Also she presently told her, approaching it with caution, for she was
sure Lucy wouldn't like it, that as Everard was coming down next day she
thought it better to go back to Eaton Terrace in the morning.
'You two love-birds won't want me,' she said gaily, expecting and
prepared for opposition; but really, as the child was getting well so
quickly, there was no reason why she and Everard should be forced to
begin practising affection for each other here and now. Besides, in the
small bag she brought there had only been a nightgown and her washing
things, and she couldn't go on much longer on only that.
To her surprise Lucy not only agreed but looked relieved. Miss
Entwhistle was greatly surprised, and also greatly pleased. 'She adores
him,' she thought, 'and only wants to be alone with him. If Everard
makes her as happy as all that, who cares what he is like to me or to
anybody else in the world?'
And all the horrible, ridiculous things she had been thinking half an
hour before were blown away like so many cobwebs.
Just before half-past seven, while she was in her room on the other side
of the house tidying herself before facing Chesterton and the evening
meal--she had reduced it to the merest skeleton of a meal, but Chesterton
insisted on waiting, and all the usual ceremonies were observed--she was
startled by the sound of wheels on the gravel beneath the window. It
could only be Everard. He had come.
'Dear me,' said Miss Entwhistle to herself,--and she who had planned to
be gone so neatly before his arrival!
It would be idle to pretend that she wasn't very much perturbed,--she
was; and the brush with which she was tidying her pretty grey hair shook
in her hand. Dinner alone with Everard,--well, at least let her be
thankful that he hadn't arrived a few minutes later and found her
actually sitting in his chair. What would have happened if he had? Miss
Entwhistle, for all her dismay, couldn't help laughing. Also, she
encouraged herself for the encounter by remembering the doctor. Behind
his authority she was secure. She had developed, since Tuesday, from an
uninvited visitor into an indispensable adjunct. Not a nurse; Lucy
hadn't at any moment been positively ill enough for a nurse; but an
adjunct.
She listened, her brush suspended. There was no mistaking it: it was
certainly Everard, for she heard his voice. The wheels of the cab, after
the interval necessary for ejecting him, turned round again on the
drive, crunching much less, and went away, and presently there was his
well-known deliberate, heavy tread coming up the uncarpeted staircase.
Thank God for bedrooms, thought Miss Entwhistle, fervently brushing.
Where would one be without them and bathrooms,--places of legitimate
lockings-in, places even the most indignant host was bound to respect?
Now this wasn't the proper spirit in which to go down and begin getting
fond of Everard and giving him the opportunity of getting fond of her,
as she herself presently saw. Besides, at that very moment Lucy was
probably in his arms, all alight with joyful surprise, and if he could
make Lucy so happy there must be enough of good in him to enable him
to fulfil the very mild requirements of Lucy's aunt. Just bare
pleasantness, bare decency would be enough. She stoutly assured herself
of her certainty of being fond of Everard if only he would let her.
Sufficiently fond of him, that is; she didn't suppose any affection she
was going to feel for him would ever be likely to get the better of her
reason.
Immediately on Wemyss's arrival the silent house had burst into feverish
life. Doors banged, feet ran; and now Lizzie came hurrying along the
passage, and knocked at the door and told her breathlessly that dinner
would be later not for at least another half hour, because Mr. Wemyss
had come unexpectedly, and cook had to----
She didn't finish the sentence, she was in such a hurry to be off.
Miss Entwhistle, her simple preparations being complete, had nothing
left to do but sit in one of those wicker work chairs with thin, hard,
cretonne-covered upholstery, which are sometimes found in inhospitable
spare-rooms and wait.
She found this bad for her _morale_. There wasn't a book in the room, or
she would have distracted her thoughts by reading. She didn't want
dinner. She would have best liked to get into the bed she hadn't yet
slept once in, and stay there till it was time to go home, but her pride
blushed scarlet at such a cowardly desire. She arranged herself,
therefore, in the chair, and, since she couldn't read, tried to remember
something to say over to herself instead, some poem, or verse of a poem,
to take her attention off the coming dinner; and she was shocked to
find, as she sat there with her eyes shut to keep out the light that
glared on her from the middle of the ceiling, that she could remember
nothing but fragments: loose bits floating derelict round her mind,
broken spars that didn't even belong, she was afraid, to any really
magnificent whole. How Jim would have scolded her,--Jim who forgot
nothing that was beautiful.
By nature cool, in pious habits bred,
She looked on husbands with a virgin's dread....
Now where did that come from? And why should it come at all?
Such was the tone and manners of them all
No married lady at the house would call....
And that, for instance? She couldn't remember ever having read any poem
that could contain these lines, yet she must have; she certainly hadn't
invented them.
And this,--an absurd German thing Jim used to quote and laugh at:
Der Sultan winkt, Zuleika schweigt,
Und zeigt sich gänzlich abgeneigt....
