'How they all try to separate us,' she said to him one day, sitting as usual safe in the circle of his arm, her head on his breast.
'You can't separate unity,' remarked Wemyss comfortably.
She wanted to tell them that answer, confront them with it next time they came after breakfast, as a discouragement to useless further effort, but she had learned that they somehow always knew when what she said was Everard's and not hers, and then, of course, prejudiced as they were, they wouldn't listen.
'Now, Lucy, that's pure Wemyss,' they would say. 'For heaven's sake say something of your own.'
At Christmas Wemyss had an encounter with Miss Entwhistle, who ever since she had been told of the engagement had been so quiet and inoffensive that he quite liked her. She had seemed to recognise her position as a side-show, and had accepted it without a word. She no longer asked him questions, and she made no difficulties. She left him alone with Lucy in Eaton Terrace, and though she had to go with them on the outings she asserted herself so little that he forgot she was there. But when towards the middle of December he remarked one afternoon that he always spent Christmas at The Willows, and what day would she and Lucy come down, Christmas Eve or the day before, to his astonishment she looked astonished, and after a silence said it was most kind of him, but they were going to spend Christmas where they were.
'I had hoped you would join us,' she said. 'Must you really go away?'
'But——' began Wemyss, incredulous, doubting his ears.
It was, however, the fact that Miss Entwhistle wouldn't go to The Willows; and of course if she wouldn't Lucy couldn't either. Nothing that he said could shake her determination. Here was a repetition, only how much worse—fancy spoiling his Christmas—of her conduct in Cornwall when she insisted on going away from that nice little house where they were all so comfortably established, and taking Lucy up to London. He had forgotten, so acquiescent had she been for weeks, that down there he had discovered she was obstinate. It was a shock to him to realise that her obstinacy, the most obstinate obstinacy he had ever met, might be going to upset his plans. He couldn't believe it. He couldn't believe he wasn't going to be able to have what he wished, and only because an old maid said 'No.' Was the story of Balaam to be reversed, and the angel be held up by the donkey? He refused to believe such a thing possible.
Wemyss, who made his plans first and talked about them afterwards, hadn't mentioned Christmas even to Lucy. It was his habit to settle what he wished to do, arrange all the details, and then, when everything was ready, inform those who were to take part. It hadn't occurred to him that over the Christmas question there would be trouble. He had naturally taken it for granted that he would spend Christmas with his little girl, and of course as he always spent it at The Willows she would spend it there too. All his arrangements were made, and the servants, who looked surprised, had been told to get the spare-rooms ready for two ladies. He had begun to feel seasonable as early as the first week in December, and had bespoken two big turkeys instead of one, because this was to be his first real Christmas at The Willows—Vera had been without the Christmas spirit—and he felt it couldn't be celebrated lavishly enough. Two where there had in previous years been one,—that was the turkeys; four where there had been two,—-that was the plum puddings. He doubled everything. Doubling seemed the proper, even the symbolic expression of his feelings, for wasn't he soon going to be doubled himself? And how sweetly.
Then suddenly, having finished his preparations and proceeding, the time being ripe, to the question of the day of arrival, he found himself up against opposition. Miss Entwhistle wouldn't go to The Willows—incredible, impossible, and insufferable,—while Lucy, instead of instantly insisting and joining with him in a compelling majority, sat as quiet as a mouse.
'But Lucy——' Wemyss having stared speechless at her aunt, turned to her. 'But of course we must spend Christmas together.'
'Oh yes,' said Lucy, leaning forward, 'of course——'
'But of course you must come down. Why, any other arrangement is unthinkable. My house is in the country, which is the proper place for Christmas, and it's your Everard's house, and you haven't seen it yet—why, I would have taken you down long ago, but I've been saving up for this.'
'We hoped,' said Miss Entwhistle, 'you would join us here.'
'Here! But there isn't room to swing a turkey here. I've ordered two, and each of them is twice too big to get through your front door.'
'Oh, Everard—have you actually ordered turkeys?' said Lucy.
She wanted to laugh, but she also wanted to cry. His simplicity was too wonderful. In her eyes it set him apart from criticism and made him sacred, like the nimbus about the head of a saint.
That he should have been secretly busy making preparations, buying turkeys, planning a surprise, when all this time she had been supposing that why he never mentioned The Willows was because he shrank both for himself and for her from the house of his tragedy! There had never been any talk of showing it to her, as there had about the house in Lancaster Gate, and she had imagined he would never go near it again and was probably quietly getting rid of it. He would want to get rid of it, of course,—that house of unbearable memories. To the other one, the house in Lancaster Gate, he had insisted on taking them to tea, and in spite of a great desire not to go, plainly visible on her aunt's face and felt too by herself, it had seemed after all a natural and more or less inevitable thing, and they had gone. At least that poor Vera had only lived there, and not died there. It was a gloomy house, and Lucy had wanted him to give it up and start life with her in a place without associations, but he had been so much astonished at the idea—'Why,' he had cried, 'it was my father's house and I was born in it!'—that she couldn't help laughing at his dismay, and was ashamed of herself for having thought of uprooting him. Besides, she hadn't known he had been born in it.
The Willows, however, was different. Of that he never spoke, and Lucy had been sure of the pitiful, the delicate reason. Now it appeared that all this time he had just been saving it up as a Christmas treat.
'Oh, Everard——!' she said, with a gasp. She hadn't reckoned with The Willows. That The Willows should still be in Everard's life, and actively so, not just lingering on while house agents were disposing of it, but visited and evidently prized, came upon her as an immense shock.
'I think we can achieve a happy little Christmas for you here,' said her aunt, smiling the smile she smiled when she found difficulty in smiling. 'Of course you and Lucy would want to be together. I ought to have told you earlier that we were counting on you, but somehow Christmas comes on one so unexpectedly.'
'Perhaps you'll tell me why you won't come to The Willows,' said Wemyss, holding on to himself as she used to make him hold on to himself in Cornwall. 'You realise, of course, that if you persist you spoil both Lucy's and my Christmas.'
'Ah, but you mustn't put it that way,' said Miss Entwhistle, gentle but determined. 'I promise you that you and Lucy shall be very happy here.'
'You haven't answered my question,' said Wemyss, slowly filling his pipe.
'I don't think I'm going to,' said Miss Entwhistle, suddenly flaring up. She hadn't flared up since she was ten, and was instantly ashamed of herself, but there was something about Mr. Wemyss——
'I think,' she said, getting up and speaking very gently, 'you'll like to be alone together now.' And she crossed to the door.
There she wavered, and turning round said more gently still, even penitentially, 'If Lucy wishes to go to The Willows I'll—I'll accept your kind invitation and take her. I leave it to her.'
Then she went out.
'That's all right then,' said Wemyss with a great sigh of relief, smiling broadly at Lucy. 'Come here, little love,—come to your Everard, and we'll fix it all up. Lord, what a kill-joy that woman is!'
And he put out his arms and drew her to him.
But Christmas was spent after all at Eaton Terrace, and they lived on Wemyss's turkeys and plum puddings for a fortnight.
It was not a very successful Christmas, because Wemyss was so profoundly disappointed, and Miss Entwhistle had the apologeticness of those who try to make up for having got their own way, and Lucy, who had shrunk from The Willows far more than her aunt, wished many times before it was over that they had after all gone there. It would have been much simpler in the long run, and much less painful than having to look on at Everard being disappointed; but at the time, and taken by surprise, she had felt that she couldn't have borne festivities, and still less could she have borne seeing Everard bearing festivities in that house.
