"There are moments, I admit," said Majendie, "when Hannay saddens me."
Anne had drawn him into discussing at breakfast-time their host and
hostess of the night before.
"Shall you have to see very much of them?" She had made up her mind that
she would see very little, or nothing, of the Hannays.
"Well, I haven't, lately, have I?" said he, and she owned that he had
not.
"How you ever could--" she began, but he stopped her.
"Oh well, we needn't go into that."
It seemed to her that there was something dark and undesirable behind
those words, something into which she could well conceive he would not
wish to go. It never struck her that he merely wished to put an end to
the discussion.
She brooded over it, and became dejected. The great tide of her trouble
had long ago ebbed out of her sight. Now it was as if it had turned,
somewhere on the edge of the invisible, and was creeping back again. She
wished she had never seen or heard of the Hannays--detestable people.
She betrayed something of this feeling to Edith, who was impatient for an
account of the evening. (It was thus that Edith entered vicariously into
life.)
"Did you expect me to enjoy it?" she replied to the first eager question.
"No, I don't know that I did. _I_ should have enjoyed it very much
indeed."
"I don't believe you."
"Was there anybody there that you disliked so much?"
"The Hannays were there. It was enough."
"You liked Mr. Gorst?"
"Yes. He was different."
"Poor Charlie. I'm glad you liked him."
"I don't like him any better for meeting him there, my dear."
"Don't say that to Walter, Nancy."
"I have said it. How Walter can care for those people is a mystery to
me."
"He ought to be ashamed of himself if he didn't. Lawson Hannay has been a
good friend to him."
"Do you mean that he's under any obligation to him?"
"Yes. Obligations, my dear, that none of us can ever repay."
"It's intolerable!" said Anne.
"Is it? Wait till you know what the obligations are. That man you dislike
so much stood by Walter when your friends the Eliotts, my child, turned
their virtuous backs on him--when none of his own people, even, would
lend him a helping hand. It was Lawson Hannay who saved him."
"Saved him?"
"Saved him. Moved heaven and earth to get him out of that woman's
clutches."
Anne shook her head, and put her hands over her eyes to dispel her vision
of him. Edith laughed.
"You can't see Mr. Hannay moving heaven?"
"No, really I can't."
"Well, _I_ saw him. At least, if he didn't move heaven, he moved earth.
When nothing else could shake her hold, he bought her off."
"Bought--her--off?"
"Yes, bought her--paid her money to go. And she went."
"He owes him money, then?"
"Money, and a great many other things beside. You don't like it?"
"I can't bear it."
"Of course you can't. It hurts your pride. It hurt mine badly. But my
pride has had to go down in the dust before Lawson Hannay."
Anne raised her head as if she refused to lower her pride an inch to him.
She was trying to put the whole episode behind her, as it had come before
her. She had nothing whatever to do with it. Edith, of course, had to be
grateful. _She_ was not bound by the same obligation. But she was
determined that they should be quit of the Hannays. She would make Walter
pay back that money.
Meanwhile Edith's eyes filled with tears at the recollection. "Lawson
Hannay may not have been a very good man himself--I believe at one time
he wasn't. But he loved his friend, and he didn't want to see him going
the same way."
"The same way? That means that, if it hadn't been for Mr. Hannay, he
would never have met her."
"Mr. Hannay did his best to prevent his meeting her. He knew what she
was, and Walter didn't. He took him off in his yacht for weeks at a time,
to get him out of her way. When she followed him he brought him back.
When she persecuted him--well, I've told you what he did."
Anne lifted her hand in supplication, and rose and went to the open
window, as if, after that recital, she thirsted for fresh air. Edith
smiled, in spite of herself, at her sister-in-law's repudiation of the
subject.
"Poor Mr. Hannay," said she, "the worst you can say of him now is that he
eats and drinks a little more than's good for him."
"And that he's married a wife who sets him the example," said Anne,
returning from the window-sill refreshed.
