There came a tap at the doors, and they opened to admit Avery's cook with the supper tray. Almost immediately afterwards Gerda came in. She was wearing fluffy mules and a long silk dressing-gown. Lygia stared at her for a moment wondering what was different about her, and then she realized that the china-blue eyes and the fair eyebrows were not made up and this gave Gerda a curiously 'bald' look; Lygia could think of no other word to describe it.
She came straight to the fireplace and her eyes were fixed upon Robert. "I thought that must be your car I heard, though I rather imagined you wouldn't get here till tomorrow," she said.
"Tomorrow?" He looked at her rather curtly. "My grandmother's very ill, Gerda—she's probably dying— do you really imagine I'd have left it till tomorrow to come?"
"Oh dear, Gerda's put her foot in it!" she murmured, and helped herself to a cigarette out of a box on the mantelpiece. "Though, of course," she said, blowing out smoke, "I think it's a shame about your grandmother— it's quite spoiled all your plans for the new play, hasn't it, Robert?"
Avery was pouring out coffee and he glanced up sharply at this. "Gerda, do you mind if we keep personal issues out of all this for the time being? This is a house of sickness. If you can't respect the sick, then you'd better go back to bed."
She shrugged her shoulders with a kind of delicate insolence. "May we talk at all?" she asked. "May I ask Robert how London's looking?"
"London's looking fine, Gerda." Robert spoke rather wearily, and Lygia, sipping coffee in a deep armchair, watched him walk restlessly to the terrace-doors and back again. "When can I see Gran?" he demanded of Avery.
"Not yet—she must have some undisturbed sleep."
"She's got a nurse?"
"Of course."
"It's damnable, not being able to do anything!"
"I suggest that you sit down and drink a cup of coffee," Avery said. "Everything that can be done for Gran is being done and it won't help anyone for you to get into a stew."
"Don't pour any coffee for me," Robert decided after a moment. "I'm going to have a whisky." He went to the cabinet that held the drinks, and when he turned round with his glass it was almost full. He tossed the whisky back in several nervous gulps, and when he saw Lygia watching him, he frowned slightly.
Then, quite suddenly, the doors swished open and a nurse was beckoning to Avery. Lygia felt as though her heart stopped for a second, and then it raced on and Avery had gone from the room.
Gerda flicked ash into the fire. "These sudden alarms have been going on all day, Robert. I think Nurse is the jumpy type," she drawled.
But he didn't seem to hear her. He was staring at the doors through which Avery had just gone and quite suddenly Lygia got to her feet and went to him. When she slipped her hand through his arm, he glanced down at her. "She's dying," he said. "I can feel it."
"My dear—"
"I can feel it, Lygia, and when she's gone, I shall have no one."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The pines, those trees which had always seemed to express the moods of this house, had a low troubled sound when Lygia went up to bed. She was given her old room, with its big bed and its vast cupboards, and she lay sleepless a long time, listening to the trees and remembering Robert's face, its look of shaken relief, when Avery had come back to the drawing-room to reassure him that their grandmother had not, as they had thought, taken a turn for the worse. She had woken up and with something of her old asperity she had demanded to see her grandson. The nurse had thought she meant Avery.
Anyway, Avery had allowed Robert to go and see her for a few minutes, and afterwards he had relaxed a little and eaten some supper. But conversation had grown stilted. A mood that was almost self-conscious had come over them all and even Gerda had looked subdued. When Avery finally suggested that they go to bed—he was making do on a couch in Mrs. Chase's sitting-room, so that he'd be within call if needed— Lygia for one had been relieved to escape the strained atmosphere of the drawing-room.
As she undressed, she shivered with mental as well as bodily weariness, but before she climbed into bed she knelt by it and murmured a prayer for Mrs. Chase. The courageous, formidable spirit was slowly slipping out of the tired old body and Lygia did not ask God to keep her from her rest, she asked instead that he give her a peaceful rest.
