Elise sat in the big dark drawing-room with the tea things before her.
She knew that it was half an hour after John’s usual time, but there was
nothing expectant in her attitude. She was doing embroidery. As she bent
her head over her work, the sun caught her light gold hair and made a
glory of it. She was finishing the wing of a bee drawing honey from a
larkspur. The design was her own and when it was finished she was going
to give it to Hermione.
Sometimes Elise thought she ought to do war work, but on the whole she
believed that making Papa comfortable was war work.
Papa invented wonderful things for the Allies, and he had diabetes.
The diet system of a famous Viennese doctor had saved Mr. Brett’s life
and might indefinitely prolong it. But a good deal depended on his
keeping still and having his mind at rest. Elise knew that one of the
things which rested Mr. Brett’s mind most was seeing her at Mambles, and
watching her come in and out of the long French windows to see if there
were anything he wanted. Hermione had pointed out to Elise that she was
wasting her life, and Elise had felt rather upset, but she had gone on
wasting it.
From the age of fifteen Hermione had sat on piazzas black with young
men. When she took a country excursion young men followed her as a
string of ducks follow their leader across a field. When she was in
town, she drew the young men away from other girls with the faultless
placidity of a magnet.
Elise might not have achieved so long a line of ducks, or such
responsive needles, but she could certainly draw young men. Hermione
told her that she ought to go to America and draw them. She would
literally have New York, or if she preferred it, Washington, at her
feet. Elise had listened quietly to these dazzling pictures. It was
difficult to tell Hermione without appearing unpatriotic that she did
not want New York, or even Washington, at her feet. So she said a little
vaguely that Europe was very interesting just now. Hermione skimmed the
vagueness off the top of Elise’s mind.
“Europe isn’t Mambles,” she said with some sharpness, and she offered
Elise London; but the mere thought of London petrified Elise. She had a
dread of its indiscriminate, sophisticated rabble, its precedences and
pitfalls, its stiff old families and their lax young offshoots.
The life of a social circle had always petrified Elise, but Hermione,
even when she was almost dead, thought of people in circles.
Mercifully Papa said that when Elise wanted London she could go to
Harrod’s Stores; he wasn’t going to live in a place where you could get
everything, including air raids, at first hand when he didn’t need to.
“If you want to be quick,” he explained, “you go to a quick country and
you naturally take the quickest place in it. But if you want to be slow,
you go to a slow country and you go to the slowest place in it. I’ll
hunt about till I find the slowest place in England.”
At length Papa had found Mambles. A very few country people called on
the Bretts slowly and as if it didn’t matter. They talked about wasps,
and how the best plan was to get the milkman to bring your coal from the
station on the milk cart. They were chiefly old ladies who called, and
they seemed quite satisfied with being old ladies, indeed they made
Elise feel as if she ought to be rather apologetic for being so young,
but as if they would agree to overlook it on account of her not being at
all noisy.
Elise was very quiet. She had no American accent, and only the faintest
interrogative note at the end of her sentences, which sounded
submissive.
In her loveliness and her quietness with her enormous expectations and
her extraordinarily small claims, Elise won a place for herself in the
neighbourhood which, if she had known it, was as rare as it was
enviable.
Nobody who didn’t play games had ever been so liked before.—When John
came in at the window Elise looked up at him over her embroidery as if
it were his usual time.
Her eyes were very wide and blue, as blue as the azure delphiniums in
front of the drawing-room window.
They were set some distance apart, the shape of her small face was oval,
and her little mouth was tenderly curved and very sensitive. It was
without humour.
“It must have been very hot in London,” Elise said gently. “Is Papa all
right in the garden?”
“It’s heavenly to be here,” said John, “and anywhere that isn’t here is
as bad as London. I had to go first to Mr. Brett, but I came as soon as
I could. Yes, he’s all right. He says he can just sit in the sun without
an overcoat, so he expects to read in the paper that the heat is
tropical.”
“I hope the tea isn’t cold,” said Elise, devoting herself to the tea
table.
John didn’t want any tea, but he watched her with fascinated eyes.
It seemed to him that no one ever had such small white hands or had so
wonderfully manipulated tea cups and copper kettles. Elise never asked
people twice what their tastes were; she persistently studied tastes,
and she never forgot them. If she had had an analytical mind she would
have known that there was nothing she enjoyed so much as supplying the
wants of others, and that nothing so dismayed her as when those wants
conflicted.
“I had to see Mr. Brett before I saw you,” John repeated. He seemed
unable to take his eyes off Elise’s face, or to say anything which
didn’t explain why he hadn’t been there before.
