Unknown (138 page)

This time the girl blushed scarlet. He had touched the sore spot—the one spot that rankled—in her romantic adventure.

“I tell her I have to work all night in the office,” she whispered. “She sends me to bed for hours!” she added ruefully, and without a smile.

He changed the conversation then, asking Ned some very searching technical questions about his methods of painting. The talk between the three of them flagged and wilted a little after that and he soon rose to go.

“Did you hear old Johnny's speech today?” he asked, as he picked up his coat and hat and gloves.

“Haven't you seen our special edition, Dad?” cried Lady Rachel, placing in the hands of the grey, elderly man, whose figure in that warmly lighted room—a room so full of a radiant atmosphere of youthful happiness—seemed to dwindle at that moment and become old and pinched and rather forlorn, a copy of the Wayfarer with the most startling headlines that any human chronicle could conceivably carry, short of the announcement of an approaching Deluge.

'What's this, eh? What's this? Gad! but he couldn't have been really dead! Come now, come now, this is getting a bit too thick. But ... of course ... if you wild children ... are going ... to turn this place . . . into . . . into . . . this will, I suppose ... be the kind of thing—but, good God, Rachel, you don't really think . . . yourself . . . that my old Johnny Geard could------"

Marquis stood there in that rosy light, between the girl in her soft night-allire looking like some enamoured nymph out of a Welsh fairy-tale, and the sturdy young poet-painter in his Norfolk jacket, frowning and bewildered. He kept folding up the paper he held, as if to conceal that troublesome word “Miracle” in those big black letters, and then unfolding it again. What was the world coming to?

“Good-night, little one,” he murmured at last, kissing her tenderly. “You might send over a few of those sketches before I leave Mark Court,5' he added gravely. ”I'll take 'em up to town with me."

He turned to her once more as she held the door open to light him down the staircase.

“Don't 'ee do this too often, girlie,” he said. “The good Miss Crow is no fool. Besides, we don't want any confounded scandal.”

He was at the bottom of the stairs now.

“Remember what long ears your Aunt Betsy has!” he called back, as he turned to go to the street door.

Once in the dark street, buttoning his coat to face a frosty wind, and pulling on his grey cloves, an emotion of miserable depression took hold of him.

His little Rachel, his little Rachel! And yet how radiant the wench had looked. But, oh, what a man had to see, and bear, and endure, if, in these days he meant to keep a child's love and not make her hate him!

“But they're not out for marrying,” he thought, “that's one good thing. And she's playing safe with the Crow woman, I can see that, though she hates it like the devil! Well, who can blame her? She'll never be young again. And the lad's a decent lad . . . nothing caddish or tricky about the lad.”

He was moving along now beside a dark row of wretched houses. The pavement was uneven. The wind had got up and had become icy cold. It moaned and whistled over the slate roofs of this poorer portion of the town. Very old and very desolate did Henry Zoyland, Marquis of P., feel as he walked along! Those enchanting, unconventional retreats with his little Rachel at Mark Court all, all over! She had been restless and distrait, die last time he had had her with him up there; and those Bellamys! Their quarrels with poor Blimp were becoming intolerable. Yet he hadn't the heart to turn them out.

“The place is nothing without her,” he thought, and he saw himself sitting by that big, lonely hearth with the ancient staircase leading up and up: and then her room, and then that stone causeway, and the Merlin room—was it during his night in that place that old Johnny had learnt these devil's tricks of putting life into dead babies?

The man's desolation grew apace as he approached the outskirts of Paradise. “Old; I'm getting old,” he thought. “And no Merlin cantrips, learnt by any modern Messire Bleheris, could make me stir when once I was knocked on the head. No, damn it! I won't put anything in the child's way. Let her have her fling. Zoyland women always begin with a passionate romance in their teens; and then settle down into savage harridans at forty! Betsy did it; and never married at all! The child's not half as wild as Betsy was. To hell with middle-class pruderies! The Zoylands always did what they wanted; and, by gad, my little girl shall.”

Thus the old diplomatist swaggered in his mood, doing his best to rationalise, as they call it, his doting partiality for that glowing child in her soft night-dress. But the ice-cold wind went shrieking over the roofs and wailing down the cobbled alleyways, and a feeling of bitter desolation chilled the man to the very bone.

