Miss Silver Comes To Stay (7 page)

They had to talk about something. She wanted to be reasonably sure that Carr was only walking off his passion. She allowed herself to relax, and said,

“That would depend—”

“How truly cautious! It would depend on what I mean by a packet? Well, let us say enough to run this place on quite a lavish scale. Would you want to live here?”

She laughed frankly.

“I should hate it. I like my cottage.”

“No urge to go elsewhere and make a splash?”

“My dear James!”

He was leaning back against the table again, his eyes bright, his lips smiling.

“Then what would you do with it? You’ve got to do something—in my hypothetical case.”

She said in a considering voice,

“There are such a lot of people who haven’t any homes. Nobody wants them. They drift into cheap bed-sitting rooms and shrivel up. I thought some of the big country houses might be run on communal lines—a lot of comfortable bed-sitting rooms, and the big public rooms for meals and recreation—”

He nodded, and then laughed.

“A hennery! I don’t envy you the running of it. Just think how they’d scratch each other’s eyes out!”

“Why should they? And I wouldn’t only have women. Men want homes even more—they can’t make them for themselves.” She held out her hand. “And now, James, please burn that paper.”

He shook his head, smiling.

“It’s my will, and none of your business. If I’d ever cared enough, I’d have made another years ago. I just haven’t bothered. But if I did bother, I’ve an idea that I should do the same thing all over again.”

He got a very direct look.

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you. Stand by to receive a bouquet. There was love’s young dream, as I said—and, believe it or not, I never managed to repeat it. I’ve made love to quite a number of charming women, and I’ve enjoyed myself, but if I may say so, the contacts were—on a different plane. The idyllic note was—well, lacking. The other ladies bore no resemblance whatever to Pallas Athene. Without any desire to return to the uncomfortable period of youth, it has in retrospect a certain charm. You, as it were, personify that charm.”

“You know perfectly well I’ve never had an atom of charm.”

“Ars est celare artem. Do you know, when you said that you made me feel like a boy again.”

She laughed.

“You used to tell me I was as blunt as a poker. I am still. I never did have any tact, so you must just take me the way I am. There’s something I want to say to you. It’s about Catherine.”

Outside upon the steps, leaning against the glass door, Catherine Welby heard her own name. At the top of the window above her head there was one of the old star-shaped ventilators dating from the discovery round about 1880 that fresh air was not necessarily lethal. The ventilator was open, the voices of the two people in the study were vigorous and resonant. She had heard a good deal. She now heard James Lessiter say,

“What about Catherine?”

Rietta took a step forward.

“James—don’t harry her.”

“My dear girl, she’s a thief.”

Catherine was wrapped in a long black cloak. It was very warm, because it was lined with fur. Mildred Lessiter had given it to her long ago. The fur was still good and warm. Inside it her body shrank with cold.

“She’s a thief.”

“You’ve no right to say that!”

“I think I have. Here’s my mother’s memorandum—you can read it if you like. She’s put everything down on it. Catherine was lying when she said the things were given to her. If she.can’t or won’t produce them, I shall prosecute.”

“You can’t do that!”

“I can, and will.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s a thief.”

Rietta shook her head.

“It isn’t that. You’ve got something against her. What is it?”

“You don’t need me to tell you that. She broke our engagement—lied about me to you—”

“James, they weren’t lies!”

“She lied about both of us to my mother.”

She came up quite close to him and stood there at the side of the table, her right hand resting on it.

“James, those were not the things which broke our engagement. I broke it—when you killed your dog.”

A dark flush of anger had come up into his face. His jesting manner had gone.

“Did you expect me to keep a brute that had turned on me?”

“You frightened him and he snapped. You killed him— cruelly.”

“I suppose Catherine told you that.”

“No, it was one of the gardeners—he saw it. Catherine didn’t know. I’ve never told anyone.”

He said moodily, “What a fuss about a dog.” Then, with a resumption of his earlier manner, “I told you I paid my scores. I think I’m going to enjoy settling with Catherine.”

“James—please—”

As she met his look she knew just how useless it was. He laughed lightly.

“It’s going to give me a good deal of pleasure to see Catherine in the dock.”

The words hit her like a blow. He had stirred the past, played on her feelings, even for a moment reached out to touch her with the old charm. And now this. If he had actually struck her in the face, it would have been no more of a stinging shock. Rietta’s anger broke. Afterwards she couldn’t remember what she said. The words sprang up out of her anger and she flung them at him. If she had had anything in her hand she might have flung that too.

And then suddenly she was afraid of her own anger. It came up out of the past, and she was afraid of it. She said in a choked voice,

“I’ll go.”

