“Oh, no! I’ll face them,” she exclaimed, with a touch of obstinate pride. “I’ve learned a little about self-control in the last few weeks and, anyway, I’d be ashamed not to be able to—to hide anything like that from the family. Besides, they will be longing to hear every detail about Morley, you know. It wouldn’t be fair to keep them waiting.”
“Good girl,” he said approvingly, and turned in at the gates of Cranley Magna.
It was not so difficult, really, Leslie thought, when they all crowded round her in the drawing-room later, eager for the latest news of Morley. They wanted to know how he had looked, if she had left him cheerful, what she thought of the nursing-home, and any possible information she might have gleaned about Sir James Trevant himself and his hopes of success.
They were so affectionate to her and, through her, to Morley that, if she concentrated hard on what they were saying and on what they wanted to know, she could almost ignore that great aching blank which had replaced all her hopes and fears and expectations so far as Oliver was concerned.
Until half-way through tea they continued their questions, and she her account of her stay in London. Then at last Alma, who had obviously been bursting with ill-suppressed news on her side for the last few minutes, said,
“You’ll never guess what we have to tell you.”
“Sorry, Alma. I’m afraid I told Leslie,” Reid put in contritely. “Did I steal your scoop?”
“Well”—Alma looked a little dashed—“I didn’t think of your being interested enough to tell her. After all, you hardly knew Oliver, did you?”
“True,” Reid agreed. “But I did,” he added dryly, “know Caroline.”
“Yes, of course. I’d forgotten that. But it wasn’t as though she meant anything much to you,” Alma explained comfortably. “Oliver was about our oldest friend.”
“Yes, since you put it that way, I do see it must have been a shock to you.”
Alma looked surprised.
“Well, I don’t know about a shock,” she said protestingly. “After all, a marriage is something nice, isn’t it?”
“That,” Reid assured her, “depends entirely on the parties concerned and the circumstances.”
Richard Greeve gave his mellow, understanding man-to-man laugh.
“All right, my dear boy. No one expects you to take much interest in any marriage but your own at this point. And indeed all of us—now that we have such excellent reports of our dear Morley—can prepare with confidence and pleasure for what I might call that next event in the family’s affairs.”
For a moment Leslie looked so blank that Reid gave her a warning glance. And, with reluctance, her mind accepted the idea that, to the outside observer, nothing in their affairs had changed. Though Oliver and Caroline might have rendered their engagement a tragic farce from the point of view of Reid and herself, in the eyes of the family she and Reid were as firmly and happily linked as ever. Not only that. The family’s comfortable enjoyment in the good news about Morley depended for what one might call its financial support on that engagement continuing.
All at once she felt indescribably trapped. She wanted to cry out against the forces which were being gently and smilingly arrayed around her. But, even as the idea came to her, she heard Reid, calmly and pleasantly, answering some specific enquiry which her father had added to his genial, if heavy, generalization.
“We didn’t think of making any very definite arrangements until Morley was home again, sir,” he was saying, aware—as Leslie knew—that an occasional “sir” tended to put Richard Greeve in an excellent humour.
On this occasion, however, he was more intent on seeing that no one departed from a line of conduct which should have the desirable result of providing financial stability without imposing any slight on his personal pride.
“We don’t need to let the affairs of one member of the family was so exactly on those of another,” he stated agreeably but firmly. “There is no reason whatever, my dear Reid, for you and Leslie to wait for your happiness. Indeed, though I deprecate any such unseemly haste as Oliver has shown, nothing would please me—or my family,” he added as an inconsiderable afterthought, “more than to have you and Leslie fix an early date for your wedding. For my part, I was going to suggest—”
“Oh, Father, do leave us to settle these things for ourselves!” exclaimed Leslie, her nerves drawn taut, so that she spoke with unusual irritation.
All she had done by her impatient objection, she saw now, was to fix her father’s attention, with offended determination, on the whole question of an early marriage.
“I keep on making mistakes in technique, it seems,” she said ruefully to Reid later, when they snatched a few moments alone together. “It makes me feel afraid to open my mouth.”
He laughed and patted her shoulder consolingly.
“Your father will forget about wedding arrangements in some new interest quite soon.”
“Oh, no.” Leslie shook her head. “You don’t know him, Reid, if you can say that. He’s got his teeth into this business now, and just won’t let go. Besides—” She stopped, coloured a little and looked distressed.
“All right. Don’t distress yourself about it. I know quite well that there’s the money aspect. The poor old boy feels—not unjustifiably—that he’ll be a lot more comfortable when he has a rich daughter than when he merely has a rich prospective son-in-law.” Leslie thought how greatly her father would have resented being referred to as a poor old boy. But the statement, as such, represented the situation exactly.
“I know it must seem hypocritical and inconsistent of him,” she said apologetically, “to strike such an attitude of pride and integrity about refusing to take money from a stranger, and then to try, with almost indecent haste, to hustle that stranger into becoming a relation, so that he can profit from the arrangement with almost ingenuous openness. But, Reid, he honestly believes in the essential rightness of both attitudes. Both the pride, I mean, and the genial plundering of a close relation.”