The touch of her warmth as she sat just now on the arm of his chair had insinuated into his veins a craving for young blood and feminine softness. It was for her sake he had given up that French woman in Soho, the successor of Will's German mother. For years he had lived like a monk for the child's sake and this was his reward! And these curst communists turning Glastonbury into a bedlam of follies, while old Johnny was working miracles!

He'd better get back to town at once, get hold of a good lawyer—Beere was no use,any more—and make sure that those ungrateful sons of his couldn't touch a stiver of what he'd left to Rachel and to Will, of all this new cash.

He was passing Mother Legge's ambiguous domain now and as he glanced at that familiar “other house,” which in younger days he had so often entered, he saw the door furtively opened and a man and a woman came out. He stepped into the shadow of a wall-buttress to let them pass and he could not help recognising them. One was Clarissa Smith, the pretty head-waitress at the Pilgrims', and the other was a man he'd seen in the stables there—none other in fact than the converted ostler with whom the miracle-worker had been drinking that very morning.

“What does the old woman make people like that fork out?” he wondered. “She must be hard pressed these days if those are her clients!”

But when he emerged from his retreat he actually found himself hesitating for the fraction of a second and imagining himself ringing that Cyprian door-bell!

“I suppose Young Tewsy's there still,” he thought. “Who was it told me these communists were going to give the old boy a job at the Grail Spring? From Camelot to Chalice Hill! Well . . . that's how this world wags!”

He could still see the two figures moving along in front of him, Clarissa clinging tenderly to her ostler's arm.

“I hope he feels the same,” he said to himself. “That sort of thing leaves the girl more loving, but the man—not always! By gad, if that boy of Rachel's plays any games------”

But the sight of that waitress and ostler clinging together so happily troubled the senses of this elderly gentleman as he walked behind them. The girl had the sort of plump figure he used to like; he could see that well enough even in this dark street! Garment by garment he undressed the unconscious Clarissa in that ice-cold wind. He was traversing the very pavement that Red Robinson had traversed, that night of the party at Mother Legge's, and precisely the same sort of soul-sick craving for a warm fire and a warm feminine body came over him as had devastated the angry proletarian. Had the ambitious Clarissa only known!

But that young lady continued to cling to her ostler's arm, whispering amid her endearments, if the truth must be confessed, certain wickedly intimate strictures upon the character of Mr. Thomas Barter. Strange that the guileless warmth of Rachel's romance should be driving her father on now to undress Clarissa Smith!

Rachel . . . Clarissa . . . oh, how cold the wind blew, and how harsh and desolate and comfortless the world was! In the warmth of the bodies of women, in their ways, in their laughter, in their clinging, yes! even in their anger and their mockery there is the only real refuge, he thought.

“Let 'em scold and rave. However cruel their words, their limbs are still satiny to our touch, their souls still free of our curst laws and labours and fuss and fume.”

He slackened his pace, for Clarissa's arm was now round her companion's neck. He actually stopped again while his heart, as he imagined himself returning on his steps and ringing that door-bell, began to beat within him in the way it used to do, twenty, thirty years ago! But the Sergeant would be sitting up for him. Resides, what was he thinking of? That “other house” wasn't a brothel. Young Tewsy would expect—damn it! He was just a fool. The figures in front of him had turned the corner now; and he walked rapidly on.

Tommy Chinnock's “I'd like to, Clarissa,” ebbed quickly from the life-weary pulses of the Marquis of P. When he reached the lighted lamps of the High Street, a bare-footed boy came rushing past him calling out a late edition of a Yeovil paper.

“Mir-acle at Glaston-bury7” the boy shouted. Lord P. smiled a bitter, man-of-the-world's smile.

“There's only one miracle in this world,” he muttered aloud, “that can make old men young and that's not for old men who've outlived their time!”

THE GRAIL

AS MAY BE EASILY IMAGINED THE SITUATION IN GLASTONBURY Vicarage as the winter passed, with Nell and her child under the same roof as her former lover, although it was not strained to the limit of human endurance, was sufficiently uncomfortable to all the three persons concerned. It was obvious, too, that the little boy, though his expressions of it were obscure, missed the rollicking caresses of his mother's husband.

Mrs. Pippard who took upon herself all through December the role of ambassador—though hardly of peacemaker—between Nell's new sanctuary and her old home, kept them pretty closely informed of what was going on in Whitelake Cottage.