"She keeps him straight, dear."
"Edith! I shall never understand you. You're angelically good. But it's
horrible, the things you take for granted. 'She keeps him straight!'"
"You think I take for granted a natural tendency to crookedness. I
don't--I don't. What I take for granted is a natural tendency to
straightness, when it gets its way. It doesn't always get it, though,
especially in a town like Scale."
"I wish we were out of it."
"So did I, dear, once; but I don't now. We must make the best of it."
"Has Walter paid any of that money back to Mr. Hannay?"
Edith looked up at her sister-in-law, startled by the hardness in her
voice. She had meant to spare Anne's pride the worst blow, but something
in her question stirred the fire that slept in Edith.
"No," she said, "he hasn't. He was going to, but Mr. Hannay cancelled the
debt, in order that he might marry--that he might marry you."
Anne drew back as if Edith had struck her bodily. She, then, had been
bought, too, with Mr. Hannay's money. Without it, Walter could not have
afforded to marry her; for she was poor.
She sat silent, until her self-appointed hour with Edith ended; and then,
still silently, she left the room.
And Edith turned her cheek on her cushions and sobbed weakly to herself.
"Walter would never forgive me if he knew I'd told her that. It was awful
of me. But Anne would have provoked the patience of a saint."
Anne owned that Edith was a saint, and that the provocation was extreme.
In the afternoon, Edith, at her own request, was forgiven, and Anne, by
way of proving and demonstrating her forgiveness, announced her amiable
intention of calling on Mrs. Hannay on her "day."
The day fell within a week of the dinner. It was agreed that Majendie was
to meet his wife at the Hannays, and to take her home. There was a good
mile between Prior Street and the Park; and Anne was a leisurely walker;
so it happened that she was late, and that Majendie had arrived a few
minutes before her. She did not notice him there all at once. Mrs. Hannay
was a sociable little lady; the radius of her circle was rapidly
increasing, and her "day" drew crowds. The lamps were not yet lit, and as
Anne entered the room, it was dim to her after the daylight of the open
air. She had counted on an inconspicuous entrance, and was astonished to
find that the announcement of her name caused a curious disturbance and
division in the assembly. A finer ear than Anne's might have detected an
ominous sound, something like the rustling of leaves before a storm. But
Anne's self-possession rendered her at times insensible to changes in the
social atmosphere. In any case the slight commotion was no more than she
had come prepared for in a whole roomful of ill-bred persons.
"Pussy," said a lady who stood near Mrs. Hannay. Mrs. Hannay had her back
to the doorway. The lady's voice rang on a low note of warning, and she
brought her mouth close to Mrs. Hannay's ear.
The hostess started, turned, and came at once towards Mrs. Majendie,
rolling deftly between the persons who obstructed her perturbed and
precipitate way. The perfect round of her cheeks had dropped a little; it
was the face of a poor cherub in vexation and dismay.
"Dear Mrs. Majendie,"--her voice, once so triumphant, had dropped too,
almost to a husky whisper,--"how very good of you."
She led her to a sofa, the seat of intimacy, set back a little from the
central throne. (Majendie could be seen fairly immersed in the turmoil,
struggling desperately through it, with a plate in his hand.)
Mrs. Hannay was followed by her husband, by the other lady, and by
Gorst. She introduced the other lady as Mrs. Ransome, and they seated
themselves, one on each side of Anne. The two men drew up in front of
the sofa, and began to talk very fast, in loud tones and with an
unnatural gaiety. The women, too, closed in upon her somewhat with their
knees; they were both a little confused, both more than a little
frightened, and the manner of both was mysteriously apologetic.
Anne, with her deep, insulating sense of superiority, had no doubt as to
the secret of the situation. She felt herself suitably protected, guarded
from contact, screened from view, distinguished very properly from
persons to whom it was manifestly impossible, even for Mrs. Hannay, to
introduce her. She was very sorry for poor Mrs. Hannay, she tried to make
it less difficult for her, by ignoring the elements of confusion and
fright. But poor Mrs. Hannay kept on being frightened; she refused to
part with her panic and be natural. So terrified was she, that she hardly
seemed to take in what Mrs. Majendie was saying.
