Her eyebrows went up. “D’you think so? Then why d’you wear it yourself?”
He tried to pass off the clash of their antagonism with a laugh. “You insisted on it.”
“My dear Dick, you’re not a child. Though,” she added looking him up and down with disdain, “you so often behave like one.”
“Oh, well,” he said, still trying to appear unconcerned. “When in Rome, do as the Romans— eh, Frances?”
“I don’t, unless I happen to like their ways,” answered his sister-in-law.
“Oh,” said Gwenllian, “it’s no good your appealing against me to her. Frances never thinks or acts as other people do. You’d lose your reputation for originality if you did, wouldn’t you, dear?” There was malice in the elder sister’s smile, and Dick hated her for it. Frances might be eccentric; but she was a good sort. He’d be damned if that old cat should sneer at her!
“I’ve changed my mind,” he blurted out. “I’m going to stay and keep Frances company.”
He saw the detested black eyebrows raised once more and he turned his back on his wife.
“Indeed,” he heard her say. She was waiting there, silently, behind him. He felt her overpowering presence. In a flurry he added, “It’s too damned hot to go chasing up and down the country today.”
“I never heard you complain of the heat before. You are generally grumbling about the cold,” said the voice at his shoulder.
“Well, it is hot! Can’t I ever say what I like without your jumping down my throat?” he almost shouted.
Frances intervened. “Children! Children! What a thing to quarrel about! For goodness sake let him stay if he wants to!”
Dick turned round in time to see Gwenllian throw her sister a glance of icy resentment. “By all means,” she said, “if you have made him your convert. What excuse shall I give Colonel Howells—that Dick is busy reading Socialist economics?”
“Why the devil should you offer any excuse?” Dick broke out.
“They’re on our water,” Gwenllian replied, scrutinising a distant tree above his head.
“They’re there to please themselves, aren’t they?” he retorted, and he longed to shout at her, “Can’t you even look at me, you stuck-up prig?”
“You promised to be there,” she said, without lowering her glance.
“I’ve changed my mind, I tell you.”
“I see. So I shall have to keep your obligations for you.” And she added: “Perhaps I’d better say you were detained by estate business.”
He felt the flame of a blush run up his spine and burn his face. Damn her, taunting him with his ineptitude as a landlord and in front of her sister too!
“I’m afraid I only ordered a light luncheon for one,” she resumed, acidly polite, now that she had the satisfaction of seeing him turn red.
“I prefer bread and cheese,” he muttered, and scowled after her as she turned her back upon him and walked away.
Frances had sunk down again into her deck-chair.
“Bread and cheese and kisses,” he heard her murmur. He glanced at her with suspicion to see whether she was mocking him, but she seemed lapsed in a state of dreamy exhaustion. That queer turn she had, he thought, has left her fagged out. Damned uncanny, it was. He fetched a chair and flopped into it beside her to enjoy a quiet sulk. Filling a pipe, he brooded over his misfortunes. These odious wrangles with Gwen were becoming more frequent. They made him angrier while they lasted; their passing left him more shaken and sore. A life of continence was enough to sour any man who hadn’t chosen to be a monk. Yet, God knew, he had no desire ever again to be her lover! As for taking a mistress, that seemed to him as foreign as the eating of frogs. Once when he had remarked to Frank, “that sort of thing’s not quite English, what?” Frank had jeered, “you mean that it’s not respectable middle-class.” What Dick had meant in his heart was that it would have shocked his mother. There were furtive things a fellow didn’t want to do, unless he was driven to them. But it might come to that. You couldn’t look at a girl in this dreary district, without all the old tabbies getting on your track. Damned unfair when you’d done no wrong, but only wished you dared. And sitting hunched beneath his stately colonnade, scowling at the gay flowers in his garden, Dick wondered why everything seemed to go against him in spite of the honesty of his intentions.
