Ladies of Lyndon

by Margaret Kennedy

  Gerald, in delicious security, took his ease under the roses. In a very few days he was hoping to be out of this demoralizing place and back at his work. Lyndon was altogether too full of ladies for his liking. He had shut women out of his life on the day that he learnt of Agatha’s desertion. He took no interest in them, and, except in his consulting room, saw as little of them as a religious in a monastery. His friends were men and he worked with men.

  This newly awakened preoccupation with his cousin was, therefore, wholly undesirable and must be shaken off. But he did not believe that it would trouble him long when once he had got away from her. His broken heart had been mended very quickly before; sooner indeed than he quite liked. His profession had absorbed him and he was able to see how disastrous marriage might have been. His particular field was, as yet, almost uncharted. He was one of the pioneers in a new branch of medical science. He possessed enough means to support himself if he did not marry, and he intended to devote his life to experimental research; to use to the full his peculiar opportunities.

  He had scarcely thought of Agatha since the first despairing weeks. They had not met until she had been married some two and a half years, for she lay ill at Lyndon when he returned from his sojourn in Paris. He had heard of the death of her baby with detached compassion. Soon afterwards he went to Austria and thence to Italy. Now he was returned to London, was working sixteen hours a day, and accomplishing a third as much as he could wish.

  He should not have allowed himself to be entrapped into this visit. But his relatives pestered him and he resented their intimations that he avoided Lyndon for a particular reason. All that was over and done with; he was immune. If a spark of the old feeling had been left he could never have criticized her so coolly. A man must be genuinely out of love who can condemn as he condemned. But he should have distrusted this inclination to protest too much. He now suffered for his over-confidence. He had discovered that she could still command his unreasoned pity. Criticism, as strong as ever, could not kill it. And his conviction that she was destined to pain was the more agonizing to him since he could not leave off condemning her.

  For his own sake he must immediately put an end to this state of things. He told himself that it would never do. That it was no concern of his whether she were happy or not. That hers was no isolated case and not to be compared with the pain and sorrow which he encountered daily among his patients. He must get the thought of her out of his head. And he smiled as he thought how he would lecture a patient who had thus lost his sense of proportion. But few physicians can heal themselves.

  The path where he walked ended in a low, brick wall enclosing part of the kitchen garden. Upon the other side of this wall he heard a voice which startled him into instant attention. A rather peculiar duologue was going on.

  ‘Really, Kell … you can’t manage it alone. I oughtn’t to let you.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right, my lady. It’s not heavy really. Only a bit awkward.’

  ‘It would be much better if I were to take the other end. Just wait a minute…. Oh, I’m sorry! Did it catch your elbow?’

  ‘Not at all, my lady.’

  ‘It’s just till I get used to the weight….’

  Staggering steps ensued, and then:

  ‘Surely it’s much too large! Couldn’t you find a smaller one?’

  ‘This was the one Mr Higgins gave me, my lady.’

  ‘He should have brought it himself. It’s too heavy for a woman. Wait till I call one of the men. Two men….’

  Gerald brushed aside the larkspurs in the border, stepped up to the wall, and looked over it. He saw Agatha and the pretty housemaid who had attended the Dante lecture; they were struggling with a large step-ladder. Both were very pink.

  ‘Where do you want it taken?’ he called.

  Agatha pointed to a brick building at the end of the enclosure. Swinging himself over the wall he picked up the ladder for them and set off between the raspberry canes and onion beds. Agatha, following, explained in a distressed voice:

  ‘It’s so silly. It’s to get some cherries for James. It seems that he has a passion for those little dark morello cherries against the potting-shed wall. They are rather hard to get, they grew so high, and are not very good when you’ve got them. At least, most people don’t care for them. But James likes them better than anything else. Of course, I ordered fruit and flowers to be sent up to him while he was in bed, but Kell tells me it hasn’t been done. She has asked twice for the cherries, but Higgins wouldn’t take the trouble. So today she went and got a ladder, intending to get them herself. I saw her dragging this heavy ladder along. You really shouldn’t, you know, Kell.’

  Kell smiled respectfully and helped Gerald to place the ladder against the potting-shed wall. She then produced a little basket which hung from her arm and looked doubtfully from it to the top of the ladder. She was evidently wondering which of the three should climb up and fill it.

  ‘We will get the cherries and take them up to Mr James,’ said Agatha. ‘You must be very busy at this time of the morning. It was most kind of you to take all this trouble.’

  The housemaid murmured a word of thanks and departed, walking sedately up the box-edged path.

  Gerald climbed the ladder and began to fill the basket, glancing down from time to time at his cousin as she sat in the sun upon an upturned rhubarb pot. He picked the cherries very slowly, prolonging as far as possible this moment of satisfaction and contentment. He had become aware that it was better to suffer in her company than to be tranquil in her absence. She appeared to him perfect. Nothing she said or did could make the slightest difference to his feeling for her. He could find no fault, and her words and thoughts were beyond reproof simply because they were hers. He had been overtaken unawares by that over-powering need of one individual for another which defies reason and shapes our ends. This final stage of his subjugation had been so sudden and so surprising that he almost fell off the ladder.