When Lygia went downstairs in the morning, the first person she saw was Gerda. She was sitting on one of the high-backed settles in the hall. With her gold hair in loose curls at the nape of her neck and a light blue sash encircling the waist of her dark blue dress, she looked, Lygia thought, like a Gainsborough painting. But her mouth was a little thin as she rose from the settle and she did not return Lygia's good morning. "I want to talk to you," she said.
"What about?" Lygia thrust her hands into the pockets of her cardigan, and they stood confronting one another—almost in the manner of angry cats on a wall, Lygia thought, with a small flash of rather hysterical humour.
"I want to know why the hell you've come back. What are you after this time? Do you think the old lady's going to leave you something in her will?" The questions rapped out like small blows.
"As far as I know she isn't," Lygia retorted coldly. "I've come back because Mrs. Chase has asked to see me."
"Asked?" Gerda's eyes went narrow. "Why should she ask to see you?"
"I—I don't know."
"Oh, stop being so mealy-mouthed." Gerda exclaimed. "You've got round everyone with all your pretensions to innocence, haven't you? Is that how you wangled this part in Robert's play? Did you get him to make love to you and then pretend that he'd injured your sweet innocent feelings?"
"Robert has never made love to me!" Lygia denied hotly. "When I went to the cottage the other day, we did no more than eat a pleasant meal and talk theatre— and that was probably what brought back my memory."
"Avery said it could only come back if you went through a similar experience to the one that made you forget," Gerda argued, in a rising voice. "And that director of yours made love to you—"
"Gerda, your eternal preoccupation with all my seductions of other women is beginning to grow less and less funny," drawled a voice, and Gerda swung round. Robert was coming across the hall from the direction of his grandmother's suite of rooms and he looked rather haggard, as though he hadn't slept. "Good morning, Lygia," he said. "I've just been into see Gran again."
"How is she—a little better?"
"She's amazing." He smiled slightly and some of the strain went out of his face. "The nurse removed her ring, the big ruby, in case it should be a bit heavy for her. Gran is never without that ring, you know—it's always been a part of her, right from when we were kids—and she's just berated the woman with nearly all her old wonderful gumption—" Then he bit his lip and ran a hand over his rumpled hair. "I could do with a cup of coffee," he said, and he strode into the breakfast-room.
"Robert!" Gerda hurried after him. She went close to him and caught at his arms. "Look, I didn't really mean what I said! It's you—you drive me to it! You never really let me know what you want of me. I'm beautiful! Other men have found me so!"
"Gerda—for God's sake!" He shook off her hands. "I'm tired and I want a cup of coffee." He swung to the table and took up the coffee pot. Lygia was standing rather hesitant in the doorway and he lifted the pot, in a rather ironical manner, and invited her to come and join him in a cup. "Unless you prefer tea?" he added. She shook her head and came into the room and she saw him smile slightly as he applied himself to the coffee cups; she knew that he was thinking of the evening before when she had looked at the whisky in his hand in a rather disapproving manner.
She came to the table and sat down. Gerda had lit a cigarette and she was smoking it in a quick, nervous way.
"What are you doing, Robert," she suddenly demanded, "giving me the brush-off?"
Robert was lounging against the table now, stirring his coffee, and he looked up sharply at this.
"Well, don't you think it would be the polite thi
ng to do, to tell me I've been wasting my time all these weeks?" she asked.
"Perhaps." He stared moodily in front of him. "But I didn't think you ever wanted love from me, Gerda. And the other, sex for the mere sake of it, well, it hasn't much meaning, has it? You learn that as you get older. At least, I have."
"You're talking like a damn play," she retorted. She looked him up and down. "I think I know the truth about you now. The only time you warm up and come alive is when you're in front of the footlights. When they switch off, you switch off with them." She swung her cigarette to her mouth and her eyes had a hard, thwarted look. "Robert Chase—the great lover! It reads well on a playbill and you even look the part, but women don't really mean a thing to you, do they? They make a satisfactory audience and that's all."
"That's all, Gerda," he agreed. "I tried to tell you so, more than once, but you wouldn't listen."
"Does our little rep actress know all this?" Gerda threw out a hand towards Lygia.