'This is morbid,' he said, when in answer to his questioning she at last told him it was poor Vera's dreadful death there that made her feel she couldn't go; and he explained, holding her in his arms, how foolish it was to be morbid, and how his little girl, who was marrying a healthy, sensible man who, God knew, had had to fight hard enough to keep so—she pressed closer—and yet had succeeded, must be healthily sensible too. Otherwise, if she couldn't do this and couldn't do that because it reminded her of something sad, and couldn't go here and couldn't go there because of somebody's having died, he was afraid she would make both herself and him very unhappy.
'Oh, Everard——' said Lucy at that, holding him tight, the thought of making him unhappy, him, her own beloved who had been through such terrible unhappiness already, giving her heart a stab.
His little girl must know, he continued, speaking with the grave voice that was natural to him when he was serious, the voice not of the playmate but of the man she adored, the man she was in love with, in whose hands she could safely leave her earthly concerns,—his little girl must know that somebody had died everywhere. There wasn't a spot, there wasn't a house, except quite new ones——
'Oh yes, I know—but——' Lucy tried to interrupt.
And The Willows was his home, the home he had looked forward to and worked for and had at last been able to afford to rent on a long lease, a lease so long that it made it practically his very own, and he had spent the last ten years developing and improving it, and there wasn't a brick or a tree in it in which he didn't take an interest, really an almost personal interest, and his one thought all these months had been the day when he would show it to her, to its dear future mistress.
'Oh, Everard—yes—you shall—I want to——' said Lucy incoherently, her cheek against his, 'only not yet—not festivities—please—I won't be so morbid—I promise not to be morbid—but—please——'
And just when she was wavering, just when she was going to give in, not because of his reasoning, for her instincts were stronger than his reasoning, but because she couldn't bear his disappointment, Miss Entwhistle, sure now of Lucy's dread of Christmas at The Willows, suddenly turned firm again and announced that they would spend it in Eaton Terrace.
So Wemyss was forced to submit. The sensation was so new to him that he couldn't get over it. Once it was certain that his Christmas was, as he insisted, spoilt, he left off talking about it and went to the other extreme and was very quiet. That his little love should be so much under the influence of her aunt saddened him, he told her. Lucy tried to bring gaiety into this attitude by pointing out the proof she was giving him of how very submissive she was to the person she happened to live with,—'And presently all my submissiveness will be concentrated on you,' she said gaily.
But he wouldn't be gay. He shook his head in silence and filled his pipe. He was too deeply disappointed to be able to cheer up. And the expression 'happen to live with,' jarred a little. There was an airy carelessness about the phrase. One didn't happen to live with one's husband; yet that had been the implication.
Every year in April Wemyss had a birthday; that is, unlike most people of his age, he regularly celebrated it. Christmas and his birthday were the festivals of the year for Him, and were always spent at The Willows. He regarded his birthday, which was on the 4th of April, as the first day of spring, defying the calendar, and was accustomed to find certain yellow flowers in blossom down by the river on that date supporting his contention. If these flowers came out before his birthday he took no notice of them, treating them as non-existent, nor did he ever notice them afterwards, for he did not easily notice flowers; but his gardener had standing orders to have a bunch of them on the table that one morning in the year to welcome him with their bright shiny faces when he came down to his birthday breakfast, and coming in and seeing them he said, 'My birthday and Spring's'; whereupon his wife—up to now it had been Vera, but from now it would be Lucy—kissed him and wished him many happy returns. This was the ritual; and when one year of abnormal cold the yellow flowers weren't there at breakfast, because neither by the river's edge nor in the most sheltered of the swamps had the increasingly frantic gardener been able to find them, the entire birthday was dislocated. He couldn't say on entering the room and beholding them, 'My birthday and Spring's,' because he didn't behold them; and his wife—that year Vera—couldn't kiss him and wish him many happy returns because she hadn't the cue. She was so much used to the cue that not having it made her forget her part,—forget, indeed, his birthday altogether; and consequently it was a day of the extremest spiritual chill and dinginess, matching the weather without. Wemyss had been terribly hurt. He hoped never to spend another birthday like it. Nor did he, for Vera remembered it after that.
Birthdays being so important to him, he naturally reflected after Miss Entwhistle had spoilt his Christmas that she would spoil his birthday too if he let her. Well, he wasn't going to let her. Not twice would he be caught like that; not twice would he be caught in a position of helplessness on his side and power on hers. The way to avoid it was very simple: he would marry Lucy in time for his birthday. Why should they wait any longer? Why stick to that absurd convention of the widower's year? No sensible man minded what people thought. And who were the people? Surely one didn't mind the opinions of those shabby weeds he had met on the two Thursday evenings at Lucy's aunt's. The little they had said had been so thoroughly unsound and muddled and yet dangerous, that if they one and all emigrated to-morrow England would only be the better. After meeting them he had said to Lucy, who had listened in some wonder at this new light thrown on her father's friends, that they were the very stuff of which successful segregation was made. In an island by themselves, he told her, they would be quite happy undermining each other's backbones, and the backbone of England, which consisted of plain unspoilt patriots, would be let alone. They, certainly, didn't matter; while as for his own friends, those friends who had behaved badly to him on Vera's death, not only didn't he care twopence for their criticisms but he could hardly wait for the moment when he would confound them by producing for their inspection this sweetest of little girls, so young, so devoted to him, Lucy his wife.
He accordingly proceeded to make all the necessary arrangements for being married in March, for going for a trip to Paris, and for returning to The Willows for the final few days of his honeymoon on the very day of his birthday. What a celebration that would be! Wemyss, thinking of it, shut his eyes so as to dwell upon it undisturbed. Never would he have had a birthday like this next one. He might really quite fairly call it his First, for he would be beginning life all over again, and entering on years that would indeed be truthfully described as tender.
So much was it his habit to make plans privately and not mention them till they were complete, that he found it difficult to tell Lucy of this one in spite of the important part she was to play in it. But, after all, some preparing would, he admitted to himself, be necessary even for the secret marriage he had decided on at a registrar's office. She would have to pack a bag; she would have to leave her belongings in order. Also he might perhaps have to use persuasion. He knew his little girl well enough to be sure she would relinquish church and white satin without a murmur at his request, but she might want to tell her aunt of the marriage's imminence, and then the aunt would, to a dead certainty, obstruct, and either induce her to wait till the year was out, or, if Lucy refused to do this, make her miserable with doubts as to whether she had been right to follow her lover's wishes. Fancy making a girl miserable because she followed her lover's wishes! What a woman, thought Wemyss, filling his pipe. In his eyes Miss Entwhistle had swollen since her conduct at Christmas to the bulk of a monster.
Having completed his preparations, and fixed his wedding day for the first Saturday in March, Wemyss thought it time he told Lucy; so he did, though not without a slight fear at the end that she might make difficulties.
'My little love isn't going to do anything that spoils her Everard's plans after all the trouble he has taken?' he said, seeing that with her mouth slightly open she gazed at him in an obvious astonishment and didn't say a word.