  At last the basket was full and he descended to her side. Together they strolled away through the vegetables. She was pensive, reflecting upon the strangeness of a lover. She knew him to be that and was just a little triumphant at having won him again. But she could not tell what she had done to bring him back. She asked him to come with her on a charitable visit to James, and they mounted to the sick-room.

  James’s bedroom gave no clue to his tastes. The furniture was that which Marian had provided when he had been promoted from the night nursery to a room of his own. Only the bed had been changed in deference to his added inches. There were no memorials of the past, no photographs of school groups, no relics of obsolete, boyish collections, nothing that could throw light on the essential James. His hair-brushes and a couple of ties lay forlornly upon the dressing-table, while on the mantelpiece was a china money-box in the shape of a bathing machine which had been there since his eighth birthday. Pictures had formed part of Marian’s scheme: The Boyhood of Raleigh, Nelson in the Cockpit of the ‘Victory’, and When did you last see your Father? had hung on the walls for seventeen years. To remove them now would have revealed large, brilliant squares on the trellised paper. The whole room was suggestive of a little boy recently deported to a preparatory school with all his more intimate possessions. James, sitting upright in bed and badly needing a shave, did not seem to belong to it at all.

  Gerald, used as he was to the study of abnormal mentalities, was struck anew by the baffling qualities of this one. He divined a degree of contra-suggestibility beyond any he had previously encountered. It was impossible to make any impression upon James. He lived in a strange world of his own, developing character, as it were, in spite of his surroundings. Agatha put the basket of cherries on his bed and asked him how he did.

  ‘I had thought,’ he said very seriously, ‘that I must be extremely ill. But Dr Crosbie tells me that this kind of injury, though always painful, is seldom serious.’

  ‘I sent up flowers,’ she said, glancing round the room with dissatisf
action. ‘Didn’t they come?’

  ‘Dolly took them. We don’t think flowers are healthy in a bedroom.’

  ‘Not healthy? How funny of you, James! What makes you think so?’

  ‘Well, Dolly has a married friend at Brixton who was a trained nurse. And she told Dolly that flowers in bedrooms give people cancer.’

  ‘Kell seems to look after you very nicely,’ said Agatha, trying to hide her amusement. ‘Did she give you these to read?’

  There was a pile of literature on James’s bed, including several numbers of Home Chat and a Sunday School prize called Leonard’s Temptation. James nodded but explained that the Bible was, in Dolly’s opinion, the best reading for an invalid. She had lent him hers, which had pictures in it, and a large number of pressed flowers and memorial cards of which he apparently knew the several histories.

  It was always difficult to talk to James, even if he was, as now, in an expansive mood. His visitors were glad when Lois and Hubert appeared, inspired also to visit the sick. Under the pretext that the room must be crowded the cousins made off.

  Agatha said, outside the door:

  ‘Everyone seems to visit James in couples. I wonder if Cynthia and Sir Thomas have been yet.’

  ‘That girl … Kell … is very good to him.’

  ‘Isn’t she? I don’t know what he would do without her. Of course, she isn’t cut out for a housemaid really. She oughtn’t to be in service. She’s too rough and countrified ever to soar beyond being an under-servant; she doesn’t adapt herself like most of them do. She has too much in her. She ought to be a farmer’s wife or something like that. She’d run things splendidly if she were in a position of responsibility.’

  Lois and Hubert found that conversation flagged. They were oppressed by the memory of the studio window. The accident which had led to James’s illness was always with them and it tied their tongues. Lois had by now quite convinced herself that it was disappointed love which had caused him to throw her out of the window, and she was inclined to be very forgiving in consequence. But Hubert was not softened; he regarded the fellow as a homicidal lunatic. James was taciturn and made no attempt to help them out. At last they abandoned the effort of talking to him and diverted themselves by laughing at the pictures in Dolly’s Bible. It is to be hoped that they did not know it was hers, for they continued their merriment when she brought in James’s lunch.

  ‘Who is this party contemplating a sort of astral butcher’s shop?’ demanded Hubert.

  ‘Oh, that’s Peter on Cornelius’s roof. It’s in Acts.’

  ‘I never read Acts. It’s got shipwrecks and all sorts of excitements in it, hasn’t it?’

  The luncheon tray reminded them of their own need for food and they departed. Dolly, her cheeks deeply flushed, gathered up the markers and pressed flowers, which had been scattered over the bed, and replaced them in the despised Book. James regarded her with sorrow and comprehension.

  ‘Dolly,’ he said gently, ‘I’m ever so sorry they laughed at your things. I couldn’t stop them.’

  ‘Miss Lois ought to know better,’ said Dolly. ‘She’s had enough education, I should think, to know it’s wrong to make a mock of sacred things.’

  ‘He did it first.’

  ‘More shame to him!’ she cried hotly. ‘And then he comes and sets himself up to teach us! Education! If education makes people talk like ignorant heathen, I’m glad I haven’t got any.’

  ‘Don’t think about them,’ he urged.

  ‘People like that call themselves ladies and gentlemen! I wonder they have the face! When they talk so bad that poor people are ashamed to hear them. Don’t you never want to teach them manners, James? I do.’

