A CLOUD slid over the sun; the stream went opaque as tortoise-shell.
Then, startling Hugo, the water suddenly flushed with light as the
cloud moved east. Minnows, disturbed like thoughts, darted shadowy over
the clear yellow stare of the stones. He dipped his stick in the water,
then, drawing it out, thoughtfully looked at the shining end. At this
point: eighteen inches; the stream, divided in two deep channels by the
island of turf where he stood, went hurrying to the Darra. In its fold
of the Darra valley, the high white mill would remain sardonic. He was
swept by an irresistible anger back to that affair of the pistol. For
Marda had written: her hand had healed; no one had asked any questions
or wondered, she said.
She had written to Lois, sending Hugo this message. It had pleased both
the girls to underline his exclusion. She wrote also, Leslie had given
her a dog--a correct dog, Lois expected, like all that was best in
English country house life. Marda could not think what to do with the
dog till she married; she would have to leave it in Kent.... And what
else did Marda say, Francie had wanted to know. But Lois, who seemed
to have swallowed the letter, postmark and all, could not remember.
Later, she did seek out Hugo and offer to show him.... But he had put
up surprise. “Oh? Was there any particular--?” No, he did not think
on the whole he would trouble her.... Would the child see, he wondered,
that the little oblique snub was not intended to stop at _her_, but
to go past? His look now fell empty, reflective, on the tawny glass
sliding water.
The child, having seen, went upstairs to describe his behaviour to
Marda. Her unreticence was immoderate, though she was sensitive for
him. She wrote scrupulously, with an affect of hardness.
“He is terrible, and, as the end of everything, they are to build a
bungalow. _She_ has it all her own way now; I don’t know if he still
even brushes her hair. Since you went, it has been the same time all
day: three o’clock, after a long lunch. We all talk about my future (by
common consent I am about nine now, very distracting and sunny; they
like to have me about). It is to be a school of art, certainly.--Why
did you never tell them I couldn’t draw?--But we can’t decide where.
London, in view of my age, is supposed to be too large. In Dublin,
a man who came to tea yesterday said there might be high explosives
inside all the casts with capacious figures. In Cork I might pick up
an accent, and Paris they will not hear of--my wretched virtue. But as
a matter of fact, I have no future, in their sense. I have promised to
marry Gerald.”
Here she paused, for from now on it was all obscure ahead of her.
Reading back, she was surprised at the woman she was. She took this
merciless penetration for maturity’s. But when she looked for Gerald
there seemed too much of him. He was a wood in which she counted from
tree to tree--all hers--and knew the boundary wall right round. But how
to measure this unaccountable darkness between the trees, this living
silence? So she turned back to Mr. Montmorency, adding a paragraph. He
had, this morning, snubbed her.
She would have been surprised to have seen him, at this same moment,
step across to the island and stand there rootedly. And he, his
whereabouts even so much as guessed at, would have been quite at
her mercy. For to have followed the stream to this loneliest reach,
beyond the plantation wall, where the meadow’s hedge trailed unknown
blackberries over the water, was not to have walked, to have strolled
even, but to have betrayed oneself in an emotional kind of straying.
Further down, stepping-stones had been displaced by last winter’s
flood, there was a ruined cottage; nobody came here. Even Lois had
given up, since her eighteenth birthday, coming to lie on her stomach
along the bank, weep out a bottomless despair at nothing and look at
herself in the stream. And this wildness within the demesne boundaries,
within sound of the farmyard bell, had a particular desolation.
Hugo was pleased with the place; here he seemed to have stepped
through into some kind of nonexistence. And here, divorced equally
from fact and from probability, he set up a stage for himself: the
hall’s half-light. Marda’s hand is on the wide scrolled curve of
the baluster rail: he touches her still and electric hand with the
deliberation of certainty, all the senses running into his touch. She
stares recognition fixedly, darkly back.... For though in actuality
she had had only one mood for him--cool and equivocal--he, now frantic
with this power disconnected from life, could command her whole range
imaginatively: her very features became his actors. And if this were
not love ...
He was pleased with the place. They must all, he expected, be looking
for him: it produced the faintest vibration behind the solitude. This
morning, Myra was driving into Clonmore to lunch with the Boatleys;
she had asked him to come, he had said he would see. He had intended
by this “Good God, no,” and if she were fool enough to interpret it
otherwise there was a rightness about her delay in starting. Francie
would certainly go; she was painfully fascinated by military society.
She would now be standing out on the steps, grey net veil strained
elegantly over the tip of her nose, looking at her gloves in despair,
persisting: “He must be _somewhere!_”
“How many of us do they really expect?” said Francie at last, getting
into the car disconsolate.
