by Ann Bridge
‘Come here.’ She led him a little way along the landing, out of earshot of the hovering footmen, and told him hurriedly of Hetta’s disappearance and their fruitless pursuit. ‘So now we’ve completely lost track of her, and so have the Security Police; there’s absolutely nothing we can do—God simply must take a hand,’ she said, with a direct earnestness which made the words far from irreverent.
‘Thank you for telling me, my daughter. I will offer the Mass for her release. Pray yourself,’ he added as he went away.
‘Oh, I will—for what that’s worth,’ said Julia. She drew from her pocket a little black lace scarf, such as all women in Portugal carry in their handbags for use in church, twined it round her tawny-gold hair, and went and knelt down in the chapel. A moment later Dona Maria Francisca sidled in and knelt also, followed by Nanny and some of the maid-servants, among them the old kitchen crone, Maria do Carmo, whom the Duke had described as a tigress; several shabby-looking men with broken boots crept in too, escorted by Antonio, and knelt on the opposite side of the aisle—these Julia recognised, without surprise, to be some of the Duke’s wayfaring guests who had passed the night in the hay-loft above the courtyard. At Gralheira not only food and lodgement, but Mass itself were available to the poorest traveller who desired it. How lovely that was, the girl thought, most unwonted tears suddenly filling her eyes. She glanced round at the pictures and small statues that made the chapel a treasure-house: the Grao Vasco Crucifixion over the main altar, and an enchanting Nativity by the same hand in the Lady-chapel on the right, the faces in both vividly alive; everywhere delicious polychrome sculptures of Our Lady and various saints, mostly dressed in the height of 18th-century fashion, but nevertheless possessing an unmistakeable devotional tone that is all their own. The odd thought struck her: how idolatrous, how papistical, this beautiful rococo building and its rich ornaments would seem to thousands of people—to her low-church Aunt Ellen in Scotland for instance. But Aunt Ellen would not ever see those shabby poor men, with their cracked boots and their stubbly chins, fingering their rosaries so devoutly just across the aisle from her. No, this was real, a reality that the normal Protestant world would never understand unless, like her, they could come and live with it.
The thought of Aunt Ellen reminded her of Mrs. Hathaway, always her poor aunt’s mentor and stand-by in any emergency—she must ring her up the moment after breakfast.
A tiny silvery chime of bells, jangled by the footman-server kneeling at the altar steps, announced that Mass had begun; Father Antal in a wonderful faded chasuble of silvery rose brocade was saying the Judica me. Like everyone else Julia crossed herself, recalled her wandering thoughts, and began to pray. She was not a Catholic, she was just a very usual type of casual Anglican, who went to Church when she felt like it—because she was in Durham and the Cathedral was so beautiful or, elsewhere, because the singing would be good or the preacher interesting. She made her Communion at Christmas and Easter, because she always had; she lived a kind and generous life partly because she had a kind and generous nature, but even more because she was unconsciously drawing on an enormous bank-balance, so to speak, of inherited Christian traditions of living. But during her long sojourn with the Ericeiras she had got into the habit of attending Mass, and going up to the Chapel after dinner to say the Rosary with Dona Maria Francisca, Nanny and Luzia—partly, again, out of a generous impulse not to separate herself from her pupil in anything; so this morning’s proceedings were all perfectly familiar, and in her present distress on Hetta’s account she found them deeply comforting.
When Father Antal went up to the altar to say the Introit there was a slight rustle and a tiny push beside Julia—Luzia had slipped into the pew. The Mass pursued its brief, majestic course—so stately, so impersonal, so overwhelming in its implications. After the dismissal Father Antal left the altar, and at the foot of the steps began the prayers ‘for the conversion of Russia’; Julia said them with unwonted fervour, realising as never before that under ‘Russia’ were comprised all Communists, everywhere. As the priest left the chapel Luzia whispered to her—‘It is frightful! I was too late to ask Dom Francisco to offer his Mass for Hetta. This idiotic Anna let me sleep. Now I suppose I must ask the Monsignor.’
‘Dom Francisco did offer it for her—I asked him to,’ Julia whispered back; she felt a curious gladness and relief as she told Luzia this. The girl’s great grey eyes glowed under the black mantilla that shadowed her pale face.
