CHAPTER XXI.THEsun, peering through the carelessly-drawn curtain and falling across her eyes, awakened Pamela next morning.She jumped briskly to the floor from the high, enshrouded bed. She realized, with a joyful thrill, that this was not London—not Beaufort Street. She must write to Barbara, who had been kind; but the bread of dependence, when a woman hands it, is never sweet.When she was half dressed she threw back the casement and occasionally bobbed out her head to look at the garden. Beneath her stretched the closely-shaven, vividly green grass, the accurately-cut beds, the long, flower-tangled borders. She saw with satisfaction, with a thrill of gratitude to Jethro, that everything had been kept in exactly the order that she wished.The garden drew her, looking up at her with a bright, magnetic glance: the satisfying, intense, and comprehensive love for a garden caught her once more; she marveled because she had once cared more passionately for something else.All the things that should be blooming in that month were there. Daborn had been very good; not a single chrysanthemum—those choice, delicate ones—had been lost. He had taken cuttings fromher dahlias, or preserved the tubers. They were there too. Her eyes dwelt almost tearfully on the blazing red cactus which had been her favorite. Her Japanese anemones, with their rough dull leaves, were heavy with pure white or pale pink flowers—widely open and waxen, like small saucers of the finest porcelain.She was going to be very happy in a placid way—the most satisfactory form of happiness. She would always be happy; the garden needed her every month of the twelve. She had passed the stage of rapturous, transient happiness; she was too old. As she looked in the glass, twisting her dull, abundant hair, she saw, for the first time, accusing, brutally frank lines across her face.She clasped the silver buckle at her waist with a click, and settled the crimson tie which made a mark of flame down the front of her white flannel shirt. She ran downstairs, humming under her breath, saying to herself that it was fortunate that Jethro was indifferent to the old, agitating passion—looking forward to his tepid, brother’s kiss above the eyes.It seemed as if the whole world of Folly Corner rejoiced at her return. There was a busy cackling in the poultry yard; the bees were flying in the sun; the geese went, in their waddling, ludicrously dignified way, along the dry road, cackling with satisfaction. It was like a May morning—so blue, so warm, so golden. It was like spring; all over the garden were little chirrups and snatches of song, as if the birds were nesting.The dining-room was empty; so was Jethro’s room. She went into the drawing-room, opened the window, jubilantly ran her fingers over the keyboard of the piano. Then she went into the kitchen; she must show herself, assert herself.Gainah was frying sausages over the wood fire in the back kitchen. She rigorously tabooed the new range, and she never allowed anyone to touch her sausages. She made them from the very foundation—putting in a good taste of sage, in the Sussex way. She fried them, set the dish on the table with her own hands. She had a reputation for her sausages.Some of them were sizzling in a copper pan, others waited, long and lean and red, on a plate close by. They were not very appetizing to look at, although they were admittedly delicious to eat. They gave out a great deal of fat; the pan needed frequent emptying.Gainah had a Windsor chair with a round back set near the fire. She had a table at her elbow. Every minute or so she got up and emptied the surplus fat into a bowl. It was a yellow bowl, ringed with lines of white, and decorated with brown trees roughly run on—a common yellow bowl such as they sell in country shops.Pamela stepped across the bricks, her high heels clittering. She put out her hand with nonchalance, smiled, tried to look pleasant—but she had always been repelled by Gainah.“Good-morning,” she said.The pan of red copper, half full of fat and bubblingsausages, was in Gainah’s hand. It was tipped toward the yellow bowl.“Good-morning,” repeated Pamela, the wide smile of greeting exposing her teeth. “Why didn’t you come into the drawing-room last night to welcome me back?”Gainah gave a choking cry and fell forward in the wooden chair. The pan dropped from her nerveless hand. The sausages were thrown about the brick floor, the fat streamed along sluggishly, a hot brown stream, rapidly settling.Pamela started back. Some of those spitting brown grease spots were already hardening on her skirt, on the toes of her shoes.