"Well, I don't think she's been sitting at the table with her ears sealed up," Robert drawled, and when Lygia glanced up at him, he shrugged slightly, as if to say to her: 'I am what I am and there are no excuses that I can make'.
But she hadn't known that there had been little or nothing in Gerda's visits to the cottage and some of the bewilderment showed in her eyes and he frowned slightly. When she saw him do that, she looked away from him. She had already learned that he had an uncanny knack of reading her mind and she didn't want him to know about Gerda's insinuations—and that she had believed them. She had, she realized, grown sensitive about seeing him hurt and she felt it would hurt him, to know she had thought he'd use the cottage to carry on a love affair. His pride in the cottage, she remembered, had been curiously boyish. He seemed to regard even the coppice that surrounded it as his very own, where he picked the mushrooms he cooked himself, and where he probably smoked a cigarette under the elms on a clear night.
Then she saw the red flash of Gerda's fingernails as she flicked ash into a saucer. "I hope you meant it, Robert, when you called yourself a solitary man at heart," she said. "I hope you get lots of satisfaction out of your lonely nights. And I hope you don't wish yourself dead when the wind whispers down the chimney and rain taps at the windows and you've only a blank pillow beside you."
"I hope I don't as well, Gerda," he returned, and he walked across to the terrace-doors and watched dry leaves scud past along the stone pavement.
"What are you made of?" Gerda threw at him.
"Snips and snails and puppy-dogs' tails," he smiled, and Lygia watched his long fingers extract a cigarette from his case and tap the end of it. "Oh, I'm not completely without feelings, Gerda. We've laughed a little together and been convivial and I shan't forget it, but it might have been a different story if you had ever asked for my heart, but you just took it for granted that I hadn't got one. And I, I'm afraid, have grown weary and sated of quick, grabbed pleasures. I'd sooner be condemned to my lonely nights and only the wind to whisper in my ears."
He lit his cigarette and then he opened the long glass doors and stepped out upon the terrace. The wind lifted his black hair as he pushed his hands into his pockets and made for the stone steps. He ran down them in a decisive yet hurried way.
It was a strange, waiting sort of day, and in the end the house grew unbearable for Lygia and she grabbed a raincoat from the hall closet and went out to the garden. She talked to old Tanner for a while, but he was so subdued by Mrs. Chase's illness that she finally left him and wandered off to the winding fish-stream. The sky had grown a little grey, a little sad, and she sat on the bank above the stream and watched the fish darting about in leaf-scattered water.
How inexpressibly sad was the thought that no more would Mrs. Chase cross the little stone bridge to her herb garden; that no more would she stand where the lemon thyme grew, so that she might remember the son who had so loved pancakes as a boy. The son who had carelessly thrown away all her hopes in him when he had grown to a man.
She trailed her hand in the stream and a small orange-gold fish flickered through the water and bumped against her fingers in almost the manner of an investigative kitten. Then, a few minutes later, she walked back to the house.
Lunch, eaten at two o'clock, was an odd sort of meal. Robert had not returned from his walk and Gerda chose to eat in her room, so Lygia and Avery left the dining-room and drank their coffee by the big fire in the hall. Lygia sat on a settle with her legs curled under her, and there were pools of growing afternoon shadow scattered about the hall. The firelight flickered on the brass firedogs and spilled across the oak floor and Lygia gradually grew aware that she and Avery had dropped their constraint with one another.
"More coffee?" he asked, and when she shook her head, he came and sat on the settle beside her. "It's nice that you're back here, Lygia, even under these sad circumstances," he said.
She pleated a fold of her green dress, and the flickering firelight softened the thrust of her cheekbones and showed the new, compassionate fullness her mouth seemed to have. "Is your grandmother going to get well?" she asked.
He shook his head. "She's got about a week, no more. I haven't told Bob that there's so little time."
"I think he's guessed," Lygia said quietly. "I think, when you love someone very deeply, a little of them is inside you and when they begin to die, the part that is inside you begins to die as well."
"Lygia—little Lygia—how would you know this?" he murmured, and he touched her dark hair very gently and then drew his hand away.
