§ 1
CHARLES PLETHERN mixed his drink and, full length in a deck chair,
allowed the velvet brilliance of the June afternoon to stroke with its
soft fingers his pleasurable fatigue. Corinne, his niece, curled on the
grass beside him.
“Good game, Rinka,” said Charles contentedly.
She nodded.
“I hate those corner-drives of Captain Welwyn’s.”
“You’ll get into them. Welwyn is no good really--are you, Jim?”
Their late opponent smiled across the shady space from his seat near
the garden table.
“Am I what?... At tennis? Quite good enough for you, old man. You can
thank Miss Corinne for saving your bacon.”
His wife drifted into sight.
“Jim, I’m going for a walk. Come on.”
With a shrug of delighted resignation Jim Welwyn struggled to his feet
and, his arm in hers, strolled towards the park.
“There you are, Rinka,” said Charles. “That’s marriage. Long drink and
comfy chair. Enter Venus, exit repose.”
The young girl looked at him naughtily.
“That is why, I suppose, ...”
She paused and Charles cocked his delicate, sarcastic eyebrows in mock
interrogation.
“Why I never married----?”
“Never--_actually_--Uncle Charles,” she replied demurely.
He laughed delightedly.
“Upon my soul!”
A comfortable lady of middle age, dressed in the flowing manner of
pseudo-homeliness affected by the garden-loving aristocracy, walked
toward them from the house. Charles raised his voice as she approached.
“You will be shocked to know, Belinda, that this shameless child is
lecturing me about my morals.”
Lady Grieve beamed lazily.
“Out of the mouths of babes, Charles. I dare not hope she has made an
impression. You waste your trouble, child.”
Corinne giggled, and the point of her pretty foot polished the
burnt grass of the lawn. She was at an age when young womanhood and
childishness alternate with bewildering rapidity. It was the sudden
turn of immaturity and power for silence failed her.
“He _is_ silly! I only said--you see, he said....”
She stopped. The attention of her hearers had wandered. Baffled, she
asked herself why these elder people were for ever wearying of this
topic or of that. Nursing youth’s perpetual grievance against the
volatile mentality of age, she sank into embarrassed silence. Meantime,
the others had passed to different topics.
“She is nearly due?”
Charles glanced at the watch on his wrist and nodded.
“You know what I think of your leaving her to arrive all alone. It’s
brutal, Charles.”
“Not really, Belinda. I hope not, at any rate. I want to size her up
when she is at a disadvantage.”
“Exactly. Refined cruelty. Oh, you can grin, you wretch! Here comes
your mother. What does she think?”
Mrs. Plethern moved heavily from the doorway of her tower. In her hands
were playing cards. She spoke with an abstracted monotony of intonation.
“I have come out to join the audience, dears. Just a little game while
I wait. Corinne, my precious, get me my little table.”
Charles sprang to his feet and prepared her a chair and table. She
gave him a slanting look of leaden tenderness, mumbling something as
she touched his fingers with her large, white hand. Placidly she began
setting out her cards.
“The dear girl should soon be here, yes?”
Lady Grieve returned to her earlier theme.
“I am calling Charles over the coals for not meeting her, at least in
London.”
Mrs. Plethern smiled absently.
“You may call and call, Belinda. Charles goes his way and no one
else’s.”
There was an impatient note in Charles’ voice as he changed the subject.
“You are going to Lords, Belinda?”
“I suppose so. Inevitably, I have to be in town. Algy pretends he has
to attend a conference. July--or virtually so--and a conference! They
invent them, so that they can get their wretched relatives to Lords!
Daniel of course refuses to be seen there and Algy gets so cross with
him--so I _have_ to go to comfort the poor lamb. You will be
there, of course, and Corinne? To see Christopher get his hundred?”
“We’re going, aren’t we, Rinka?”
“_Rather!_ And Miss Marvell.”
“Supposing she won’t, my child. Supposing she insists on your uncle
staying here and starting a beaver farm or planting maple sugar.... You
never know, with these Wild West heroines.”
Charles laughed.
“Cheer up, Rinka. Mother shall take you, if I can’t.”
Mrs. Plethern looked over her glasses at her eldest son. She still held
some cards in her hand and these, all the time she was speaking, she
shuffled softly and stealthily.
“I go to Lords? Dear boy, how you talk! You know I never leave
home--except,” she added, noting a gleam of irony in Charles’ indolent
eye, “when I have to. For my health, you know.”
And she returned, oppressively, to silence and Miss Milligan. Almost at
the same time the far sound of wheels floated along the hot quietude of
the summer garden.
“There she is! Now we’ll see. Watch her first reaction. It’s a
wonderful experiment!”
Lady Grieve looked at Charles with interest. He was clearly excited.