‘You did? Wonderful! How thankful I am!’
Emerging from the chapel with Luzia, out on the broad landing Julia heard a voice she knew coming up from the hall below—Richard’s voice, talking his rather peculiar brand of Portuguese to someone; looking down over the carved walnut banisters she saw him in conversation with Elidio. Luzia saw him too, and shot down the three right-angled sections of the wide staircase like a rocket.
‘Oh Atherley, she is lost! She is lost! We followed her, we tried to save her, but we failed!’ She clung to his arm, her face more Medusa-like than ever, and more beautiful.
‘Luzia! Luzia!’ Dona Maria Francisca and Nanny, on the landing above, hissed vainly in reprobation, without producing the smallest effect; Julia was reminded irresistibly of geese by the roadside hissing at a high-powered car —laughing a little, she walked down the broad shallow stairs. Just as she reached the hall the Duke, disturbed by his daughter’s high-pitched lamentations, came out from his study to see what was going on.
‘Ah, Atherley, it is you. This is very pleasant—welcome to Gralheira! I hope you stay with us?’ He turned to his daughter. ‘My child, must your greeting to a guest be to wail like an Irish peasant or a Chinese woman at a funeral? You make a most lamentable noise. I think you had better go and have your breakfast.’
‘Papa, I was only telling him’—Luzia began, when Townsend Waller walked in at the front door, and simultaneously Major Torrens appeared from the direction of the smoking-room. Meanwhile Father Antal, having disvested himself, was proceeding calmly down the stairs in search of breakfast, which was normally served to him on a tray in the priests’ study.
‘Hullo, Atherley, you’re very early!’ Major Torrens said. ‘You must have been driving all night. Well don’t accuse me any more of involving you in our affairs! You’ve bought it this time, coming up—’ He broke off suddenly at the sight of Richard’s stricken face; but not soon enough to forestall Luzia, who said brusquely—‘Major! You are being tactless!’ While the Duke stared in amazement at this unwonted behaviour on the part of his offspring, and Julia stifled unseasonable laughter—even as sne tried to think of some remark to tide over the awkward little pause which followed Luzia’s words—yet another figure appeared in the hall: the rather portly soutane-d shape of Monsignor Subercaseaux.
‘Good morning, good morning! My dear Duke, good morning to you!’ He glanced about him. ‘Quite an assembly—both our young ladies! And Atherley! Mon cher, this is an unexpected pleasure! When did you arrive?’ Then his eye lighted on the American. ‘Monsieur Waller, too!—how very pleasant.’ He shook hands. ‘My dear Duke, are you giving a breakfast-party, or what?’
The Duke of Ericeira was exceptionally well able to deal with such situations. ‘Come into my study a moment, Monsignor,’ he said. There he explained the events of the evening before. Subercaseaux, who like Father Antal and everyone else had only been told that Luzia and her companions had been ‘delayed’, was horrified.
‘This child in the hands of the Communists! But this is frightful. What is being done? Does Colonel Marques know?’
‘Colonel Marques?’
‘The Head of the Security Police. Oh yes, Major Torrens will certainly have told him. But this is an appalling thing! How could it happen?’
‘Major Torrens will be able to tell you that,’ the Duke said. ‘But it seems that Monsieur Atherley is greatly attached to the young lady, and his feelings need to be spared. The American, too, is apparently devoted to her, and feels to blame. And now I think
I must rejoin my guests.’
‘And I will go and say my Mass.’ Chastened in a way most unusual for him, Mgr Subercaseaux left the study and went slowly up the staircase towards the chapel.
His rather unfortunate little joke about a breakfast-party had inspired Julia to more drastic action than she usually took in the Ericeira household. Nanny and Dona Maria had stopped hissing like geese on the upper landing, and vanished; she sent Luzia up after them, then rang the bell and gave some orders to Elidio. When her host reappeared she muttered to him in an aside—‘Duke, I hope I haven’t done wrong, but I told Elidio to order breakfast for all these people, to save time. Poor Atherley must be starving, he’s been driving all night; and I’m sure Mr. Waller usually eats a steak in the morning! All right?’
The Duke laughed, with his usual appreciation of this lively sensible young woman.