He then proceeded to shut the eyes that were gazing up into his, and the surprised parted lips, with kisses, for he had discovered that gentle, lingering kisses hushed Lucy quiet when she was inclined to say, 'But——' and brought her back quicker than anything to the mood of tender, half-asleep acquiescence in which, as she lay in his arms, he most loved her; then indeed she was his baby, the object of the passionate protectiveness he felt he was naturally filled with, but for the exercise of which circumstances up to now had given him no scope. You couldn't passionately protect Vera. She was always in another room.
Lucy, however, did say, 'But——' when she recovered from her first surprise, and did presently—directly, that is, he left off kissing her and she could speak—make difficulties. Her aunt; the secrecy; why secrecy; why not wait; it was so necessary under the circumstances to wait.
And then he explained about his birthday.
At that she gazed at him again with a look of wonder in her eyes, and after a moment began to laugh. She laughed a great deal, and with her arm tight round his neck, but her eyes were wet. 'Oh, Everard,' she said, her cheek against his, 'do you think we're really old enough to marry?'
This time, however, he got his way. Lucy found she couldn't bring herself to spoil his plans a second time; the spectacle of his prolonged silent disappointment at Christmas was still too vividly before her. Nor did she feel she could tell her aunt. She hadn't the courage to face her aunt's expostulations and final distressed giving in. Her aunt, who loomed so enormous in Wemyss's eyes, seemed to Lucy to be only half the size she used to be. She seemed to have been worried small by her position, like a bone among contending dogs, in the middle of different indignations. What would be the effect on her of this final blow? The thought of it haunted Lucy and spoilt all the last days before her marriage, days which she otherwise would have loved, because she very quickly became infected by the boyish delight and excitement over their secret that made Wemyss hardly able to keep still in his chair. He didn't keep still in it. Once at least he got up and did some slow steps about the room, moving with an apparent solemnity because of not being used to such steps, which he informed her presently were a dance. Till he told her this she watched him too much surprised to say anything. So did penguins dance in pictures. She couldn't think what was the matter with him. When he had done, and told her, breathing a little hard, that it was a dance symbolic of married happiness, she laughed and laughed, and flew to hug him.
'Baby, oh, baby!' she said, rubbing her cheek up and down his coat.
'Who's another baby?' he asked, breathless but beaming.
Such was their conversation.
But poor Aunt Dot....
Lucy couldn't bear to think of poor little kind Aunt Dot. She had been so wonderful, so patient, and she would be deeply horrified by a runaway marriage. Never, never would she understand the reason for it. She didn't a bit understand Everard, didn't begin to understand him, and that his birthday should be a reason for breaking what she would regard as the common decencies would of course only seem to her too childish to be even discussed. Lucy was afraid Aunt Dot was going to be very much upset, poor darling little Aunt Dot. Conscience-stricken, she couldn't do enough for Aunt Dot now that the secret date was fixed. She watched for every possible want during their times alone, flew to fetch things, darted at dropped handkerchiefs, kissed her not only at bedtime and in the morning but whenever there was the least excuse and with the utmost tenderness; and every kiss and every look seemed to say, 'Forgive me.'
'Are they going to run away?' wondered Miss Entwhistle presently.
Lucy would have been immensely taken aback, and perhaps, such is one's perversity, even hurt, if she could have seen the ray of hope which at this thought lit her Aunt Dot's exhausted mind; for Miss Entwhistle's life, which had been a particularly ordered and calm one up to the day when Wemyss first called at Eaton Terrace, had since then been nothing but just confused clamour. Everybody was displeased with her, and each for directly opposite reasons. She had fallen on evil days, and they had by February been going on so long that she felt worn out. Wemyss, she was quite aware, disliked her heartily; her Jim was dead; Lucy, her one living relation, so tenderly loved, was every day disappearing further before her very eyes into Wemyss's personality, into what she sometimes was betrayed by fatigue and impatience into calling to herself the Wemyss maw; and her little house, which had always been so placid, had become, she wearily felt, the cockpit of London. She used to crawl back to it with footsteps that lagged more and more the nearer she got, after her enforced prolonged daily outings—enforced and prolonged because the house couldn't possibly hold both herself and Wemyss except for the briefest moments,—and drearily wonder what letters she would find from Jim's friends scolding her, and what fresh arrangements in the way of tiring motor excursions, or invitations to tea at that dreadful house in Lancaster Gate, would be sprung upon her. Did all engagements pursue such a turbulent course? she asked herself,—she had given up asking the oracle of Chesham Street anything because of her disconcerting answers. How glad she was she had never been engaged; how glad she was she had refused the offers she had had when she was a girl. Quite recently she had met one of those would-be husbands in an omnibus, and how glad she was when she looked at him that she had refused him. People don't keep well, mused Miss Entwhistle. If Lucy would only refuse Wemyss now, how glad she would be that she had when she met him in ten years' time in an omnibus.
But these, of course, were merely the reflections of a tired-out spinster, and she still had enough spirit to laugh at them to herself. After all, whatever she might feel about Wemyss Lucy adored him, and when anybody adores anybody as much as that, Miss Entwhistle thought, the only thing to do is to marry and have done with it. No; that was cynical. She meant, marry and not have done with it. Ah, if only the child were marrying that nice young Teddy Trevor, her own age and so devoted, and with every window-sill throughout his house in Chelsea the proper height....
Miss Entwhistle was very unhappy all this time, besides having feet that continually ached. Though she dreaded the marriage, yet she couldn't help feeling that it would be delicious to be able once more to sit down. How enchanting to sit quietly in her own empty drawing-room, and not to have to walk about London any more. How enchanting not to make any further attempts to persuade herself that she enjoyed Battersea Park, and liked the Embankment, and was entertained by Westminster Abbey. What she wanted with an increasing longing that amounted at last to desperation as the winter dragged on, was her own chair by the fire and an occasional middle-aged crony to tea. She had reached the time of life when one likes sitting down. Also she had definitely got to the period of cronies. One's contemporaries—people who had worn the same kinds of clothes as oneself in girlhood, who remembered bishop's sleeves and could laugh with one about bustles—how very much one longed for one's contemporaries.
When, then, Lucy's behaviour suddenly became so markedly attentive and so very tender, when she caught her looking at her with wistful affection and flushing on being caught, when her good-nights and good-mornings were many kisses instead of one, and she kept on jumping up and bringing her teaspoons she hadn't asked for and sugar she didn't want, Miss Entwhistle began to revive.
'Is it possible they're going to run away?' she wondered; and so much reduced was she that she very nearly hoped so.
Lucy had meant to do exactly as Wemyss said and keep her marriage secret, creeping out of the house quietly, going off with him abroad after the registrar had bound them together, and telegraphing or writing to her aunt from some safe distant placeen routelike Boulogne; but on saying good-night the evening before the wedding day, to her very great consternation her aunt, whom she was in the act of kissing, suddenly pushed her gently a little away, looked at her a moment, and then holding her by both arms said with conviction, 'It's to-morrow.'
Lucy could only stare. She stared idiotically, open-mouthed, her face scarlet. She looked and felt both foolish and frightened. Aunt Dot was uncanny. If she had discovered, how had she discovered? And what was she going to do? But had she discovered, or was it just something she chanced to remember, some engagement Lucy had naturally forgotten, or perhaps only somebody coming to tea?
She clutched at this straw. 'What is to-morrow?' she stammered, scarlet with fright and guilt.
And her aunt made herself perfectly clear by replying, 'Your wedding.'