“Why certainly,” agreed Elise, noting with disapproval but without
reproof that John was neglecting his tea. “I know it’s the greatest
comfort to Papa your going up to town and seeing people for him, it
saves him so much fatigue, and he relies so on your judgment. He says
you’re the only man who doesn’t have to tell him all you said yourself
in reply to what the other people said.”
Elise broke off under John’s supplicating eyes: he was looking at her as
if he wanted more than she was giving him, more than either her
attention or his tea. Elise’s breath came quickly, and the heavy row of
pink pearls round her small white throat rose and fell spasmodically.
“When I first saw you,” said John irrelevantly, “you were wearing those
pearls, and you had your hair up for the first time.”
Elise smiled faintly. “I remember,” she said. “Papa had just given them
to me because Hermione said I ought only to wear white, and I wanted to
wear pink. Of course Hermione was right—in America that summer girls
were only wearing white; but Papa said it didn’t matter what the other
girls wore. You could have lilies and pinks in the same garden without
any one’s throat being cut. So he gave me these. And you said if I were
an English girl and only sixteen years old I’d still be a flapper, and I
didn’t know what a flapper was, but I do now. I know lots of English
things.”
“Do you like England?” asked John earnestly, as if it were a personal
question. “Does it seem like home to you now, Elise?”
She hesitated a moment, then she said gently, “I should think any
country seems like home when the people you love are in it. You see what
I like best is being with the people I like as long as I know which to
attend to first.” Elise gave the ghost of a sigh, then she smiled
because she did not want John to know that she had voiced her only
grief. She didn’t want any one to be inconvenienced by knowing that she
had a grief at all.
There are many people who love to spare others pain and enjoy carrying
their brothers’ burdens; but they do not mind an audience. Elise never
wanted any one to know that she was bearing anything.
“Elise,” said John firmly, “do you know what I want? I want you to
attend to me first?”
Elise drew a quick breath, her eyes lingered on John’s, a little
startled, but not at all distressed. She had long ago wanted to attend
to John first. Her clear colourless skin became suffused with a deep
rose blush. Elise knew that John loved her, but she had not known, she
did not know now, what his love meant to her. John’s love for her was
three years old. Mambles was full of it, it was the background of her
life; she had grown used to its protectiveness.
A little frown fixed itself between her tender brows.
“You wouldn’t,” she murmured, “if I did like you John, want me to ever
give up Papa? You see he hasn’t any one now—not Mamma, or Arnold, and
just being wonderful must be so dull, if it only means outsiders.”
John shook his head.
“Never,” he said emphatically. “There isn’t a man on earth I admire and
like as I do your father. I consider it an honour to work for him. I
don’t ever want to take you away from him; but I do want to have you as
well.”
“More than this?” Elise asked gently.
“A great deal more than this,” said John with unmistakable solidity.
Elise’s eyes wavered; she wanted of course that John should have what he
wanted. It would be lovely to make his eyes stop looking anxious, and
smile. But, on the other hand, her mind was full of an apprehensive
picture. How would Hermione bear it? She had seen Hermione bearing
things she didn’t like before. John would probably bear them very much
better.
“But Hermione,” Elise said under her breath, “you won’t want me ever to
give up Hermione?”
“I don’t suppose for a moment I shall want you to give up your sister,”
John said in a more measured tone than he had used in referring to Mr.
Brett. “Why should you, darling, have to give up anything? I only want
you to have more.”
Elise did not reply that in her small but deeply felt experience having
more had invariably implied certain renunciations. She only said, “You
don’t know Hermione, John; but if you did, you’d feel the way I do about
her, and you’d help me so that she and dear Papa could understand each
other better. Hermione’s heart is broken, that’s what makes her so ill,
and sometimes so—difficult.
“Don’t you think if your heart’s broken, you just have to act difficult
at times? Papa’s so clever, but he’s been too happy himself to realise
about Hermione. Why he and Mamma had just an ideal marriage. I never
heard Papa say one sharp word to Mamma, so naturally he can’t feel the
way I do about Hermione. I haven’t been able to _do_ anything, but oh,
John—don’t you think that perhaps you and I together could work it so
that Papa could understand Hermione?”
John had a very great respect for Mr. Brett’s judgment, but he belonged
to the younger generation, and he knew how misguided parents are apt to
be about their children, and how wise children necessarily are about
their parents. He decided to keep an open mind on the subject of
Hermione.
“My dearest,” he said fervently, “I will always help you in whatever you
want—all my strength is yours.”
Elise gave a soft sigh of relief. All John’s strength would do
beautifully.
Very slowly she lifted her blue eyes again, and John knew that he had
received his signal.
He kneeled down beside her and kissed her. There seemed to both of them
to be nothing in the world so simple or so straightforward as their
love.