Presently he saw the nursery procession making its careful way over the gravel. “Mind, darling,” he heard Nannie admonish. She was leading his wife’s heir by the hand. Her stout person was tightly encased in a grey coat that looked superfluous on so hot a day. Dick thought with discomfort of the thick corsets and petticoats she so obviously wore. The nursery-maid, who walked behind her, slowly pushing a glossy pram, was a meagre imitation of her elder, grey with black points, and closely girthed. The girl’s face was shiny with perspiration, yet on her hands, as on Nannie’s, were white cotton gloves, and on her feet stockings of black wool. Gwen would insist on making the poor devils uncomfortable, Dick thought, and the children too. No use his trying to interfere on behalf of the little blighters! Illtyd was so utterly her own. And if he tried to give Richard his share of attention, she grew furious with jealousy on her favourite’s behalf. They wouldn’t have much of a life with a mother who coddled one, snubbed the other, and would leave neither alone. What had been the use, anyway, of bringing more people into a world he couldn’t make head or tail of himself? But there they were. He had begotten them, though he hadn’t much wanted to, and it filled him with contradictory irritation that Gwen should behave as though she owed them to none but the Holy Ghost.
White clouds, piled up in rounded blobs like whipped cream, were beginning to cover the hard blue sky. But still the sunshine gilded Plâs Einon garden with an intense, metallic light. The green of the lawns was grown vivid as the covering of a billiard table. The motionless trees appeared no longer to be living things, but painted scenery against the backcloth of a stage. Theatrical, that’s what it looks, Dick suddenly said to himself. Like the setting on an empty stage for a play that’s about to begin. And it’ll be a tragedy according to Frances.
Out of the stifling silence she said: “Dick, in all the six years we’ve known each other, we’ve never told the truth.”
“Oh, I say,” he protested.
“You know quite well what I mean. About your marriage.”
“Don’t,” he muttered hastily. “I can’t possibly discuss it—with you of all people.” But he knew that it was in her he longed to confide.
“My dear,” she said, “why don’t you and Gwenllian separate?”
“Oh,” he declared, shocked that Gwen’s sister should suggest such a thing, “it hasn’t become unbearable—not yet.”
“Why go on until it does?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered vaguely. “There are the kids to be thought of.”
“D’you think children benefit so much by seeing their father and mother always at loggerheads?”
“People expect a married couple to stick it out for the sake of their kids,” he sighed.
Frances sat up and flashed her bright eyes on him. There were golden lights in their darkness. They seemed to burn with an impatient flame. “For heaven’s sake, try to think this matter out for yourself,” she cried. “How much do you mean to your children, or they to you?”
“Well, I couldn’t bear to hurt the little beggars,” he answered, trying to evade the issue. “I don’t even like to see Gwen as strict as she is.”
“That’s only your universal attitude of passive goodwill,” she told him. “How much do you and your children mean to one another positively?”
Her searching eyes compelled candour.
“Nothing,” he muttered, and hung his head.
“Don’t imagine I’m blaming you, my dear,” she said, laying one of her hands on his. “It’s simply that you’re not a born parent. You’ve always funked power and responsibility, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” he answered, less humiliated th
an relieved to be telling the truth at last.
“Then leave it all to Gwenllian who revels in it,” she urged. “Go away from here at once, and find a job among the sort of people with whom you’re most at ease. You’d be popular in some sets, my dear. But you’ll never go down here.”
“I know that,” he admitted.
“And to be liked means such a lot to you,” she went on vehemently. “I hate to see you being starved of what you need.”
Then he confessed his real objection to a separation.
“I’d be in danger of starving, literally, if we tried to run two establishments, Gwen and I. And you must agree it would be inhuman to part her from all this.”
“Of course,” said Frances. “She’d have to stay on here. It belongs to her, in a sense.”
“That’s all very fine,” he grumbled, “but with present taxation and the boys to educate, how much d’you suppose there’d be left over for me to live on? Gwen never stops nagging if I take a month or two abroad in the winter.”
“I know, I know,” Frances exclaimed. “But poverty couldn’t be as damnable as living with someone who hates you.”
“I’ve tasted poverty before,” he declared, his small mouth grown stubborn under its trim moustache. “I’d clear out soon enough, if I could afford to live comfortably in my own quiet way. But there wouldn’t be enough, I tell you.”