Then Lucy fell on her neck and cried and told her everything, and her wonderful, unexpected, uncanny, adorable little aunt, instead of being upset and making her feel too wicked and ungrateful to live, was full of sympathy and understanding. They sobbed together, sitting on the sofa locked in each other's arms, but it was a sweet sobbing, for they both felt at this moment how much they loved each other. Miss Entwhistle wished she had never had a single critical impatient thought of the man this darling little child so deeply loved, and Lucy wished she had never had a single secret from this darling little aunt Everard so blindly didn't love. Dear, dear little Aunt Dot. Lucy's heart was big with gratitude and tenderness and pity,—pity because she herself was so gloriously happy and surrounded by love, and Aunt Dot's life seemed, compared to hers, so empty, so solitary, and going to be like that till the end of her days; and Miss Entwhistle's heart was big with yearning over this lamb of Jim's who was giving herself with such fearlessness, all lit up by radiant love, into the hands of a strange husband. Presently, of course, he wouldn't be a strange husband, he would be a familiar husband; but would he be any the better for that, she wondered? They sobbed, and kissed, and sobbed again, each keeping half her thoughts to herself.
This is how it was that Miss Entwhistle walked into the registrar's office with Lucy next morning and was one of the witnesses of the marriage.
Wemyss had a very bad moment when he saw her come in. His heart gave a great thump, such as it had never done in his life before, for he thought there was to be a hitch and that at the very last minute he was somehow not going to get his Lucy. Then he looked at Lucy and was reassured. Her face was like the morning of a perfect day in its cloudlessness, her Love-in-a-Mist eyes were dewy with tenderness as they rested on him, and her mouth was twisted up by happiness into the sweetest, funniest little crooked smile. If only she would take off her hat, thought Wemyss, bursting with pride, so that the registrar could see how young she looked with her short hair,—why, perhaps the old boy might think she was too young to be married and start asking searching questions! What fun that would be.
He himself produced the effect on Miss Entwhistle, as he stood next to Lucy being married, of an enormous schoolboy who has just won some silver cup or other for his House after immense exertions. He had exactly that glowing face of suppressed triumph and pride; he was red with delighted achievement.
'Put the ring on your wife's finger,' ordered the registrar when, having got through the first part of the ceremony, Wemyss, busy beaming down at Lucy, forgot there was anything more to do. And Lucy stuck up her hand with all the fingers spread out and stiff, and her face beamed too with happiness at the words, 'Your wife.'
'"Nothing is here for tears,"' quoted Miss Entwhistle to herself, watching the blissful absorption with which they were both engaged in getting the ring successfully over the knuckle of the proper finger. 'He reallyisa—a dear. Yes. Of course. But how queer life is. I wonder what he was doing this day last year, he and that poor other wife of his.'
When it was over and they were outside on the steps, with the taxi Wemyss had come in waiting to take them to the station, Miss Entwhistle realised that here was the place and moment of good-bye, and that not only could she go no further with Lucy but that from now on she could do nothing more for her. Except love her. Except listen to her. Ah, she would always be there to love and listen to her; but happiest of all it would be for the little thing if she never, from her, were to need either of those services.
At the last moment she put her hand impulsively on Wemyss's breast and looked up into his triumphant, flushed face and said, 'Be kind to her.'
'Oh, Aunt Dot!' laughed Lucy, turning to hug her once more.
'Oh, Aunt Dot!' laughed Wemyss, vigorously shaking her hand.
They went down the steps, leaving her standing alone on the top, and she watched the departing taxi with the two heads bobbing up and down at the window and the four hands waving good-byes. That taxi window could never have framed in so much triumph, so much radiance before. Well, well, thought Aunt Dot, going down in her turn when the last glimpse of them had disappeared, and walking slowly homeward; and she added, after a space of further reflection, 'He reallyisa—a dear.'
Marriage, Lucy found, was different from what she had supposed; Everard was different; everything was different. For one thing she was always sleepy. For another she was never alone. She hadn't realised how completely she would never be alone, or, if alone, not sure for one minute to the other of going on being alone. Always in her life there had been intervals during which she recuperated in solitude from any strain; now there were none. Always there had been places she could go to and rest in quietly, safe from interruption; now there were none. The very sight of their room at the hotels they stayed at, with Wemyss's suitcases and clothes piled on the chairs, and the table covered with his brushes and shaving things, for he wouldn't have a dressing-room, being too natural and wholesome, he explained, to want anything separate from his own woman—the very sight of this room fatigued her. After a day of churches, pictures and restaurants—he was a most conscientious sightseer, besides being greatly interested in his meals—to come back to this room wasn't rest but further fatigue. Wemyss, who was never tired and slept wonderfully—it was the soundness of his sleep that kept her awake, because she wasn't used to hearing sound sleep so close—would fling himself into the one easy-chair and pull her on to his knee, and having kissed her a great many times he would ruffle her hair, and then when it was all on ends like a boy's coming out of a bath, look at her with the pride of possession and say, 'There's a wife for a respectable British business man to have! Mrs. Wemyss, aren't you ashamed of yourself?' And then there would be more kissing,—jovial, gluttonous kisses, that made her skin rough and chapped.
'Baby,' she would say, feebly struggling, and smiling a little wearily.
Yes, he was a baby, a dear, high-spirited baby, but a baby now at very close quarters and one that went on all the time. You couldn't put him in a cot and give him a bottle and say, 'There now,' and then sit down quietly to a little sewing; you didn't have Sundays out; you were never, day or night, an instant off duty. Lucy couldn't count the number of times a day she had to answer the question, 'Who's my own little wife?' At first she answered it with laughing ecstasy, running into his outstretched arms, but very soon that fatal sleepiness set in and remained with her for the whole of her honeymoon, and she really felt too tired sometimes to get the ecstasy she quickly got to know was expected of her into her voice. She loved him, she was indeed his own little wife, but constantly to answer this and questions like it satisfactorily was a great exertion. Yet if there was a shadow of hesitation before she answered, a hair's-breadth of delay owing to her thoughts having momentarily wandered, Wemyss was upset, and she had to spend quite a long time reassuring him with the fondest whispers and caresses. Her thoughts mustn't wander, she had discovered; her thoughts were to be his as well as all the rest of her. Was ever a girl so much loved? she asked herself, astonished and proud; but, on the other hand, she was dreadfully sleepy.
Any thinking she did had to be done at night, when she lay awake because of the immense emphasis with which Wemyss slept, and she hadn't been married a week before she was reflecting what a bad arrangement it was, the way ecstasy seemed to have no staying power. Also it oughtn't to begin, she considered, at its topmost height and accordingly not be able to move except downwards. If one could only start modestly in marriage with very little of it and work steadily upwards, taking one's time, knowing there was more and more to come, it would be much better she thought. No doubt it would go on longer if one slept better and hadn't, consequently, got headaches. Everard's ecstasy went on. Perhaps by ecstasy she really meant high spirits, and Everard was beside himself with high spirits.
Wemyss was indeed the typical bridegroom of the Psalms, issuing forth rejoicing from his chamber. Lucy wished she could issue forth from it rejoicing too. She was vexed with herself for being so stupidly sleepy, for not being able to get used to the noise beside her at night and go to sleep as naturally as she did in Eaton Terrace, in spite of the horns of taxis. It wasn't fair to Everard, she felt, not to find a wife in the morning matching him in spirits. Perhaps, however, this was a condition peculiar to honeymoons, and marriage, once the honeymoon was over, would be a more tranquil state. Things would settle down when they were back in England, to a different, more separated life in which there would be time to rest, time to think; time to remember, while he was away at his office, how deeply she loved him. And surely she would learn to sleep; and once she slept properly she would be able to answer his loving questions throughout the day with more realélan.
