Miss Entwhistle lived in a slim little house in Eaton Terrace. It was
one of those little London houses where you go in and there's a
dining-room, and you go up and there's a drawing-room, and you go up
again and there's a bedroom and a dressing-room, and you go up yet more
and there's a maid's room and a bathroom, and then that's all. For one
person it was just enough; for two it was difficult. It was so difficult
that Miss Entwhistle had never had any one stay with her before, and the
dressing-room had to be cleared out of all her clothes and toques, which
then had nowhere to go to and became objects that you met at night
hanging over banisters or perched with an odd air of dashingness on the
ends of the bath, before Lucy could go in.
But no Entwhistle ever minded things like that. No trouble seemed to any
of them too great to take for a friend; while as for one's own dear
niece, if only she could have been induced to take the real bedroom and
let her aunt, who knew the dressing-room's ways, sleep there instead,
that aunt--on such liberal principles was this family constructed--would
have been perfectly happy.
Lucy, of course, only smiled at that suggestion, and inserted herself
neatly into the dressing-room, and the first weeks of their mourning,
which Miss Entwhistle had dreaded for them both, proceeded to flow by
with a calm, an unruffledness, that could best be described by the word
placid.
In that small house, unless the inhabitants were accommodating and
adaptable, daily life would be a trial. Miss Entwhistle well knew Lucy
would give no trouble that she could help, but their both being in such
trouble themselves would, at such close quarters, she had been afraid,
inevitably keep their sorrow raw by sheer rubbing against each other.
To her surprise and great relief nothing of the sort happened. There
seemed to be no rawness to rub. Not only Lucy didn't fret--her white
face and heavy eyes of the days in Cornwall had gone--but she was almost
from the first placid. Just on leaving Cornwall, and for a day or two
after, she was a little _bouleversée_, and had a curious kind of
timidity in her manner to her aunt, and crept rather than walked about
the house, but this gradually disappeared; and if Miss Entwhistle hadn't
known her, hadn't known of her terrible loss, she would have said that
here was some one who was quietly happy. It was subdued, but there it
was, as if she had some private source of confidence and warmth. Had she
by any chance got religion? wondered her aunt, who herself had never had
it, and neither had Jim, and neither had any Entwhistles she had ever
heard of. She dismissed that. It was too unlikely for one of their
breed. But even the frequent necessary visits to the house in Bloomsbury
she and her father had lived in so long didn't quite blot out the odd
effect Lucy produced of being somehow inwardly secure. Presently, when
these sad settlings up were done with, and the books and furniture
stored, and the house handed over to the landlord, and she no longer had
to go to it and be among its memories, her face became what it used to
be,--delicately coloured, softly rounded, ready to light up at a word,
at a look.
Miss Entwhistle was puzzled. This serenity of the one who was, after
all, chief mourner, made her feel it would be ridiculous if she outdid
Lucy in grief. If Lucy could pull herself together so marvellously--and
she supposed it must be that, it must be that she was heroically pulling
herself together--she for her part wouldn't be behindhand. Her darling
Jim's memory should be honoured, then, like this: she would bless God
for him, bless God that she had had him, and in a high thankfulness
continue cheerfully on her way.
Such were some of Miss Entwhistle's reflections and conclusions as she
considered Lucy. She seemed to have no thought of the future,--again to
her aunt's surprise and relief, who had been afraid she would very soon
begin to worry about what she was to do next. She never talked of it;
she never apparently thought of it. She seemed to be--yes, that was the
word, decided Miss Entwhistle observing her--resting. But resting on
what? A second time Miss Entwhistle dismissed the idea of religion.
Impossible, she thought, that Jim's girl,--yet it did look very like
religion.
There was, it appeared, enough money left scraped together by Jim for
Lucy in case of his death to produce about two hundred pounds a year.
This wasn't much; but Lucy apparently didn't give it a thought. Probably
she didn't realise what it meant, thought her aunt, because of her life
with her father having been so easy, surrounded by all those necessities
for an invalid which were, in fact, to ordinary people luxuries. No one
had been appointed her guardian. There was no mention of Mr. Wemyss in
the will. It was a very short will, leaving everything to Lucy. This,
as far as it went, was admirable, thought Miss Entwhistle, but
unfortunately there was hardly anything to leave. Except books;
thousands of books, and the old charming furniture of the Bloomsbury
house. Well, Lucy should live with her for as long as she could endure
the dressing-room, and perhaps they might take a house together a little
less tiny, though Miss Entwhistle had lived in the one she was in for so
long that it wouldn't be very easy for her to leave it.
Meanwhile the first weeks of mourning slid by in an increasing serenity,
with London empty and no one to intrude on what became presently
distinctly recognisable as happiness. She and Lucy agreed so perfectly.
And they weren't altogether alone either, for Mr. Wemyss came regularly
twice a week, coming on the same days, and appearing so punctually on
the stroke of five that at last she began to set her clocks by him.
He, too, poor man, seemed to be pulling himself together. He had none of
the air of the recently bereaved, either in his features or his clothes.
Not that he wore coloured ties or anything like that, but he certainly
didn't produce an effect of blackness. His trousers, she observed, were
grey; and not a particularly dark grey either. Well, perhaps it was no
longer the fashion, thought Miss Entwhistle, eyeing these trousers with
some doubt, to be very unhappy. But she couldn't help thinking there
ought to be a band on his left arm to counteract the impression of
light-heartedness in his legs; a crape band, no matter how narrow, or a
band of black anything, not necessarily crape, such as she was sure it
was usual in these circumstances to wear.