‘Perfectly right. What a comfort you always are, Miss Probyn! But I am not sure that there is beef-steak, properly hung, in the house,’ he added seriously.
‘Oh, hang his steak!—I mean bother it!’ Julia said briskly.’ I said tomato omelettes all round, in the morning-room; then we shan’t interfere with all Elidio’s fusses over flowers and polishing in the dining-room.’
To her great surprise the middle-aged man bent and kissed her hand.
‘No congratulations will be sufficient for the man who becomes your husband!’ he pronounced.
‘Dear Duke, you really are a poppet!’ said Julia, touched by this praise. (Several hours later the Duke, in his study, consulted an Anglo-French and an Anglo-Portuguese dictionary for the meaning of the word ‘poppet’; since both described it as some form of doll, he was left mystified.)
Richard Atherley was in torture over the whole business. Ever since Torrens had telephoned to him the morning before he had recognised that he was responsible for Hetta’s having gone off with the American—he, and he alone; and the quite hideous outcome, though it could not have been foreseen, was his fault. On the long drive up, first through waning moonshine, then through the sweet-smelling Portuguese dark, the young man had spent those hours of solitude doing what Housman has perhaps described better than anyone else:
I took my question to the shrine
that has not ceased from speaking,
The heart within that tells the truth,
and tells it twice as plain.
—and his heart had told him, with loud and piercing distinctness, that whatever her mistakes and her gaucheries, for him henceforward it was Hetta, only and always; and that unless she was somehow restored to them he would have lost the person who meant more to him than anything else in the world. A frantic impulse of remorse had sent him off in the middle of the night in one of the Chancery cars, leaving a cryptic and abjectly apologetic note for the Ambassador with the night-watchman; by daylight, over breakfast at Gralheira, he realised plainly enough that he had made a fool of himself. What could he hope to achieve that would not be better done by Colonel Marques or Torrens?—or indeed, it seemed, by Luzia? These reflections left him with an extreme consciousness of his own folly and misery, and a great desire to unburden himself to someone. For this last purpose who could be more desirable than Mgr Subercaseaux?—and the instant they rose from the table he asked the priest if he could spare him a few minutes?
‘But of course, my dear young friend. Shall we walk in the garden?—the sun shines.’
French windows led from several of the ground-floor rooms into the knot-garden; stepping out, they walked there. For years afterwards any sense of shame or embarrassment would bring back to Atherley, quite unbidden, a picture of dark geometrical patterns on a pale ground, so deeply were the close-clipped shapes of the tiny box hedges burnt into his mind that morning during his talk with the priest.
‘Monsignor, I want to tell you—I—in fact this is all my fault,’ the young man began, with none of his usual aplomb.
‘You wish to explain to me why Countess Hetta made this journey with Monsieur Waller rather than with you?’ Subercaseaux asked as Richard paused.
The young man stared.
‘You know, then?’
‘No, I deduce. Did she ask you to bring her here?’
‘Yes, and really I wished nothing more than to do so; but she happened to suggest it at—at an awkward moment. I said I would telephone to her later, but when I tried she was not taking any calls.’
‘This was when?’
‘Sunday evening.’
‘Had Madame de Vermeil arrived?’
Richard stared again—then, in spite of his distress, he gave one of his baying laughs.
‘Monsignor, there is no end to you! Yes, she had; in fact they met at the Pretender’s, at luncheon.’
‘Ah, that explains much. I expect this detestable Fanny —I am sorry, my dear Richard, but to be honest with you I do really regard this person as one of the most pernicious of creatures!—did or said something perfectly hideous to that poor child. And then she asked you to bring her up here, and you temporised? Is that it?’
‘Yes, that was it.’ He kept his eyes on the box hedges. ‘She said she would make her own arrangements,’ he said wretchedly. ‘Well we know what those were, and what they have led to! I would give anything that it hadn’t happened; I could kill myself!’
‘More practical is to decide, finally and definitively, which of these two ladies you now propose to pursue,’ Subercaseaux said, with elegant severity.
‘Hetta! I’ve broken with Fanny. She doesn’t believe it yet, but it’s true.’
