IX

It was not only possible, but the fact. Aunt Dot had suspected, only she

hadn't suspected anything like all that was presently imparted to her,

and she found great difficulty in assimilating it. And two hours later

Lucy, standing in the middle of the drawing-room, was still passionately

saying to her, and saying it for perhaps the tenth time, 'But don't you

_see_? It's just _because_ what happened to him was so awful. It's

nature asserting itself. If he couldn't be engaged now, if he couldn't

reach up out of such a pit of blackness and get into touch with living

things again and somebody who sympathises and--is fond of him, he would

die, die or go mad; and oh, what's the _use_ to the world of somebody

good and fine being left to die or go mad? Aunt Dot, what's the _use_?'

And her aunt, sitting in her customary chair by the fireplace, continued

to assimilate with difficulty. Also her face was puckered into folds of

distress. She was seriously upset.

Lucy, looking at her, felt a kind of despair that she wasn't being able

to make her aunt, whom she loved, see what she saw, understand what she

understood, and so be, as she was, filled with confidence and happiness.

Not that she was happy at that moment; she, too, was seriously upset,

her face flushed, her eyes bright with effort to get Wemyss as she knew

him, as he so simply was, through into her aunt's consciousness.

She had made her clean breast with a completeness that had included the

confession that she did know what Mrs. Wemyss's accident had been, and

she had described it. Her aunt was painfully shocked. Anything so

horrible as that hadn't entered her mind. To fall past the very window

her husband was sitting at ... it seemed to her dreadful that Lucy

should be mixed up in it, and mixed up so instantly on the death of her

natural protector,--of her two natural protectors, for hadn't Mrs.

Wemyss as long as she existed also been one? She was bewildered, and

couldn't understand the violent reactions that Lucy appeared to look

upon as so natural in Wemyss. She would have concluded that she didn't

understand because she was too old, because she was out of touch with

the elasticities of the younger generation, but Wemyss must be very

nearly as old as herself. Certainly he was of the same generation; and

yet behold him, within a fortnight of his wife's most shocking death,

able to forget her, able to fall in love----

'But that's _why_--that's _why_,' Lucy cried when Miss Entwhistle said

this. 'He _had_ to forget, or die himself. It was beyond what anybody

could bear and stay sane----'

'I'm sure I'm very glad he should stay sane,' said Miss Entwhistle, more

and more puckered, 'but I can't help wishing it hadn't been you, Lucy,

who are assisting him to stay it.'

And then she repeated what at intervals she had kept on repeating with a

kind of stubborn helplessness, that her quarrel with Mr. Wemyss was that

he had got happy so very quickly.

'Those grey trousers,' she murmured.

No; Miss Entwhistle couldn't get over it. She couldn't understand it.

And Lucy, expounding and defending Wemyss in the middle of the room with

all the blaze and emotion of what was only too evidently genuine love,

was to her aunt an astonishing sight. That little thing, defending that

enormous man. Jim's daughter; Jim's cherished little daughter....

Miss Entwhistle, sitting in her chair, struggled among other struggles

to be fair, and reminded herself that Mr. Wemyss had proved himself to

be most kind and eager to help down in Cornwall,--though even on this

there was shed a new and disturbing light, and that now that she knew

everything, and the doubts that had made her perhaps be a little unjust

were out of the way and she could begin to consider him impartially, she

would probably very soon become sincerely attached to him. She hoped so

with all her heart. She was used to being attached to people. It was

normal to her to like and be liked. And there must be something more in

him than his fine appearance for Lucy to be so very fond of him.

She gave herself a shake. She told herself she was taking this thing

badly; that she ought not, just because it was an unusual situation, be

so ready to condemn it. Was she really only a conventional spinster,

shrinking back shocked at a touch of naked naturalness? Wasn't there

much in what that short-haired child was so passionately saying about

the rightness, the saneness, of reaction from horror? Wasn't it nature's

own protection against too much death? After all, what was the good of

doubling horror, of being so much horrified at the horrible that you

stayed rooted there and couldn't move, and became, with your starting

eyes and bristling hair, a horror yourself?

Better, of course, to pass on, as Lucy was explaining, to get on with

one's business, which wasn't death but life. Still--there were the

decencies. However desolate one would be in retirement, however much one

would suffer, there was a period, Miss Entwhistle felt, during which the

bereaved withdrew. Instinctively. The really bereaved _would_ want to

withdraw----

'Ah, but don't you _see_,' Lucy once more tried despairingly to explain,

'this wasn't just being bereaved--this was something simply too awful.

Of course Everard would have behaved in the ordinary way if it had been

an ordinary death.'