Lady Naylor had not the slightest idea. “But they are accustomed to
Ireland. She was a Vere Scott. And they know that I usually fill the
car.”
“You’re not taking Lois?”
“Lois goes into Clonmore quite enough,” replied Lady Naylor.
For Lady Naylor had further reasons for going into Clonmore. She had
an assignation with Gerald at half-past three, in Mrs. Fogarty’s
drawing-room. Fridays were Club days, Mrs. Fogarty would be “up at the
tennis,” and her drawing-room, disembarrassed for once of her large
personality, remained at the disposition of friends. Lady Naylor,
though she deplored Mrs. Fogarty’s taste in beads, her husband, her
stays--which stuck out half-way up her back in a frill--and her too
overflowing maternity, had fallen into the general habit of using
her house as a kind of Ladies’ Club, dropping in there at all times
to leave parcels, wash her hands or meet friends. And she had the
impression, always, that the maid who admitted her ran upstairs at
once to put Mr. Fogarty under lock and key. Still, one knew that one’s
coming gave pleasure and gratification: she would enter the little
drawing-room, even when empty, with her queenliness at its full.
Gerald, questioning but elated, turned up a little before time, much
braced in and polished about the belt. He had never been given an
assignation so directly. For she had said (this now divinely probable
aunt of his): “I may be at the Fogartys, resting, about half-past
three. If you should be passing--though of course you may not be and
I do not want to keep you away from the tennis--you might look in and
have a chat. For it has been too bad to-day, I have hardly seen you. I
have missed our usual talk. There is still so much ... But I dare say
you won’t be passing.” Her look, a special point to its wide-pupilled
eagerness, transposed this to the imperative. The vigorous arch of
her eyebrows insisted strongly. He, feeling himself ordered like
a taxi--better still, like a nephew--had flushed with pleasure.
_Rath_-er; he’d make a point--(would she then call him Gerald?). “Of
course, I may not be there; we may not even come in; it is all quite
uncertain,” said Lady Naylor.
Riding home, the intoxication of Gerald had mounted. He guessed that
she never rested, rarely leaned back in a chair, never pushed up her
hat with a sigh or stretched tender feet out, unbuttoning shoes. She
would remain imperious, even in Oxford Street. So she was contriving
for him; a special tribute.
Lady Naylor, coming in to the Fogartys’ soon after four, was annoyed
to find Gerald before her. She had now, instead of being discovered,
to manœuvre more or less openly for position. Disregarding the chair
Gerald trundled up with its load of cushions, she placed herself
(unaccountably, it would have to appear) on the narrow window-seat.
Thus, she conceded no more to the room than an imposing silhouette
of hat and boa, while Gerald, glancing round pessimistically at
the chairs, remaining with elbow planted among photo-frames on the
mantelpiece, was exposed to her full in the strained green light coming
over the bushes.
“Such a day,” she sighed briskly. “We have lunched with the Boatleys.
What a delightful Colonel he must be! _She_, you know, is Irish; a Vere
Scott. We must seem ridiculous to you, over here, the way we are all
related.”
“Topping, I think,” said Gerald.
“Oh, I don’t know! Now you lucky people seem to have no relations at
all; that must feel so independent.”
“I have dozens.”
“Indeed? All in Surrey?”
“Scattered about.”
“That sounds to _me_, of course,” remarked Lady Naylor, pulling her
gloves off brightly, “exceedingly restless. But you all _came_ from
Surrey, didn’t you?”
“More or less,” said Gerald, who was not sure. The Boatleys had
not been sure where he came from, either; her day so far had been
unsatisfactory.
“Now I do hope I’m not keeping you from smoking?”
She was. He smiled and lighted a cigarette. “You don’t ...?”
“Oh dear me, no, I am quite old-fashioned. Now tell me--you know how
I hate all this gossip in a garrison neighbourhood, but there is
something I must set right. What is this nonsense I hear about Livvy
Thompson? You know she’s a friend of my niece’s and comes a good deal
to our house, and I do feel I ought to refute these stories about her.”
“Oh?” said Gerald, alarmed. “I had no idea.”
“Hadn’t you,” said Lady Naylor. “Well, you are a friend of the young
man Mr. Armstrong’s, so I felt I’d come straight to you. It appears
they were seen in Cork having tea rather intimately and in consequence
there are all sorts of rumours. Now it doesn’t seem fair to a young
girl, at the beginning of life, having her name coupled.”