‘She will find plenty of consolations, believe me,’ the priest said sardonically. ‘But if—when—’ he sighed and looked distressed. ‘If and when you are able to renew your addresses to Countess Hetta,’ he went on, ‘I think you should realise that there must be no sentimental harking back, in fact no outside flirtations at all. This young girl is not the sort of person either to understand that kind of thing, or to tolerate it.’
‘I know she isn’t,’ Richard said humbly. ‘And honestly, Monsignor, I didn’t start it this time. I had no idea, even, that Madame de Vermeil was coming to Lisbon till she turned up at my house on Sunday evening. That was the damnable part of it.’
‘Damnable is indeed the word, especially for this poor child, in the event,’ the Monsignor said. He could guess at the details of the ‘awkward moment’. ‘But can you explain one thing to me—how came the American to let her out of his sight?’
‘That was my fault too,’ Richard said miserably. ‘He was with us the night Miss Probyn’s car was crashed, and I promised to tell him what it was all about—or at least enough to make him careful; but what with one thing and another I never did. He isn’t in the least to blame.’
‘I see—no.’
A little silence fell, as they walked to and fro in the strong sunlight.
‘If only there were something one could do!’ Richard broke out.
‘You could pray, of course, if you have that habit.’ Richard shook his head. The priest looked at him quizzically.
‘Of course if you were a Catholic I could give you a swingeing penance,’ he said. ‘That would do you all the good in the world. But for a Protestant penitent, who doesn’t even pray, I hardly know what to prescribe! I suggest that you go and do something to distract poor Mr. Waller—play billiards with him, or take him for a walk. Not in the least as a penance, he is too nice. And when you are alone—’ he paused.
‘Yes?’
‘Reflect long and carefully on what your relations are to be with Countess Hetta, if by God’s mercy she is restored to her friends, and to you. If you were to marry her, both her integrity and her naïveté would irritate you twenty times a week! Spend this time of suspense and distress in asking your heart whether you can school yourself to abide that with patience, and with sweetness; if you cannot, leave her alone.’
He turned away and went into the house.
When the breakfast-party broke up Julia had gone first to find Dona Maria Francisca,
and make her apologies both for returning so late, and for keeping Luzia out. Then, at last, the girl felt free to do what had been at the back of her mind all the morning, namely to ring up Mrs. Hathaway in Lisbon. They had so tormented the Duke with all their telephoning the previous day that she went straight to that inconvenient instrument by the pantry, and put through a call to the Hotel Lucrezia; she lit a cigarette and waited, perched on a case of wine. When the call came through she demanded Mrs. Hathaway, and presently heard that familiar voice.
‘Darling Mrs. H., there you are at last! I only got your letter up here yesterday afternoon, just as I was going out; I meant to ring you up last night, but we didn’t get back till one o’clock this morning. I am so sorry. How are you? Is the pub all right? I do wish I hadn’t been away.’
Mrs. Hathaway replied, cheerfully, that she was quite all right, and the hotel charming; also she had been astonished to see how red Portugal looked from the air—‘like Devon—quite extraordinary!’ Then as usual she brushed aside her own concerns to enquire into Julia’s. ‘Dearest child, what were you doing, out till 1 a.m.? A ball? Was it fun?’
‘No, it wasn’t a ball, and it wasn’t fun,’ Julia said sombrely. ‘I can’t tell you properly now, but a quite darling girl has been carried off by perfectly deadly people, and we were chasing after her. You can probably guess for yourself who the deadliest people in the world are today! —well, it’s them, and we’re all in agony till we get her back. I don’t know when I can come down, Mrs. H. dear, with this going on.’
‘Was she carried off in a car?’ Mrs. Hathaway asked sharply.
‘Yes,’ Julia said a little surprised. ‘Why?’ It wasn’t like Mrs. Hathaway to ask futile questions.
‘She isn’t short and dark?—and her initials P. H. or H. P.?’ Mrs. Hathaway pursued very briskly.
Julia was utterly amazed.
‘Yes—yes to both. But how on earth do you know this?’
‘I’ve got her here in my room in the hotel, at least I think it must be her. Exquisite H. and P. monograms on all her underclothes! The Doctor thinks she’s been drugged, but he gave her an injection, and we’ve poured black coffee into her, and now she seems to be sleeping it off fairly naturally. There’s a policeman outside my door, too, and another at the front door; they seem quite concerned about it.’