'So that the more terrible one's sorrow the more cheerfully one goes out

to tea,' said Miss Entwhistle, the remembrance of the light trousers at

one end of Wemyss and the unmistakably satisfied face at the other being

for a moment too much for her.

'Oh,' almost moaned Lucy at that, and her head drooped in a sudden

fatigue.

Miss Entwhistle got up quickly and put her arms round her. 'Forgive me,'

she said. 'That was just stupid and cruel. I think I'm hide-bound. I

think I've probably got into a rut. Help me out of it, Lucy. You shall

teach me to take heroic views----'

And she kissed her hot face tenderly, holding it close to her own.

'But if I could only make you _see_,' said Lucy, clinging to her, tears

in her voice.

'But I do see that you love him very much,' said Miss Entwhistle gently,

again very tenderly kissing her.

That afternoon when Wemyss appeared at five o'clock, it being his

bi-weekly day for calling, he found Lucy alone.

'Why, where----? How-----?' he asked, peeping round the drawing-room as

though Miss Entwhistle must be lurking behind a chair.

'I've told,' said Lucy, who looked tired.

Then he clasped her with a great hug to his heart. 'Everard's own little

love,' he said, kissing and kissing her. 'Everard's own good little

love.'

'Yes, but----' began Lucy faintly. She was, however, so much muffled and

engulfed that her voice didn't get through.

'Now wasn't I right?' he said triumphantly, holding her tight. 'Isn't

this as it should be? Just you and me, and nobody to watch or

interfere?'

'Yes, but----' began Lucy again.

'What do you say? "Yes, but?"' laughed Wemyss, bending his ear. 'Yes

without any but, you precious little thing. Buts don't exist for

us--only yeses.'

And on these lines the interview continued for quite a long time before

Lucy succeeded in telling him that her aunt had been much upset.

Wemyss minded that so little that he didn't even ask why. He was

completely incurious about anything her aunt might think. 'Who cares?'

he said, drawing her to his heart again. 'Who cares? We've got each

other. What does anything else matter? If you had fifty aunts, all being

upset, what would it matter? What can it matter to us?'

And Lucy, who was exhausted by her morning, felt too as she nestled

close to him that nothing did matter so long as he was there. But the

difficulty was that he wasn't there most of the time, and her aunt was,

and she loved her aunt and did very much hate that she should be upset.

She tried to convey this to Wemyss, but he didn't understand. When it

came to Miss Entwhistle he was as unable to understand Lucy as Miss

Entwhistle was unable to understand her when it came to Wemyss. Only

Wemyss didn't in the least mind not understanding. Aunts. What were

they? Insects. He laughed, and said his little love couldn't have it

both ways; she couldn't eat her cake, which was her Everard, and have it

too, which was her aunt; and he kissed her hair and asked who was a

complicated little baby, and rocked her gently to and fro in his arms,

and Lucy was amused at that and laughed too, and forgot her aunt, and

forgot everything except how much she loved him.

Meanwhile Miss Entwhistle was spending a diligent afternoon in the

newspaper room of the British Museum. She was reading _The Times_ report

of the Wemyss accident and inquest; and if she had been upset by what

Lucy told her in the morning she was even more upset by what she read in

the afternoon. Lucy hadn't mentioned that suggestion of suicide. Perhaps

he hadn't told her. Suicide. Well, there had been no evidence. There was

an open verdict. It had been a suggestion made by a servant, perhaps a

servant with a grudge. And even if it had been true, probably the poor

creature had discovered she had some incurable disease, or she may have

had some loss that broke her down temporarily, and--oh, there were many

explanations; respectable, ordinary explanations.

Miss Entwhistle walked home slowly, loitering at shop windows, staring

at hats and blouses that she never saw, spinning out her walk to its

utmost, trying to think. Suicide. How desolate it sounded on that

beautiful afternoon. Such a giving up. Such a defeat. Why should she

have given up? Why should she have been defeated? But it wasn't true.

The coroner had said there was no evidence to show how she came by her

death.

Miss Entwhistle walked slower and slower. The nearer she got to Eaton

Terrace the more unwillingly did she advance. When she reached Belgrave

Square she went right round it twice, lingering at the garden railings

studying the habits of birds. She had been out all the afternoon, and,

as those who have walked it know, it is a long way from the British

Museum to Eaton Terrace. Also it was a hot day and her feet ached, and

she very much would have liked to be in her own chair in her cool

drawing-room having her tea. But there in that drawing-room would

probably still be Mr. Wemyss, no longer now to be Mr. Wemyss for

her--would she really have to call him Everard?--or she might meet him

on the stairs--narrow stairs; or in the hall--also narrow, which he

would fill up; or on her doorstep she might meet him, filling up her

doorstep; or, when she turned the corner into her street, there, coming

towards her, might be the triumphant trousers.