However, whatever she felt about his legs she welcomed him with the
utmost cordiality, mindful of his kindness to them down in Cornwall and
of how she had clung to him there as her rock; and she soon got to
remember the way he liked his tea, and had the biggest chair placed
comfortably ready for him--the chairs were neither very big nor numerous
in her spare little drawing-room--and did all she could in the way of
hospitality and pleasant conversation. But the more she saw of him, and
the more she heard of his talk, the more she wondered at Jim.
Mr. Wemyss was most good-natured, and she was sure, and as she knew from
experience, was most kind and thoughtful; but the things he said were so
very unlike the things Jim said, and his way of looking at things was so
very unlike Jim's way. Not that there wasn't room in the world for
everybody, Miss Entwhistle reminded herself, sitting at her tea-table
observing Wemyss, who looked particularly big and prosperous in her
small frugal room, and no doubt one star differed from another in glory;
still, she did wonder at Jim. And if Mr. Wemyss could bear the loss of
his wife to the extent of grey trousers, how was it he couldn't bear
Jim's name so much as mentioned? Whenever the talk got on to Jim--it
couldn't be kept off him in a circle composed of his daughter and his
sister and his friend--she noticed that Mr. Wemyss went silent. She
would have taken this for excess of sensibility and the sign of a deep
capacity for faithful devotion if it hadn't been for those trousers.
Faced by them, it perplexed her.
While Miss Entwhistle was thinking like this and observing Wemyss, who
never observed her at all after a first moment of surprise that she
should look and behave so differently from the liquid lady of the
cottage in Cornwall, that she should sit so straight and move so
briskly, he and Lucy were, though present in the body, absent in love.
Round them was drawn that magic circle through which nobody and nothing
can penetrate, and within it they sat hand in hand and safe. Lucy's
whole heart was his. He only had to come into the room for her to feel
content. There was a naturalness, a bigness about his way of looking at
things that made intricate, tormenting feelings shrink away in his
presence ashamed. Quite apart from her love for him, her gratitude, her
longing that he should go on now being happy and forget his awful
tragedy, he was so very comfortable. She had never met any one so
comfortable to lean on mentally. Bodily, on the few occasions on which
her aunt was out of the room, he was comfortable too; he reminded her of
the very nicest of sofas,--expensive ones, all cushions. But mentally he
was more than comfortable, he was positively luxurious. Such perfect
rest, listening to his talk. No thinking needed. Things according to him
were either so, or so. With her father things had never been either so,
or so; and one had had to frown, and concentrate, and make efforts to
follow and understand his distinctions, his infinitely numerous,
delicate, difficult distinctions. Everard's plain division of everything
into two categories only, snow-white and jet-black, was as reposeful as
the Roman church. She hadn't got to strain or worry, she had only to
surrender. And to what love, to what safety! At night she couldn't go to
bed for thinking of how happy she was. She would sit quite still in the
little dressing-room, her hands in her lap, and a proverb she had read
somewhere running in her head:
When God shuts the door He opens the window.
Not for a moment, hardly, had she been left alone to suffer. Instantly,
almost, Everard had come into her life and saved her. Lucy had indeed,
as her aunt had twice suspected, got religion, but her religion was
Wemyss. Ah, how she loved him! And every night she slept with his last
letter under her pillow on the side of her heart.
As for Wemyss, if Lucy couldn't get over having got him he couldn't get
over having got Lucy. He hadn't had such happiness as this, of this
quality of tenderness, of goodness, in his life before. What he had felt
for Vera had not at any time, he was sure, even at the beginning, been
like this. While for the last few years--oh, well. Wemyss, when he found
himself thinking of Vera, pulled up short. He declined to think of her
now. She had filled his thoughts enough lately, and how terribly. His
little angel Lucy had healed that wound, and there was no use in
thinking of an old wound; nobody healthy ever did that. He had explained
to Lucy, who at first had been a little morbid, how wrong it is, how
really wicked, besides being intensely stupid, not to get over things.
Life, he had said, is for the living; let the dead have death. The
present is the only real possession a man has, whatever clever people
may say; and the wise man, who is also the natural man of simple healthy
instincts and a proper natural shrinking from death and disease, does
not allow the past, which after all anyhow is done for, to intrude upon,
much less spoil, the present. That is what, he explained, the past will
always do if it can. The only safe way to deal with it is to forget it.
'But I don't want to forget mine,' Lucy had said at that, opening her
eyes, which as usual had been shut, because the commas of Wemyss's talk
with her when they chanced to be alone were his soothing, soporific
kisses dropped gently on her closed eyelids. 'Father----'
'Oh, you may remember yours,' he had answered, smiling tenderly down at
the head lying on his breast. 'It's such a little one. But you'll see
when you're older if your Everard wasn't right.'
To Wemyss in his new happiness it seemed that Vera had belonged to
another life altogether, an elderly, stale life from which, being
healthy-minded, he had managed to unstick himself and to emerge born
again all new and fresh and fitted for the present. She was forty when
she died. She had started life five years younger than he was, but had
quickly caught him up and passed him, and had ended, he felt, by being
considerably his senior. And here was Lucy, only twenty-two anyhow, and
looking like twelve. The contrast never ceased to delight him, to fill
him with pride. And how pretty she was, now that she had left off
crying. He adored her bobbed hair that gave her the appearance of a
child or a very young boy, and he adored the little delicate lines of
her nose and nostrils, and her rather big, kind mouth that so easily
smiled, and her sweet eyes, the colour of Love-in-a-Mist. Not that he
set any store by prettiness, he told himself; all he asked in a woman
was devotion. But her being pretty would make it only the more exciting
when the moment came to show her to his friends, to show his little girl
to those friends who had dared slink away from him after Vera's death,
and say, 'Look here--look at this perfect little thing--_she_ believes
in me all right!'