“How careless of you!” she cried wrathfully. “You have spoilt my skirt.”Gainah made that disquieting sound again. It did not seem to come from her throat: it was a threatening sound—outside, beyond her. She was now sitting bolt-upright in the chair. She made an odd figure, with her stiff, blanched face, her unreadable eyes, her uncouthly-cut gown, and her flat, stiffly planted feet. The fat was settling around her, going white and hard on the cold floor. The sausages were stuck in it. The pan was face downward on the floor.Her crooked fingers were caught in at her throat, between the limp collar and the gown. She seemed to be desperately clawing the stuff away from her skin, as if she could bear no contact, as if she suffocated. Her feet were fast in grease, it molded them like a plaster cast. She didn’t seem to be inany pain, although the fat was thick on her feet. Her jaw had dropped, like a poor dead jaw. Her eyes were blank.Such eyes! Pamela thought of a mechanical toy—broken. Gainah looked like that. Something had given the last pull at the wire, the superfluous dangerous turn of the key—the one turn too many, the last turn. It was just the same: there was the fixed grin, the hard stare, the obstinate refusal to perform. There had been too violent a pull; now there was Oblivion where a moment before there had been a semblance at least of intelligence. She had always intolerantly considered Gainah very stupid, only half developed in a mental sense. Yet she had never before been an absolute, helpless, insensate, staring fool.The door opened, Jethro came in.He had been out early in the keen brief frost. The bridge of his high nose was ruddy, his eyes shone. There was about him the intolerant aggravating air of the person who gets up and goes out while others sleep. He seemed hungry—a trifle cross.“I saw you through the window,” he said curtly, giving her a bluff little nod, and approaching as if to kiss her—the calm kiss that she imagined she wanted from his mouth. “Haven’t they got breakfast ready? Will you make the coffee, Pamela? The way you used to make it; nobody does it so well.”“Yes, yes!—but look! But what is the matter with her, Jethro? Is it a fit?”She pointed to Gainah, stiff, staring, widely smiling; a terrified grin that had petrified on her wrinkled mouth. He looked. He gave a long, high whistle, then he seemed terribly touched.“Aunt Sophy’s been afraid of this,” he said gravely. “We must get her up to bed.”He picked the rigid figure up tenderly, as he would have picked up an ailing child.Pamela followed him. On the way through the kitchen she told the maids to send two messengers—one to Turle, another to Liddleshorn for Egbert.Jethro was halfway up the stairs, the odd figure bunched up like a short-coated baby in his long arms. It looked so ludicrous, so fearsome, that Pamela stepped back from the fixed eyes and stretched mouth. He went slowly, his hands gripped round the blue gown. He paused on the landing; paused by the window, with its tiny dull panes, its wide ledge, on which stood a jar of white honesty-pods—“money in both pockets,” as Gainah had always called it. Pamela slid by him, keeping her skirt, her head and hands from contact with the blue gown and hanging arms. She flung back the door of her old room.“Carry her in here,” she said. “It is nearer. It is a better room than her own, too. When the doctor comes—I have sent for Egbert—the room must be tidy.”He crossed the threshold; she ran in front and flung back the curtains, letting in the glad November sun.“Put her in here. Then go down and sendNettie up. We’ll undress her,” she said tersely, with the cool air of business that follows a shock.They both looked at the bed at the same moment. Pamela stared, started, contracted her forehead. Then she threw a stronger look of terror and dislike at the doll-like, silly head of Gainah, which hung over Jethro’s shoulder.“The wicked old woman!” she gasped. “I always knew she wasn’t safe; these queer people are much more dangerous than a full-blown lunatic. All the crimes that one reads of in the newspapers are committed by people like she was—peculiar people. She meant to murder me. She thought I was sleeping in this bed. Look at the knife.”She stopped, with a wild leaping at her throat. Jethro had tumbled his burden down on one side of the humped-up bed. He drew out the knife. Pamela was close behind him. Together they traced its course. She put her shaking, twitching fingers through the close long cuts, which rent everything down to the very bed. All around the cut in the ticking were down and feathers that had puffed out. The down flew about their heads, stirred by the quick, short breaths of horror which gushed from their lungs.