Probably his refusal to meet his ward had been due largely to shyness
and to a dread of what he might find. It was natural enough that he
should be excited. A hazardous legacy she might turn out to be. Or a
grotesque one. The good woman’s pleasant face puckered with suppressed
amusement at the thought of Charles Plethern saddled for good and
all with a girl rube from the Canadian backwoods! Poor man, what
_would_ he do with her? The wheels were near now. In another
moment the carriage would stop at the front door the stranger would
alight, cross the hall, be conducted to the long windows of the
drawing-room, step over the lintel to the terrace----. Irresistibly
Lady Grieve’s eyes were drawn toward the house; mysteriously fell
silence and immobility upon the waiting group. It seemed the next
instant that a figure slipped through the half-opened window, and that
Charles Plethern, rising quickly to his feet, hurried across the grass
to greet his ward.
Viola never forgot that first sight of her new home and of her new
friends. Of the house as she passed through it, she noticed little.
It seemed that her every power of registering impressions hung back
for the moment of her emergence, through the open window of the
drawing-room, on to the flagstones of the terrace. Then indeed she
absorbed, in one gluttonous and accurate second, the panorama that was,
in epitome, the panorama of her future. She saw a broad strip of paved
terrace, edged by a balustrade broken in the centre to allow shallow
steps to lead to the lower level of the lawn; she saw the closely
cropped grass, brown and sun-dried, sweep away towards a group of great
cedars; between two of these she saw a tennis court, vividly squared
with white, and, beyond it, the glow and pallor of piled roses. To
the right of the rose garden she saw more lawn, starred erratically
and ornately with flower-beds. To the right again she saw a stretch
of park-land and the beginnings of an avenue, the first trees of a
dual row of beeches, between which long grass grew to luxuriance. On
the other side, to the left of the tennis-court and clear of all but
the lower fingers of the nearest of the clustered cedars, she saw a
huge, white tower, that rose into the blue sky, with walls irregularly
pierced with windows and at its summit a cone-shaped bulb of light,
metallic green. Between the tower and the house that ran at her back
she saw more garden, a long wall with delphiniums intensely blue
against its greyness; beyond the wall and over it the upper boughs of
fruit trees. And last and most of all she saw, in the shade of the
cedars, not fifty yards from the spot on which she stood, figures
seated. She saw a lady lying back in a long chair wearing a broad hat,
round which a scarf, faintly coloured, was loosely knotted. She saw,
seated at a small table and seemingly intent on a game of cards, a
large figure in black silk with pale hair under a widow’s cap. She saw,
in a strained attitude of eager nonchalance, a young girl crouching on
a stool. And she saw, with a start that rallied all her faculties from
their exhaustive tour of vision, a lean, dark man in white flannels who
had crossed the lawn and was now almost at the terrace steps.
“My dear Viola,” Charles Plethern said, taking her hands in his, “I
am very glad to see you. I hope you will be happy here. Come and be
presented, and then you shall see your room. Tea will be ready very
soon.”
As they crossed the lawn side by side, the three watchers passed
their first private judgments on the newcomer. When she saw the quiet
elegance of Viola, her pale, proud face, the glint of gold hair under
her simple hat, Corinne Plethern felt a throb of joyous excitement in
her young, impressionable heart. “How lovely she is!” she thought, “and
what fun we shall have together! I must show her London and Chris and
buy clothes with her and go to dances. Oh, I am so glad she is like
this and not horrible!” Lady Grieve, in her kindly wisdom, gave Viola
every credit for beauty and manner, but wondered a little uneasily
what the county would think of Charles Plethern and his new charge.
Even a niece, she said to herself, were explicable. But this exquisite
thing from out of the blue--and Charles the creature he is known to
be----! As for old Mrs. Plethern, what were the thoughts that stirred
sluggishly in her ageing but tenacious brain? They defy expression,
so secret were they, so unexpressed even to herself, so darkly vague
and yet so definite. One glance sufficed. Charles was crossing the
lawn with a young woman. The young woman was more than presentable
and Charles, by a trick of fate, was her guardian. Guardian...! With
purposeful inconsequence her mind shifted heavily toward her absent
nephew.
And Charles?
And Viola herself?
The moment of meeting had for them both only suspended significance.
The latter, dimly aware that she was nearer misery than ever before
in her brief and troubled life, fought down the implications of the
visual facts around her. Her eyes took in this unknown England, but
for the moment she emptied her mind of all that it might mean to her.
Charles knew his ward for a beautiful girl and that, in nine cases,
would have sufficed him. But on this tenth occasion he was conscious
of a check to the warm excitement implicit in the situation. Perhaps
the pale spirituality of her profile--with its straight, delicate
nose, long chin, her lips so cleanly cut, so wistful with their hint
of petulance--threw him back upon the circumstance of her coming.
Perhaps also the timid pride of her isolation--she had drifted like a
forlorn, golden leaf on to the terrace of his house--prompted romance
to fight and vanquish dalliance. He paced by her side at once downcast
and exultant, while his head sang with the meaningless music of a
half-comprehended chivalry.
§ 2
Because she could not at that time recognize their inevitability,
Viola came near to hysterical weariness of the conversations that, in
relentless series, occupied her first evening at Morvane. Physical
fatigue, to the point of enduring a guardian’s natural curiosity, she
had come prepared to conquer. When, however, she found herself also a
target for the investigation of two elderly women and a young girl,
she was hard put to it to maintain even a semblance of self-control.
