"Probably not," I said roughly. "He'll never make up his mind about it
himself."
"How did you know?" she asked, as if it had been a mystery.
"I didn't. It only seems to me like that."
"Seems to you like that," she re-echoed, in that sad, clean monotone of
finality, always like metal. I appreciate it in her, that she does not
murmur or whisper. But I wished she left me alone, in that beastly
theatre.
She was wearing emeralds, on her snow-white skin, and leaning forward
gazing fixedly down into the auditorium, as a crystal-gazer into a
crystal. Heaven knows if she saw all those little facets of faces and
plastrons. As for me, I knew that, like a sansculotte, I should never be
king till breeches were off.
"I had terrible work to make him marry me," she said, in her swift,
clear low tones.
"Why?"
"He was frightfully in love with me. He _is_! But he thinks he's
unlucky..."
"Unlucky, how? In cards or in love?" I mocked.
"In both," she said briefly, with sudden cold resentment at my
flippancy. There was over her eyes a glaze of fear. "It's in their
family."
"What did you say to him?" I asked, rather laboured, feeling the dead
weight.
"I promised to have luck for two," she said. "And war was declared a
fortnight later."
"Ah, well!" I said. "That's the world's luck, not yours."
"Quite!" she said.
There was a pause.
"Is his family supposed to be unlucky?" I asked.
"The Worths? Terribly! They really are!"
It was interval, and the box door had opened. Carlotta always had her
eye, a good half of it at least, on the external happenings. She rose,
like a reigning beauty--which she wasn't, and never became--to speak to
Lady Perth, and, out of spite, did not introduce me.
Carlotta and Lord Lathkill came, perhaps a year later, to visit us when
we were in a cottage in Derbyshire, and he was home on leave. She was
going to have a child, and was slow, and seemed depressed. He was vague,
charming, talking about the country and the history of the lead mines.
But the two of them seemed vague, as if they never got anywhere.
The last time I saw them was when the war was over, and I was leaving
England. They were alone at dinner, save for me. He was still haggard,
with a wound in the throat. But he said he would soon be well. His slow,
beautiful voice was a bit husky now. And his velvety eyes were hardened,
haggard, but there was weariness, emptiness in the hardness.
I was poorer than ever, and felt a little weary myself. Carlotta was
struggling with his silent emptiness. Since the war, the melancholy
fixity of his eyes was more noticeable, the fear at the centre was
almost monomania. She was wilting and losing her beauty.
There were twins in the house. After dinner, we went straight up to look
at them, to the night nursery. They were two boys, with their father's
fine dark hair, both of them.
He had put out his cigar, and leaned over the cots, gazing in silence.
The nurse, dark-faced and faithful, drew back. Carlotta glanced at her
children; but more helplessly, she gazed at him.
"Bonny children! Bonny boys, aren't they, nurse?" I said softly.
"Yes, sir!" she said quickly. "They are!"
"Ever think I'd have twins, roistering twins?" said Carlotta, looking at
me.
"I never did," said I.
"Ask Luke whether it's bad luck or bad management," she said, with that
schoolgirl's snirt of laughter, looking up apprehensively at her
husband.
"Oh, I!" he said, turning suddenly and speaking loud, in his wounded
voice. "I call it amazing good luck, myself! Don't know what other
people think about it." Yet he had the fine, wincing fear in his body,
of an injured dog.
After that, for years I did not see her again. I heard she had a baby
girl. Then a catastrophe happened: both the twins were killed in a
motor-car accident in America, motoring with their aunt.
I learned the news late, and did not write to Carlotta. What could I
say?
A few months later, crowning disaster, the baby girl died of some sudden
illness. The Lathkill ill-luck seemed to be working surely.
Poor Carlotta! I had no further news of her, only I heard that she and
Lord Lathkill were both living in seclusion, with his mother, at the
place in Derbyshire.
When circumstances brought me to England, I debated within myself,
whether I should write or not to Carlotta. At last I sent a note to the
London address.
I had a reply from the country: "So glad you are within reach again!
When will you come and see us?"
I was not very keen on going to Riddings. After all, it was Lord
Lathkill's place, and Lady Lathkill, his mother, was old and of the old
school. And I always something of a sansculotte, who will only be king
when breeches are off.
"Come to town," I wrote, "and let us have lunch together."