No, she felt she couldn't stand seeing him that day. So she lingered

forlornly watching the sparrows inside the garden railings of Belgrave

Square, balancing first on one and then on the other of those feet that

ached.

This was only the beginning, she thought; this was only the first of

many days for her of wandering homelessly round. Her house was too small

to hold both herself and love-making. If it had been the slender

love-making of the young man who was so doggedly devoted to Lucy, she

felt it wouldn't have been too small. He would have made love

youthfully, shyly. She could have sat quite happily in the dining-room

while the suitably paired young people dallied delicately together

overhead. But she couldn't bear the thought of being cramped up so near

Mr. Wemyss's--no, Everard's; she had better get used to that at

once--love-making. His way of courting wouldn't be,--she searched about

in her uneasy mind for a word, and found vegetarian. Yes; that word

sufficiently indicated what she meant: it wouldn't be vegetarian.

Miss Entwhistle drifted away from the railings, and turning her back on

her own direction wandered towards Sloane Street. There she saw an

omnibus stopping to let some one out. Wanting very much to sit down she

made an effort and caught it, and squeezing herself into its vacant seat

gave herself up to wherever it should take her.

It took her to the City; first to the City, and then to strange places

beyond. She let it take her. Her clothes became steadily more

fashionable the farther the omnibus went. She ended by being conspicuous

and stared at. But she was determined to give the widest margin to the

love-making and go the whole way, and she did.

For an hour and a half the omnibus went on and on. She had no idea

omnibuses did such things. When it finally stopped she sat still; and

the conductor, who had gradually come to share the growing surprise of

the relays of increasingly poor passengers, asked her what address she

wanted.

She said she wanted Sloane Street.

He was unable to believe it, and tried to reason with her, but she sat

firm in her place and persisted.

At nine o'clock he put her down where he had taken her up. She

disappeared into the darkness with the movements of one who is stiff,

and he winked at the passenger nearest the door and touched his

forehead.

But as she climbed wearily and hungrily up her steps and let herself in

with her latchkey, she felt it had been well worth it; for that one day

at least she had escaped Mr. We---- no, Everard.

X

Miss Entwhistle, however, made up her mind very firmly that after this

one afternoon of giving herself up to her feelings she was going to

behave in the only way that is wise when faced by an inevitable

marriage, the way of sympathy and friendliness.

Too often had she seen the first indignation of disappointed parents at

the marriages of their children harden into a matter of pride, a matter

of doggedness and principle, and finally become an attitude unable to be

altered, long after years had made it ridiculous. If the marriages

turned out happy, how absurd to persist in an antiquated disapproval; if

they turned out wretched, then how urgent the special need for love.

Thus Miss Entwhistle reasoned that first sleepless night in bed, and

on these lines she proceeded during the next few months. They were

trying months. She used up all she had of gallantry in sticking to

her determination. Lucy's instinct had been sound, that wish to keep

her engagement secret from her aunt for as long as possible. Miss

Entwhistle, always thin, grew still more thin in her constant daily and

hourly struggle to be pleased, to enter into Lucy's happiness, to make

things easy for her, to protect her from the notice and inquiry of their

friends, to look hopefully and with as much of Lucy's eyes as she could

at Everard and at the future.

'She isn't simple enough,' Wemyss would say to Lucy if ever she said

anything about her aunt's increasing appearance of strain and overwork.

'She should take things more naturally. Look at us.' For it was the

one fly in Lucy's otherwise perfect ointment, this intermittent

consciousness that her aunt wasn't altogether happy.

And then he would ask her, laying his head on hers as he stood with his

arms about her, who had taught his little girl to be simple; and they

would laugh, and kiss, and talk of other things.

Miss Entwhistle was unable to be simple in Wemyss's sense. She tried

to; for when she saw his fresh, unlined face, his forehead without a

wrinkle on it, and compared it in the glass with her own which was

only three years older, she thought there must be a good deal to be

said for single-mindedness. It was Lucy who told her Everard was so

single-minded. He took one thing at a time, she said, concentrating

quietly. When he had completely finished it off then, and not till then,

he went on to the next. He knew his own mind. Didn't Aunt Dot think it

was a great thing to know one's own mind? Instead of wobbling about,

wasting one's thoughts and energies on side-shows?

This was the very language of Wemyss; and Miss Entwhistle, after having

been listening to him in the afternoon--for every time he came she put

in a brief appearance just for the look of the thing, and on the

Saturday and Sunday outings she was invariably present the whole

time--felt it a little hard that when at last she had reached the end of

the day and the harbour of her empty drawing-room she should, through

the mouth of Lucy, have to listen to him all the evening as well.

