Well, in another month’s time, or less, Mary should be.
At the entrance to her own woods, Lady Olivia stopped the car and got out, telling the chauffeur that she would walk the rest of the way.
To be alone sometimes rested her, for most people were rather boring to her. Only men of intelligence greater than her own, such as John Silverton, really interested her, or else a type — there were few of them, indeed — that was actually new to her, like little Mary Merrion.
She walked slowly through the wintry woods. Almost automatically she noted where a tree had been felled, and where another one was marked for cutting down.
She knew the Chaddock woods so very well.
Presently she saw John Silverton, coming through the trees towards her. She thought how wonderfully young he looked, in his delightfully shabby tweeds, and how well he had kept his figure.
John must be close on sixty, now.
“I thought you’d send the car on by the new road and come through this way yourself,” he said triumphantly. “See how well I know you, Olivia!”
“You do indeed, John. How nice of you to come and meet me!”
They exchanged the quiet smile of complete and long established intimacy.
“Well?” He turned to walk beside her.
“Well, it will be all right. Arabella Poole has only one idea — to see her boy happy. She says he’s desperately in love, and she’s only thankful the girl is a Catholic and a lady. It only remains to persuade the Merrions.”
“And that you’ll easily do.”
“Frankly, I think I shall. Francis is always amenable, and Agnes can be made so, if one goes the right way to work. I fancy she had it in mind that Arabella Poole would object, and although she’s a saint, she’s terribly proud, and couldn’t bear the idea of Mary coming into the family as a favour so to speak.”
“That little fairy damsel will have a lot to thank you for.”
“Will she?” said Lady Olivia. “We shall know that in ten years’ time, perhaps. But in the meanwhile, of course, the poor little thing will regard me as a fairy godmother. Such is the glamour of first love!”
“The last love is the best love, Olivia.”
“That’s what Dennis Calthorp says — you remember one day at lunch in Lower Seymour Street?”
“I remember the discussion, yes. But no one went very much below the surface — naturally. It wasn’t the time, or the place. And I remember, too, thinking that one day I must ask you what you thought about it.”
“I think I gave my verdict in favour of first love — but I don’t remember. These things — they all pass.”
The man and the woman both fell silent, and followed the path, now increasingly narrow, that wound amongst the trunks of the Scotch firs, without speaking.
They were within a quarter of a mile of the Chaddock lodge gates when John Silverton pointed with his stick to a small, stone temple, built in a pretentious style popular in the eighteen-fifties and earlier.
“What’s the history of that, Olivia?”
“What — Oh, the Belvedere. Ridiculous place! I believe my father-in-law built it. I haven’t been inside it for years.”
“Let’s look in.”
“There’s nothing to see.”
But she turned off the path, across a few hundred yards of spongy moss and springing bramble, and they entered the little open stone building.
It was semi-circular, and a stone seat ran round one side of the inner wall. A heap of rotting leaves lay in one corner, and birds had fouled the tessellated paving of the floor, and the empty niche that broke the line of the back wall. A faint smell of decay pervaded it all.
John Silverton and Lady Olivia looked round a little vaguely.
At last the man spoke, as though in answer to an unuttered thought of which he took her cognizance for granted.
“Yes. It’s a sad little place, after all. It must be a long while since it was last used as a lovers’ tryst.”
“Thirty years, John,” said Lady Olivia with a harsh laugh.
He swung round to look at her.
“Was it — ?”
She nodded.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, my dear. I didn’t know.” His kind, grave face had grown graver, but hers wore its habitual air of cold arrogance.
“You needn’t mind. Let’s sit down for a few minutes. I’m not such a good walker as I used to be. No, John, you needn’t mind.”
“I didn’t know,” he repeated.
“You knew I’d had what melodramas call, I believe, a past?”
“I knew that a woman as beautiful as you, my dear, and with a personality like yours, hadn’t escaped tragedy.”
“It wasn’t that — though it’s like you to put it that way. I don’t know why I’ve never told you, John. I’ve told you so much else.”
“I always want to hear, Olivia.”
“I know.”
She looked at him — the man who had loved her faithfully for so many years, and to whom she had never given more than friendship.