“I should have thought,” said Gerald rather stiffly, “anyone could see
Miss Thompson was entirely straight. And as for Armstrong-- They are
engaged, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh, nonsense,” said Lady Naylor pleasantly.
“Oh yes,” he nodded, then with his rather engaging childishness looked
at her under his lashes. “But they don’t want--”
“To begin with, the Thompsons would never hear of it. And they would be
quite right. Of course, poor Livvy is motherless--”
“But many people are,” said Gerald, faintly aggressive. “Lois is.”
“Oh, naturally we should never consider a marriage like that for Lois.
The point would not even arise. But even for Livvy-- And then think
of the young man’s career: these early marriages ruin careers, and
engagements are nearly as bad. I know Colonel Boatley feels-- No,
what you should do, I think, is: have a straight sensible talk with
your friend Mr. Armstrong. I know how much you young men will take from
each other. I think as a friend you should say to him--”
“But look here--” began Gerald, and paused. “Look here, Lady
Naylor--” He stopped dead and looked round the room, which was
darker since she had come in: the afternoon was clouding over. He was
disengaging himself with some anguish of illusions which he had brought
here and which during the first minute or so of their talk had been
fortified. When they came to Surrey, he had thought she was hoping to
meet his mother. Crossing his legs, he rubbed the side of one shoe on
the other with a slight creak at which she, betraying her tensity,
started. Standing with lowered eyes, with an air of heaviness and
confusion, he noted this movement, a tremor of light round the edge of
her boa. With unusual calmness and virility he said:
“As a matter of fact, I love Lois.”
“Oh yes. But I’m afraid, you know, that she doesn’t love you,” said the
aunt equably.
He overruled this without comment, simply by maintaining his attitude.
For all his physical lightness and vigour, there was a quality in him
she would describe as stodginess. “Then I gather she’s told you we--”
“Oh, she’s naturally pleased that you like her. And at her age, with
her temperament, of course it is nice to love anyone.”
“But you’ve just said she doesn’t--”
“Not as I understand love.”
“But so long,” said Gerald, with the particular urbanity of an approach
to rudeness, “so long as she and I both mean the same thing.”
“But you don’t,” said his friend in her kind, social voice. “That is
what I am trying to make you see. With her temperament--”
“_I_ haven’t noticed her temperament,” said Gerald loyally, as if a
temperament were a hump.
“Now that alone,” exclaimed Lady Naylor, waving her gloves in a rapid
gesticulation, “would make a marriage quite fatal.... Mr. Lesworth, I
don’t want to have to imagine you miserable. I have no sons of my own,
you know, and Laurence being so intellectual-- And there is another
thing ...” She paused, and with unusual nervousness, with a movement
almost of Francie’s, touched her boa, her jabot, two carnations pinned
in the lace. She had now to tilt straight at indecency. There was this
question of money--a subject the English made free with, as free with
as what was below their diaphragms, but from which her whole modesty
shrank. “You may think me dreadful,” she said, “but there are things
in life one must face. After all, I am Lois’s aunt....”
Gerald, blushing, stood agonized to attention.
“There is money,” she brought out at last. “I mean, you haven’t any,
have you? Of course, I don’t see why you should have. But two people
must live, though it’s all rather sordid. However, this need not arise.
But I just want to show you--”
“I know she’s got a beautiful home,” he said glumly.
“However ... You see, it’s impossible every way. But first and last,
she does not love you.”
He was forced into the position which he would have described to a
friend as bloody, of asserting she _did_. “Though I cannot think why.”
“Oh, but so many girls would!” she cried earnestly. “But for Lois I
do think--we all think--a school of art. She cares for her drawing
intensely.”
“She never speaks of it.”
“Ah, that just shows ... Lack of sympathy!” said the aunt with mournful
complacency. “And it isn’t simply your age; it would be the same thing
if you were a captain or even a major. Now I do think you ought to be
sensible. It can all pass off so quietly. Nobody knows except me. Now
what I suggest--”
“--She might have told me she’d told you!” He stared round the changed
room bitterly.
“That was just what I didn’t encourage, to tell you the truth. Oh, the
child was most honest. But I thought you and I should approach this
quite fresh and unprejudiced.”
“Did we have to?”
“Oh, Mr. Lesworth!” she cried, disconcerted. She resumed, firmly but
with inspiration, something between a hospital nurse and a prophetess:
“The less talk, the less indirect discussion round and about things,
the better, I always think.”