“Then set to and earn it,” she flashed at him.
“What earthly chance has a fellow of my age, brought up in the Service? The best I could hope to pick up would be a billet abroad in some vile climate. You seem to forget how I was knocked about in the war. My health would never stand it.” And he fought with a foolish inclination to cry. “Besides,” he added, after a gloomy silence, “it isn’t as though I should ever be free to marry again and have another shot at being happy.”
“Gwenllian might be induced to divorce you.”
Dick wearily shook his head. “I don’t think so. She’d say it looked so bad.”
The clouds, which had by now blotted out all the blue of the sky, were no longer creamy. Some were of a lowering grey, others were toadstool yellow. One last gleam of sun fell upon the hillside that rose above the tree-tops of the dingle. Dick saw the whitewashed buildings of his farms, shining like pearls against their green setting, and he recalled the day on which he had first beheld his property. It had brought him none of the joy for which he looked. But since for Gwen and her heir’s sake he must not sell it, he’d be hanged if he didn’t at least wring what pride and comfort there was to be had out of the damned place! Frances was one of these unworldly fools who cared only for people and ideas. She hadn’t the sense to understand that a fellow couldn’t inherit a magnificent old country house, an estate, a position in the best county society, and then go back, of his own free will, to being a penniless suburban nobody. It might be jolly if he could. But it couldn’t be done.
The sky became a leaden lid closing down upon him. All sunlight was gone, and colour faded from the landscape. Over the hill opposite he saw a veil of rain descending and with its approach the sultry air grew chill and he shivered. A roll of thunder, reminding him of distant gun-fire, made him start.
“It’s coming,” he said. “Better take shelter.”
Frances did not reply. She gave a long sigh and began to gather up her books.
A cold shaft of rain struck him. “Come on in,” he cried, obstinate against this mad woman who wanted to part him from his money. Obstinate against her, angry with her for having troubled him, and yet, as she stood for an instant with the edge of a book forced upward into the curve of her breast, suddenly desiring to kiss her. He hesitated; perhaps, if he asked her, she might in her present mood, consent; and he lightened the weight on one of his feet as though he had the courage to take a pace towards her.
“Well, Dick,” she said, “what’s the matter?”
“I thought,” he began. “That is, I felt that—”
A blinding dazzle of lightning interrupted him. “Look,” he said, “let me carry the books,” and, though a clap of thunder had killed his words, he took the books almost roughly, and began to run for shelter, finding in this an excuse for putting his hand into hers.
Chapter IV
SHE DOES HER DUTY
Gwenllian crouched over the hearth in his bedroom. Her elbows dug into her knees. She felt the hard pressure of her jaw-bone thrust between clenched fists. The heat and the jigging light of the fire made her wince. But she moved only to turn Dick’s night clothes, that were hung upon a towel rail; and, when he fought for breath, to rise and bend over the sick man on the bed. Deftly she eased his body, propping it with pillows. He acknowledged these services with a gasp of thanks. Yet she saw that he shrank from her touch; and in angry contempt she thought: The fool’s afraid of me! Back to her chair she would go then and sit as before, shoulders hunched, muscles taut, tired beyond the longing for rest. Hours passed. There was no sound but of Dick’s distressed breathing, the unconcerned, gossiping voices of the fire, and the ticking of the clock. But, all the while, over the pale walls and ceiling, shadows were dancing; and to Gwenllian, the stillness was peopled with ghosts.
This was the bridal chamber of her race. Man and woman, betrothed in the interests of property, had lain beneath that canopy night after night through the years, until one or other, pitied by time, was put away, alone at last, in a yet straighter box. Cowering over the grate, Gwenllian pictured those proud, chaste women, her forebears, enduring such moments of rumpled shame as she could not forget. Never would she pardon Dick for what she had made him do. “The animal,” she muttered, “to be tricked by his lust!”