She came. She looked older, and pain had drawn horizontal lines across
her face.
"You're not a bit different," she said to me.
"And you're only a little bit," I said.
"Am I!" she replied, in a deadened, melancholic voice. "Perhaps! I
suppose while we live we've got to live. What do you think?"
"Yes, I think it. To be the living dead, that's awful."
"Quite!" she said, with terrible finality.
"How is Lord Lathkill?" I asked.
"Oh," she said. "It's finished him, as far as living is concerned. But
he's very willing for _me_ to live."
"And you, are you willing?" I said.
She looked up into my eyes, strangely.
"I'm not sure," she said. "I need help. What do you think about it?"
"Oh God, live if you can!"
"Even take help?" she said, with her strange involved simplicity.
"Ah, certainly!"
"Would you recommend it?"
"Why, yes! You are a young thing----" I began.
"Won't you come down to Riddings?" she said quickly.
"And Lord Lathkill--and his mother?" I asked.
"They want you."
"Do you want me to come?"
"I want you to, yes! Will you?"
"Why, yes, if you want me."
"When, then?"
"When you wish."
"Do you mean it?"
"Why, of course."
"You're not afraid of the Lathkill ill-luck?"
"_I_!" I exclaimed in amazement; such amazement, that she gave her
schoolgirl snirt of laughter.
"Very well, then," she said. "Monday? Does that suit you?"
We made arrangements, and I saw her off at the station.
I knew Riddings, Lord Lathkill's place, from the outside. It was an old
Derbyshire stone house, at the end of the village of Middleton: a house
with three sharp gables, set back not very far from the high road, but
with a gloomy moor for a park behind.
Monday was a dark day over the Derbyshire hills. The green hills were
dark, dark green, the stone fences seemed almost black. Even the little
railway-station, deep in the green, cleft hollow, was of stone, and dark
and cold, and seemed in the underworld.
Lord Lathkill was at the station. He was wearing spectacles, and his
brown eyes stared strangely. His black hair fell lank over his forehead.
"I'm so awfully glad you've come," he said. "It is cheering Carlotta up
immensely."
Me, as a man myself, he hardly seemed to notice. I was something which
had arrived, and was expected. Otherwise he had an odd, unnatural
briskness of manner.
"I hope I shan't disturb your mother. Lady Lathkill," I said as he
tucked me up in the car.
"On the contrary," he sang, in his slow voice, "she is looking forward
to your coming as much as we both are. Oh, no, don't look on Mother as
too old-fashioned, she's not so at all. She's tremendously up-to-date in
art and literature and that kind of thing. She has her leaning towards
the uncanny--spiritualism, and that kind of thing--nowadays, but
Carlotta and I think that if it gives her an interest, all well and
good."
He tucked me up most carefully in the rugs, and the servant put a
footwarmer at my feet.
"Derbyshire, you know, is a cold county," continued Lord Lathkill,
"especially among the hills."
"It's a very dark county," I said.
"Yes, I suppose it is, to one coming from the tropics. We, of course,
don't notice it; we rather like it."
He seemed curiously smaller, shrunken, and his rather long cheeks were
sallow. His manner, however, was much more cheerful, almost
communicative. But he talked, as it were, to the faceless air, not
really to me. I wasn't really there at all. He was talking to himself.
And when once he looked at me, his brown eyes had a hollow look, like
gaps with nothing in them except a haggard, hollow fear. He was gazing
through the windows of nothingness, to see if I were really there.
It was dark when we got to Riddings. The house had no door in the front,
and only two windows upstairs were lit. It did not seem very hospitable.
We entered at the side, and a very silent manservant took my things.
We went upstairs in silence, in the dead-seeming house. Carlotta had
heard us, and was at the top of the stairs. She was already dressed; her
long white arms were bare; she had something glittering on a dull green
dress.
"I was so afraid you wouldn't come," she said, in a dulled voice, as she
gave me her hand. She seemed as if she would begin to cry. But of course
she wouldn't. The corridor, dark-panelled and with blue carpet on the
floor, receded dimly, with a certain dreary gloom. A servant was
diminishing in the distance, with my bags, silently. There was a
curious, unpleasant sense of the fixity of the materials of the house,
the obscene triumph of dead Matter. Yet the place was warm,
central-heated.