But,—there in England waiting for her, inevitable, no longer to be put off or avoided, was The Willows. Whenever her thoughts reached that house they gave a little jump and tried to slink away. She was ashamed of herself, it was ridiculous, and Everard's attitude was plainly the sensible one, and if he could adopt it surely she, who hadn't gone through that terrible afternoon last July, could; yet she failed to see herself in The Willows, she failed altogether to imagine it. How, for instance, was she going to sit on that terrace,—'We always have tea in fine weather on the terrace,' Wemyss had casually remarked, apparently quite untouched by the least memory—how was she going to have tea on the very flags perhaps where.... Her thoughts slunk away; but not before one of them had sent a curdling whisper through her mind, 'The tea would taste of blood.'
Well, this was sleeplessness. She never in her life had had that sort of absurd thought. It was just that she didn't sleep, and so her brain was relaxed and let the reins of her thinking go slack. The day her father died, it's true, when it began to be evening and she was afraid of the night alone with him in his mysterious indifference, she had begun thinking absurdly, but Everard had come and saved her. He could save her from this too if she could tell him; only she couldn't tell him. How could she spoil his joy in his home? It was the thing he loved next best to her.
As the honeymoon went on and Wemyss's ecstasies a little subsided, as he began to tire of so many trains—after Paris they did the châteaux country—and hotels and waiters and taxis and restaurants, and the cooking which he had at first enjoyed now only increased his longing at every meal for a plain English steak and boiled potatoes, he talked more and more of The Willows. With almost the same eagerness as that which had so much enchanted and moved her before their marriage when he talked of their wedding day, he now talked of The Willows and the day when he would show it to her. He counted the days now to that day. The 4th of April; his birthday; on that happy day he would lead his little wife into the home he loved. How could she, when he talked like that, do anything but pretend enthusiasm and looking forward? He had apparently entirely forgotten what she had told him about her reluctance to go there at Christmas. She was astonished that, when the first bliss of being married to her had worn off and his thoughts were free for this other thing he so much loved, his home, he didn't approach it with more care for what he must know was her feeling about it. She was still more astonished when she realised that he had entirely forgotten her feeling about it. It would be, she felt, impossible to shadow his happiness at the prospect of showing her his home by any reminder of her reluctance. Besides, she was certainly going to have to live at The Willows, so what was the use of talking?
'I suppose,' she did say hesitatingly one day when he was describing it to her for the hundredth time, for it was his habit to describe the same thing often, 'you've changed your room——?'
They were sitting at the moment, resting after the climb up, on one of the terraces of the Château of Amboise, with a view across the Loire of an immense horizon, and Wemyss had been comparing it, to its disadvantage, when he recovered his breath, with the view from his bedroom window at The Willows. It wasn't very nice weather, and they both were cold and tired, and it was still only eleven o'clock in the morning.
'Change my room? What room?' he asked.
'Your—the room you and—the room you slept in.'
'My bedroom? I should think not. It's the best room in the house. Why do you think I've changed it?' And he looked at her with a surprised face.
'Oh, I don't know,' said Lucy, taking refuge in stroking his hand. 'I only thought——'
An inkling of what was in her mind penetrated into his, and his voice went grave.
'You mustn't think,' he said. 'You mustn't be morbid. Now Lucy, I can't have that. It will spoil everything if you let yourself be morbid. And you promised me before our marriage you wouldn't be. Have you forgotten?'
He turned to her and took her face in both his hands and searched her eyes with his own very solemn ones, while the woman who was conducting them over the castle went to the low parapet, and stood with her back to them studying the view and yawning.
'Oh, Everard—of course I haven't forgotten. I've not forgotten anything I promised you, and never will. But—have I got to go into that bedroom too?'
He was really astonished. 'Have you got to go into that bedroom too?' he repeated, staring at the face enclosed in his two big hands. It looked extraordinarily pretty like that, like a small flower in its delicate whiteness next to his discoloured, middle-aged hands, and her mouth since her marriage seemed to have become an even more vivid red than it used to be, and her eyes were young enough to be made more beautiful instead of less by the languor of want of sleep. 'Well, I should think so. Aren't you my wife?'
'Yes,' said Lucy. 'But——'
'Now, Lucy, I'll have no buts,' he said, with his most serious air, kissing her on the cheek, she had discovered that just that kind of kiss was a rebuke. 'Those buts of yours butt in——'
He stopped, struck by what he had said.
'I think that was rather amusing—don't you?' he asked, suddenly smiling.
'Oh yes—very,' said Lucy eagerly, smiling too, delighted that he should switch off from solemnity.
He kissed her again,—this time a real kiss, on her funny, charming mouth.
'I suppose you'll admit,' he said, laughing and squeezing up her face into a quaint crumpled shape, 'that either you're my wife or not my wife, and that if you're my wife——'
'Oh, I'mthatall right,' laughed Lucy.
'Then you share my room. None of these damned new-fangled notions for me, young woman.'
'Oh, but I didn't mean——'
'What? Another but?' he exclaimed, pouncing down on to her mouth and stopping it with an enormous kiss.
'Monsieur et Madame se refroidiront,' said the woman, turning round and drawing her shawl closer over her chest as a gust of chilly wind swept over the terrace.
They were honeymooners, poor creatures, and therefore one had patience; but even honeymooners oughtn't to wish to embrace in a cold wind on an exposed terrace of a château round which they were being conducted by a woman who was in a hurry to return to the preparation of her Sunday dinner. For such purposes hotels were provided, and the shelter of a comfortable warm room. She had supposed them to bepère et fillewhen first she admitted them, but was soon aware of their real relationship. 'Il doit être bien riche,' had been her conclusion.
'Come along, come along,' said Wemyss, getting up quickly, for he too felt the gust of cold wind. 'Let's finish the château or we'll be late for lunch. I wish they hadn't preserved so many of these places—one would have been quite enough to show us the sort of thing.'
'But we needn't go and look at them all,' said Lucy.
'Oh yes we must. We've arranged to.'
'But Everard——' began Lucy, following after him as he followed after the conductress, who had a way of darting out of sight round corners.
'This woman's like a lizard,' panted Wemyss, arriving round a corner only to see her disappear through an arch. 'Won't we be happy when it's time to go back to England and not have to see any more sights.'
'But why don't we go back now, if you feel like it?' asked Lucy, trotting after him as he on his big legs pursued the retreating conductress, and anxious to show him, by eagerness to go sooner to The Willows than was arranged, that she wasn't being morbid.
'Why, you know we can't leave before the 3rd of April,' said Wemyss, over his shoulder. 'It's all settled.'
'But can't it be unsettled?'
'What, and upset all the plans, and arrive home before my birthday?' He stopped and turned round to stare at her. 'Really, my dear——' he said.
She had discovered that my dear was a term of rebuke.
'Oh yes—of course,' she said hastily, 'I forgot about your birthday.'