“She meant to kill me. I took the sheets away and slept in the guest-room. It looked rather like a body—you can see the likeness yourself: the doubled-up bolster, the blankets all heaped up under the quilt. She meant to kill me. Show her the knife.”She took it from Jethro and held it up, held itclose to the stony, widely-opened eyes of the figure at the edge of the bed. But the eyes gave no sign, the mouth did not relax.“She doesn’t understand; it is no good trying to make any impression on her.”She put the knife on the dressing-table.“I’m afraid to touch her,” she said. “What an escape!”“She’s lost her reason.” He looked down sorrowfully.“You don’t care forme.You don’t think of my escape.”He lifted his eyes from the bed, seeming suddenly to remember. Then he pulled her to him, kissed her with all the calm restraint of last night, smoothed her hair—petted her as if she were a startled bird. But all the time his eyes were turning to the bed. He treated her tenderly—as a pet thing who had narrowly missed destruction. But any pet was less than a woman. Gainah was a woman—the wreck of the woman who had been his mother, his mentor, his tyrant all his days. His eyes dwelt sorrowfully on the bed. Pamela pushed him to the door rather pettishly.“We must get her undressed,” she said. “Egbert will be here soon. Tell Nettie to bring up a needle and thread. The tick must be sewn or we shall have the feathers all over the place.”He went away reluctantly. When Pamela was alone she sat down on the edge of the sofa. Once she shrugged her shoulders and gave a cold short laugh of terror. Only last night she had been discontentedbecause her return to Folly Corner had lacked the elements of drama. There had been tragedy brewing for her all the while.Gainah was on her side, just as Jethro had left her. A gentle, almost imperceptible, vibration of her head was unceasing; it extended to her hands, which clutched round the edge of the blanket. She seemed to be slowly crawling back to some muffled kind of consciousness. Once, when her eyes met Pamela’s, the girl fancied that she saw a gleam of terror. In another moment she felt certain that Gainah recognized her, was abjectly afraid of her, was trying, in an agony and without the least avail, to slip down in the bed and get out of sight.It was the monthly washing day. It had been the day of the monthly wash when Pamela first came to Folly Corner. She thought of that as she threw back the window and heard the rasping, spasmodic sound of the brush.Nettie came up. Between them they took off Gainah’s clothes, divested her of her many flannel packings. Then Pamela went and looked for a nightgown. She opened all Gainah’s boxes and drawers in the search. She wanted a fairly smart nightgown—for the doctor. She rejected those of daily wear—coarse, plain things which any self-respecting housemaid would disdain—narrow things, like bolster-cases with the bottoms out.She found, at last, a parcel sewn in linen. On it was pinned a paper with the words, written in an uncertain, illiterate hand:“For my laying out.”She hesitated—for sentimental reasons. Then—for practical reasons, and the practical was usually uppermost with her when it came to other people’s affairs—she unpinned the parcel. Woman’s pity for another woman touched her heart as she flipped the carefully-made nightgown, of fair, thin stuff, over her arm.“Poor thing!” she said pitifully, and hesitated once more. Then she said brusquely to herself:“Well, at the worst, if she dies, it can be washed, and she can be buried in it as she wished.”She shut the drawer, it was a bottom drawer, with her foot. Gainah’s quilts, the blue one still unfinished, were folded carefully away.When she went back she found the cook and washerwoman standing by the bed. The former had brought clean sheets, the latter was standing stolidly, her crinkled hands on her hips. She sent them all away and finished Gainah’s toilet herself. She fancied that the helpless figure shrank from the touch of her hands; fancied that the eyes tried eloquently and quite in vain to say things which the lips could not.When the bed was made and Gainah was stretched straight and stiff and robed in snow-white linen of the very finest, Pamela tidied the room. She picked up the old woman’s garments with a “finicky,” fine air of distaste. She twisted together strips of flannel and rolled up stockings which had been frugally re-footed. Last of all sheplunged her hand into the pocket of the dim blue gown and brought out the heavy bunch of housekeeping keys. The clinking sound they made roused Gainah. She tried piteously to move in the bed.
THEsun, peering through the carelessly-drawn curtain and falling across her eyes, awakened Pamela next morning.
