The Fountain Overflows (57 page)

When she had gone Mary said, “She has bought that coat and skirt because she expects whoever it is she is in love with to call on Mamma and ask to take her out somewhere.”

“But where could he take her?” I said doubtfully. “It isn’t summer, they can’t go on the river.”

“Young men in magazine stories and novels take girls they want to marry to all sorts of places,” said Mary. “Hurlingham and Ranelagh, oh, there must be places open at this time of year. People don’t fall in love just in summer. Oh, please God, let it happen.”

“Don’t do that,” I said, “until we know that he is really nice.”

“I keep on telling you, she is sure to be happy for a time,” said Mary, “and if it goes wrong, we will have got our scholarships and after that we will make money, and we can get her a divorce. The thing is to stop her playing now.”

Though no young man appeared in Lovegrove Place, Cordelia’s behaviour continued to support our theory. She now took great interest in the post, which she explained as anxiety about the date of a big evening concert, which had been postponed because of a death, and might be fixed for some date when she was already booked. But such an anxiety would not have been burning, nor would it have given place to a burning satisfaction. And the day after she ceased to watch the post brought confirmation which even Rosamund had to admit was impressive, though she had never agreed with us that Cordelia might be in love, and had said that since we were always getting into states she did not see how we could fail to recognize that was all that was happening to our eldest sister too. “Why, if sh-she were in love,” she stammered, “she would look different. Not like this at all.” But that morning Cordelia left for school early, telling Mamma that she wanted to speak to one of the teachers before prayers. But when Mary and Rosamund and I got to school she was not there at all. When we came home at one o’clock we learned that she had told Mamma that she was going to have luncheon with Miss Beevor. We felt a painful sense of crisis. We would never have dared to play truant from school, and Cordelia was more law-abiding than we were; also Cordelia was very truthful. Then Kate said to us, with an air of knowing nothing, that when Cordelia had left that morning she had been carrying a large cardboard box and a big paper bag, and we went up and looked in her room, and the new coat and skirt and hat were gone.

“You see,” Mary said, “she has gone to meet him, and probably his mother, and they will come back and tell Mamma that they are engaged.”

But I did not like it. The empty wardrobe looked wrong, as Papa’s empty study looked wrong. And Rosamund shrugged an indifference I did not think she felt.

Anything might have happened. So Mary and I were not altogether surprised when, on our way back from school that afternoon, alone because Rosamund had gone to do some shopping, turning from the High Street into Lovegrove Place, we saw Miss Beevor ahead of us, hastening towards our home, and saw too that she was agitated. She was walking very fast, and sometimes trotted, till her long copper-coloured dress caught round her ankles, and her big feathered hat fell awry.

“Look, look,” said Mary, “she is in a terrible state. I tell you it is not all imagination, it must be just what I thought. Cordelia has run away with someone and has written to tell Miss Beevor that she will not go on with her music. Come on, come on, let us ask her.”

When Miss Beevor heard our running feet she turned, closed her eyes on seeing us, and leaned against the railings. As we reached her, she breathed bitterly, “I thought it was Cordelia.”

“What is the matter?” asked Mary. “What has happened to her?”

Miss Beevor sobbed, and began to trot on again towards our house. We walked beside her, pressing her to explain, so that we could be prepared if there should be news to break to Mamma. We knew Miss Beevor to be very stupid and she might be making a fuss about nothing, but we had to be sure. But she only made sounds expressive of impatience and disgust, and waved us away. Her hands were bare, which was startling in those days; and as she made hostile gestures against us, she said in accents appealing for sympathy, “I have lost my gloves, that too,” and, bursting into tears again, scuttled on quite fast till she got to our gate.

There we saw at once that whatever bad news Miss Beevor had received, it had been heard here also. The front door was open and as we mounted the steps we saw that the handbag Mamma usually carried about with her was cast down on the mat. We hurried in, brushing past Miss Beevor, who was crying, “I couldn’t even get a cab, there is always a cab at the station, this day of all days there wasn’t one.” She followed us into the sitting room, which was empty. But the french windows into the garden were open, and Mamma was standing on the lawn and looking up at the window of the little bedroom which had been Papa’s, which was now Cordelia’s.

