With All My Worldly Goods (12 page)

“Forty thousand pounds! To spend!” Mr. Meerwell was staggered. “Really, my dear lady, there is nothing at all to prevent your turning the whole lot into money and spending it—except a little common-sense. You must excuse my saying so, but at your age it is difficult to realize what a very dangerous thing it is to start spending in large sums. Nothing disappears so rapidly as capital when your being encroaching on it in that fantastic manner. And it doesn’t build itself up again, you know. It doesn’t build itself up again.”

Leonora wanted to say that she was not a child, but he so obviously thought she was that it would have been waste of time.

“I was thinking of buying a house,” she said obstinately.

“A
house?
You mean house property? It’s not a very good investment, these days, Mrs. Mickleham, believe me. By the time you’ve paid the repairs and outings—”

“I don’t mean as an investment,” Leonora interrupted patiently. “I mean to
live
in.”

“But—” Mr. Meerwell was evidently struggling to be patient too—“you can’t want to spend forty thousand pounds on a house, you know. It is rather more than half your total capital.”

“It’s an estate, too,” Leonora explained. “With farms and things. It—it sort of pays for itself, once you’ve put down the lump sum.”

“Nonsense,” exclaimed the lawyer sharply, abandoning all appearance of suave politeness. “Estates don’t ‘sort of pay for themselves’. I’m afraid you have been listening to some cock and bull story from a land swindler.”

Leonora gathered the remnants of her dignity round her.

“Well, all I really wanted to know was—could I spend my money as I pleased, once it was mine? It seems I can. Thank you very much, Mr. Meerwell.”

Mr. Meerwell’s mouth twitched slightly. He had tiresome daughters of his own and was not on entirely unfamiliar ground.

“All right, Mrs. Mickleham. Only do talk it over very carefully with your husband first.”

“Yes.” Leonora smiled brilliantly. “Yes. I’ll talk it over with my husband. I meant to do so anyway, of course.”
That
would be the most wonderful, the most exquisite part of all, she thought, as she drove homewards in the taxi once more. To talk it over with Bruce!

“Oh, darling,” she murmured, “I would give every penny I have
—all
the seventy thousand pounds—just to see your dear face when I tell you that you shall live at Farron again.”

CHAPTER
SIX

“Bruce!” Leonora
let herself into the house, scarcely able to control her excitement until she could find him. “Bruce, where are you?”

He came to the door of the library, in answer to her call, smiling a little to see how radiant she was.

“What is it, Lora?” He bent his head and kissed her. And then, putting his arm round her, drew her into the library, where Agatha too looked up, amused and expectant.

Leonora tossed off her hat and ruffled up her hair. It was a wonderful moment, and she prolonged it for a second while she looked triumphantly from one to the other. Then she spoke at last.

“Farron is coming into the market again. It’s going to be sold. Not at once—but sometime very soon. It’s—”

“Farron!” Agatha half rose to her feet.

“Farron!” Bruce’s voice was a whisper, but it seemed to shout down Agatha’s exclamation.

“Y-yes.” Leonora stared at him as the smile was wiped from his face, leaving it white and blank.

She saw the perspiration start out on his forehead, and a nervous pulse beating in his cheek. Then with an immense effort he seemed to control himself, and spoke in a perfectly calm voice.

“Well—what has that to do with us?”

“What—has it—to do—with us?” Leonora swallowed. “Why—why, everything.”

“Lora dear—” It was Agatha speaking a troubled voice. “Don’t talk about it any more.”

“But why not?”

“Well, whatever do you suppose it would cost to buy a place like Farron?”

“Forty thousand pounds,” Leonora cried eagerly. “Martin says so. He knows. They’re selling it.”

“Forty thousand pounds?” Bruce gave the bitterest laugh she had ever heard. “I haven’t got forty thousand pounds, if I realized every penny I possess.”

“No—but don’t you see?
I
have.” She turned to him quickly again. “Oh, I didn’t explain. I can buy it, Bruce. I want to buy it. I’ve got thousands and thousands. I can
easily
buy Farron—”

“
No
!”

She had never heard anything like the hoarse cry of protest from Bruce.

“But why not?” She fell away from him, the back of her hand pressed against her mouth.

“
You
buy Farron?
You
own the place? No.”

“But, Bruce—”

“No.”

“But, Bruce, listen to me.” She was beside him again now. “I want to buy it. Don’t you understand? I want you to live there again.”