But she always agreed, and said Yes, he was a great dear; for when an

only and much-loved niece is certainly going to marry, the least a wise

aunt can call her future nephew is a great dear. She will make this

warmer and more varied if she can, but at least she will say that much.

Miss Entwhistle tried to think of variations, afraid Lucy might notice a

certain sameness, and once with an effort she faltered out that he

seemed to be a--a real darling; but it had a hollow sound, and she

didn't repeat it. Besides, Lucy was quite satisfied with the other.

She used, sitting at her aunt's feet in the evenings--Wemyss never came

in the evenings because he distrusted the probable dinner--sometimes to

make her aunt say it again, by asking a little anxiously, 'But you _do_

think him a great dear, don't you, Aunt Dot?' Whereupon Miss Entwhistle,

afraid her last expression of that opinion may have been absent-minded,

would hastily exclaim with almost excess of emphasis, 'Oh, a _great_

dear.'

Perhaps he was a dear. She didn't know. What had she against him? She

didn't know. He was too old, that was one thing; but the next minute,

after hearing something he had said or laughed at, she thought he wasn't

old enough. Of course what she really had against him was that he had

got over his wife's shocking death so quickly. Yet she admitted there

was much in Lucy's explanation of this as a sheer instinctive gesture of

self-defence. Besides, she couldn't keep it up as a grudge against him

for ever; with every day it mattered less. And sometimes Miss Entwhistle

even doubted whether it was this that mattered to her at all,--whether

it was not rather some quite small things that she really objected to: a

want of fastidiousness, for instance, a forgetfulness of the minor

courtesies,--the objections, in a word, she told herself smiling, of an

old maid. Lucy seemed not to mind his blunders in these directions in

the least. She seemed positively, thought her aunt, to take a kind of

pride in them, delighting in everything he said or did with the adoring

tenderness of a young mother watching the pranks of her first-born. She

laughed gaily; she let him caress her openly. She too, thought Miss

Entwhistle, had become what she no doubt would say was single-minded.

Well, perhaps all this was a spinster's way of feeling about a type not

previously met with, and she had got--again she reproached herself--into

an elderly groove. Jim's friends,--well, they had been different, but

not necessarily better. Mr. Wemyss would call them, she was sure, a

finicking lot.

When in October London began to fill again, and Jim's friends came to

look her and Lucy up and showed a tendency, many of them, to keep on

doing it, a new struggle was added to her others, the struggle to

prevent their meeting Wemyss. He wouldn't, she was convinced, be able to

hide his proprietorship in Lucy, and Lucy wouldn't ever get that look of

tenderness out of her eyes when they rested on him. Questions as to who

he was would naturally be asked, and one or other of Jim's friends would

be sure to remember the affair of Mrs. Wemyss's death; indeed, that day

she went to the British Museum and read the report of it she had been

amazed that she hadn't seen it at the time. It took up so much of the

paper that she was bound to have seen it if she had seen a paper at all.

She could only suppose that as she was visiting friends just then, she

chanced that day to have been in the act of leaving or arriving, and

that if she bought a paper on the journey she had looked, as was

sometimes her way in trains, not at it but out of the window.

She felt she hadn't the strength to support being questioned, and in her

turn have to embark on the explanation and defence of Wemyss. There was

too much of him, she felt, to be explained. He ought to be separated

into sections, and taken gradually and bit by bit,--but far best not to

produce him, to keep him from meeting her friends. She therefore

arranged a day in the week when she would be at home, and discouraged

every one from the waste of time of trying to call on her on other days.

Then presently the afternoon became an evening once a week, when whoever

liked could come in after dinner and talk and drink coffee, because the

evening was safer; made safe by Wemyss's conviction--he hadn't concealed

it--that the dinners of maiden ladies were notoriously both scanty and

bad.

Lucy would have preferred never to see a soul except Wemyss, who was all

she wanted, all she asked for in life; but she did see her aunt's point,

that only by pinning their friends to a day and an hour could the risk

of their overflowing into precious moments be avoided. This is how Miss

Entwhistle put it to her, wondering as she said it at her own growing

ability in artfulness.

She had an old friend living in Chesham Street, a widow full of that

ripe wisdom that sometimes comes at the end to those who have survived

marriage; and to her, when the autumn brought her back to London, Miss

Entwhistle went occasionally in search of comfort.

'What in the whole world puts such a gulf between two affections and

comprehensions as a new love?' she asked one day, freshly struck,

because of something Lucy had said, by the distance she had travelled.

Lucy was quite a tiny figure now, so far away from her had she moved;

she couldn't even get her voice to carry to her, much less still hold on

to her with her hands.