"I knew when my father was going to die," she replied. "It's the loneliest feeling in the world and no one can help you. You have to be alone for a while— as Robert is alone today. You have to gather the strength to face your grief—and it's a kind of pilgrimage back over the past and into the land of memory."
"My dear girl!" He stared at her. "How grown up you're talking! I—hardly know you any more!"
"Oh, I'm no different." But she flushed as she spoke and looked away from him. He reached for her chin and turned her face back towards him. He examined it very carefully, then he said: "I was wrong, you're not little Lygia any more. You're suddenly a woman. The expression in your violet eyes is deeper. Your mouth is fuller. It's perfectly obvious that you're—"
"I beg your pardon, doctor," said a voice, "but Mrs. Chase is awake now. She's asking again to see the young lady."
It was the nurse, and Avery rose from the settle. "I'll just go in and see her," he said to Lygia. "Wait here for me."
Lygia watched Avery and the nurse go in under the shadowy archway that led to Mrs. Chase's rooms. Her heart had begun to beat very fast and the long moments of waiting seemed like hours. Then at last Avery stood in the archway, and she went to him. "All right, Lygia?" he asked, and she nodded and they entered the big, dim room with its strong smell of drugs.
"Nurse, you can leave us for a little while," Avery said, and as the woman slipped out of the room, Lygia knelt by Mrs. Chase's bed. The action had a young, unselfconscious homage about it, and a waiting quality that made Mrs. Chase smile a little. "Hullo, my child," she said. "I see that you're ready to listen to a tired old lady with patience."
"Yes."
"And you're so puzzled!" The tremulous left hand, weighted down with its big ruby, clung to Lygia's hand and there was a glimmer of the old strength of character and humour in the jetty eyes that were now so tired. "I've lived many years, my dear, and I've kept many secrets, but now I'm going to permit myself the luxury of revealing one."
"To me?" Lygia whispered.
Mrs. Chase nodded and chuckled a little, and then her eyes found Avery. He was standing at the foot of the bed and his blond face was slightly stern. "You're a good boy," she said to him. "You've all the better qualities of the Chases, but love is a strange passenger and it doesn't always alight in the steady, unswerving vehicles for the journey through life. And I—I made a mistake when I was young. I chose deliberately to be safe and secure and I let love f
lit away out of my life like a will-o'-the-wisp, and once that mysterious and true little light has vanished, all else is very artificial. So, though you may not think I am being very wise, Avery, in what I am about to do, will you bear with me?"
"Of course, Gran." But his face, now, was boyishly troubled and he glanced rather helplessly at Lygia. She didn't seem to be very aware of him, however. Her violet eyes were fixed upon his grandmother—and they were just a little afraid, he saw.
"Lygia," Mrs. Chase said, "did it puzzle you, I wonder, that I raised no objection when Robert came to me, last Friday morning, and told me he wished to have you in his new play with him? Did you wonder?"
"A little," Lygia admitted. "But he—he told me on the train that he had made you a promise he'd take care of me."
Mrs. Chase nodded. She was breathing heavily, but when Avery would have come round to her, she gestured to him to remain where he was. "What I— what I have to say won't take very much longer, Avery. But it must be said. I shan't be able to rest until it is said."
She wetted her dry lips and Lygia could feel the restlessness of her fingers.
"Yes," she went on, "he made me a promise and I knew he would keep it. You see, my child, when I asked him why he wished to take you to London with him, he replied that he couldn't see you go out into the world alone, to fend for yourself. When a man says that, he isn't so very bad and hard, is he? And when he says that, I think it means he is a man who loves."
The dry old fingers slackened their grip on Lygia's, loosened and fell to the eiderdown. "Avery is a good man, my dear, but he has his work—he has his work. It's his great love, his first love, but you are my Robert's only love."
Lygia's dark lashes slowly sank down over her eyes, as if to hide their expression in this moment of revelation, and she was very still, there on her knees beside the bed. The logs in the fireplace shifted a little and red sparks darted up the chimney. A clock ticked softly, somewhere in the room.
The Strange Waif Page 16