Anne, however, conversed with the utmost amiability, while her thoughts
ran thus: "Dear lady, why this agitation? You cannot help being vulgar.
As for your friends, what do you think I expected?"
The other lady, Mrs. Dick Ransome, could not be held accountable for
anything but her own private vulgarity; and it struck Anne as odd that
Mrs. Dick Ransome, who was not responsible for Mrs. Hannay, seemed, if
anything, more terrified than Mrs. Hannay, who was responsible for her.
Mrs. Dick Ransome did not, at the first blush, inspire confidence. She
was a woman with a great deal of blonde hair, and a fresh-coloured,
conspicuously unspiritual face; coarse-grained, thick-necked, ruminantly
animal, but kind; kind to Mrs. Hannay, kind to Anne, kinder even than
Mrs. Hannay who was responsible for all the kindness.
Charlie Gorst hurried away to get Mrs. Majendie some tea, and Lawson's
Hannay's large form moved into the gap thus made, blocking Anne's view of
the room. He stood looking down upon her with an extraordinary smile of
mingled apology and protection. Gorst's return was followed by Majendie,
wandering uneasily with his plate. He smiled at Anne, too; and his smile
conveyed the same suggestion of desperation and distress. It was as if he
said to her: "I'm sorry for letting you in for such a crew, but how can
I help it?" She smiled back at him brightly, as much as to say; "Don't
mind. It amuses me. I'm taking it all in."
He wandered away, and Anne felt that the women exchanged looks across her
shoulders.
"I think I'll be going, Pussy dear," said Mrs. Ransome, nodding some
secret intelligence. She elbowed her way gently across the room, and came
back again, shaking her head hopelessly and helplessly. "She says I can
go if I like, but she'll stay," said Mrs. Ransome under her breath.
"Oh-h-h," said Mrs. Hannay under hers.
"What am I to do?" said Mrs. Ransome, flurried into audible speech.
"Stay--stay. It's much better." Mrs. Hannay plucked her husband by the
sleeve, and he lowered an attentive ear. Mrs. Ransome covered the
confidence with a high-pitched babble.
"You find Scale a very sociable place, don't you, Mrs. Majendie?" said
Mrs. Ransome.
"Go," said Mrs. Hannay, "and take her off into the conservatory, or
somewhere."
"More sociable in the winter-time, of course." (Mrs. Ransome, in her
agitation, almost screamed it.)
"I can't take her off anywhere, if she won't go," said Mr. Hannay in a
thick but penetrating whisper. He collapsed into a chair in front of
Anne, where he seemed to spread himself, sheltering her with his supine,
benignant gaze.
Mrs. Hannay was beside herself, beholding his invertebrate behaviour.
"Don't sit down, stupid. Do something--anything."
He went to do it, but evidently, whatever it was, he had no heart for it.
A maid came in and lit a lamp. There was a simultaneous movement of
departure among the nearer guests.
"Oh, heavens," said Mrs. Hannay, "don't tell me they're all going to go!"
Anne, serenely contemplating these provincial manners, was bewildered by
the horror in Mrs. Hannay's tone. There was no accounting for provincial
manners, or she would have supposed that Mrs. Hannay, mortified by the
presence of her most undesirable acquaintance, would have rejoiced to see
them go.
Their dispersal cleared a space down the middle of the room to the
bay-window, and disclosed a figure, a woman's figure, which occupied,
majestically, a settee. The settee, set far back in the bay of the
window, was in a direct line with Anne's sofa. That part of the room was
still unlighted, and the figure, sitting a little sideways, remained
obscure.
A servant went round lighting lamps.
The first lamp to be lit stood beside Anne's sofa. The effect of the
illumination was to make the lady in the window turn on her settee.