The trend of events seemed to be that Will Zoyland and Persephone were living out there in an irresponsible trance of amorous happiness, completely self-absorbed and self-contained, and prepared to await any deluge that fate might send, with the reckless defiance of their new-found delight in each other.

It struck Nell that it was totally unlike all she had ever known of Will, this ensorcerised interim of moonstruck quiescence. As week followed week at the Vicarage—each week bringing new agitations between the father and the son, and between herself and each of the two men,—she was constantly expecting Zoyland to appear in person, having quarrelled with Percy, and full of angry and despotic demands that his wife and her child should return home. But the New Year came and nothing of the kind happened!

In the end the cantankerous Mrs. Pippard, having played the part of eavesdropper to the infatuated pair at Whitelake till Zoyland nearly threw her out, and having clung desperately to the little Master Henry in the Vicarage, till Penny Pitches actually did throw her out, retired from domestic labours altogether and took up her abode with the mother of Red Robinson's bride, as a partner-assistant in the tea-shop business.

Hearing that Sally was leaving Cardiff Villa in order to be married to Red, Mrs. Pippard offered herself as the girl's successor in the Mayor's household; but I\Irs. Geard, glad enough to return to her old freedom from any servants, very brusquely declined this honour; and thus it was left for the patient visitors to the town to endure the ministrations and be subjected to the all-seeing eye of Eudoxia's diplomatic parent.

The astounding nature of the scandals which many of these innocent pilgrims carried home, along with Mr. Barter's and Lady RachePs Arthurian figurines, concerning the more intimate life of Glastonbury, can thus be accounted for; but it is hardly necessary in this modest chronicle to state that Zoyland did not beat his wife black and blue, and that Nell did not live with three men at the same time.

But although the wild tales related by Mrs. Pippard wTere far from the truth, the two weeks that followed the arrival of Nell under the roof of her child's father and her child's grandfather were charged with explosive electricity.

Sam's attitude was the same as it had always been, since he had decided to trample down and to kill all natural sex pleasure. He didn't avoid her. On the contrary he snatched every moment he could, when his father was out of sight, to enjoy her society. He helped her with the child, though not proving as skilful as Zoyland in quieting him and distracting him. He kept Penny from intruding into the spare-room, for they had given Nell the William-of-Orange bed to sleep in. He tried to co-ax her to give up her awkward and timid habit of retreating into the never-used drawing-room, a room that smelt, not of dust and mustiness for it was the only room in the house where Penny was allowed to scrub and tidy up without let or hindrance, but o-f the Dead Time itself, like a palpable ghost brooding there inside that locked door, brooding over the heavy, magenta coloured tassels that hung down above the front of the mantelpiece, brooding over the green plush sofa, brooding over the massive marble clock that never ticked, brooding over the footstool, trimmed with tarnished gold thread, brooding over the upstanding wool basket of Sam's mother that had never been touched since that young woman died.

It was a shock to Sam when one morning, a few days after the opening of the arch, he found Nell sitting in this drawing-room with her sewing—which he knew she was shy of his catching her with—on that gold-threaded footstool, over a wretched newly lit fire.

“Good Lord!” he cried, “does Father know you're in the drawing-room? One second—I'll be back in one second!”

Nell smiled and bending her head down drew her needle rapidly and nervously through the small, white garment she was making for her son. There was already descending upon her that resigned, effortless passivity, patient, docile, unresisting in which, because of some hereditary pliability in Jier ancestors, or at any rate in the women among her ancestors, though Dave had something of it too, it was easy for her to sink. She was surprised herself at the drowsy weight of this curious passivity. It had come over her the very first morning she had awaked in Williani-of-Orange's bed. She had cried herself passionately to sleep the night before; but that had been rather because, in a briefly snatched talk she had had alone with Sam, he had nervously disengaged her warm arms from his neck, than because of any culminating wave of self-pity. Yes! not a tear of all those tears of that first night could Zoyland claim to have evoked, nor the treacherous Percy either! It was Sam alone; Sam not pressing her to his heart, Sam not treating her as his love, Sam not crying out, “Let's take our child and go away from here, away from all of them!” that had broken her down. But she had experienced when she woke up at dawn, a feeling towards Sam that was like the feeling which those sweet persecuted lemans in the old ballads, kept, through weal and woe, for their cruel lords!