  She bit her lip, realizing that she had called him by his name.

  ‘They get taught sometimes,’ said James, grinning reminiscently. ‘Do you know how Lois fell out of the window?’

  ‘No. How?’

  ‘I put her out.’

  ‘You never didn’t! What for?’

  ‘Bad manners.’

  ‘My stars!’ Dolly gasped. ‘You shouldn’t ought.’

  ‘I know. I was very much frightened. I thought I’d killed her. But it’s done her no harm.’

  ‘It hasn’t done her no good neither, seemingly.’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘But you was really very wrong to do it. You have got a nerve! Whatever will you do next?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  He grew morose again.

  ‘What do you live here for?’ she asked suddenly. ‘I wouldn’t. Not when they treat you like they do. Haven’t you got any money of your own?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve got about four hundred pounds a year.’

  ‘What? As much as that? Why, it’s nearly eight pounds a week!’

  ‘Do you think that much or little?’

  ‘Depends on how you look at it. At my home we think a man gets good wages if he gets three pounds a week. Why! Lots of men marry on two pounds.’

  ‘Marry?’ said James. ‘Marry?’

  ‘Have you finished your soup?’

  She bent over him to take the bowl but with his free arm he caught her and forced her to sit on the bed beside him.

  ‘Marry!’ he exclaimed again. ‘I was a fool not to think of it! Look here, Dolly! I can marry you, can’t I?’

  ‘Don’t talk silly….’

  ‘It’s not silly. Couldn’t we be married and have a house of our own? Would you like it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t we? Don’t you think we’d be very happy?’

  She perceived the gravity of his intention and began to reflect.

  ‘I used to think I’d never marry anyone,’ she said at last, indecisively. ‘But you’re different somehow. I don’t believe you’d annoy me the way other men would.’

  ‘Of course I wouldn’t. I don’t annoy you now, do I? Well, why should I then?’

  ‘That’s right. That’s where it is. And then I believe you’d let me have my way about the house and everything. I like managing things.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you can do what you like in the house as long as you don’t get telling me how to paint.’

  ‘Tell you how to paint! Me? Not much! I can’t even draw. But listen while I explain. Will you come to chapel with me Sundays? That’s my trouble. I never felt I could marry a religious man, because my stepfather was religious. And the way he went on … well, it made you hate the name of God sometimes, if you know what I mean. But then, I couldn’t marry an unbeliever, because I’m religious myself, somehow, in spite of my stepfather. Divine worship I like; it’s only religious people I can’t bear. If you’ll come to chapel Sundays and hold your tongue about it other times, and not always be asking blessings, it will just suit me.’

  ‘Me too,’ said James. ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘I never thought I could fancy a husband,’ she observed. ‘But there’s something about you, James … well … I don’t know! So gentle as you are generally and then throwing anybody out of the window!’ She laughed. ‘It seems like I’ve got to keep you out of mischief.’

  ‘We’ll be married at once,’ he said, revolving the great idea in his mind.

  ‘We might as well,’ she agreed.

  There was a pause while the betrothed pair stared at each other. Dolly began to wonder whether she would have to prompt him, so slow was he in arriving at a clear conception of his own needs. But at last he drew her towards him and began to kiss her fresh cheek, tentatively, and with an embarrassment which seemed to her pitiful. She realized that these were probably the first caresses ever offered by him to any human being since the departure of her aunt from Lyndon. This was not the diffidence of an inept lover but a symbol of the complete isolation in which he had lived.

  The knowledge filled her with a passionate tenderness, and, half sobbing, she flung a protecting arm round him as though to shield him from a world which had been too unkind.

  3.

  ‘I can’
t quite understand what is going on in the shrubbery,’ said Agatha, sitting up and shading her eyes. ‘First of all I saw Lady Clewer and Mr Ervine walking up and down on the terrace. Then, with a determined air, they went into the shrubbery, just as if they had lost something and were going to look for it. Then she came out without him and went into the house. Then she reappeared with Lois and marched her into the shrubbery. Now I see her coming out again alone. She has presumably left them inside together.’

  ‘Rather unusual on her part, isn’t it?’ said Gerald.

  ‘Very. That’s why I’m puzzled. What can be the meaning of it?’

  ‘Well, she’s coming to tell us.’

  Marian was advancing across the lawn towards the cedar tree, her face aglow with smiles. Though she was at least a hundred yards from the shrubbery she had the air of one who walks on tip-toe. She joined them.

  ‘I hope you won’t mind my giving you a hint,’ she began, ‘but I wouldn’t go into the shrubbery just now if I were you.’

  ‘Not if you’d rather we didn’t,’ said Agatha, feeling that no power on earth should induce her to ask why not.

  ‘Of course, I don’t know,’ pursued the joyful mother, ‘if anything will come of it. But Mr Ervine is having a little talk with Lois. A very important little talk.’

  ‘So we saw.’

  ‘Oh, did you guess? How quick of you, dear! Between ourselves I have a very shrewd suspicion of what her feelings are. And nothing could please me more. He is such a nice fellow! And he has been so straightforward about it all, speaking to me before he ever said a word to her. I just had to give him the opportunity.’