At that Wemyss stared at her harder than ever; incredulously, in fact. Forgot about his birthday?Lucyhad forgotten? If it had been Vera, now—but Lucy? He was deeply hurt. He was so much hurt that he stood quite still, and the conductress was obliged, on discovering that she was no longer being followed, to wait once more for the honeymooners; which she did, clutching her shawl round her abundant French chest and shivering.
What had she said, Lucy hurriedly asked herself, nipping over her last words in her mind, for she had learned by now what he looked like when he was hurt. Oh yes,—the birthday. How stupid of her. But it was because birthdays in her family were so unimportant, and nobody had minded whether they were remembered or not.
'I didn't mean that,' she said earnestly, laying her hand on his breast. 'Of course I hadn't forgotten anything so precious. It only had—well, you know what even the most wonderful things do sometimes—it—it had escaped my memory.'
'Lucy! Escaped your memory? The day to which you owe your husband?'
Wemyss said this with such an exaggerated solemnity, such an immense pomposity, that she thought he was in fun and hadn't really minded about the birthday at all; and, eager to meet every mood of his, she laughed. Relieved, she was so unfortunate as to laugh merrily.
To her consternation, after a moment's further stare he turned his back on her without a word and walked on.
Then she realised what she had done, that she had laughed—oh, how dreadful!—in the wrong place, and she ran after him and put her arm through his, and tried to lay her cheek against his sleeve, which was difficult because of the way their paces didn't match and also because he took no notice of her, and said, 'Baby—baby—were his dear feelings hurt, then?' and coaxed him.
But he wouldn't be coaxed. She had wounded him too deeply,—laughing, he said to himself, at what was to him the most sacred thing in life, the fact that he was her husband, that she was his wife.
'Oh, Everard,' she murmured at last, withdrawing her arm, giving up, 'don't spoil our day.'
Spoil their day? He? That finished it.
He didn't speak to her again till night. Then, in bed, after she had cried bitterly for a long while, because she couldn't make out what really had happened, and she loved him so much, and wouldn't hurt him for the world, and was heart-broken because she had, and anyhow was tired out, he at last turned to her and took her to his arms again and forgave her.
'I can't live,' sobbed Lucy, 'I can't live—if you don't go on loving me—if we don't understand——'
'My little Love,' said Wemyss, melted by the way her small body was shaking in his arms, and rather frightened, too, at the excess of her woe. 'My little Love don't. You mustn't. Your Everard loves you, and you mustn't give way like this. You'll be ill. Think how miserable you'd make him then.'
And in the dark he kissed away her tears, and held her close till her sobbing quieted down; and presently, held close like that, his kisses shutting her smarting eyes, she now the baby comforted and reassured, and he the soothing nurse, she fell asleep, and for the first time since her marriage slept all night.
Early in their engagement Wemyss had expounded his theory to Lucy that there should be the most perfect frankness between lovers, while as for husband and wife there oughtn't to be a corner anywhere about either of them, mind, body, or soul, which couldn't be revealed to the other one.
'You can talk about everything to your Everard,' he assured her. 'Tell him your innermost thoughts, whatever they may be. You need no more be ashamed of telling him than of thinking them by yourself. Heisyou. You and he are one in mind and soul now, and when he is your husband you and he will become perfect and complete by being one in body as well. Everard—Lucy. Lucy—Everard. We shan't know where one ends and the other begins. That, little Love, is real marriage. What do you think of it?'
Lucy thought so highly of it that she had no words with which to express her admiration, and fell to kissing him instead. What ideal happiness, to be for ever removed from the fear of loneliness by the simple expedient of being doubled; and who so happy as herself to have found the exactly right person for this doubling, one she could so perfectly agree with and understand? She felt quite sorry she had nothing in her mind in the way of thoughts she was ashamed of to tell him then and there, but there wasn't a doubt, there wasn't a shred of anything a little wrong, not even an unworthy suspicion. Her mind was a chalice filled only with love, and so clear and bright was the love that even at the bottom, when she stirred it up to look, there wasn't a trace of sediment.
But marriage—or was it sleeplessness?—completely changed this, and there were perfect crowds of thoughts in her mind that she was thoroughly ashamed of. Remembering his words, and whole-heartedly agreeing that to be able to tell each other everything, to have no concealments, was real marriage, the day after her wedding she first of all reminded him of what he had said, then plunged bravely into the announcement that she'd got a thought she was ashamed of.
Wemyss pricked up his ears, thinking it was something interesting to do with sex, and waited with an amused, inquisitive smile. But Lucy in such matters was content to follow him, aware of her want of experience and of the abundance of his, and the thought that was worrying her only had to do with a waiter. A waiter, if you please.
Wemyss's smile died away. He had had occasion to reprimand this waiter at lunch for gross negligence, and here was Lucy alleging he had done so without any reason that she could see, and anyhow roughly. Would he remove the feeling of discomfort she had at being forced to think her own heart's beloved, the kindest and gentlest of men, hadn't been kind and gentle but unjust, by explaining?
Well, that was at the very beginning. She soon learned that a doubt in her mind was better kept there. If she brought it out to air it and dispel it by talking it over with him, all that happened was that he was hurt, and when he was hurt she instantly became perfectly miserable. Seeing, then, that this happened about small things, how impossible it was to talk with him of big things; of, especially, her immense doubt in regard to The Willows. For a long while she was sure he was bearing her feeling in mind, since it couldn't have changed since Christmas, and that when she arrived there she would find that he had had everything altered and all traces of Vera's life there removed. Then, when he began to talk about The Willows, she found that such an idea as alterations hadn't entered his head. She was to sleep in the very room that had been his and Vera's, in the very bed. And positively, so far was it from true that she could tell him every thought and talk everything over with him, when she discovered this she wasn't able to say more than that hesitating remark on the château terrace at Amboise about supposing he was going to change his bedroom.
Yet The Willows haunted her, and what a comfort it would have been to tell him all she felt and let him help her to get rid of her growing obsession by laughing at her. What a comfort if, even if he had thought her too silly and morbid to be laughed at, he had indulged her and consented to alter those rooms. But one learns a lot on a honeymoon, Lucy reflected, and one of the things she had learned was that Wemyss's mind was always made up. There seemed to be no moment when it was in a condition of becoming, and she might have slipped in a suggestion or laid a wish before him; his plans were sprung upon her full fledged, and they were unalterable. Sometimes he said, 'Would you like——?' and if she didn't like, and answered truthfully, as she answered at first before she learned not to, there was trouble. Silent trouble. A retiring of Wemyss into a hurt aloofness, for his question was only decorative, and his little Love should instinctively, he considered, like what he liked; and there outside this aloofness, after efforts to get at him with fond and anxious questions, she sat like a beggar in patient distress, waiting for him to emerge and be kind to her.
Of course as far as the minor wishes and preferences of every day went it was all quite easy, once she had grasped the right answer to the question, 'Would you like?' She instantly did like. 'Oh yes—verymuch!' she hastened to assure him; and then his face continued content and happy instead of clouding with aggrievement. But about the big things it wasn't easy, because of the difficulty of getting the right flavour of enthusiasm into her voice, and if she didn't get it in he would put his finger under her chin and turn her to the light and repeat the question in a solemn voice,—precursor, she had learned, of the beginning of the cloud on his face.
