One day in early May Sir John Barclay, who had been lunching at "Happy
House," managed to slip as he went down the steps into the garden and
tore the tendons away from one of his ankles. Grisel telephoned for the
doctor, who bound it up and gave Sir John, who was suffering acute pain,
a quietening draught of some kind, and went away leaving Grisel and her
lover in the dismal drawing-room alone together.
"Did it hurt much?" she asked anxiously.
He nodded, "Yes, ridiculously. It is odd how a little injury like that
can hurt so much more than a good many serious ones." After a moment he
added, looking thoughtfully at her as she moved about setting the room
to rights, "It is exactly the same with mental pain, too, my dear. Ever
noticed that?"
"What do you mean?" She turned at the door, grasping the basin of cold
water in which the bandages had been wetted.
"I mean that some little annoyance or disappointment," he went on
slowly, feeling his way, "often causes one more real discomfort than a
big blow would."
She nodded listlessly. "I suppose so. I'll be back in a minute, John."
The strengthening spring sunshine fell through a window full on his face
as he waited for her to come back, and there was something very
thoughtful and a little sad in his strong blue eyes. In spite of his
white hair he looked very young for his years, and his face, finely
modelled and dignified, held a look of mental clarity and freshness,
that, combined with its dominant expression of quiet energy, was very
striking. But a heat wave had been hovering over London for the last
three days and the humid warmth had tired everyone, and even he looked a
little fagged.
As Grisel came back and drew together the hideous lace curtains that the
doctor had wrenched to the ends of the poles, he said gently:
"This heat is exhausting you, my dear. You look fagged and worn."
"Why not say hideous at once?" she laughed, with a little edge in her
voice and her slim hands moving restlessly as she sat down.
"For two reasons, the first is that you are not looking or never could
look hideous; the second that I am too old and too old-fashioned for the
brutal frankness that seems so popular nowadays." After a moment he
added quietly, "I leave that kind of downrightness to younger men--such
as Oliver Wick."
She started. "Oliver Wick's manners are perfectly abominable, and they
seem to get worse. The beautiful Miss Perkins does not appear to have a
very good influence on him."
John Barclay's blue eyes did not waver from her face.
"And yet," he said, "there is no doubt, at least to my mind, that the
young man is very much in love."
"Oh, he's _always_ very much in love," she retorted, the edge in her
voice sharpening. "Why, it is only nine months ago that he was making a
perfect fool of himself about--about a friend of mine."
Barclay nodded. "Yes, I gathered from something his mother said that
the young lady with the floral name has not the advantage of being his
first love. I suppose the girl--the other girl," he took a cigarette
case from his pocket and lit a cigarette, "didn't care about him."
Grisel rose. "Oh, give me a cigarette. Care about him? I should think
she didn't. He bored the life out of the poor girl with his
scenes--and--and," she struck a match, "his absurd white face."
"Dear me, I should have called him rather brown," commented Sir John
mildly. "Quite a brown young man, I should have said."
"Oh, yes, but he used to turn white, and all those hideous lines in his
face used to look suddenly so sharp and--and so deep."
"Very emotional he must be. You knew the young lady well, then?"
Grisel shot a quick glance at him. "Yes--yes, I did. She was a friend of
mine. She has--she is in South America now."
"I see. But we are digressing. What I started to say was that as you are
looking so tired, and as it is so frightfully hot, and as my foot is
going to make me pretty useless for a few days, suppose we go for a
little motor tour?"
Her face brightened, "Oh yes, let's. Couldn't we go to the sea, John,
I--I think the sea up north somewhere would brace me--I mean all of us
up and make us feel better."
"Good! What do you think of Yorkshire, Whitby or Robinhood Bay? Could
you start to-morrow?"
She flushed with pleasure and came over and kissed his forehead, at
which he smiled a little sadly in his growing wisdom.
"We can get Caroline to go with us," the girl resumed, sitting down on
the sofa and smoothing the shawl which she had spread over his bandaged
foot. "Poor old Caroline, she never gets any pleasure, and she will love
it."
"I think perhaps you had better ring up Jackson" (he gave the number)
"and tell him to get the car ready for a long run to-morrow; and if you
and Paul don't mind, and will put me up to-night, you might tell Jackson
to send Bob up with my clothes and things. It would not hurt this foot
to be perfectly quiet till we start, and Bob can make the compresses,
and bandage it, as well as any doctor."
After a little pause she answered, "Yes, that would be splendid. You can
have mother's room, and Bob can sleep in--in the dressing-room. Shall I
go and tell Caroline?"
"No, go and telephone." He repeated the number. "Better get Jackson at
once. By the way, Miss Perkins' young man will be coming in this
afternoon, won't he?"
She nodded, "Yes, oh dear, I had forgotten. He and Jenny are coming to
dinner. Paul has a lot of new Russian music----"
Barclay sat there and listened to her pretty voice at the telephone, the
thoughtful look in his face deepening though not saddening, and when she
came back he asked her abruptly if she thought Paul and Jenny Wick were
falling in love with each other.
