon knew it. One day last week a picture had fallen: the maids said it was a sign of death. Annie, the cook, had heard knockings from unseen hands at midnight, and Powell told how a robin had flown in at her pantry window. “There’s glad I was, Ma’am,” she confessed, “next day, when poor Mrs. Pugh-the-lodge was taken so simple, sitting in our kitchen and died before they got her home.” In tense silence Gwenllian had looked at the speaker. There was no need to ask, “why should you be glad of a harmless old woman’s death?” The mistress knew that she and her maid, bred up in the same superstitions, had shared a common terror lest these signs should herald the death of Illtyd.

  Huddled in a wadded dressing-gown, Gwenllian went to the fireplace and threw a log into the grate. It fizzled and spat. Then the dry wood caught fire and golden tongues of flame licked upwards, re-lighting the room. On the hearth stood an ancient cradle of oak. It was used for the wood that Gwen- llian burned when she allowed herself any heating at all. As she crouched beside it, warming her hands at the little blaze, she noticed the gleams of light dancing along the dark polished side of the cradle. To make them shimmer the more, she gave it a push. Weighted by logs, it could not swing easily upon its rockers. She thought: There ought to be a baby inside there. And suddenly she knew, with a shock that stiffened her, what it was she must do: what it was that, in waking, she had feared.

  It was long before she had will enough to move, but when she could command her cold, numbed limbs, she forced them to raise and carry her to the window. Draw back the curtain, she said to her right hand, as though it had belonged to another, for her spirit and her body seemed to have been separated. They were no longer composed in the living unity that had been herself. Her will had become the detached and pitiless tyrant of a shrinking slave that was her flesh. She saw her hand extended. Her fingers felt the coldness and the gloss of the calendered chintz; but their sensation was an occurrence from which she stood aloof. She was remote; aware of the nerves and muscles in her body uttering their shuddering pro- test, of the heart’s laboured beating, of the tightening of a throat that swallowed with difficulty, of the drumming noise in her ears, of the hot trickle of fear down her spine, of a disgust that tasted nauseous on her tongue—she was aware, but indifferent. She would compel this slave to her purpose. Though it shrank from the humiliation of an embrace it loathed, though it would be weary of the burden, though its delivery should rend it in two, yet it should obey. And it would survive, that the epic she had planned might, in her own seeing, be fulfilled.

  When her hand had pulled aside the curtain, she looked out upon the night. It was opaque, but its darkness did not hide the shapes of the nearer trees. They loomed through the denseness of a sea-fog, their branches furred with the tentacles of hoar frost: wan ghosts of trees, like an army o
f skeletons. “Horrible,” she whispered, shrinking back, “horrible!” And she remembered Frances’s saying: “When things die, they should be given swift burial. Churches and traditions and marriages that go on in form after the spirit is out of them, breed poison. They remind me of gaunt dead trees on which venomous fungoids grow—dismal while they stand, and certain to fall some day on those who shelter beneath them.” Gwenllian had mocked at Frances.

  “How far-fetched!” And how like Frances! But she had thought: Frances is an Einon-Thomas, as I am, with a streak of passionate mysticism in her. Her sister’s dark eyes had shone as she answered, “Far-fetched? I wonder. My similes are from nature. Growth is beautiful but decay foul. Nothing is sweet that lingers on when it has ceased to grow.”

  “Not sweet,” Gwenllian muttered, thinking of her own unhappy marriage. Love there had never been; affection and respect were dead now; but lust might survive and be made to serve her. “It is necessary,” she said, half-aloud.

  Shut out those ghosts, she ordered her hand. Light all the candles. When it was done, she drove her still reluctant body to the wardrobe. Here were hanging the shabby tweeds that she wore every week-day and the neat coat and skirt of serge that went to church on Sunday mornings. Searching beneath a pile of woollen garments, washed, darned, and folded in dried lavender, ready for next Christmas and the deserving poor, her fingers touched at last something smooth and sleek, and brought out a Chinese robe. Fierce golden dragons were embroidered on a heavy silk that had the gleam and colour of liquid blood. When she had received it from Hong Kong as a wedding-gift, it had seemed too grotesque, too theatrical for her to wear, but it was fitting that she should wear it now. She put on the graceful, ruby coat, the black trousers, the patterned shoes, and, standing before her mirror, gazed at the reflection of herself transformed. The woman in the mirror was brushing out a curtain of thick hair, and Gwenllian remembered that, in the early days of their marriage, Dick had loved to play with this hair. She had been still and submissive, a trifle bored, her thoughts far away from his caressing fingers.

  Since last November he had not seen her hair loosened. To-night he should see it—no longer in the tight braids she wore by day. He should see and touch it; its soft web should fall again over his face and throat: and she took from a cupboard scent which Frances had given her at Christmas. The bottle was still unopened. She broke the gilded seal, and, dipping in a finger tip, put a drop of the fluid on to the parting of her hair. The perfume was of orange blossom—“The most aphrodisiac in the world,” Frances had laughingly declared. Was it this sensuous sweetness, or her sister’s words, or knowledge of her own plan that filled her now with an angry, unhappy excitement, an eagerness without joy? She despised her body for its half-willing response. Ashamed and derisive, she groped in an old chest that had once held the dowry of a bride. Here she stored the properties used when she organised theatricals for her Sunday School class. Sometimes she had wondered whether making up the little girls did not “put ideas into their heads.” Now, finding the rouge and the hare’s paw, she put a soft blush on her sallow cheeks and red upon her lips. She looked with shame and defiance at the result. Dick would prefer her thus—like a streetwalker; he was ill at ease in the presence of a gentlewoman. She Stoops to Conquer, she thought with a bitter smile, should have been the title of a tragedy.