When she had said that, Catherine drew back from the glass. She stepped down into the bushes out of which she had come. She saw the curtains pulled back and the door wrenched open. Rietta Cray ran down the steps, bareheaded, in her red dress.

She opened her own door and went in. All the way back she had met no one, heard nothing. Her anger was so hot in her that she did not miss the coat, lying where she had dropped it in the study at Melling House. She did not remember it or think of it at all. She thought about Carr, she thought about Catherine, she thought about her own quick anger and was aghast.

She opened the door of the living-room and went in. Fancy looked up, yawning.

“You’ve missed the nine o’clock news.”

Instinctively Rietta glanced at the clock, an old round wall-clock hanging on the chimney breast. It was twenty past nine. A dance band was swinging the latest song hit. She put out her hand and switched it off.

“Has Carr come back?”

Fancy yawned again. She really had lovely teeth, as white as milk and as even as peas in a pod.

“No, he hasn’t. What’s the matter with him, Miss Cray?”

Rietta came and stood over her, tall and frowning.

“I want you to tell me what happened—when I was out of the room.”

The large blue eyes blinked up at her. There was an obvious attempt to control another yawn. Rietta thought with exasperation that the creature looked exactly like a sleepy child. You couldn’t blame her for it, but it wasn’t a situation in which a child was going to be much use. She said,

“I want you to tell me just what happened whilst I was at the telephone.”

“Well—” the eyes remained wide and a little unfocussed— “I don’t know that anything happened—much. Not till the end.”

“What happened then?”

“Well, we were looking at those papers—the ones Mr. Ainger brought—and I’d seen a hat I liked, and I was thinking about how I could copy it, so I wasn’t taking a lot of notice— you don’t when you’re thinking about something special. And all at once there was Carr, calling out. I thought he must have been stung or something. He looked awful, Miss Cray, he really did. And he said, ‘The damned swine!’ and I said, ‘Where?’ because I didn’t know what he meant—I don’t see how I could. And then you came in, and he said that piece about its being the man who took Marjory away—in the picture he was looking at—and he asked you if it was James Lessiter. Marjory was his wife, wasn’t she? I mean, she was Carr’s wife, and that James Lessiter went off with her. Carr won’t do anything silly, will he?”

Rietta said, “No,” in a deep, determined voice. It seemed to surprise Fancy a little. She blinked.

“Well, you can’t pick up spilt milk again, can you?”

Rietta said, “No.”

Fancy yawned.

“By what I’ve heard she wasn’t much loss, was she?” Then she blinked again. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to have said that. You weren’t fond of her, were you?”

“No, I wasn’t fond of her.”

“By all accounts nobody was. I expect Carr got a bit of a jolt with her. He’s kind of—nice, isn’t he? When I told Mum about him she said she reckoned he’d had his feelings pretty badly hurt. She told me to look out and be careful. ‘Have him if you want to, Ducks, or don’t have him if you don’t want to, but don’t play him up.’ That’s what Mum said.”

“And which are you going to do?”

At any other time there might have been sarcasm in the question. At this moment Rietta put it with complete simplicity, and with equal simplicity Fancy answered her.

“He doesn’t want me. He said we wouldn’t fit in. I think he likes that girl where he took me to tea—that Elizabeth Moore. He was fond of her, wasn’t he?”

“A long time ago.”

“Why didn’t he marry her?”

“He met Marjory.”

Fancy nodded.

“She was the sort who’d snatch. I only really met her once, but you could see how she was. Oh, Miss Cray, whatever have you done to your hand—it’s all over blood!”

Rietta glanced down at her right hand. It was astonishing how much blood had come from that small scratch. Up at Melling House she had wrapped James Lessiter’s handkerchief about it. It must have dropped whilst they were talking, and the bleeding had started again. It was dry now, but what a mess. She went down the passage to the lavatory and held it under the cold tap until the stain was gone.

Elizabeth Moore sat with a book on her lap, but she wasn’t reading. She had turned off the wireless after listening to the headlines of the nine o’clock news. Her mind refused to leap the Atlantic, the Channel, traverse the wastes of Europe and Asia, and concern itself with the follies which men were perpetrating hundreds of thousands of miles away. There are moments when the world contracts to what is happening to one person. Elizabeth’s world had so contracted. There was only one person it it—Carr. She herself was present only as a striving against pain. Fancy hovered vaguely as a threat. But Carr wandered alone in that small, empty world. He was in torment, and she couldn’t go to him, or touch him, or help him. A line came to her from her schooldays:

“Yes: in the sea of life enisl’d…

We mortal millions live alone.”