She jumped briskly to the floor from the high, enshrouded bed. She realized, with a joyful thrill, that this was not London—not Beaufort Street. She must write to Barbara, who had been kind; but the bread of dependence, when a woman hands it, is never sweet.
When she was half dressed she threw back the casement and occasionally bobbed out her head to look at the garden. Beneath her stretched the closely-shaven, vividly green grass, the accurately-cut beds, the long, flower-tangled borders. She saw with satisfaction, with a thrill of gratitude to Jethro, that everything had been kept in exactly the order that she wished.
The garden drew her, looking up at her with a bright, magnetic glance: the satisfying, intense, and comprehensive love for a garden caught her once more; she marveled because she had once cared more passionately for something else.
All the things that should be blooming in that month were there. Daborn had been very good; not a single chrysanthemum—those choice, delicate ones—had been lost. He had taken cuttings fromher dahlias, or preserved the tubers. They were there too. Her eyes dwelt almost tearfully on the blazing red cactus which had been her favorite. Her Japanese anemones, with their rough dull leaves, were heavy with pure white or pale pink flowers—widely open and waxen, like small saucers of the finest porcelain.
She was going to be very happy in a placid way—the most satisfactory form of happiness. She would always be happy; the garden needed her every month of the twelve. She had passed the stage of rapturous, transient happiness; she was too old. As she looked in the glass, twisting her dull, abundant hair, she saw, for the first time, accusing, brutally frank lines across her face.
She clasped the silver buckle at her waist with a click, and settled the crimson tie which made a mark of flame down the front of her white flannel shirt. She ran downstairs, humming under her breath, saying to herself that it was fortunate that Jethro was indifferent to the old, agitating passion—looking forward to his tepid, brother’s kiss above the eyes.
It seemed as if the whole world of Folly Corner rejoiced at her return. There was a busy cackling in the poultry yard; the bees were flying in the sun; the geese went, in their waddling, ludicrously dignified way, along the dry road, cackling with satisfaction. It was like a May morning—so blue, so warm, so golden. It was like spring; all over the garden were little chirrups and snatches of song, as if the birds were nesting.
The dining-room was empty; so was Jethro’s room. She went into the drawing-room, opened the window, jubilantly ran her fingers over the keyboard of the piano. Then she went into the kitchen; she must show herself, assert herself.
Gainah was frying sausages over the wood fire in the back kitchen. She rigorously tabooed the new range, and she never allowed anyone to touch her sausages. She made them from the very foundation—putting in a good taste of sage, in the Sussex way. She fried them, set the dish on the table with her own hands. She had a reputation for her sausages.
Some of them were sizzling in a copper pan, others waited, long and lean and red, on a plate close by. They were not very appetizing to look at, although they were admittedly delicious to eat. They gave out a great deal of fat; the pan needed frequent emptying.
Gainah had a Windsor chair with a round back set near the fire. She had a table at her elbow. Every minute or so she got up and emptied the surplus fat into a bowl. It was a yellow bowl, ringed with lines of white, and decorated with brown trees roughly run on—a common yellow bowl such as they sell in country shops.
Pamela stepped across the bricks, her high heels clittering. She put out her hand with nonchalance, smiled, tried to look pleasant—but she had always been repelled by Gainah.
“Good-morning,” she said.
The pan of red copper, half full of fat and bubblingsausages, was in Gainah’s hand. It was tipped toward the yellow bowl.
“Good-morning,” repeated Pamela, the wide smile of greeting exposing her teeth. “Why didn’t you come into the drawing-room last night to welcome me back?”
Gainah gave a choking cry and fell forward in the wooden chair. The pan dropped from her nerveless hand. The sausages were thrown about the brick floor, the fat streamed along sluggishly, a hot brown stream, rapidly settling.
Pamela started back. Some of those spitting brown grease spots were already hardening on her skirt, on the toes of her shoes.
“How careless of you!” she cried wrathfully. “You have spoilt my skirt.”