How difficult it was sometimes. When he said to her, 'You'll like the view from your sitting-room at The Willows,' she naturally wanted to cry out that she wouldn't, and ask him how he could suppose she would like what was to her a view for ever associated with death? Why shouldn't she be able to cry out naturally if she wanted to, to talk to him frankly, to get his help to cure herself of what was so ridiculous by laughing at it with him? She couldn't laugh all alone, though she was always trying to; with him she could have, and so have become quite sensible. For he was so much bigger than she was, so wonderful in the way he had triumphed over diseased thinking, and his wholesomeness would spread over her too, a purging, disinfecting influence, if only he would let her talk, if only he would help her to laugh. Instead, she found herself hurriedly saying in a small, anxious voice, 'Oh yes—verymuch!'
'Is it possible,' she thought, 'that I am abject?'
Yes, she was extremely abject, she reflected, lying awake at night considering her behaviour during the day. Love had made her so. Love did make one abject, for it was full of fear of hurting the beloved. The assertion of the Scriptures that perfect love casteth out fear only showed, seeing that her love for Everard was certainly perfect, how little the Scriptures really knew what they were talking about.
Well, if she couldn't tell him the things she was feeling, why couldn't she get rid of the sorts of feelings she couldn't tell him, and just be wholesome? Why couldn't she be at least as wholesome about going to that house as Everard? If anybody was justified in shrinking from The Willows it was Everard, not herself. Sometimes Lucy would be sure that deep in his character there was a wonderful store of simple courage. He didn't speak of Vera's death, naturally he didn't wish to speak of that awful afternoon, but how often he must think of it, hiding his thoughts even from her, bearing them altogether alone. Sometimes she was sure of this, and sometimes she was equally sure of the very opposite. From the way he looked, the way he spoke, from those tiny indications that one somehow has noticed without knowing that one has noticed and that are so far more revealing and conclusive than any words, she sometimes was sure he really had forgotten. But this was too incredible. She couldn't believe it. What had perhaps happened, she thought, was that in self-defence, for the preservation of his peace, he had made up his mind never to think of Vera. Only by banishing her altogether from his mind would he be safe. Yet that couldn't be true either, for several times on the honeymoon he had begun talking of her, of things she had said, of things she had liked, and it was she, Lucy, who stopped him. She shrank from hearing anything about Vera. She especially shrank from hearing her mentioned casually. She was ready to brace herself to talk about her if it was to be a serious talk, because she wanted to help and comfort him whenever the remembrance of her death arose to torment him, but she couldn't bear to hear her mentioned casually. In a way she admired this casualness, because it was a proof of the supreme wholesomeness Everard had attained to by sheer courageous determination, but even so she couldn't help thinking that she would have preferred a little less of just this kind of wholesomeness in her beloved. She might be too morbid, but wasn't it possible to be too wholesome? Anyhow she shrank from the intrusion of Vera into her honeymoon. That, at least, ought to be kept free from her. Later on at The Willows....
Lucy fought and fought against it, but always at the back of her mind was the thought, not looked at, slunk away from, but nevertheless fixed, that there at The Willows, waiting for her, was Vera.
Those who go to Strorley, and cross the bridge to the other side of the river, have only to follow the towpath for a little to come to The Willows. It can also be reached by road, through a white gate down a lane that grows more and more willowy as it gets nearer the river and the house, but is quite passable for carts and even for cars, except when there are floods. When there are floods this lane disappears, and when the floods have subsided it is black and oozing for a long time afterwards, with clouds of tiny flies dancing about in it if the weather is at all warm, and the shoes of those who walk stick in it and come off, and those who drive, especially if they drive a car, have trouble. But all is well once a second white gate is reached, on the other side of which is a gravel sweep, a variety of handsome shrubs, nicely kept lawns, and The Willows. There are no big trees in the garden of The Willows, because it was built in the middle of meadows where there weren't any, but all round the iron railings of the square garden—the house being the centre of the square—and concealing the wire netting which keeps the pasturing cows from thrusting their heads through and eating the shrubs, is a fringe of willows. Hence its name.
'A house,' said Wemyss, explaining its name to Lucy on the morning of their arrival, 'should always be named after whatever most insistently catches the eye.'
'Then oughtn't it to have been called The Cows?' asked Lucy; for the meadows round were strewn thickly as far as she could see with recumbent cows, and they caught her eye much more than the tossing bare willow branches.
'No,' said Wemyss, annoyed. 'It ought not have been called The Cows.'
'No—of course I didn't mean that,' she said hastily.
Lucy was nervous, and said what first came into her head, and had been saying things of this nature the whole journey down. She didn't want to, she knew he didn't like it, but she couldn't stop.
They had just arrived, and were standing on the front steps while the servants unloaded the fly that had brought them from the station, and Wemyss was pointing out what he wished her to look at and admire from that raised-up place before taking her indoors. Lucy was glad of any excuse that delayed going indoors, that kept her on the west side of the house, furthest away from the terrace and the library window. Indoors would be the rooms, the unaltered rooms, the library past whose window..., the sitting-room at the top of the house out of whose window..., the bedroom she was going to sleep in with the very bed.... It was too miserably absurd, too unbalanced of her for anything but shame and self-contempt, how she couldn't get away from the feeling that indoors waiting for her would be Vera.
It was a grey, windy morning, with low clouds scurrying across the meadows. The house was raised well above flood level, and standing on the top step she could see how far the meadows stretched beyond the swaying willow hedge. Grey sky, grey water, green fields,—it was all grey and green except the house, which was red brick with handsome stone facings, and made, in its exposed position unhidden by any trees, a great splotch of vivid red in the landscape.
'Like blood,' said Lucy to herself; and was immediately ashamed.
'Oh, how bracing!' she cried, spreading out her arms and letting the wind blow her serge wrap out behind her like a flag. It whipped her skirt round her body, showing its slender pretty lines, and the parlourmaid, going in and out with the luggage, looked curiously at this small juvenile new mistress. 'Oh, I love this wind—don't take me indoors yet——'
Wemyss was pleased that she should like the wind, for was it not by the time it reached his house part, too, of his property? His face, which had clouded a little because of The Cows, cleared again.
But she didn't really like the wind at all, she never had liked anything that blustered and was cold, and if she hadn't been nervous the last thing she would have done was to stand there letting it blow her to pieces.
'And what a lot of laurels!' she exclaimed, holding on her hat with one hand and with the other pointing to a corner filled with these shrubs.
'Yes. I'll take you round the garden after lunch,' said Wemyss. 'We'll go in now.'
'And—and laurustinus. I love laurustinus——'
'Yes. Vera planted that. It has done very well. Come in now——'
'And—look, what are those bare things without any leaves yet?'
'I'll show you everything after lunch, Lucy. Come in——' And he put his arm about her shoulders, and urged her through the door the maid was holding open with difficulty because of the wind.
There she was, then, actually inside The Willows. The door was shut behind her. She looked about her shrinkingly.
They were in a roomy place with a staircase in it.
'The hall,' said Wemyss, standing still, his arm round her.
'Yes,' said Lucy.
'Oak,' said Wemyss.
'Yes,' said Lucy.
He gazed round him with a sigh of satisfaction at having got back to it.
'All oak,' he said. 'You'll find nothing gimcrack aboutmyhouse, little Love. Where are those flowers?' he added, turning sharply to the parlourmaid. 'I don't see my yellow flowers.'
'They're in the dining-room, sir,' said the parlourmaid.
'Why aren't they where I could see them the first thing?'
'I understood the orders were they were always to be on the breakfast-table, sir.'