The fire seemed to have become fiercer. Rapidly she passed trembling hands over her face. Her hot thoughts ran on. On that night last winter, when she had danced again with the man she had once loved in virginal innocence, she, too, had learned desire. Asleep, she had dreamed warm, troubling dreams; and, waking, been restless. Curiosity, that crept and pried, had tainted her former cold compassion for young women that erred. Often of late, she had insinuated: “Tell me just how it happened? You need not be afraid to speak quite openly. You see, I’m married,” and had at once been suspicious of her own motive in making these enquiries. She found that she craved more and more detail of reply, and hating this obscene eagerness in herself, laid the blame for it on her marriage, which had awakened her to passions it could not satisfy. Dick’s shadow darkened her soul, corrupting even her deeds of mercy. Yet he himself was so small a thing, lying alone on that big hateful bed!
When the fire burned cheerful and steady, there came to her memories of childhood. Then the sense of her duty towards him was uppermost. The shaded lamp, the airing garments, the hushed warmth of the room, these were as they had been in the beginning. Forty years ago in the nursery overhead, Nanny had bidden her say her prayers. No matter how the day’s injustices and thwarted cravings for self-assertion had driven her to fury, she must beg a blessing on her relations. Often she had flung away from the firm hands tucking her in.
“I don’t want God to bless Howel! He started it, and when I hit back, Mother sent me out of the room. I hate him! I hate Mother!”
“Now Miss Gwennie, you’re talking like a bad wicked girl. Never let me hear you say such shocking things no more. Haven’t I taught you to love all your relations?”
“I can’t, Nanny!”
“But you must. You must make yourself. Now get on with Gentle Jesus meek and mild… Well? Have the naughty cross thoughts put the nice pretty hymn out of your head? That comes of hating those it’s your duty to love. ‘Look upon a little child. Pity my simplicity. Suffer me to come to Thee.’ Not so fast! ’Tisn’t reverent.”
As she recalled the unconscious irony of Nanny’s parting benediction, which no preceding rages, tears or chastisements ever altered—“Good night my little lamb. Go to sleep at once like a good girl, and you’ll have sweet dreams ”—Gwenllian’s tight lips relaxed into a smile. Of Nanny’s
peasant piety she could now make light. But she could not thus dismiss the grand words of the Book of Common Prayer. Unlike Frances, she had never disturbed her faith. There had been no doubt in her mind of the doctrine contained in the marriage service when she stood before the altar rails with Dick. Yet, how could she be bound to honour a fool who brought discredit upon herself and her house? Frances would say that promises, which could not be kept, might without blame be broken. But Gwenllian scorned to be as her sister was. She would continue to do her duty by the man she had married. Perhaps the end was nearer than she dared to hope. …Trapped by this thought, she flushed with guilt, assuring herself again and again that she was not evil but good, good. Then with a shudder she remembered the night on which she had modelled her husband in wax and melted him to death. She must have been mad then. Was she losing her reason again now? She had a vision of herself laying a wreath upon his coffin, and the woman in the vision smiled, drawing a widow’s long black veil across her mouth that none should see her rejoice. In imagination, Gwenllian tasted the veil upon her lips.
Something dark slid over the rug at her feet. There was no movement of running. It passed as smooth as a shadow and as soundless. She started up, clutching at her throat to stifle a scream. A moment later, the familiar scuttering behind the wainscot told her that it was but a mouse. She was twisted by a fit of silent, hysterical laughter, and, in the midst of it was checked, stricken by a new fear, hearing a new sound. This was no fancy, bred of solitude, but a footfall! Quivering, she listened, and heard it again. Someone was coming slowly up- stairs. The boards creaked beneath a heavy tread. And, with a shock that stayed her breath and made her heart leap, she exclaimed: “It’s Father I … Because I’ve failed …I can’t bear it! I can’t!” But this mocking spectre drew steadily nearer. Always, she had struggled to escape his derision. Because she was female and disinherited, she had struggled in vain. But she had sworn to convince him, in the end, that her brain, at least, was not contemptible and girlish. Had she failed in this also? Would he stand with his feet wide apart, as he used to do, and laugh at her?
The Soldier and the Gentlewoman Page 19