  When she was ready, she glanced at her watch. It was ten o’clock. After dining at the dower house, Dick seldom came home before midnight. She went up the narrow flight of stairs to the day nursery and softly opened the door. In the warm, still room there was no light but that of a merrily burning fire and one bright streak from the night nursery, whose communicating door stood ajar.

  “Is that you, Madam?” Nannie whispered. She appeared in petticoat and corsets, her abundant person nipped in at the waist, like an hour-glass.

  “Yes, Nannie. But don’t mind me. I’ll watch here, while you go on undressing. How has he been?”

  “Sleeping lovely. I hope you’ve had a rest too, Madam?”

  “Oh yes,” Gwenllian answered. “I’ve had all the rest I need—all the rest I’m going to allow myself, anyway.”

  She knelt down beside the cot and gazed at her sleeping child. She had almost died that he might live, and she grudged neither peril nor torture. But by how little he seemed to hold the life she had given him! His face was the colour of an old wax candle; and a vision that had of late often appeared in her dreams returned to her—that baby face motionless among lilies waxen as itself. And she heard the whispered comments of the gossips who came to gape: “The only child!” .…“Of course there’ll never be another. She married too late in life…”

  “Who will the property go to if she doesn’t have any more children?”… “Her sisters, I suppose. But the entail’s gone. Her husband can will it where he likes.”

  If you die, thought Gwenllian, staring at the sick child, I may as well die too, unless I bear another son. She pressed her head against the bars of the cot. Unless I bear another son, she repeated again and again.

  She had long been repeating these words to herself when she heard a timid, hesitant knock on the door. Dick! With hot excitement she sprang up and went to him.

  They stood together on the landing, her hand drawing to the door behind her, his holding a little lamp whose light shot flames of scarlet among the crimson she was wearing. He stared at her robe and her coloured cheeks, and when she forced her lips to smile at him with the semblance of affection, he stared the more. She was seized by a wild desire to laugh. Dick’s stupid, startled face—her own bedaubed one! What a mad-house jest, ludicrous and obscene, respectable, legal marriage could be! She wanted to laugh and cry and scream, to liberate herself in an outburst of hysteria. But she must not scare Dick away. She must win him, keep him, use him.

  She said: “It was nice of you to come up.”

  “Oh,” he answered, visibly embarrassed, “I only wanted to ask the nurse if the little beggar was better.”

  “Yes dear. He’s much better. He’ll live now, I think.”

  “Good Lord,” exclaimed Dick, “you never told me his life was really in danger.”

  She clutched at his shoulder. “I didn’t dare trust myself to speak. Oh, Dick, you don’t know what I’ve gone through. Be a little nice to me. Comfort me, please. Please comfort me.”

  A flush spread over his face. “There, there,” he muttered. “Better have a hot bath and go to bed. That’ll do you good,” and he began to retreat downstairs.

  “No,” she cried, following him. “I couldn’t possibly sleep. I must have you to talk to till I’m calmer. Please, Dick, stay.” He waited for her on the landing, looking more than ever embarrassed. “Is there a fire in your bedroom?” she asked, taking his arm. “May I come in and warm myself for a little?”

  “If you really want to,” he answered, averting his eyes. “But I think it would be far better for you to get to bed.”

  “Can’t you understand,” she answered, making her voice low and pleading, “that I’m lonely and miserable.”

  “I’ll get you a hot drink,” he said.

  As soon as she entered the room they had shared, he left it, muttering about a saucepan. He was a long time gone; and while she crouched on the hearth, hugging her knees, pressing her chin against them, there dawned on her the humiliating conviction that he knew she had dressed up to woo him and that he wanted none of her. He had been intermittently ardent and she constantly cold during the first months of their marriage. When the birth of her child had separated them, when their quarrel over Major Stansbury had made her deny herself to Dick altogether, she had supposed that he would be glad enough to return at her summons. Now she hated him as never before, and with her hatred was mingled a fierce pride that demanded his submission.

  At last he entered, the collar of a jaeger dressing-gown hunched up to his ears.

  “Here,” he said, “I heated this milk for you while I was undressing. Come on. Let me take it along to yo
ur room, and tuck you up. Do you good to drink it in bed. No use staying here moping.”

  “Oh Dick,” she implored, “need we go on like this?”

  His face became more purposefully stupid. “Like what?” he asked.

  “You know what I mean—torturing ourselves with loneliness, living apart, keeping up hostilities, just because we once had a quarrel.”

  “You began it,” he said. “And you kept it up. It wasn’t I who suggested” He left the sentence unfinished and scowled fixedly at the floor. She had held out her arms to him and he was pretending not to see.

  “Yes dear, I know,” she persisted, though shame and rage burned within her. “But I’m sorry now. I’ll even make it up with your friend, if you wish it. To please you, I’ll—oh, Dick, say something! Try to meet me half way. I’ve been unhappy this last year.”

  “You haven’t shown it.”

  “I don’t show everything I feel,” she said, and a voice within her cried out, “or I would strike you dead at this instant for daring to scorn me!” But aloud she pleaded, “Let’s not keep up this heart-breaking estrangement. Let’s start ail over again.”

  He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his dressing-gown and stood sulky and stubborn, his feet far apart. “I see no reason for changing the arrangement you made yourself. We jog along quite comfortably as we are.”

  “No,” she exclaimed, “we don’t. You know we don’t. It’s unendurable. How can you pretend? Oh Dick, am I so old that you have ceased to think of me as a woman?” She went close to him, swiftly, before he had time to withdraw, and drew his face down upon her hair.

  “You didn’t appear to think much about me, or my feelings as a man,” he sulked.

  “Dick! Dick,” she cried, “don’t harp on the past. It’s been a wretched, stupid year. And it’s been my fault. Forgive me, dearest. Look at me.”