'Breakfast-table! When there isn't any breakfast?'
'I understood——'
'I'm not interested in what you understood.'
Lucy here nervously interrupted, for Everard sounded suddenly very angry, by exclaiming, 'Antlers!' and waving her unpinned-down arm in the direction of the——
'Yes,' said Wemyss, his attention called off the parlourmaid, gazing up at his walls with pride.
'What a lot,' said Lucy.
'Aren't there. I always said I'd have a hall with antlers in it, and I've got it.' He hugged her close to his side. 'And I've got you too,' he said. 'I always get what I'm determined to get.'
'Did you shoot them all yourself?' asked Lucy, thinking the parlourmaid would take the opportunity to disappear, and a little surprised that she continued to stand there.
'What? The beasts they belonged to? Not I. If you want antlers the simple way is to go and buy them. Then you get them all at once, and not gradually. The hall was ready for them all at once, not gradually. I got these at Whiteley's. Kiss me.'
This sudden end to his remarks startled Lucy, and she repeated in her surprise—for there still stood the parlourmaid 'Kiss you?'
'I haven't had my birthday kiss yet.'
'Why, the very first thing when you woke up——'
'Not my real birthday kiss in my own home.'
She looked at the parlourmaid, who was quite frankly looking at her. Well, if the parlourmaid didn't mind, and Everard didn't mind, why should she mind?
She lifted her face and kissed him; but she didn't like kissing him or being kissed in public. What was the point of it? Kissing Everard was a great delight to her. A mixture of all sorts of wonderful sensations, and she loved to do it in different ways, tenderly, passionately, lingeringly, dreamily, amusingly, solemnly; each kind in turn, or in varied combinations. But among her varied combinations there was nothing that included a parlourmaid. Consequently her kiss was of the sort that was to be expected, perfunctory and brief, whereupon Wemyss said, 'Lucy——' in his hurt voice.
She started.
'Oh Everard—what is it?' she asked nervously.
That particular one of his voices always by now made her start, for it always took her by surprise. Pick her way as carefully as she might among his feelings there were always some, apparently, that she hadn't dreamed were there and that she accordingly knocked against. How dreadful if she had hurt him the very first thing on getting into The Willows! And on his birthday too. From the moment he woke that morning, all the way down in the train, all the way in the fly from the station, she had been unremittingly engaged in avoiding hurting him; an activity made extra difficult by the unfortunate way her nervousness about the house at the journey's end impelled her to say the kinds of things she least wanted to. Irreverent things; such as the silly remark on his house's name. She had got on much better the evening before at the house in Lancaster Gate where they had slept, because gloomy as it was it anyhow wasn't The Willows. Also there was no trace in it that she could see of such a thing as a woman ever having lived in it. It was a man's house; the house of a man who has no time for pictures, or interesting books and furniture. It was like a club and an office mixed up together, with capacious leather chairs and solid tables and Turkey carpets and reference books. She found it quite impossible to imagine Vera, or any other woman, in that house. Either Vera had spent most of her time at The Willows, or every trace of her had been very carefully removed. Therefore Lucy, helped besides by extreme fatigue, for she had been sea-sick all the way from Dieppe to Newhaven, Wemyss having crossed that way because he was fond of the sea, had positively been unable to think of Vera in those surroundings and had dropped off to sleep directly she got there and had slept all night; and of course being asleep she naturally hadn't said anything she oughtn't to have said, so that her first appearance in Lancaster Gate was a success; and when she woke next morning, and saw Wemyss's face in such unclouded tranquillity next to hers as he still slept, she lay gazing at it with her heart brimming with tender love and vowed that his birthday should be as unclouded throughout as his dear face was at that moment. She adored him. He was her very life. She wanted nothing in the world except for him to be happy. She would watch every word. She really must see to it that on this day of all days no word should escape her before it had been turned round in her head at least three times, and considered with the utmost care. Such were her resolutions in the morning; and here she was not only saying the wrong things but doing them. It was because she hadn't expected to be told to kiss him in the presence of a parlourmaid. She was always being tripped up by the unexpected. She ought by now to have learned better. How unfortunate.
'Oh Everard—what is it?' she asked nervously; but she knew before he could answer, and throwing her objections to public caresses to the winds, for anything was better than that he should be hurt at just that moment, she put up her free arm and drew his head down and kissed him again,—lingeringly this time, a kiss of tender, appealing love. What must it be like, she thought while she kissed him and her heart yearned over him, to be so fearfully sensitive. It made things difficult for her, but how much, much more difficult for him. And how wonderful the way his sensitiveness had developed since marriage. There had been no sign of it before.
Implicit in her kiss was an appeal not to let anything she said or did spoil his birthday, to forgive her, to understand. And at the back of her mind, quite uncontrollable, quite unauthorised, ran beneath these other thoughts this thought: 'I am certainly abject.'
This time he was quickly placated because of his excitement at getting home. 'Nobody can hurt me as you can,' was all he said.
'Oh but as though I ever, ever mean to,' she breathed, her arm round his neck.
Meanwhile the parlourmaid looked on.
'Why doesn't she go?' whispered Lucy, making the most of having got his ear.
'Certainly not,' said Wemyss out loud, raising his head. 'I might want her. Do you like the hall, little Love?'
'Verymuch,' she said, loosing him.
'Don't you think it's a very fine staircase?'
'Veryfine,' she said.
He gazed about him with pride, standing in the middle of the Turkey carpet holding her close to his side.
'Now look at the window,' he said, turning her round when she had had time to absorb the staircase. 'Look—isn't it a jolly window? No nonsense about that window. You can really see out of it, and it really lets in light. Vera'—she winced—'tried to stuff it all up with curtains. She said she wanted colour, or something. Having got a beautiful garden to look out at, what does she try to do but shut most of it out again by putting up curtains.'
The attempt had evidently not succeeded, for the window, which was as big as a window in the waiting-room of a London terminus, had nothing to interfere with it but the hanging cord of a drawn-up brown holland blind. Through it Lucy could see the whole half of the garden on the right side of the front door with the tossing willow hedge, the meadows, and the cows. The leafless branches of some creeper beat against it and made a loud irregular tapping in the pauses of Wemyss's observations.
'Plate glass,' he said.
'Yes,' said Lucy; and something in his voice made her add in a tone of admiration, 'Fancy.'
Looking at the window they had their backs to the stairs. Suddenly she heard footsteps coming down them from the landing above.
'Who's that?' she said quickly, with a little gasp, before she could think, before she could stop, not turning her head, her eyes staring at the window.
'Who's what?' asked Wemyss. 'You do think it's a jolly window, don't you, little Love?'
The footsteps on the stairs stopped, and a gong she had noticed at the angle of the turn was sounded. Her body, which had shrunk together, relaxed. What a fool she was.
'Lunch,' said Wemyss. 'Come along—but isn't it a jolly window, little Love?'
'Veryjolly.'
He turned her round to march her off to the dining-room, while the housemaid, who had come down from the landing, continued to beat the gong, though there they were obeying it under her very nose.
'Don't you think that's a good place to have a gong?' he asked, raising his voice because the gong, which had begun quietly, was getting rapidly louder. 'Then when you're upstairs in your sitting-room you'll hear it just as distinctly as if you were downstairs. Vera——'
But what he was going to say about Vera was drowned this time in the increasing fury of the gong.