“No, I tell you. No.” He took hold of her, bruising her arms with his nervous grip. “Do you think I’ll go through all that again? I lived there sixteen years on sufferance, to be turned out at the end for a whim—”

“Bruce!”

“Do you think I’ll live there again, knowing that it’s no more mine than the sky over it—that a word from you—”

“Oh don’t!” She was crying wildly. “I’ll give it to you. It shall be yours, too. It shall be yours entirely, if you like.”

“Oh, for God’s sake—” He pushed her from him so that she stumbled and almost fell.

“I don’t understand. I don’t understand..” She came to him again, clinging to his arm passionately, like a child who refused to be thrust away. “Will it do if I give it to you?”

His eyes blazed then in a way that terrified her, but he spoke quite quietly this time.

“You must have a short memory, haven’t you? I told you I wouldn’t touch a penny of your money. Do you think, after that, I’ll take something that costs forty thousand pounds of the damned stuff? Let go my arm, or I think I shall, strike you.”

“Bruce!” It was Agatha who spoke this time. “Are you mad that you can speak to the child like that?”

But Leonora said nothing.

She turned and rushed out of the room, shaking and sobbing. She tore upstairs and into her own room, somehow locking the door behind her with trembling fingers, and finally flung herself on her bed, crying such tears as she had never thought to shed.

Presently Agatha came and knocked on the door, but Leonora only said: “No, no. Please leave me alone. Please go away.”

Very much later there came another quiet knock at the door. She thought it was Agatha once more. But when she called out quiveringly: “Who’s there?” there was a slight pause, and then his voice said:

“Bruce.”

She got slowly off the bed, feeling stiff and a little bit faint. It was quite dark by now, but she didn’t even think of putting on the light—just felt her way over and slowly unlocked the door.

He was standing there, big and dark, with the dim light of the upstairs landing behind him. Leonora looked up at him, her face deathly pale, her lashes clustered together in little wet points.

“What do you want?” she said in a whisper.

And at that he put out his arms rather gropingly and gathered her into them. She clung to him, shivering still, but not crying any more. And then he picked her up and carried her into the room, pushing the door to behind him with his shoulder.

He didn’t put on the light either. He came and lay on the bed with her in his arms, his cheek pressed against her hair.

“Aren’t you angry any more?” she whispered at last, and he gave a little groan.

“Don’t my darling—my little love. What can I say to you? There—there are no words.”

“It’s all right, Bruce. Perhaps—perhaps I was clumsy about it—”

But his mouth on hers stopped her from saying any more.

After a long while he said: “Do you understand at all? Can you possibly find some way of forgiving me? It was because I was quite mad, you know, at the thought of my own helplessness about Farron.”

“I know. I know. You needn’t explain.” She stroked his arm gently.

“Oh, your dear little stricken face—” He stopped. “Why do you ever bother about me again, Lora?”

“Don’t you know?”

He kissed her in answer.

“Little Lora. It’s so much more than I deserve.” And she knew that whatever had been pretence in the past, and whatever protestations might be false in the future, at least the humility in his voice was genuine now.

“Bruce, will you really not let me—let me give you Farron?” she said timidly.

“No, dear.” He spoke very gently this time. “Will you just believe once and for all that I couldn’t have it that way. I simply couldn’t. It hurt having to say a deliberate ‘no’ and that was why I lashed out and hurt you so brutally, too. Will you
please
try somehow to forgive me, and then forget all about it?”

“I have forgiven you now,” she said simply. “And I’ll try to forget, if that is what you want me to do.”

“Lora dear, you didn’t have any dinner, did you?” He passed his hand tenderly over her hair.

“No.” She didn’t add that she hadn’t felt much like it, but she knew from his remorseful kiss that he was thinking that.

“I’ll get you something now,” he said.

When he had gone, she got off the bed again and put on the light. Then she undressed slowly and sat down in front of the mirror to brush her hair. She was faintly shocked to see how she looked, with those black smudges round her eyes, and no color at all in her cheeks.

She was in bed by the time he came back. He was carrying a tray with a little bowl of strong soup and a roll on it, and he seemed oddly pleased to be doing something for her.

“Agatha and Millicent both wanted to come up and say good night to you, but I said I would do it for them,” he told her.

“Oh—” Leonora looked faintly put out “Millicent didn’t—didn’t know, did she?”

He shook his head, but he didn’t say anything—only watched her rather eagerly while she ate her supper.

“It’s nice,” she told him, realizing how hungry she was.