Nevertheless, that every one of her four protagonists should force upon
her so immediately their friendly but inquisitive confidence distressed
more than it surprised her; for of the aloof indifference of the
English she had no experience, imagining them merely to be idler, less
emphatic versions of their Canadian cousins.
Mrs. Plethern secured first turn. After Viola had seen her room,
confided her keys to a maid, and repaired the damage done to her
appearance by the journey, she descended as bidden to the garden and
found tea laid out by the cedars. The meal passed in the customary
scuffle of small talk, second-cups, and minor accidents. More hot water
must be fetched. The cigarettes had been brought out, but no matches.
Both Charles and Captain Welwyn were coatless, and their coats, loaded
to embarrassment with matches, hung on the wire netting far across the
tennis court. Corinne ran such errands as these and others incidental
to meals out of doors, with easy good nature and much physical grace.
Viola felt conscious of her own slowness of movement. This girl was
lithe as a young leopard. She seemed rather to ripple from place to
place than to walk or run. How slightly built she was and yet with
what suggestion of supple strength! Perhaps the Pletherns were all
like that. Certainly, as she now recalled it, her first impression of
Charles had been one of slightness and rhythm of movement.
Tea finished, more tennis was proposed.
“You won’t mind?” asked Charles of his ward. “Mother will entertain
you if you care to watch, or Belinda will take you round and show you
everything, or, if you prefer, you can have nothing to do with either
of them.”
“Come and talk to me for a little, my dear,” said old Mrs. Plethern.
“They prefer to overheat themselves running about in the sun, and I
suppose they are welcome. I’m an old woman and know better. So you have
come all the way from Canada to live here with us? Very curious. Very
curious indeed. Are you glad to come?”
“Why, of course I am glad,” said Viola. “I was quite alone, you see,
when father died.”
She spoke very quietly and steadily, but the old lady heard a whisper
of tears in the last word.
“Poor child,” she mumbled. “All alone. Do not talk about your father,
if it is painful to you, but tell me about your home and whether it was
at all like this. I shall go on playing my game and shall hear every
word you say. I love cards. You shall come and see my collection. Some
beautiful packs. Catalogues, you know--I order them--I so seldom go
away from home now. You will be such nice company for me. Charles is
often away. Nicer company for me than I can be for you. But we will ask
Corinne and her brother and their father and mother and all be happy
together.”
How far Mrs. Plethern rambled on for reasons of tact, or how far she
was concerned to create a bewilderment in her hearer’s mind, may
hardly be judged. Ever and again she would throw from under her pale
lashes a sidelong glance at the girl beside her, noting how Viola sat
motionless, her hands crossed on her lap, her eyes fixed upon the
tennis lawn. That she was unconscious of the tennis Mrs. Plethern
well knew. Of what was she thinking? The aged sleuth padded off along
another scent.
“How long is it since you knew Charles was to be your guardian?” she
went on. “Always, perhaps? Your father and he were great friends, were
they not? And then, your mother died so long ago, of course...?”
A tiny frown showed itself for a moment between the girl’s eyes and
vanished. Suddenly she felt on her guard and, having of necessity
formed habits of reserve, told herself that silence, or as near silence
as might be, was at present her best weapon of defence. Accordingly of
the four questions asked or implied she answered only one.
“I knew nothing of it until on his death-bed my father told me he had
asked Mr. Plethern to look after me and that he surely would.”
“But, my dear, was it not rather terrible to be fetched over to England
by some one you had never seen?”
“It does not seem very terrible now,” said Viola, smiling.
The old eyelids drooped over the cards. The girl was not a fool. So
much was evident. All the worse, or all the better? Mrs. Plethern tried
again.
“I hope you will not find this very dull after city life. Charles, as
I said, is away months at a time. And then we are quiet, very quiet. I
think we must find some nice woman to come and live here. I am almost
useless, you see. So old. And I live in my tower, and often during the
bad weather hardly go out at all. That will be dull for you, all alone
in the house.”
“I shall not be dull while the country is unexplored and while I have a
horse to ride.”
“That is what I like to hear!” replied Mrs. Plethern. “Young women in
this country nowadays do not seem happy unless they are out of it. When
I was a girl we had our horses and our archery and occasionally a ball,
and we were content with England. You are fond of dancing?”
Viola nodded.
“Corinne’s brother dances a great deal in London. You will go and stay
with them, I have no doubt, and they will take you about. They are very
gay. My son James is so well known in London. He has always worked very
hard, and I think men ought to work.”
During the silence that followed this remark, for Viola once more
scented danger in comment, Lady Grieve drifted into sight round the
low-spreading branches of the cedar. She carried a flat gardenbasket
and a pair of scissors.
“Would you care to stroll round and see the garden?” she asked kindly.
“I must cut off the deads. Gardeners hate doing it; but then, of
course, they know nothing about gardening.”
Together they moved to a tour of inspection. Lady Grieve chattered
easily of flowers and fruit and the mistaken effort of insect-creation.