We ran towards her, calling out, “What has happened?” and Mamma took no notice, her eyes were fixed on the empty window. But when Miss Beevor was making her way down the iron steps into the garden, she slipped and fell to the bottom onto the gravel path, squealing as people do when they have reached such a pitch of misery that the inorganic world turns against them, and heels come off their shoes, and stones wait to bruise their knees. Mamma heard her, turned her great staring eyes upon her, and said to us, “Pick that poor idiot up.” But Miss Beevor’s frenzy had brought her to her feet before we could get to her, and she hobbled towards Mamma, crying out, “I have lost Cordelia, I could not help it, she ran away from me.”

“She is here,” said Mamma. “She is in her room. She has locked the door. What have you done to her?”

“I did nothing, she ran away from me,” said Miss Beevor, “oh, thank God she is safe.”

“Safe?” said Mamma. “What did you do to her?”

“I did nothing,” said Miss Beevor. “What have I ever done to Cordelia but love her?”

“She has been with you, you tell me yourself, and she came home half an hour ago, older than I am. What did you do to her?”

“I know, I know,” said Miss Beevor. “Oh, her face. Her lovely little face. She looked hard, cruel, just like you. Oh, Cordelia.”

“Well, what did you do to her?” said Mamma.

“I did nothing,” said Miss Beevor, “it was that horrible man.”

“What horrible man?” asked Mamma. “Stop clutching your hat, I cannot see your face.”

“Why,” said Miss Beevor, “Hans Fechter.”

Mamma looked upwards at the windows of Cordelia’s room and stretched out her arms. “My lamb, my lamb,” she said. Then she raged at Miss Beevor, “Did I not tell you not to take her near him?”

“I could not help it,” said Miss Beevor. “It was that vulgar woman, Madame Corando. She never should have been allowed to come near Cordelia. She has been married three times.”

“What, Giulia Corando sent Cordelia to Hans Fechter?” exclaimed Mamma. “I do not believe it.”

“No, no, it was not like that at all,” said Miss Beevor. “It was at that banquet. Cordelia played beautifully. She did, she did. If she did not, then there is no such thing as playing beautifully. And Madame Corando complimented her, and Cordelia thanked her, and told her what hopes we had for the scholarship, and then suddenly the woman was not nice any more. She said that being a professional was very different from being even a good amateur. And oh, then it became very unpleasant.”

“But all the same I cannot believe that Giulia Corando could have been ill-natured enough to send Cordelia to Hans Fechter,” cried Mamma.

“No, no,” said Miss Beevor querulously, “I keep on telling you it was not like that at all. But Cordelia always said it was impossible to tell you anything because you would not listen. It all happened because Cordelia held her ground and said that she was studying with Signor Sala. Then this dreadful woman said, ‘What, not old Silvio Sala?’ and when Cordelia said yes, she burst out into the most vulgar laugh, everybody looked round, and she said he was an old rascal, and told a long story about how his father was a macaroni manufacturer who was mad about music, and he had determined to have a son who was a violinist, and he had pushed him as a boy, but he had never been any good, and the old father had left all his money to a nephew who really was a good violinist, and so the son had just had to get on as he could, and had swaggered about and pretended all sorts of things, and had said he had taught in Milan Conservatory, though he had never seen the inside of the place. Oh, the lies she told. Yet, after all, they may be true.”

“In the name of goodness tell me how Cordelia got to Hans Fechter,” demanded Mamma.

“I am coming to that,” said Miss Beevor. “After that Cordelia would not stay any longer, she insisted on going home, and in the dressing room I remember now, in the dressing room she gave me such a hard look, I should have known that she was going to turn against me, though how she could, when she knew how I loved her—”

“Never mind that now,” said Mamma, “go on, go on.”

“Then she told me that she did not believe what Madame Corando had said, but all the same she was afraid that she might lose her self-confidence because of it, and she asked me to arrange for her to play to Hans Fechter, and so I said I would, and we were so happy coming back in the train. And now we shall never be happy again.”