“Yes. I’ve worked that out some time ago,” Reid assured her good-humouredly. “And as, in my heart, I consider the money largely his by right, I don’t very much mind by what specious argument he can convince himself that he may take it. What does worry me is that, so far, he seems only willing to accept it if it’s offered, so to speak, on our marriage certificate.”
“Reid, I don’t know how you can joke about it! It’s terribly serious, you know.”
“Terribly,” agreed Reid, with a grin. “I feel the bands of matrimony tighten round me every time he calls me ‘my dear boy.’ ”
She laughed reluctantly. And then, because she had been through enough to test the strongest nerves, she suddenly felt the tears come.
“I wish—I knew—what to do.” She had turned away from him, but the unevenness of her voice betrayed her.
“Sweetheart, don’t cry.” He came up behind her.
“I’m not crying.”
“Well, don’t sound so exactly as though you are, then,” he said, and took her in his arms.
“Oh, Reid!” She turned against him, and found the strangest comfort in being held very tightly while she. sobbed once or twice.
“Now look, honey, nothing’s ever so bad that one can’t make something of it.” He ruffled her hair, with a half-amused, half-tender gesture. “You’ve had altogether too much to handle lately. But, although I made such a howling fiasco of the Caroline-Oliver business, I promise you I’ll get you out of this somehow.”
“Oh, it isn’t really that. At least, of course, it is partly. Only everything seems so—so out of hand and I can’t see my way ahead one little bit, and well, anyway, that’s how it is.”
“I know. And, most of all, the thing you didn’t mention. It must he the very devil losing your confounded Oliver all over again.”
She was silent. Then she nodded her head slightly, because he seemed to expect her to. But to her immense surprise she realized that, until he mentioned Oliver
, she hadn’t really been thinking of him.
“We can’t do anything for the moment but go on with this engagement. You do see that, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course.” She wasn’t really paying much attention to him. She was turning over in her mind the incredible fact that “losing Oliver all over again,” as Reid put it, was not the agonizing central point of her distress, as it should have been.
“He has really gone this time. He’s Caroline’s husband,” she told herself, like someone pressing on a doubtful tooth to see if it really ached.
But there was a sort of dull acceptance, rather than anguished protest, and she told herself that she was probably past feeling very acutely about anything that day.
“Feeling better?” enquired Reid at that moment. And she laughed, because she knew there was no reason why she should be feeling better, except for his comforting presence. Only she did.
“Much better,” she said, and flung her arms round him, as she had that time in the hall when she had first known that she could call on every penny he had to make Morley well. “Much, much better, Reid. Because one can’t help feeling better and more hopeful when you’re around. There’s something about you. It’s your—your special gift to mankind.”
“Make it womankind,” he said, and kissed her. Not just a light, teasing kiss. But the kiss of someone who had shared some varied experiences with her and valued her after the test. She felt the rather hard line of his cheek against hers, and knew the most real and primitive consolation of all—the sheer physical contact of someone in whom there was the answering spark of understanding.
It became clear during the next few days, however, that no one else in the family was thinking of her engagement in terms of prolonging it. Only from the point of view of shortening it.
Even Alma said importantly,
“I’ll have to know fairly soon about the wedding, because I suppose I’ll be a bridesmaid, and it’ll mean getting a day’s holiday from school.”
“Maybe we shan’t have the wedding until your next holidays,” Leslie said, with seeming carelessness.
“Oh, Leslie! You couldn’t delay it as long as that! Besides, I think it’s mean’ of you to talk about having it in the holidays. What a waste of a perfectly good reason for having a day off.”
Alma looked so reproachful that Leslie had to laugh and say that at least she would keep that important point in mind.
“Anyway, what’s the need for delay?” Alma threw at her as a parting shot, as she flounced off into the garden on some affairs of her own.
“Yes, Leslie dear. What need is there for delay?” asked her mother, the only other person who had been in the room when this conversation took place.
“There isn’t any, Mother!” Leslie tried to look perfectly natural and mildly surprised at the question. “Some people like a longer engagement than others.”
“But I thought—the whole impression in the beginning was that you were both swept off your feet, and the sooner you were married the happier you would both be.”
“Well, of course. But there’s no frantic hurry—It’s just that Father has this been in his bonnet about it.”
“No, darling, it isn’t. No one wants to hurry you. Not even your Father really.” This was said without complete conviction. “Only, there’s no denying that you are both sure of your own minds, in the a the peculiar circumstances, an early marriage would certainly solve a lot of difficulties. As it is—” She broke off and sighed.
“You mean that the day-to-day financial position is pretty grim?”
“I’m afraid so. I hate to sound as though we’re only waiting to sponge on Reid, but—”
“It isn’t sponging! Reid told me himself that he—regards Great-Aunt Tabitha’s money as largely Father’s own due.”
“I know, Leslie dear. He told us that too, and I’m quite sure he means it. But you know what your Father is. He keeps on saying that he wants the position regularized.”
“Well!” cried Leslie in amused indignation. “I can think of better ways of describing my wedding.”
Her mother smiled too. But passingly, like someone whose worries were too near for her to indulge in real laughter.