And it was true—when it came down to brass tacks you had to work things out for yourself. Another line came to her, from the Bible this time, full of haunting melancholy beauty: “No man can save his brother, nor make agreement unto God for him, for it cost more than that to redeem their souls, so that he must let it alone for ever.”

It was on this that she stretched out her hand to the bookcase without even looking to see what book it was that she had taken. It lay open upon her lap, and it was just white paper and black print, as dead to her as if the script had been Phoenician.

She did not know whether the time was long or short before she heard the tapping on the window. The room was at the back of the house. She lifted the curtain and saw only the black night pressing up against the glass like another curtain. Then in the dark something moved. A hand came up to knock again. Carr said her name.

It was a casement window with a low sill. She threw it wide, and he came in and pulled it to behind him. She let the curtain fall into its place, and saw his ghastly look, his shaking hands. They caught at her and held her, weighing her down until she came to a chair and dropped upon it. Then he was on his knees, his head against her, his whole body shaken. It was as if they had stumbled through the everyday crust into a dream where the most fantastic things are as natural as the drawing of one’s breath. She put her arms round him and held him until the shuddering died down and he was still, his head against her breast, her arms holding him. She knew that she had said his name, and that he had repeated hers over and over like a cry for help. If there had been other words, she did not know. They were in her thought, they beat with her blood, but she did not know if they passed her lips, or whether they reached him without sound on a pure tide of comforting love.

“What is it, my darling?”

She heard herself say that, and felt him shudder.

“Don’t let me go!”

“Carr—what is it?”

He told her then, lifting his head and speaking just above a whisper, as if the breath had gone out of him and he had to struggle for it.

“That man—I told you about—the one who took Marjory away—and left her—I saw his photograph—in a paper. It’s James Lessiter—”

She said with a gasp, “Carr, what have you done?”

“I haven’t—I thought I should if I stayed.”

The fear which had touched her was still cold at her heart.

“What happened?”

“Henry Ainger came in—he brought some papers for Rietta. Afterwards Fancy and I were looking at them—Rietta had gone to the telephone. I saw that man’s picture with his name under it—James Lessiter. I told you Marjory had kept his photograph—it was the same one. Rietta came in—I asked her, ‘Is this James Lessiter?’ After that I don’t quite know what happened. She said, ‘Yes,’ and I went out of the house— I wanted to get my hands on him—I knew I’d kill him if I did. I’ve been walking—I don’t know how long—”

She looked across his shoulder to the grandfather clock with its slow, solemn tick.

“It’s getting on for half past nine.”

“I can’t have taken an hour to get here—I suppose I did— I think I started out the other way—then I thought about you. It’s all I did think about after that—to get to you. I’ve made a damned fool of myself—”

“It doesn’t matter.”

It came to him that what she had just said was the underlying fact in their relationship. It didn’t matter what he did or said, or what anyone else did or said, whether he went away and forgot or came back and remembered, wet or shine, day or night, year in year out, the bond between them held. He couldn’t put it into words. He could only say, “No, it doesn’t matter,” and lay his head against her shoulder again.

The passion of the last hour had gone out of him, it already seemed remote and far away. There was a renewing. They stayed like that without any sense of time.

At last she said, “They won’t know where you are—they’ll be worried about you.”

Elizabeth’s world had come back to the normal again. It held other people—Rietta Cray, who must be terribly worried, and Jonathan Moore, who would be coming home after an evening’s chess with Dr. Craddock. She got up and began to make tea, fetching the kettle from the kitchen, moving about the small domestic tasks as if they were the whole of love and service. It was perhaps the happiest hour that she had ever known. To receive back all that you have lost, all that you have not even hoped for, to be allowed to give again what you have kept unspent, is joy beyond words. She had not many words.

Carr was silent too. He had travelled a long way—not the two and a half miles from Melling, but the five years through which he had come to reach this place again. When she said, “You must go,” he put his arms round her and said her name.

“Elizabeth—”

“Carr—”

“Elizabeth—are you going to take me back?”

“Do you want me to?”

“You know.”

There was a little pause before she said,

“Can you—come back?”

“Do you mean—about Fancy?”

“You said you didn’t know whether you were engaged to her.”

He gave a shaky laugh.

“That was just talking. We had it out on the way home. She’s a nice kid really—quite sensible and matter-of-fact. ‘No offence meant, and none taken,’ as her estimable Mum would say, so that’s all right. I’ve come back like a bad shilling. Are you going to have me?”

Elizabeth said, “I can’t help it.”