The incidents of her new home passed before Viola like a quietly
ordered dream. To the voice of this gracious, unobtrusive beauty her
Englishry stirred to consciousness. She wandered along grass paths,
between borders blazing with English colour; she crouched by the
rock garden and listened to her companion speaking disjointedly of
this Alpine or of that; she watched fish darting among the weeds of
the great shallow fish-pond. As from the end of the beech avenue she
let her eyes follow the roadway of untidy grass between broad, sleek
tree-trunks to where, on the horizon, the long, rhythmic lines of the
lonely grille stood proudly against the sky, she felt tugging at her
heart a strange longing for England.
It was a moment of sudden, dizzying emotion.
“Is it really true?” she asked, and hardly realized she spoke.
“True, my dear? Is what true?”
Lady Grieve’s words came softly, as those of a dream-question.
“This lovely place, this old, old serenity. If you knew the rawness of
it over there! And then this--this--peace. It is like velvet to touch,
or cream to turn in the mouth. Am I really to live on here?”
Lady Grieve put her arm round the girl’s shoulder and drew her close.
She said nothing, and Viola was grateful for silence. The mood of
self-forgetfulness was passing; already a dim sense of shame at her
own eloquence was creeping over her. Under the cover of this silence
and in the shelter of the soft, encircling arm, she won her way back
to self-command. They walked towards the cedars slowly, their feet
noiseless on the dry-cropped grass. At last Lady Grieve spoke:
“Viola, dear, I am a very old friend of Charles Plethern and I know him
and those near to him more intimately than most. You have a difficult
time ahead, but in your dealing with him, if you will be just yourself
and nothing more nor less, you will find everything will go right.
Charles is a gentleman. Never forget that. And do not believe quite all
you hear about him. For the rest, if ever you want advice or help or
a change of scene--send me a telegram and come to Lavenham. You will
always be more than welcome. Now give me a kiss and we will go and see
what the others are doing.”
Viola murmured some words of thanks. “You have made me so much
happier,” she said finally. “I shall try not to make a fool of myself.”
“Don’t be too much afraid of folly, my dear,” rejoined the old lady;
“it is often a girl’s key to knowledge. So long as you keep true to
your own natural standards you’ll be as right as a trivet, whatever
other people may say. Here are the tennis players, and it’s after seven
o’clock.”
Viola found herself drawn away toward the house between Corinne and
Sylvia Welwyn. Charles stood with Lady Grieve looking after them.
“Well?” he said.
“She’s a very nice girl indeed, Charles. You are a lucky man. If only
you behave sensibly....”
He laughed.
“Already I am serious with the cares of family. I must do the paternal
after dinner, I suppose!” He stretched and sighed. “And, by the way,
Belinda, will you mind calling it ‘supper’ and not changing over much?
You see, I don’t know the limits of the child’s wardrobe. Welwyn and I
are coming in flannels, if you’ll forgive us.”
She smiled at him affectionately and they moved away side by side.
§ 3
In his dressing-room Charles for the first time forecasted the possible
influence on his own life of Viola and her dependence. Hitherto and
of set purpose he had avoided such reflection. Responsibility had
come to him by post, and by cable he had shouldered it. The duties,
the advantages, the difficulties implicit in his new trust depended
on more than one imponderable. Primarily they depended on the kind of
girl his ward should turn out to be, a point as to which he had not,
prior to seeing her, been free from foreboding. These colonial girls
were sometimes a little odd.... Viola had come and his fears were
proved groundless. At least she was not odd--not in that sense, at all
events; unusual she was, as is all beauty, but in appearance wholly
of the world to which he was accustomed. So far so good, although
he began now to realize dimly that her very beauty created fresh
complications. She would find admirers, young men who would infest his
house for love of his ward, and regard him, no longer as an experienced
and congenial companion, but as a parent. He disliked the idea; it
thrust him definitely into a generation whose comradeship he had never
frankly cultivated. It seemed hard that, without any of the preliminary
adventure and triumph usual to paternity, he should thus suddenly enter
upon its august but limited activity. For a moment he determined to
flout duty and to continue along his own gay and heedless path. The
girl should be housed and fed and provided for; it were unreasonable to
look to him for the assiduity of personal care. But the next instant
the point of his selfishness jarred against the vein of scruple that
ran through the rock foundation of his hedonism. Marvell was gone,
and had died confident in a promise from Charles Plethern. Literal
indeed should be the interpretation of promises to the dead. Until one
should appear who was entitled to take his place, he, Charles Plethern,
must perform a guardian’s task. Until one should appear----For an
instant there flashed into his mind another and different aspect of
his new-found dignity. Was it possible that his was now the power of
parenthood with few, if any, of its disabilities? In this inspired
moment he came to a half-realization of the potentialities of a
daughter in the sport of fortune-building. The echoing impatience of
the dinner-drum shattered his reverie. He thrust the problem into a
mental pigeon-hole and went downstairs.
The meal over, he closed the door after the departing women and
strolled to the mantelpiece, his hands in the pockets of his jacket.
“Port, Charles?” queried Welwyn.
“Help yourself.” There was a pause. “Good Lord, Jim, I’m all over the
shop about this girl! Not my line, you know, the heavy father!” He
laughed self-consciously.