Gainah made that disquieting sound again. It did not seem to come from her throat: it was a threatening sound—outside, beyond her. She was now sitting bolt-upright in the chair. She made an odd figure, with her stiff, blanched face, her unreadable eyes, her uncouthly-cut gown, and her flat, stiffly planted feet. The fat was settling around her, going white and hard on the cold floor. The sausages were stuck in it. The pan was face downward on the floor.
Her crooked fingers were caught in at her throat, between the limp collar and the gown. She seemed to be desperately clawing the stuff away from her skin, as if she could bear no contact, as if she suffocated. Her feet were fast in grease, it molded them like a plaster cast. She didn’t seem to be inany pain, although the fat was thick on her feet. Her jaw had dropped, like a poor dead jaw. Her eyes were blank.
Such eyes! Pamela thought of a mechanical toy—broken. Gainah looked like that. Something had given the last pull at the wire, the superfluous dangerous turn of the key—the one turn too many, the last turn. It was just the same: there was the fixed grin, the hard stare, the obstinate refusal to perform. There had been too violent a pull; now there was Oblivion where a moment before there had been a semblance at least of intelligence. She had always intolerantly considered Gainah very stupid, only half developed in a mental sense. Yet she had never before been an absolute, helpless, insensate, staring fool.
The door opened, Jethro came in.
He had been out early in the keen brief frost. The bridge of his high nose was ruddy, his eyes shone. There was about him the intolerant aggravating air of the person who gets up and goes out while others sleep. He seemed hungry—a trifle cross.
“I saw you through the window,” he said curtly, giving her a bluff little nod, and approaching as if to kiss her—the calm kiss that she imagined she wanted from his mouth. “Haven’t they got breakfast ready? Will you make the coffee, Pamela? The way you used to make it; nobody does it so well.”
“Yes, yes!—but look! But what is the matter with her, Jethro? Is it a fit?”
She pointed to Gainah, stiff, staring, widely smiling; a terrified grin that had petrified on her wrinkled mouth. He looked. He gave a long, high whistle, then he seemed terribly touched.
“Aunt Sophy’s been afraid of this,” he said gravely. “We must get her up to bed.”
He picked the rigid figure up tenderly, as he would have picked up an ailing child.
Pamela followed him. On the way through the kitchen she told the maids to send two messengers—one to Turle, another to Liddleshorn for Egbert.
Jethro was halfway up the stairs, the odd figure bunched up like a short-coated baby in his long arms. It looked so ludicrous, so fearsome, that Pamela stepped back from the fixed eyes and stretched mouth. He went slowly, his hands gripped round the blue gown. He paused on the landing; paused by the window, with its tiny dull panes, its wide ledge, on which stood a jar of white honesty-pods—“money in both pockets,” as Gainah had always called it. Pamela slid by him, keeping her skirt, her head and hands from contact with the blue gown and hanging arms. She flung back the door of her old room.
“Carry her in here,” she said. “It is nearer. It is a better room than her own, too. When the doctor comes—I have sent for Egbert—the room must be tidy.”
He crossed the threshold; she ran in front and flung back the curtains, letting in the glad November sun.
“Put her in here. Then go down and sendNettie up. We’ll undress her,” she said tersely, with the cool air of business that follows a shock.
They both looked at the bed at the same moment. Pamela stared, started, contracted her forehead. Then she threw a stronger look of terror and dislike at the doll-like, silly head of Gainah, which hung over Jethro’s shoulder.
“The wicked old woman!” she gasped. “I always knew she wasn’t safe; these queer people are much more dangerous than a full-blown lunatic. All the crimes that one reads of in the newspapers are committed by people like she was—peculiar people. She meant to murder me. She thought I was sleeping in this bed. Look at the knife.”
She stopped, with a wild leaping at her throat. Jethro had tumbled his burden down on one side of the humped-up bed. He drew out the knife. Pamela was close behind him. Together they traced its course. She put her shaking, twitching fingers through the close long cuts, which rent everything down to the very bed. All around the cut in the ticking were down and feathers that had puffed out. The down flew about their heads, stirred by the quick, short breaths of horror which gushed from their lungs.