She stood in a pool of sunlight on the other side of the mantelpiece,
twisting the ruby on her finger. She had grown a little thin during the
hot weather, and her slight, graceful figure looked almost too
unsubstantial in the little dove coloured frock.
"Paul and Jenny?" she murmured, "I don't know, John, I have been
wondering myself."
"Would you--would you like it if they did?" he asked.
"I don't know. I like Jenny very much; she is too good for Paul,
really."
He nodded, "Yes, I see what you mean, but on the other hand she draws
out the very best that there is in the boy."
"Paul is not a boy, he's thirty."
"Thirty is boyhood to fifty-three," he answered smiling. "I like the
little lady with her edible looking curls, and her music is _real_
music, based on the best things in her; music is no good at all when it
is built only on the emotions. Of course, if they do marry, the
energetic journalist would be almost a member of the family--he and his
wife."
Grisel laughed and gave a comic shiver. "Oh dear, oh dear, then I should
have to live cheek and jowl with perfection; it would be dreadful."
"By that time, dear," he said gravely, "you and I will not be living
exactly cheek and jowl with anyone at 'Happy House.'"
"No, no, of course not. I was only thinking"--she broke off a little
confused, and he laughed.
"Oh, John," she said, "you are such a dear and I am so fond of you! You
always make everything so much nicer--and so much easier to bear."
As she spoke Jessie came in with the tea tray, and when she had gone
out, and Grisel was pouring out the tea with sudden gaiety and high
spirits, Barclay went on as if they had not been interrupted:
"That sounds almost as if you had things to bear."
Her eyes darkened. "Well, haven't I? After all, it's not very pleasant
to have one's own father make such a ridiculous fool of himself as my
father is doing. I suppose you saw that article in the _Express_
yesterday?"
He nodded, "Yes, a very decent little article; the papers have behaved
very well on the whole, considering that he is, well--your mother's
husband."
She looked at him blankly and then understood. "Oh, mother's books you
mean! Yes, I suppose that does make it a little better known, the
divorce business, I mean--poor mother!"
"Why poor mother, Grisel?"
"The books, you know," she returned vaguely, stirring her tea.
"They--they are so awful, John."
"Are they?"
She nodded. "Yes. So old-fashioned and sentimental and utterly unreal. I
have not been able to get through one for years."
"Haven't you?" he answered reflectively. "I read one the other day, and,
thanks I suppose to my own old-fashionedness and sentimentality, I quite
liked it."
"Not really! What was it?"
"It was called, I think, 'The Under Secretary.'"
She nodded, "Yes, that's one of the best ones, and you know it used to
be very popular. The later ones are awful, and, oh, John," the girl's
beautiful face was filled with real sympathy, "'Lord Effingham' was
perfectly dreadful--you know she tried to modernise it--you never read
such hopeless stuff in your life."
"Yes, I looked at that one day somewhere. It struck me as being very
pathetic, Grisel."
She shrugged her shoulders. "I suppose so, but then lots of other
writers have changed with the times--advanced I mean--only mother seems
to have stuck back in the eighties somewhere. It is not so much that her
stories are bad," she went on with an air of disinterested criticism
that rather jarred on her hearer, "it is the way she tells them that is
so--so hopelessly out of fashion. Why just look at Marjory Brendon, and
Miss Thirsk and Eugene and Olive Parker, their books are just as
hopeless as mother's from a _literary_ point of view, but they sell like
anything because they're modern."
"Yes, I am not much of a novel reader," he said, "and when I do read a
novel I like the old ones, Dickens and Thackeray and so on, but I must
say I do not see much of the modern ones that are considered literary.
The two or three I have struck have been either deadly dull in their
wealth of utterly unattractive details, or so filthy that they ought to
be burnt; that book Paul lent me, for instance, 'Reek,' is not fit for
any decent young woman to read."
Grisel nodded, "Yes, it is horrid. I began it, but mother wouldn't let
me finish it. I love 'Haycocks,' don't you?"
He shook his head. "No. Of course it is beautifully written, but people
with such undeveloped minds and such lack of knowledge of anything
except turnips and sheep, don't interest me."
"That is the one my mother likes. Yes, I know what you mean about the
turnips," the girl added thoughtfully, "but I suppose it is a perfect
picture of the lives of such people. It is selling splendidly. I like
'Bess Knighthood' better, only I don't believe any family could be so
horrid to each other. Yet it is told in an odd, attractive way. Mother
couldn't bear it, yet it got the 1,000 dollar prize. 'Young Bears at
Play' was the book I liked best of all. Oliver gave us those two, and I
laughed till I was limp over it. Betterton is a funny man."