Jim Welwyn smiled under his moustache. The day before he would have
replied that it was indeed hard to cast Charles Plethern for the rôle
of parent vis-à-vis a pretty girl. But yesterday was not to-day. Old
Charles was worried and serious. Better to give badinage a bye.
“She seems a jolly nice sort of girl,” he said lamely. “Bit quiet and
all that. Strange house, you know. She’ll perk up in time. You see if
she doesn’t.”
“Dear old ass!” laughed his host.
They sipped their port in silence. Charles walked to the window and
stared out into the fading light. The garden looked differently to his
different vision. He felt a something of home in its trees and crowded
flower-beds, in the stretches of lawn on which already the mists were
softly settling. A window shone brightly in his mother’s tower. He
would discuss plans with his mother on the morrow. As he formed the
resolution, there came to his mind her reception of the first news of
Viola. ‘I’ve had a girl left me,’ he had said suddenly, the day after
his cable summoning Viola to England had gone its way. ‘A girl left
you, my son? I do not understand.’ He had explained, laconically.
For a moment she had studied him with her pale, old eyes. Then ‘What
is she like?’ she had asked. ‘I have no idea in the world!’ ‘But you
will not have her here? You will send her money, so that she can live
on in Canada?’ ‘Why not here, mother?’ ‘Think of your own life, my
son; you will not like to be tied to this quiet place. The girl may be
impossible!’ ‘She may. That is why I want to have a look at her.’ Then
he had told of his cabled instruction. The old lady had said nothing.
She had sat with drooped lids, fingering the cards that strewed her
table. At last she had bidden him good night and he had left her.
At the time, her lack of interest, her avoidance of all cordiality or
promise of help, had not struck him. He was accustomed to go his way,
recking nothing of his mother’s advice or disapproval. Now, however,
that he was faced with the actual task of caring for this young and
lovely woman, he reverted naturally to his mother’s unhelpful silences.
She, normally, would assume responsibility for Viola; on her, in the
ordinary course, would devolve the duty and privilege of mothering this
orphan girl. Somehow such assumption of responsibility, such mothering,
were hard to count upon. For the first time in his life Charles sought
to read the riddle of his mother’s calm. If he failed, the failure were
likely due as much to his rival preoccupations as to the density of the
enigma. Let it be remembered in his defence that the problem was to him
a new one, and that persons of indolent good nature, however complete
the armour of their cynicism, are not of a suspicious habit. They go
their own way and give to others opportunity to do the same. Charles
Plethern, therefore, dwelt only for a moment on the mystery of his
mother’s reaction to Viola. Then, with conscious effort, he prepared
himself for the serious business of the evening.
§ 4
The library at Morvane was a long room on the first floor, windowed at
each end, with views to west and east. On the rare occasions of his
residence, and those, still rarer, of his doing business in the house,
Charles used the library for a study. A desk was there, immense,
mahogany, with drawers to front and back. Wilkinson would sit at ease,
enjoying his employer’s excellent cigars, and present none too tersely
his report on property and income. Charles, little enough at home in
his round-backed office chair, would lean over the desk, scribbling
figures idly on paper, as he listened for the few salient facts in an
exposé that appeared to bore him. Wilkinson was a good man of business
and an honest one; in return for his work he might look for a patient
hearing. So the master of Morvane, careful as ever to cloak beneath
casual indifference his very accurate intelligence, let the agent talk,
while he himself noted, as though without method, the points upon which
his livelihood depended.
To this room, and with a nervousness that was new to him, Charles
conducted Viola on her first evening in his house. She was very tired,
but had not known how to evade an interview when, in the drawing-room,
he had with evident diffidence asked her to give him twenty minutes for
a quiet talk. He, quickly perceptive, recognized her fatigue and was
glad to let consideration shorten his own ordeal.
“I suppose,” he began, “that I ought to leave you alone to-night. You
must be fagged out. But I want for my own guidance to know one or two
facts and I think you may sleep the happier if you have a chance of
seeing what kind of a fellow it is to whom you have been bequeathed.”
Viola smiled slightly in tribute to his pleasantry. She said nothing.
“You know how it was that your father thought of me?”
She shook her head. Charles felt embarrassed. He could hardly present
truthfully the tale of his friendship with Marvell without rousing in
the girl’s mind surprise at the tenuity of bond that connected this
man with her dead father. Such surprise might suggest to her that she
was unwelcome, an irritating imposition of a distant past on a present
with its own cares and its own responsibilities. He took refuge in
misleading generality.
“Well, I knew him very well and he did me one very great service and
many lesser ones. He was a much cleverer man than I, but he had not my
good fortune--I mean, that in material things he was--well----”
“Father was poor and you are not,” said Viola quietly.
Charles accepted this summary rescue from the pitfalls of
self-expression, giving no sign either of amusement or surprise.
“Exactly. To whom more naturally than to me should he look for help.
You were an orphan----”
Viola shook her head. In genuine astonishment Charles looked at her.
“But he said so----” he began.
“Said so? When?”
“In his letter--the letter you sent me.”
“I did not know,” she said simply. “I do not know what the letter said.