“Is it? I’m glad, because I got it for you,” he said absurdly.

“Do you mean you heated it and everything?” She was amused and touched.

“Well—no,” he admitted. “Either Agatha or Millicent did that, because the servants are all in bed. But I arranged it and brought it up.”

She laughed then, and marvelled that he could be so terrifying one minute, and so almost ingenuous the next But, partly to please him and partly because she was genuinely hungry, she ate every bit of it.

Then she lay down with a little sigh of utter weariness, feeling that nothing in the world mattered except that she must sleep. Bruce tucked her up carefully as though she were a very dear child, and hung over her for a minute.
“You’ll sleep all right, won’t you? Not lie awake—worrying?”

“Sleep?” She laughed drowsily. “I could sleep for ever.”

He kissed her then and left her. And almost before he was out of the room, Leonora was sinking through those thick layers and layers of unconsciousness, just as she had that time before when she had been so much upset.

Evidently an emotional crisis had some very serious effect on her system, because this time too it seemed almost as though she
could
not return to the world again. And when, in the late afternoon, Agatha succeeded in waking her, she was just as she had been before—terribly cold and with her vitality strangely lowered.

She managed to conceal just how unwell she felt, because she was afraid Bruce would reproach himself more than ever, but she really longed to stay in bed for the rest of the day.

Afterwards, she thought that perhaps it would have been wiser to have done so, anyway, because the fact of her forcing herself to get up appeared to prolong the unpleasant after-affects.

For several days she felt anything but well, and she was unspeakably glad that Bruce was in one of his very kind and considerate moods.

Her coming-of-age, too, seemed to her a not entirely comfortable subject, but actually it passed of extremely pleasantly. Bruce and Agatha both said they saw no reason why the importance of a twenty-first birthday should be dimmed by the mere fact that she was married, and they made a very delightful fuss of her.

Bruce gave her another ring—a modern one this time—and told her she could wear it if ever her engagement ring began to seem more uncanny than beautiful.

“But I
love
my engagement ring,” Leonora said. “And I don’t think it’s a bit uncanny.”

“No? Well then just wear this one sometimes because I love you.”

Leonora put it on at once then, but she smiled and said rather teasingly:

“Wasn’t the engagement ring because you loved me too?”

“This one is even more so,” he said quite seriously and kissed her.

In the evening he took her to the opera—“Because it is a coincidence that they should give
Fidelio
on the night of your twenty-first birthday.”

“Why?” Leonora wanted to know.

“Don’t you know?” He laughed and touched her cheek in that endearing way. “Because the heroine is Leonora and she is the perfect type of the faithful and loving wife.”

“Bruce—how sweet.” Leonora looked quite awed. “How dear of you to think of it that way.”

She sat throughout the performance in a state of great solemnity.

“Well,” Bruce asked in the interval. “How do you like it?”

“I’ll—I’ll tell you afterwards, when it’s all over. Does it end happily, Bruce?”

“Oh yes,” he reassured her. “It would have been too bad to bring you to anything really miserable on your birthday.”

He didn’t ask her anything more about it, and it was not until they had got home that Leonora said fervently: “I think it was
heavenly.
And it wasn’t miserable, only it
was
serious. That’s something very different.”

“Yes?” Bruce watched her amusedly as she put her elbows on the table and propped her chin on her hands. “What is so specially serious?—apart from the fact that it is a great work magnificently performed.”

“It’s the idea, Bruce—the idea that she is called Leonora, and that she loves her husband so much that she’ll even risk being killed in order to bring him back to happiness.”

“Lora dear!” He was quite serious, too, now, and looked very much taken back at what she was saying.

“I’ve been sitting there all the evening,” Leonora said slowly, “wondering whether
I
would be ready to risk even death to make you happy, Bruce.”

He gave her an extraordinary, almost startled look at that.

“And what did you decide in the end?” he said in a curiously hoarse voice.

“Why, that I would, of course.” She smiled straight at him.

He got up and came round to her side of the table.

“Don’t talk in that easy way of dying,” he said almost roughly, and he held her tightly for a moment.

It was her turn to look amused then. She gazed up at him rather wickedly.

“Oh, it’s all right I’m not contemplating an early decease.”

But he didn’t smile. He said grimly:

“Very well. Let’s leave the subject.” And then, in his tone that was so much more like a guardian than a husband: “Eat up your supper.”

Leonora obediently set her teeth in a sandwich, and said rather impudently: “Yes, guardian.”