While she considered her gloves and with gathering satisfaction
prepared to put one of them on, he stood half-turned away from her,
stubborn but indecisive. An unusual pendulum swung in him, he was
ruined--resolute--ruined. He was dark with perplexed anger, from which
his invincible “niceness” stood, in deprecation, aside. She blasphemed,
and yet he had to admire her four-square propriety, her sound sense,
the price she set on his Lois. And love, meanwhile, did not so much
lie bleeding as sit back stunned, bruised, a little craven from shock.
Gerald drew in his chin, swallowed, put a finger inside his collar as
though to loosen it.
“Then I understand you don’t like this: you’re going to stop it?”
“--Now, my dear Mr. Lesworth, do think: would I ever ‘stop’ anything?”
“--You’re going to stop it because I’m too young and too poor and not
‘county’ enough--or whatever I ought to be?”
“You have entirely misunderstood me,” cried Lady Naylor, hurt.
“You don’t have to tell me I’m not good enough: that’s what I’ve
battered my head against ever since--”
“We all think you’re charming--the Montmorencys, every one! You know
we’re delighted to see you--”
“Oh, I’m all right for tennis,” said Gerald without rancour.
“There is no one I’d rather--as far as that goes--” began Lady Naylor
warmly.
“You feel it’s up to you to stop it,” he summed up. “And I can see
that from your point of view you’re quite right. But there are some
things you can’t stop. God knows, I’ve got little enough for Lois, and
she ought to have everything, straight off, now. But I swear I’ll see
that she gets it. I’ll give up the Army, anything. I _know_ I’m going
to work things out. If it were only what _I_ want-- But she loves
me--I dare say she’s pretty mad--but she does love me; I’ve looked at
her eyes, I know. If she hadn’t seemed--if I hadn’t felt--if it hadn’t
been just the only thing for us both, I’d never have said a word--I
swear--I’d have died sooner.”
“But she agrees with every one,” said Lady Naylor, taking off the glove
again in despair. “She is extremely keen to go to this school of art.”
“Where?” he said violently.
“Some good school.”
“Do you expect me not to trust her?”
“I should have a straightforward, sensible talk.”
“You’re not going to stop me seeing her?”
“I don’t know what sort of girls’ mothers and aunts you’re accustomed
to,” she said, nettled, “but how could you expect me to do such a
preposterous thing? It would be not only unkind but exceedingly
foolish. To begin with, she is not my own niece at all. It would be
for her uncle to decide. But Sir Richard is very easily worried: I
particularly do not wish-- You know we are always delighted to see
you at any time ...”
She paused. “It’s most awfully kind of you,” said he, by reflex action.
“In these days of frank unsentimental friendship between young people,
I do not see why you two should not have a perfectly friendly, sensible
talk. Of course there must be _no_ ... I mean, I know I can trust you
... I mean, you do quite understand you are not engaged, and not being
engaged there can be no question of--?”
“I promise I won’t kiss her.”
Lady Naylor was much embarrassed. She laughed impersonally and arranged
her boa. She expressed some envy of this generation, its frank
friendships.
“I don’t think I am very modern,” said Gerald flatly.
“Now Laurence is too modern: he does not seem to care about girls at
all.... For the present, I’d leave love out of the question--”
“But I thought that _was_ the question!”
A shadow went past the window. “Here comes Mrs. Montmorency,” said
Gerald. And he touched his moustache and blinked and looked round,
wondering which chair to offer.
“That is too bad! I sent her up to the Rectory.”
“Perhaps they were out.”
“I told her to wait; there would be plenty to read in the
drawing-room-- Well, you do understand, don’t you?”
“I’m afraid I--”
Francie was shown in. “Oh!” she cried, “what a lot of cushions!
Kittens! Fancy sitting on them, I should feel like a cannibal. No, I
don’t mean-- Mr. Lesworth! Isn’t this nice! Are those photographs
of your regiment? I had no idea there were so many officers.... Myra,
I remembered a little something I had to get at the chemist’s, so I
thought I’d call in here and save you that climb up the hill. They were
all out.”
“Well, that was very sweet of you, Francie,” said Lady Naylor.
“Oh, how patriotic!” cried Francie, knocking two cushions covered
with Union Jacks off the sofa. “She’s a Catholic, isn’t she? Oh, Mr.
Lesworth, don’t bother; I’m so clumsy.... I had no idea we were going
to meet you. Isn’t it a pity now that we didn’t bring Lois? Myra, isn’t
it too bad Lois didn’t come too.”
“Yes, it does seem a pity,” said Lady Naylor. Still faintly regretful
she got up, looked at herself in a mirror, arranged her boa and pulled
down the brim of her hat. Then she shook hands with Gerald warmly,
saying how much she had enjoyed their talk.