But I can believe he spoke of me as orphaned. It was a great sorrow and
he would always treat of her as dead. Of course she may be now. I do
not know. But--you see, my mother left him.”
“I am very sorry. I had no idea. Can you--perhaps I ought to know----If
you felt able to tell me----”
He paused. She sat motionless, then raised her wide blue eyes to his.
“I don’t believe you had seen father or heard of him or known anything
of him for years,” she said slowly.
Poor Charles quailed before those grave, accusing eyes. The feeling of
unwelcome that he had lied to allay had come to her in his despite. Or
perhaps she suspected him. Then an anger seized him against the dead
man who had placed him in this undignified position. She drooped her
head into her hands and the next instant her pitiful loneliness turned
anger to sympathy. Impulsively he sat by her on the sofa and put an
arm about her shoulders.
“Please!” he said. “I will tell you all I know and you shall tell me
whatever else you think fit.”
Gently she disengaged herself and stood up. There was no sign of tears
beyond a brightness in her tired eyes. From the hearthrug she studied
him searchingly. At last:
“Let me see father’s letter,” she demanded.
He took it from the drawer in which it was locked and handed it to her.
When she gave it back, she smiled frankly, and her eyes were no longer
brave and anxious.
“I believe it’s worse for you,” she said. “I’m sorry if I was rude, but
I am very tired.”
The submission roused his dominance.
“Nevertheless,” he said crisply, “this must finish now. Are you ready?”
She bowed her head and settled once more on the sofa. He stood, as
at first, against the mantelshelf. The tale of his Cambridge days
with Marvell, of the latter’s departure for Canada, of the rumours of
marriage, paternity, widowerhood, was told with cold precision. As he
talked, Charles felt his position strengthening. After all, he was
giving in this matter, and the Marvells taking. It was his right to
catechize.
“And so you see,” he concluded, “I know next to nothing. Who was your
mother, and what became of her?”
“She was the daughter of an inn-keeper near Cambridge bridge,” replied
Viola. She spoke lifelessly as though by rote. “Father married her very
soon after he left Cambridge. There was trouble of some kind. He never
told me what. But they came to Canada, because he had an offer of the
chair at Toronto. When I was ten, she ran away with a man. I believe
she was always--er--flighty--.”
At the word, so inadequate, so impudently trivial, she stopped. Her
vocabulary had betrayed her. The word was wrong and she knew it, but
she had no other. Charles gave no sign of hearing anything amiss.
“Go on,” he said. She obeyed.
“Father was terribly angry. He made himself very ill. Then he forbade
me to speak of her, and would himself always behave as though she were
dead. We hadn’t many friends ever, but we had fewer after that. Only
those who affected to believe she was dead were admitted. So I looked
after him--until he died--and then there was no one----”
Again she bent her head into her hands and her shoulders shook. Charles
was at her side in a moment.
“Poor little girl!” he said. “Poor child! You shall be happy here.
We’ll stand by you. Don’t cry any more. It will all come right.”
While her tears lasted she let him caress her, leaning a little
against him for support in her solitary grief. There crept into
Charles’ genuine pity a wicked realization of her exceeding beauty.
He had comforted girls before. Often and often. But they had wept for
other, more remediable causes. Also they had been fallible, and to
the lover of women fallibility marks the end of a journey. He asked
himself whether this present case were different because Viola was not
fallible. For all he could say, she might prove to be so. There is
always heredity. For an instant the spirit of the hunter awoke, only to
be stunned to unconsciousness by a brusque movement on the part of the
quarry. Unmistakably she was pushing herself free of his arms. She got
up quickly, wiping the remaining tears from her cheeks.
“I’m all right,” she said rather sharply. “I’m not usually such a fool.”
Abandoned on the sofa in an attitude of some absurdity, Charles felt
indignant and ridiculous. He groped after mastery, both of himself
and of the situation. As men will, he sought ease in tobacco. The
movement of finding, tapping, and lighting a cigarette restored his
self-respect. Leaning back easily he blew smoke from his nostrils.
“There is very little more to be said to-night,” he observed
judicially. “Do you know anything of your mother’s movements? Did she
leave Toronto?”
Viola shook her head.
“I am afraid I know nothing,” she said coldly. Then, after a short
silence: “I think I shall go to bed, if you will excuse me.”
He rose slowly and lounged to his desk.
“One other thing. You will want money. I won’t go into that now, but I
imagine an allowance in your name is most convenient. Think it over and
tell me your ideas. We can discuss it to-morrow. Good night.”
She lingered by the door, knotting her wet handkerchief between her
fingers.
“Good night,” she said slowly, but still she did not move.
He looked interrogation across the space of desk-top and crimson carpet.
“Don’t think me ungrateful,” she burst out. “It’s only that I am
overstrained. It’s very kind of you to do anything for me at all,
seeing how little----”
She broke off, as his frown deepened to evident anger.
“Good night,” she repeated quickly and slipped through the door. As
it closed, he threw back his head and his fine teeth flashed white
between his lips. She had put him down very prettily and he recognized
her spirit. He felt that joy in a thoroughbred characteristic of the
Englishman. ‘But how in the world,’ he thought, ‘did Marvell and a
wench from Cambridgeshire produce that creature!’