“What did Fechter say to Cordelia?” demanded Mamma, digging her nails into the palms of her hands.

“I do not know,” said Miss Beevor. “Oh, he is a horrible man. And he was against us from the start. When we went in he looked at me in a most insulting way, and told me to go and sit in the hall while Cordelia played. Then—” she choked and stood wagging her head this way and that.

“Then what happened?” pressed my mother, shaking her, though not so violently as we had feared she might.

“How do I know?” said Miss Beevor. “She came out of his room after about twenty minutes and walked through the hall and did not look at me. I spoke to her and she took no notice. She did not even wait for the servant who was coming up to open the door, she opened it herself, and went out into the street. And oh, her face. I could not have believed that she could ever look like that.”

“It was for you to follow her,” said Mamma. “You had taken her to that house which I had warned you she should never go near.”

“I tried to follow her,” said Miss Beevor, “but that horrible man came out and said the most dreadful things to me.”

“I told you he was cruel,” said Mamma. “He would know the truth, but who else who knew enough to know it would also be low enough to tell it to you? Cruel, cruel. But why did you stay and let this brute jeer at you instead of taking care of Cordelia? You knew yourself that she was the only one of you who mattered.”

“He stood between me and the door,” wept Miss Beevor.

“The brute, the brute,” said Mamma. “But Cordelia?”

“When he said that people like me who encouraged children with no talent ought to be shot, I hit him with my umbrella,” wept Miss Beevor.

“I am glad,” said Mamma. “But Cordelia, Cordelia.”

“That made him angry, and he opened the door and told me to leave his house as if that was not what I was trying to do, and all the time I had been hoping that Cordelia would be waiting for me outside, but she had gone.”

“She made the long journey home all by herself,” mourned Mamma, looking up at the bedroom windows.

“That was not my fault,” said Miss Beevor, “I rushed off to Great Portland Street Station, and while I was crossing the bridge our train was coming in, and I saw her on the platform, and I called down to her, and told her to wait for me. But she looked up at me as if I were a stranger, and got into the train, and when I got down to the platform, it had started. Oh, Cordelia, Cordelia, I love her so.”

“Yes,” said Mamma, “this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less, indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred.”

“Have I done so much harm to Cordelia?” asked Miss Beevor.

“Of course you have,” said Mamma, “but you have no reason to blame yourself. You have only followed the general rule. But what matters at the moment is that Cordelia has locked her bedroom door.”

“To be alone, I suppose,” said Miss Beevor. “Up till now she has always been able to come to me when she felt miserable. But now she has turned against me she will have nowhere to go.”

“Yes, yes, I must not forget that you have been very kind to her in her terrible discontent,” said Mamma. “Children, children, Mary and Rose, you must always remember that Miss Beevor has been very kind to Cordelia, she gave her much that we could not have given her. But I am so afraid about Cordelia. When she came in she must have gone straight down to the kitchen, she had just come up the basement staircase and she passed me and went up to her room, and it seemed to me that she was carrying something in her hand.”

“She passed you too without speaking?” asked Miss Beevor.

“Yes,” said Mamma. “But it has happened to me before. My husband once passed me in the High Street and looked at me like a stranger.”

“Your husband, yes, I suppose so,” said Miss Beevor, “but Cordelia, I could not have believed that her lovely little face would look like that.” She burst into noisy tears, then suddenly caught her breath and was rigid. “Something in her hands? You mean, a bottle? Something that might have been poison?”

“You see how imperfect love is,” said Mamma. “I said what should have indicated to you that she was in danger, and you did not notice it, you were absorbed in the pain she had given you by looking at you as if she did not know you. Yet your love for her is the best you can do. And my love for her is the best I can do, and both appear to be useless. And love makes some promises about being useful. But here am I, having beaten on her door and got no answer, and here are you, and neither of us knows what to do.”

“Shall I go and get the man who mended Kate’s hair trunk, just a few doors down the High Street?” I asked. “He opened the trunk lock, he said he could open any lock.”