“Women of my type have all their love affairs after marriage, as a rule,” she said abruptly. “I did, of course. I was twenty-two when I came here, and of course standards were much stricter then than they are now. I can’t imagine how I escaped a scandal, little fool that I was. Everybody knew that my husband was unfaithful to me, almost from the very first, and everybody must have been wondering how I was going To console myself. Well — I did, after a fashion. Silly affairs, most of them, embarked upon for excitement, and vanity — but I always used to imagine that I loved the man, at the time. I was emotional in those days, John.”
She paused for a moment, but Silverton said nothing.
“Well, I was twenty-eight when I had the smashing, crashing love affair that one reads about, and never believes in. We used to meet here.
When I think of the risks I took — ! It was insane. My boy was five years old, and I hoped and thought, then, that he was going to be the only child. If it hadn’t been for him, I should have gone away with my lover, of course. As it was—”
She broke off, with a shrug and glanced dispassionately round the little temple.
“Almost every night, one summer, I used to come here. As far as I know no one ever found us out. He was more careful than I was, though. He had his position in the county to think of — and of course, everybody knew us terribly well. We had to meet publicly almost every time either of us ever went anywhere.
“It lasted for three years.”
“What ended it, Olivia?”
“He had to marry. His people gave him no peace about it. We’d always agreed that if he married, it must stop. We said good-bye here, I remember.”
Lady Olivia shuddered slightly and put her hand on the stone surface of the circular seat.
“I lay full length on the seat, face downwards, and cried till I couldn’t see, after he’d gone,” she said. “I remember that I felt I couldn’t live through it. And it was after that I had a bad breakdown, and was sent abroad, and when I came home, we bought the house in Lower Seymour Street, and weren’t here so much.”
“Did he marry?”
“He married. It turned out very well.”
Lady Olivia rose.
“Shall we go on? It isn’t exactly warm here.”
As they left the stone pavilion, walking slowly, she gave her small, cold laugh again.
“As I always say, these things pass, John. Of all that madness and misery and rapture, what’s left? I’ve passed the Belvedere a thousand times, I suppose, in the last quarter of a century, and I’ve never, until to-day, remembered.... — don’t suppose I should have remembered now, if we hadn’t been talking of first love, and those children.”
“And the man?” asked Silverton in a low voice.
“For the past thirty years,” said Lady Olivia, “ — remember that it’s thirty years, John — we’ve been neighbours. We meet often. I don’t think he ever remembers. And I �
�� well, I look at him — and at myself in the glass, sometimes — and it’s only like a dream, or another life. We are not the same people now, he and I. Nothing is left. I can’t even visualize him, as he was then. Now — he’s grown very bald — and I’m nearly an old woman.”
And with her mind’s eye she saw the sinister-looking, elderly man called Keppel, with his delicate wife, of whom he took care, as she had seen him at the Hunt Ball the night before.
“Good Heavens, the child is at the gate waiting for me! Isn’t that Mary Merrion?”
“Yes, I’ll leave you.”
“I’ve nothing to tell her, except that it’s going to be all right and that I’ve asked the young man to dinner to-night. Absurd! She’ll catch her death of cold, standing there—”
“First love—” quoth John Silverton, as he turned to leave her.
But Lady Olivia smiled and raised her eyebrows.
“First love — or last love,” she said. “These things pass—”
THE WHOLE DUTY OF WOMAN
How clever of them not to have wall-paper with a pattern. Looking at that plain, unbroken, cream-coloured surface was restful — one wasn’t obliged to trace, with weary eyes and resentful brain, the repeated convolutions of twisting, impossible, floral combinations, to count and recount the spirals, and horseshoes, and crescents, formed by their distorted leaves and stems. But, of course, in a nursing home, they were bound to think of things like that. They knew that, to a person lying in bed all day, a pattern, or even a picture, on the wall, would be a fatigue, and an irritation. Now she was nearly well again. Quite well again, really.
They said that she’d had a nervous breakdown. Mrs. Ambrey was ashamed of having had such a thing. She preferred to call it “thyroid” and tried to persuade the nurses and doctors to call it that too, and very often they did, since the thyroid gland had certainly given trouble, although Mrs. Ambrey didn’t understand in what way it was connected with her nerves.
She thought sadly that a woman who was less rich than she was, and who had really hard work to do, would never have so collapsed.
Nurses and governesses looked after her three younger children. The two elder boys were at school.
She had a most excellent housekeeper, a good (and permanent) cook, and the requisite number of servants for the efficient running of her husband’s house.
They were rich. The children -were healthy. There was nothing to worry about.