Across the space between, her eyes, obscure lights in a face still
undefined, swept with the turning of her body, and fastened upon Anne's
face, bared for the first time to their view. They remained fixed, as if
Anne's face had a peculiar fascination for them.
"Who is the lady sitting in the window?" asked Anne.
"It's my sister." Mrs. Ransome blinked as she answered, and her blood ran
scarlet to the roots of her blonde hair.
A cherub, discovering a horrible taste in his trumpet, would have looked
like Mrs. Hannay.
"Do let me give you some more tea, Mrs. Majendie?" said she, while Mrs.
Ransome signalled to her husband. "Here, Dick, come and make yourself
useful."
Mr. Ransome, a little stout man with a bald head, a pale puffy face, a
twinkling eye and a severe moustache, was obedient to her summons.
"Let me see," said she, "have you met Mrs. Majendie?"
"I have not had that pleasure," said Mr. Ransome, and bowed profoundly.
He waited assiduously on Mrs. Majendie. The Ransomes might have been
responsible for the whole occasion, they so rallied around and supported
her.
Hannay and Gorst, Ransome and another man were gathered together in a
communion with the lady of the settee. There was a general lull, and her
voice, a voice of sweet but somewhat penetrating quality, was heard.
"Don't talk to me," said she, "about women being jealous of each other.
Do you suppose I mind another woman being handsome? I don't care how
handsome she is, so long as she isn't handsome in my style. Of course,
I don't say I could stand it if she was the very moral of me."
"I say, supposing Toodles met the very moral of herself?"
"Could Toodles have a moral? I doubt it."
"I want to know what she'd do with it."
"Yes, by Jove, what _would_ you do?"
"Do? I should do my worst. I should make her sit somewhere with a good
strong light on her."
"Hold hard there," said her brother-in-law (the man who called her
Toodles), "Lady Cayley doesn't want that lamp lit just yet"
In the silence of the rest, the name seemed to leap straight across the
room to Anne.
The two women beside her heard it, and looked at each other and at her.
Anne sickened under their eyes, struck suddenly by the meaning of their
protection and their sympathy. She longed to rise, to sweep them aside
and go. But she was kept motionless by some superior instinct of disdain.
Outwardly she appeared in no way concerned by this revelation of the
presence of Lady Cayley. She might never have heard of her, for any
knowledge that her face betrayed.
Majendie, not far from the settee in the window, was handing cucumber
sandwiches to an old lady. And Lady Cayley had taken the matches from the
maid and was lighting the lamp herself, and was saying, "I'm not afraid
of the light yet, I assure you. There--look at me."
Everybody looked at her, and she looked at everybody, as she sat in the
lamplight, and let it pour over her. She seemed to be offering herself
lavishly, recklessly, triumphantly, to the light.
Lady Cayley was a large woman of thirty-seven, who had been a slender and
a pretty woman at thirty. She would have been pretty still if she had
been a shade less large. She had tiny upward-tilted features in her large
white face; but the lines of her jaw and her little round prominent chin
were already vanishing in a soft enveloping fold, flushed through its
whiteness with a bloom that was a sleeping colour. Her forehead and
eyelids were exceedingly white, so white that against them her black
eyebrows and blue eyes were vivid and emphatic. Her head carried high a
Gainsborough hat of white felt, with black plumes and a black line round
its brim. Under its upward and its downward curve her light brown hair
was tossed up, and curled, and waved, and puffed into an appearance of
great exuberance and volume. Exuberance and volume were the note of this
lady, a note subdued a little by the art of her dressmaker. A gown of
smooth black cloth clung to her vast form without a wrinkle, sombre,
severe, giving her a kind of slenderness in stoutness. She wore a white
lace vest and any quantity of lace ruffles, any number of little black
velvet lines and points set with paste buttons. And every ruffle, every
line, every point and button was an accent, emphasising some beauty of
her person.