“She meant to kill me. I took the sheets away and slept in the guest-room. It looked rather like a body—you can see the likeness yourself: the doubled-up bolster, the blankets all heaped up under the quilt. She meant to kill me. Show her the knife.”
She took it from Jethro and held it up, held itclose to the stony, widely-opened eyes of the figure at the edge of the bed. But the eyes gave no sign, the mouth did not relax.
“She doesn’t understand; it is no good trying to make any impression on her.”
She put the knife on the dressing-table.
“I’m afraid to touch her,” she said. “What an escape!”
“She’s lost her reason.” He looked down sorrowfully.
“You don’t care forme.You don’t think of my escape.”
He lifted his eyes from the bed, seeming suddenly to remember. Then he pulled her to him, kissed her with all the calm restraint of last night, smoothed her hair—petted her as if she were a startled bird. But all the time his eyes were turning to the bed. He treated her tenderly—as a pet thing who had narrowly missed destruction. But any pet was less than a woman. Gainah was a woman—the wreck of the woman who had been his mother, his mentor, his tyrant all his days. His eyes dwelt sorrowfully on the bed. Pamela pushed him to the door rather pettishly.
“We must get her undressed,” she said. “Egbert will be here soon. Tell Nettie to bring up a needle and thread. The tick must be sewn or we shall have the feathers all over the place.”
He went away reluctantly. When Pamela was alone she sat down on the edge of the sofa. Once she shrugged her shoulders and gave a cold short laugh of terror. Only last night she had been discontentedbecause her return to Folly Corner had lacked the elements of drama. There had been tragedy brewing for her all the while.
Gainah was on her side, just as Jethro had left her. A gentle, almost imperceptible, vibration of her head was unceasing; it extended to her hands, which clutched round the edge of the blanket. She seemed to be slowly crawling back to some muffled kind of consciousness. Once, when her eyes met Pamela’s, the girl fancied that she saw a gleam of terror. In another moment she felt certain that Gainah recognized her, was abjectly afraid of her, was trying, in an agony and without the least avail, to slip down in the bed and get out of sight.
It was the monthly washing day. It had been the day of the monthly wash when Pamela first came to Folly Corner. She thought of that as she threw back the window and heard the rasping, spasmodic sound of the brush.
Nettie came up. Between them they took off Gainah’s clothes, divested her of her many flannel packings. Then Pamela went and looked for a nightgown. She opened all Gainah’s boxes and drawers in the search. She wanted a fairly smart nightgown—for the doctor. She rejected those of daily wear—coarse, plain things which any self-respecting housemaid would disdain—narrow things, like bolster-cases with the bottoms out.
She found, at last, a parcel sewn in linen. On it was pinned a paper with the words, written in an uncertain, illiterate hand:
“For my laying out.”
She hesitated—for sentimental reasons. Then—for practical reasons, and the practical was usually uppermost with her when it came to other people’s affairs—she unpinned the parcel. Woman’s pity for another woman touched her heart as she flipped the carefully-made nightgown, of fair, thin stuff, over her arm.
“Poor thing!” she said pitifully, and hesitated once more. Then she said brusquely to herself:
“Well, at the worst, if she dies, it can be washed, and she can be buried in it as she wished.”
She shut the drawer, it was a bottom drawer, with her foot. Gainah’s quilts, the blue one still unfinished, were folded carefully away.
When she went back she found the cook and washerwoman standing by the bed. The former had brought clean sheets, the latter was standing stolidly, her crinkled hands on her hips. She sent them all away and finished Gainah’s toilet herself. She fancied that the helpless figure shrank from the touch of her hands; fancied that the eyes tried eloquently and quite in vain to say things which the lips could not.
When the bed was made and Gainah was stretched straight and stiff and robed in snow-white linen of the very finest, Pamela tidied the room. She picked up the old woman’s garments with a “finicky,” fine air of distaste. She twisted together strips of flannel and rolled up stockings which had been frugally re-footed. Last of all sheplunged her hand into the pocket of the dim blue gown and brought out the heavy bunch of housekeeping keys. The clinking sound they made roused Gainah. She tried piteously to move in the bed.