Why should a thing like that rise now to the surface of her mind and
float round on it, while all the noble verse she had read and enjoyed,
which would have been of such use and support to her at this juncture,
was nowhere to be found, not a shred of it, in any corner of her brain?
What a brain, thought Miss Entwhistle, disgusted, sitting up very
straight in the wickerwork chair, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes
shut; what a contemptible, anæmic brain, deserting her like this, only
able to throw up to the surface when stirred, out of all the store of
splendid stuff put so assiduously into it during years and years of
life, couplets.
A sound she hadn't yet heard began to crawl round the house, and, even
while she wondered what it was, increased and increased till it seemed
to her at last as if it must fill the universe and reach to Eaton
Terrace.
It was that gong. Become active. Heavens, and what activity. She
listened amazed. The time it went on! It went on and on, beating in her
ears like the crack of doom.
When the three great final strokes were succeeded by silence, she got up
from her chair. The moment had come. A last couplet floated through her
brain,--her brain seemed to clutch at it:
Betwixt the stirrup and the ground
She mercy sought, she mercy found....
Now where did that come from? she asked herself distractedly, nervously
passing one hand over her already perfectly tidy hair and opening the
door with the other.
There was Wemyss, opening Lucy's door at the same moment.
'Oh how do you do, Everard,' said Miss Entwhistle, advancing with all
the precipitate and affectionate politeness of one who is greeting not
only a host but a nephew.
'Quite well thank you,' was Everard's slightly unexpected reply; but
logical, perfectly logical.
She held out her hand and he shook it, and then proceeded past her to
her bedroom door, which she had left open, and switched off the light,
which she had left on.
'Oh I'm sorry,' said Miss Entwhistle.
'That,' she thought, 'is one to Everard.'
She waited for his return, and then walked, followed by him in silence,
down the stairs.
'How do you find Lucy?' she asked when they had got to the bottom. She
didn't like Everard's silences; she remembered several of them during
that difference of opinion he and she had had about where Christmas
should be spent. They weighed on her; and she had the sensation of
wriggling beneath them like an earwig beneath a stone, and it humiliated
her to wriggle.
'Just as I expected,' he said. 'Perfectly well.'
'Oh no--not perfectly well,' exclaimed Miss Entwhistle, a vision of the
blue-wrapped little figure sitting weakly up against the pillows that
afternoon before her eyes. 'She is better to-day, but not nearly well.'
'You asked me what I thought, and I've told you,' said Wemyss.
No, it wouldn't be an impulsive affection, hers and Everard's, she
felt; it would, when it did come, be the result of slow and careful
preparation,--line upon line, here a little and there a little.
'Won't you go in?' he asked; and she perceived he had pushed the
dining-room door open and was holding it back with his arm while she,
thinking this, lingered.
'That,' she thought, 'is another to Everard,'--her second bungle; first
the light left on in her room, now keeping him waiting.
She hurried through the door, and then, vexed with herself for hurrying,
walked to her chair with almost an excess of deliberation.
'The doctor----' she began, when they were in their places, and
Chesterton was hovering in readiness to snatch the cover off the soup
the instant Wemyss had finished arranging his table-napkin.
'I wish to hear nothing about the doctor,' he interrupted.
Miss Entwhistle gave herself pains to be undaunted, and said with almost
an excess of naturalness, 'But I'd like to tell you.'
'It is no concern of mine,' he said.
'But you're her husband, you know,' said Miss Entwhistle, trying to
sound pleasant.
'I gave no orders,' said Wemyss.
'But he had to be sent for. The child----'
'So you say. So you said on the telephone. And I told you then you were
taking a great deal on yourself, unasked.'
Miss Entwhistle hadn't supposed that any one ever talked like this
before servants. She now knew that she had been mistaken.
'He's your doctor,' said Wemyss.
'My doctor?'
'I regard him entirely as your doctor.'
'I wish, Everard,' said Miss Entwhistle politely, after a pause, 'that I
understood.'
'You sent for him on your own responsibility, unasked. You must take the
consequences.'
'I don't know what you mean by the consequences,' said Miss Entwhistle,
who was getting further and further away from that beginning of
affection for Everard to which she had braced herself.
'The bill,' said Wemyss.
'Oh,' said Miss Entwhistle.
She was so much surprised that she could only ejaculate just that. Then
the idea that she was in the act of being nourished by Wemyss's soup
seemed to her so disagreeable that she put down her spoon.
'Certainly if you wish it,' she said.
'I do,' said Wemyss.
The conversation flagged.
Presently, sitting up very straight, refusing to take any notice of the
variety and speed of the thoughts rushing round inside her and
determined to behave as if she weren't minding anything, she said in a
very clear little voice which she strove to make sound pleasant, 'Did
you have a good journey down?'
'No,' said Wemyss, waving the soup away.
This as an answer, though no doubt strictly truthful, was too bald for
much to be done with it. Miss Entwhistle therefore merely echoed, as she
herself felt foolishly, 'No?'