And Anne looked at Lady Cayley once and no more.
It was enough. The trouble that she had put from her came again upon her,
no longer in its merciful immensity, faceless and formless (for she had
shrunk from picturing Lady Cayley), but boldly, abominably defined. She
grasped it now, the atrocious tragedy, made visible and terrible for her
in the body of Lady Cayley, the phantom of her own horror made flesh.
A terrible comprehension fell on her of that body, of its power, its
secret, and its sin.
For the first moment, when she looked from it to her husband, her mind
refused to associate him with that degradation. Reverence held her, and
a sudden memory of her passion in the woods at Westleydale. Mercifully,
they veiled her intelligence, and made it impossible for her to realise
that he should have sunk so low.
Then she remembered. She had known that it was, that it would be so,
that, sooner or later, the woman would come back. Her brain conceived a
curious two-fold intuition of the fact.
It was all foreappointed and foreknown, that she should come to this
hateful house, and should sit there, and that her eyes should be opened
and that she should see.
And the woman's voice rose again. "Do I see cucumber sandwiches?" said
Lady Cayley. "Dick, go and tell Mr. Majendie that if he doesn't want all
those sandwiches himself, I'll have one."
Ransome gave the message, and Majendie turned to the lady of the settee,
presenting the plate with the finest air of abstraction. Her large arm
hovered in selection long enough for her to shoot out one low quick
speech.
"I only wanted to see if you'd cut me, Wallie. Topsy bet me two to ten
you wouldn't."
"Why on earth should I?"
"Oh, on earth I know you wouldn't. But didn't I hear just now you'd
married and gone to heaven?"
"Gone to----?"
"Sh--sh--sh--I'm sure she doesn't let you use those naughty words. You
needn't say you're not in heaven, for I can see you are. You didn't
expect to meet me there, did you?"
"I certainly didn't expect to meet you here."
"How can you be so rude? Dick, take that tiresome plate from him, he
doesn't know what to do with it. Yes. I'll have another before it goes
away for ever."
Majendie had given up the plate before he realised that he was parting
with the link that bound him to the outer world. He turned instantly to
follow it there; but she saw his intention and frustrated it.
"Butter? Ugh! You might hold my cup for me while I take my gloves off."
She peeled two skin-tight gloves from her plump hands, so carefully that
the operation gave her all the time she wanted.
"I believe you're still afraid of me?" said she.
He was doing his best to look over her head; but she smiled a smile so
flashing that it drew his eyes to her involuntarily; he felt it as
positively illuminating their end of the room.
"You're not? Well, prove it."
"Is it possible to prove anything to you?"
Again he was about to break from her impatiently. Nothing, he had told
himself, would induce him to stay and talk to her. But he saw Anne's
face across the room; it was pale and hard, fixed in an expression of
implacable repulsion. And she was not looking at Lady Cayley, but at him.
"You can prove it," said Lady Cayley, "to me and everybody else--they're
all looking at you--by sitting down quietly for one moment, and trying to
look a little less as if we compromised each other."
He stayed, to prove his innocence before Anne; and he stood, to prove
his independence before Lady Cayley. He had longed to get away from the
woman, to stand by his wife's side--to take her out of the room, out of
the house, into the open air. And now the perversity that was in him kept
him where he hated to be.
"That's right. Thank heaven one of us has got some presence of mind."
"Presence of _mind_?"
"Yes. You don't seem to think of _me_," she added softly.
"Why should I?" he replied with a brutality that surprised himself.
She looked at him with blue eyes softly suffused, and the curve of a red
mouth sweet and tremulous. "Why?" her whisper echoed him. "Because I'm a
woman."
Her eyelids dropped ever so little, but their dark lashes (following the
upward trend of her features) curled to such a degree that the veil was
ineffectual. He saw a large slit of the wonderful, indomitable blue.
"I'm a woman, and you're a man, you see; and the world's on your side, my
friend, not on mine."