They talked on and on very pleasantly, very cosily, and as the draught
given him by the doctor began to take effect Barclay's eyes grew heavy
and his voice gradually softer; finally his head fell back against the
pillow and he slept.
Grisel sat for some time looking at him in his unconsciousness, and it
seemed to the girl that she was really seeing for the first time this
man who was to be her husband. She studied his face closely; its well
marked eyebrows and strong serene mouth; a good face it was, she saw,
the best of faces. And then she gave a little shiver and rose, for
somehow the intimacy of the little scene was painful to her.
After a minute she went quietly out of the room and down into the
garden. A little wind had risen as the sun began to go down, and the
leaves in the big elm tree were stirring with small, brisk sounds, as if
they, too, felt better for the coolness. The sky was unusually bright in
its hard blueness, and the two lilac bushes, one purple and the other
white, that had been gently grilling all day, sent out strong waves of
sweetness as they swayed in the freshening air. Grisel Walbridge sat
down on the steps and gazed out across the garden. One or two of the
earlier rose bushes were starred with half-open buds, and a patch of
some intensely yellow flower in one of the pathetic herbaceous borders
caught her eye--so yellow it was that it looked like a pool of
concentrated light--an altar of sunshine, the girl thought absently.
Then her mind went back to the sleeping man in the drawing-room. "How
handsome he looked," she said to herself resolutely. "How kind his face
is, and how strong. I certainly am a very lucky girl." Yet somehow she
seemed to know better than ever before what it was she was really doing
in marrying this kind powerful man. Strong and placid and handsome as he
undoubtedly was, the relaxation of sleep had revealed one thing very
clearly to her. His face was as smooth, and more unlined than that of
many much younger men whom she knew--the flesh looked firm and sound,
and the muscles were shapely and did not sag, but she moved restlessly
and leaning her head against the handrail on which a climbing rose had
swung its first clumps of thick pink blossom. "He's old," she said,
"old." In her security of perfect solitude she had, without knowing it,
spoken aloud, and Oliver Wick, who had come down the passage
noiselessly, on rubber-soled tennis shoes, heard her, without her having
heard him, and for several minutes he stood in the doorway quite
motionless, his white flannelled figure sharply outlined against the
inner darkness, his tennis racquet in his hand, listening, as it seemed
to him, to the repeated echo of her words. They seemed to go on for a
long time, the words, "He is old--he is old."
Presently he tiptoed back into the house and a moment later came
bounding out into the sunshine very noisily, so noisily that she turned
with an irritated frown, and on her seeing who it was her frown
deepened. "Oh, it is you," she said ungraciously, "I thought you were
coming to _dinner_, you and Jenny."
"We are; Jenny is spending the night with Mrs. Gaskell-Walker, and I am
at the Catherwoods."
"I see. Will you come upstairs? Sir John is asleep in the drawing-room.
He has sprained his ankle and is asleep."
Wick expressed proper regret at the accident, but declined to go in.
"I have a message for you," he went on, sitting down, pulling up the
knees of his trousers, "from Dorothy. She's awfully sorry to have missed
you on Tuesday."
"Yes, I was sorry too, but I thought you quite understood that I was
going to tea with Hermione."
He shook his head. "No, I muddled it somehow, fool that I am. And about
Monday, I am afraid it is no good after all, for she is going to
Birmingham to see her grandmother, who is ill. She had a wire while I
was there last night."
"Oh, I am sorry," Grisel said stiffly, picking a cluster of pink roses
and smelling them. "I hope the old lady will soon be better."
Mr. Wick had apparently great faith in the recuperative powers of his
betrothed's grandmother.
"Oh, she'll be all right; they are a splendidly healthy family, the
Wandsworths. It is her _mother's_ mother, you see."
Grisel looked at him. "Mrs. Perkins herself does not seem to be like the
rest of them, then," she suggested maliciously.
He did not flinch. "No, poor thing, she's the exception that proves the
rule. She's always bemoaning it. However, they are trying massage now, a
peculiar kind of massage and dumb-bells, and I really believe it is
going to do her good."
Grisel nodded indifferently. "I hope so, I am sure. Have you been
playing tennis?"
"Yes, Joan Catherwood and I had four sets. She beat me hollow, too. How
pretty these roses are!"
She nodded. "Yes, aren't they; I love them." Then she stroked her cheek
with a pretty cluster as if it had been a powder puff.
Wick picked a bunch and smelt it.
"Lovely things," he murmured in a rather maudlin voice. "I am glad you
like them, Grisel."
"Glad? Why?"
His small eyes looked at her reproachfully.
"My dear girl," he said, "don't you understand, don't you realise why
they are my favourite flowers?"
She stared for a moment and then rose impatiently.
"Oh, of course, 'Dorothy Perkins,'" she said shortly. "Come along in,
it's too hot here."
As he followed her, Mr. Wick treated himself to a silent chuckle, and
kicked over the edge of the veranda the clump of roses she had dropped.