* * * * *
The eastern windows of the library looked on to the campanile. They had
been uncurtained during the interview between Charles Plethern and
his ward, and the lights in the room were blazing. It was a curious
chance that Mrs. Plethern should have looked down into the library from
one of her tower rooms and that the moment of her looking should have
been that of Viola’s most bitter tears. An onlooker judges perforce by
attitude, so that perhaps the aged observer cannot be blamed if she
gleaned a false idea of the relations between her elder son and his new
charge. She had just completed a letter to her younger son. Fortunately
the envelope had not been stuck down, so that a postscript could be
added with ease and without waste of stationery.
§ 5
Safe in her room, Viola, full length on the bed, fought to steady her
quivering nerves. Her head ached and throbbed. Across the tortured
background of her imagination passed, in grotesque confusion, the
incidents and emotions of the afternoon and evening. Why had she
come to this strange, fevered place? First the old lady with her
stealthy gentleness; then Lady Grieve seemingly so soft and sweet and
comforting; then Charles Plethern, a kaleidoscope of shy volubility,
arrogance and intimate insolence--where was truth? Was England
compounded of such incalculable bewilderment? Closing her eyes she
cradled her tired brain in the lazy sway of childhood memory. She
recalled that errant mother, whose story had so abruptly and so
unexpectedly dominated the evening’s conversation. Slight and pretty
and feckless, she had left on the mind of her child often an impression
of lovable helplessness. Then she had gone away and the child had
remained. The deserted father had raged bitterly, growing thinner and
more lantern-jawed than ever, saying little to his daughter in direct
reference to the vanished woman, but overlaying the child’s protective
love with a deliberate crust of hatred. Viola had never paid more than
lip service to this hatred. The crime of which her mother had been
guilty was a meaningless one, apart from the unhappiness it had brought
upon her home. But the father required formal repudiation of all love
and loyalty, and the child had obeyed. Then, with the approach of
womanhood, came womanhood’s capacity for playing a part. Viola wondered
and pitied and forgave, but so secretly that Marvell had no suspicion
of the girl’s thoughts and longings. His death released her from the
burden of pretence. Her few weeks’ loneliness in Canada, the days of
voyage and travel were given up, not to predictions of the future, but
to aching desire for the mother that had disappeared. And now, during
the terrible interview with her guardian, the past had risen again. She
had betrayed her mother’s wrong-doing and the treachery of it still
burned upon her tongue. Why had she not lied, perjured herself if need
be, to keep sacred that memory at least? As she recalled the contempt
in his voice as he spoke of her mother, she shuddered in despair, for
the words that had given cause for it were her words. She it was that
had dangled before the eyes of this cruel stranger the tragedy of
her childhood. And he had sneered at it. For all the sympathy of his
speech, he had sneered. She would hate him more for this than for his
presumptuous hands, were it not that the fault lay first with herself.
Rigid with self-scorn she lay, staring miserably at the ceiling.
(Poor Viola! She was not free as yet of her mother’s memory. Though she
would never see again that wanton fecklessness, its blood was in her
veins, and with its blood its impulses. That will was hers to love more
well than wisely; that will was hers to lie beneath love’s sacrificial
knife; that will to love was hers that, in allegiance, sent the mother
to a sordid exile; that, in despair, was to impel the daughter to the
hazard of her soul.)
She was roused by a tapping on the door. Leaping up she smoothed her
crumpled dress and hair, casting a quick glance round the room that
she might be prepared with reason or excuse for any unlikelihood or
want of order. Then she responded to the knock. The door opened and
closed. Corinne, in a yellow dressing-gown with a bath towel round her
neck, stood smiling before her.
“May I come and talk to you? Uncle Charles said you had gone to bed and
I’ve been having a bath. So let me sit here while you undress!”
Denial was impossible. Already the unwelcome visitor had thrown off her
dressing-gown and was full length on the bed. Viola braced herself for
yet another assault of veiled curiosity.
“I’m so hot!” laughed Corinne, spreading wide her legs and arms. “Why
in the world one has a hot bath this weather I can’t imagine. But cold
ones don’t clean you. They don’t me, anyway. The trouble is I never
_look_ clean. My complexion is wrong. You fair people are lucky.
My brother Chris is fair--your colour, but not so red--and he looks
beautifully clean always, even when he isn’t. We brunettes have a lot
to put up with!”
Again she laughed, wriggling her little head on the pillow so that her
dark curls shook and shone like a mass of silky feathers. In her thin,
white nightgown she was more like a fine scarf, loosely knotted and
thrown across the eiderdown, than a creature of flesh and blood. Viola
smiled despite herself, invigorated by the irresponsible vitality of
the intruder.
“Everyone talks to me of your brother,” she said. “He must be a
remarkable person.”
“Chris remarkable?” Corinne pouted and, raising one arm, opened and
shut her fingers against the light. “Oh, I don’t know. Just an ordinary
boy, you know, strong and stupid and awfully conceited. But he _does
look clean_. He plays cricket. We’re all going to Lord’s to see him
next week. I hope he makes a lot. Aren’t you going to bed after all?