She said it sweetly. If she had been bitter she would have (as she
expressed it) "choked him off"; but Lady Cayley knew better than to be
bitter now, at thirty-seven. She had learnt that her power was in her
sweetness.
His face softened (from the other end of the room Anne saw it soften),
and Lady Cayley pursued with soundless feet her fugitive advantage.
"Poor Wallie, you needn't look so frightened. I'm quite safe now, or
soon will be. Didn't I tell you I was going there too? I'm going to be
married."
"I'm delighted to hear it," he said stiffly.
"To a perfect angel," said she.
"Really? If you're going up to heaven, he, I take it, is not coming down
to earth."
"Nothing is settled," said Lady Cayley, with such monstrous gravity that
his stiffness melted, and he laughed outright.
Anne heard him.
"Who, if I may ask, is this celestial, this transcendent being?"
She shook her head. "I can't tell you, yet."
"What, isn't even that settled?"
Majendie was so genuinely diverted at that moment that he would not have
left her if he could.
She took the sting of it, and flushed, dumbly. Remorse seized him, and he
sought to soothe her.
"My dear lady, I had a vision of heavenly hosts standing round you in
such quantities that it might be difficult to make a selection, you
know."
She rallied finely under the reviving compliment. "My dear, it's a case
of quality, not quantity--" Her past was so present to them both that he
almost understood her to say, "this time."
"I see," he said. "The wings. But nothing's settled?"
"It's settled right enough," said she, by which he understood her to
imply that the "angel's" case was. She had settled him. Majendie could
see her doing it. His imagination played lightly with the preposterous
idea. He conceived her in the act of bringing down her bird of heaven,
actually "winging him."
"But it's not given out yet."
"I see."
"You're the first I've told, except Topsy. Topsy knows it. So you mustn't
tell anybody else."
"I never tell anybody anything," said he.
He gathered that it was not quite so settled as she wished him to
suppose, and that Lady Cayley anticipated some possible dashing of the
cup of matrimony from her lips.
"So I'm not to have panics, in the night, and palpitations, every time
I think of it?"
"Certainly not, if it rests with me."
"I wanted you to know. But it's so precious, I'm afraid of losing it.
Nothing," said Lady Cayley, "can make up for the loss of a good man's
love. Except," she added, "a good woman's."
"Quite so," he assented coldly, with horror at his perception of her
drift.
His coldness riled her.
"Who," said she with emphasis, "is the lady who keeps making those awful
eyes at us over Pussy's top-knot?"
"That lady," said Majendie, "as it happens, is my wife."
"Why didn't you tell me that before? That's what comes, you see, of not
introducing people. I'll tell you one thing, Wallie. She's awfully
handsome. But you always had good taste. Br-r-r, there's a draught
cutting my head off. You might shut that window, there's a dear."
He shut it.
"And put my cup down."
He put it down.
Anne saw him. She had seen everything.
"And help me on with my cape."
He lifted the heavy sable thing with two fingers, and helped her
gingerly. A scent, horrid and thick, and profuse with memories, was
shaken from her as she turned her shoulder. He hoped she was going. But
she was not going; not she. Her body swayed towards him sinuously from
hips obstinately immobile, weighted, literally, with her unshakable
determination to sit on.
She rewarded him with a smile which seemed to him, if anything, more
atrociously luminous than the last. "I must keep you up to the mark,"
said she, as she turned with it. "Your wife's looking at you, and I feel
responsible for your good behaviour. Don't keep her waiting. Can't you
see she wants to go?"
"And I want to go, too," said he savagely. And he went.
And as she watched Mrs. Walter Majendie's departure, Lady Cayley smiled
softly to herself; tasting the first delicious flavour of success.
She had made Mrs. Walter Majendie betray herself; she had made her
furious; she had made her go.
She had sat Mrs. Walter Majendie out.
If the town of Scale, the mayor and the aldermen, had risen and given her
an ovation, she could not have celebrated more triumphally her return.