“He means, you know, that once the family is one so to speak, there is a perfectly just basis for discussing how the money should be divided. Until then he says he feels he can’t accept any of the money without putting himself in the undignified position of a man who ‘touches’ his prospective son-in-law for a loan, on the strength of doubtful expectations—”
Leslie inwardly cursed her father’s preposterous hair-splitting, which, dictated stubborn pride in one set of circumstances and almost ingenuous exploitation in another.
“I know, darling. I do understand.” She glanced affectionately at her mother, and wished anxiously that she looked less harassed. It made one feel so horribly guilty. “I wouldn’t have spoken like this, Leslie—it’s so entirely your own business, dear, I do know that—only”—for a moment her mother smiled almost brilliantly—“I feel so reassured by the way you look at Reid sometimes.”
Leslie was astounded.
“The way I look at Reid?” she repeated. “How do I look at him?”
“Oh, I was thinking of the way your face lights up when he comes into the room, as though you feel that, the moment he appears, any worries are over.”
“Oh—oh, yes. Of course.”
“And then sometimes you have such a sweet look of—discovery, darling.” Her mother’s smile became very affectionate. “As though you hardly know yourself how fond you are of him. Lots of engaged girls become very gay and confident in their attitude, you know. You aren’t a bit like that. It’s as though you feel you’re trembling on the verge of a still greater discovery any moment.”
“Mother, you—you’re fanciful.” Leslie had gone very pale suddenly.
“Oh, Leslie dear, you mustn’t mind my noticing these things. Mothers do like to flatter themselves that they have a very special understanding about their daughters. At least, sentimental mothers do. And I suppose I’m sentimental,” Mrs. Greeve said, without regret.
“You certainly are.” Leslie laughed, trying to make the laugh sound indulgent and understanding.
But it came out rather shaky and uncertain.
“Do I—really—look at Reid like that?”
“Occasionally, in the last few days. You needn’t be so taken aback, dear.” Her mother was genuinely amused. “It’s quite a proper way for an engaged girl to look.”
“Yes—I know. I only thought—”
Her voice trailed off into dismayed silence. But as her father’s voice was heard in the hall just then demanding to know where his wife was, Leslie’s silence passed unremarked. In fact, Mrs. Greeve got up and hurried out to her husband, and Leslie was left alone in the room. Slowly she went to the mirror over the fireplace and studied her own pale reflection.
Stupid of her to have lost her colour like that. She hoped her mother had not noticed. But even now her eyes widened and darkened again as she thought of the words which had given her such a shock. A shock of half-acknowledged realization.
“It’s as though you feel you’re trembling on the verge of a still greater discovery any moment,” was what her mother had said. And her mother was a singularly acute woman where people were concerned. “It couldn’t be true! Oh, Reid, it couldn’t possibly be true!”
Leslie dropped her head on her arms on the mantelpiece, and tried to recall her horror and heartbreak when she had first known that Oliver was lost to her. In that moment, she would almost have welcomed a return of the first anguish she had suffered that evening in the wood. But she felt—she admitted it ruthlessly—a sort of nostalgic regret. Nothing more.
“But perhaps I am just getting over him—quite naturally. It doesn’t have to be a case of one passion driving out another. Mother is just being fanciful. And so—am I.” She raised her head and looked at herself for a long time again. “Or am I?” she
said loud at last.
“Are you what, my sweet?” He had come into the room without her noticing, but at the sound of his voice she swung round to face him, colouring, so that no one could have guessed how pale she had been only a few minutes ago.
“Oh!” She laughed embarrassingly. “It’s a bad habit, talking to one’s own reflection. I think I was just asking myself if I—if I were really managing the present situation well,” she finished hastily.
“So far as a masterly inactivity can be described as doing things well, we are managing splendidly,” he assured her. “But it’s no good concealing the fact from ourselves—we are merely marking time. There will be a moment when we simply have to make a decision. And, so far as I can see, we’re neither of us one whit nearer knowing what that decision will be.”
“If we could only make Father see things in a more sensible light” Leslie sighed. But, even as she said the words, she knew they were a waste of time and breath. Her father had taken up a particularly obstinate line on the question of the inheritance, and—as an extension of the same question—her marriage. Nothing would move him now.
And as though echoing her thoughts, Reid said regretfully,
“It’s damned difficult to un-strike an attitude. Your father couldn’t do it without a considerable sacrifice of pride. Can you see him climbing down? Because I can’t.”
“No, no. Of course he wouldn’t do that. I know once or twice in the past he’s made things dreadfully difficult by taking up a stand that he couldn’t abandon without looking silly. Nothing would change him now. I do believe he would literally rather starve, or—or even sacrifice Morley’s best interests. But then—what can we do?”
Reid gave her a rather quizzical glance. Then, with his hands in his pockets, he strolled slowly up the room and back again.
“There are two courses open to us, my pet. There always have been. We can either tell the exact truth and have your father order me from the house, refuse all financial help and generally plunge you into disaster while I return to France or—”
“Oh. Reid!”
Tell Me My Fortune Page 11