Carlotta pulled herself together, and said, dulled:
"Would you care to speak to my mother-in-law before you go to your room?
She would like it."
We entered a small drawing-room, abruptly. I saw the water-colours on
the walls and a white-haired lady in black bending round to look at the
door as she rose, cautiously.
"This is Mr. Morier, Mother-in-law," said Carlotta, in her dull,
rather quick way, "on his way to his room."
The dowager Lady Lathkill came a few steps forward, leaning from heavy
hips, and gave me her hand. Her crest of hair was snow white, and she
had curious blue eyes, fixed, with a tiny dot of a pupil, peering from
her pink, soft-skinned face of an old and well-preserved woman. She wore
a lace fichu. The upper part of her body was moderately slim, leaning
forward slightly from her heavy black-silk hips.
She murmured something to me, staring at me fixedly for a long time, but
as a bird does, with shrewd, cold, far-distant sight. As a hawk,
perhaps, looks shrewdly far down, in his search. Then, muttering, she
presented to me the other two people in the room: a tall, short-faced,
swarthy young woman with the hint of a black moustache; and a plump man
in a dinner-jacket, rather bald and ruddy, with a little grey moustache,
but yellow under the eyes. He was Colonel Hale.
They all seemed awkward, as if I had interrupted them at a séance. I
didn't know what to say: they were utter strangers to me.
"Better come and choose your room, then," said Carlotta, and I bowed
dumbly, following her out of the room. The old Lady Lathkill still stood
planted on her heavy hips, looking half round after us with her ferret's
blue eyes. She had hardly any eyebrows, but they were arched high up on
her pink, soft forehead, under the crest of icily white hair. She had
never emerged for a second from the remote place where she unyieldingly
kept herself.
Carlotta, Lord Lathkill and I tramped in silence down the corridor and
round a bend. We could none of us get a word out. As he suddenly, rather
violently flung open a door at the end of the wing, he said, turning
round to me with a resentful, hangdog air:
"We did you the honour of offering you our ghost room. It doesn't look
much, but it's our equivalent for a royal apartment."
It was a good-sized room with faded, red-painted panelling showing
remains of gilt, and the usual big, old mahogany furniture, and a big
pinky-faded carpet with big, whitish, faded roses. A bright fire was
burning in the stone fireplace.
"Why?" said I, looking at the stretches of the faded, once handsome
carpet.
"Why what?" said Lord Lathkill. "Why did we offer you this room?"
"Yes! No! Why is it your equivalent for a royal apartment?"
"Oh, because our ghost is as rare as sovereignty in her visits, and
twice as welcome. Her gifts are infinitely more worth having."
"What sort of gifts?"
"The family fortune. She invariably restores the family fortune. That's
why we put you here, to tempt her."
"What temptation should _I_ be?--especially to restoring your family
fortunes. I didn't think they needed it, anyhow."
"Well!" he hesitated. "Not exactly in money: we can manage modestly that
way; but in everything else but money----"
There was a pause. I was thinking of Carlotta's "luck for two." Poor
Carlotta! She looked worn now. Especially her chin looked worn, showing
the edge of the jaw. She had sat herself down in a chair by the fire,
and put her feet on the stone fender, and was leaning forward, screening
her face with her hand, still careful of her complexion. I could see her
broad, white shoulders, showing the shoulder-blades, as she leaned
forward, beneath her dress. But it was as if some bitterness had soaked
all the life out of her, and she was only weary, or inert, drained of
her feelings. It grieved me, and the thought passed through my mind that
a man should take her in his arms and cherish her body, and start her
flame again. If she would let him, which was doubtful.
Her courage was fallen, in her body; only her spirit fought on. She
would have to restore the body of her life, and only a living body could
do it.
"What _about_ your ghost?" I said to him. "Is she really ghastly?"
"Not at all!" he said. "She's supposed to be lovely. But I have no
experience, and I don't know anybody who has. We hoped you'd come,
though, and tempt her. Mother had a message about you, you know."
"No, I didn't know."
"Oh, yes! When you were still in Africa. The medium said: 'There is a
man in Africa. I can only see M, a double M. He is thinking of your
family. It would be good if he entered your family.' Mother was awfully
puzzled, but Carlotta said 'Mark Morier' at once."
"That's not why I asked you down," said Carlotta quickly, looking round,
shading her eyes with her hand as she looked at me.