Don’t mind me, please. I’m used to being in a room full of people
naked as Eve. At Maddercliff we had dormitories, you see, and in the
hot weather we used to have splendid rags at night. All our nighties
off for coolness, and then rugger or dances.”
“But that must have made you very hot again,” suggested Viola gravely.
Corinne giggled.
“Yes, I suppose it did, if you come to think of it. But schoolgirls are
awful fools, aren’t they?”
For some moments Viola had been battling with her own shyness. Unlike
Corinne she was accustomed to toilet solitude and she shrank from
undressing under the merry eyes of this shameless visitor. There was,
however, no escape and with studied indifference, she set herself to
her task. Her nervousness proved to be unjustified, for the girl on
the bed chattered on without further reference to clothes or the lack
of them, and before long Viola understood that, in her own coltish
way, this half-woman was giving her hints for the future and offering
friendship and alliance.
“You’ll come and stay with us, won’t you? Uncle Charles goes off
for months on end and you can’t stop here all the time with Granny.
Granny’s a dear, but she goes out hardly at all. We live in London,
and you and I can go shopping and to theatres and have a lovely time.
You’ve never been to London? Of course you haven’t. How could you?
Oh, it’s splendid! We’ll make Chris take us about at night. Mother
won’t let me go about alone much, even in the day. Silly, I call it.
Then you’ll meet all the girls and Chris’ friends. There’s Daniel, you
know--aunt Belinda’s son. (She isn’t my aunt really, but I call her
that. She’s such a darling, you’ll love her.) Daniel is clever and
sarcastic and fearfully handsome. Some girls hate him, but I like him
immensely. Do you like us at all--the ones of us you’ve seen here?”
Behind the glittering cloud of her hair Viola laughed happily. Already
she was nearly cheerful. The heedless inconsequence of her young
friend, coupled with the physical luxury of hair-brushing, had soothed
her anger and her weariness.
“Isn’t it a bit soon to ask me?”
Corinne squeaked with delight.
“I said it because it’s the question all Americans ask as soon as an
Englishman sees New York. ‘How do you like my country?’ That’s what
they say. So I said it, too. Thought you would feel at home.”
Viola turned with mock indignation.
“I’m not American,” she said emphatically. “Hardly Canadian even.”
“Oh, I am so sorry!” Corinne, genuinely distressed, jumped off the bed
and ran across the room. “Have I said something awful?” She stood an
instant by Viola’s chair, a droll picture of repentant apprehension.
The next moment her volatile mind caught at another theme.
“What _beautiful_ hair! Do let me brush it for you! I wish I
wasn’t a nigger.”
“You silly child,” cried Viola, half in laughter, half in tears. “You
are a darling, Corinne, and you’ve cheered me up no end. Will you brush
it, really? How nice!”
With a purr of satisfaction she leant back, abandoning her brush to the
volunteer lady’s maid.
“Of course you know,” began Corinne solemnly after the brushing had
continued awhile in silence, “Uncle Charles is an awful rip! I’m not
supposed to know. Mother always covers it up when the subject comes up
in conversation. But I do know, of course. I’ve not been at school for
nothing. And then Chris tells me. Besides, Uncle Charles never denies
it. He’s just wonderful, Viola. Yes, I know you are thinking you don’t
like him, but that’s because he’s scared you.”
Viola kept silence. Gratefully conscious of the shielding curtain of
her hair she blushed uncomfortably. What did the child mean? Surely
her guardian had not told them in the drawing-room.... She held her
breath, only to find once again her fears unfounded. Corinne rattled on:
“He does scare people at first. He’s so honest about himself. Never
pretends. And then girls say he frightens them, the way he looks.
Idiots! A cat may look at a king, so why not a dog at a queen? Anyone
can look at me free gratis. But they don’t seem to want to, worse luck.”
“You’ve time enough yet, though,” said Viola encouragingly.
“I’m seventeen!” replied Corinne indignantly. “Lots of girls are
married by then.”
“Lots?”
“Well, some, anyway. Not that I want to be married yet, but I should
like what Daniel calls an ‘amourette.’ We used to practise kissing at
school. It’s awfully dull. Perhaps with a man it’s more fun.”
“You are not asking me to believe you’ve never been kissed?” asked
Viola, as she shook back the hair which was now plaited into a heavy
rope.
Corinne tossed her head and picked up her dressing-gown from the floor.
“Oh, boys don’t count! I said a man.”
“I see,” said Viola gravely.
“I’m off. Your turn to come and see me next. Passage beyond the
stair-head--third door on the left. Good night!”
* * * * *
Silence descended upon Morvane. In the soft summer night the flowers
and shrubs slept peacefully. Beyond the garden rustled the great trees
in the park and the ranked beeches of the avenue. From the high window
of the tower a single light shone faintly. It was a reading-lamp,
heavily shaded, and its brilliance fell on ordered cards, over which,
in and out of the surrounding gloom and as though weaving spells in the
night time, moved the slow, smooth hands of Rowena Plethern.