She thought that it must be her sister’s death that had made her break down so suddenly and strangely, although at the time it had not so greatly overwhelmed her.
It was afterwards that a most curious, intensely poignant, misery and sadness had gradually obsessed her mind to the final exclusion of every other thought.
But it wasn’t the real Anna, at all, that she had finally wept for so wildly. Not the grown-up Anna, married to a rich stockbroker, and playing Bridge so competently, who came often to see her sister, and brought presents for the children, and was always well dressed, and pretty, and what people called “bright.”
For her sudden and early death, Mrs. Ambrey had indeed shed tears. But it was weeks later that she had felt her heart breaking for the utter, the irrevocable, loss of an Anna who had gone long before — a ten-year-old Anna with flying brown hair and an inexhaustible imagination, who had shared everything with her in far-away nursery days. It had almost seemed to Mrs. Ambrey, then, that she was crying (those exhausting tears that had finally swept her into the category of the nervously unstable) — crying not only for Anna, but for her own long-vanished childhood. No one would ever call her Elly again. She remembered, now, lying restored and sane in her bed at the nursing home, that it was that thought which had torn most constantly at her heart-strings.
How irrational!
She had been called Elinor, ever since her marriage fifteen years earlier, at her own request.
“Mrs. Ambrey, are you awake?”
That was the nice fair-haired nurse. She always said “Are you awake?” at improbable hours like eleven in the morning, or five in the afternoon. She never said it at the cold, early hour of quarter to seven, when she brought in an unwanted cup of tea, and roused one from sleep. Perhaps she didn’t say it because she knew very well that one wasn’t, and couldn’t be, properly awake then.
“I’m quite awake,” said Mrs. Ambrey, smiling.
“Doctor’ll be here directly. He’s come early this morning. He won’t be seeing you many more times, now.”
“Oh no,” asserted Mrs. Ambrey eagerly. She wanted to be quite well again, and to go home, but there was also, at the very back of her mind, a slight, definite dislike of Dr. Gardner.
The nurse had not perceived this.
Nurses, Mrs. Ambrey unresentfully realized, were almost always very unperceptive people.
The nurse admired Dr. Gardner, and was rather afraid of him, and she would have admired, and been rather afraid of, any other doctor to whom “Sister” deferred.
“Sister” was the head of the nursing home, and the nurses were never tired of discussing her, and of telling anecdotes about her, and repeating things that she had said, or that she was reported to have said.
“I think Doctor’ll have a surprise for you, to-day,” said the fair-haired nurse, smiling down at Mrs. Ambrey, lying in the beautifully starched, tidy sheets, with the frilly pillow-case under her newly brushed, carefully arranged shingle.
Mrs. Ambrey knew how very tidy she was, for she saw herself in the hand-mirror every morning, when she and the bed had been put in order, and the nurse who did it always made the same joke about the pale colour of her patient’s face and the rose-pink colour of the satin eiderdown quilt.
“Is the surprise something about my going home?” she asked.
“We shall be ever so sorry to lose you, Mrs. Ambrey, you know. But of course, I realize how glad you’ll be to get home again, after all these weeks. Your little girls will be excited, won’t they?”
“Yes, indeed.” Mrs. Ambrey’s eyes strayed to the leather-framed photograph of her five children on the table by the bed. “It seems like years since I saw them,” she said and she remembered with a queer, almost impersonal, kind of amazement that in the last week before she left home, she had avoided the children desperately, because it had become impossible for her to leave off crying, even when she was walking about the house, or sitting at meals.
The nurse prattled on, moving things about, a quarter of an inch one way or the other, and flicking invisible specks of dust away.
“There’s your husband, too. Won’t he be excited? There’s one thing, he’ll see a tremendous difference in you, after the way you looked when he brought you here.”
“Oh yes, I hope so.”
“You’ve been putting on weight so wonderfully, this last fortnight especially. Of course, you were down to skin-and-bone when you came.”
“I’d lost a great deal of weight, I know,” said Mrs. Ambrey. She was remembering how her maid had exclaimed at the looseness with which her clothes, suddenly as it seemed, had hung upon a figure that had passed with terrifying speed from slenderness to emaciation.
“Here’s doctor. That’s his car at the door now,” exclaimed the nurse, her face pressed against the window as she gazed eagerly down into the street. “Now, he’ll go up to No. 7 first, and then 5 — that’s the little tonsils-and-adenoids boy came in yesterday — he won’t stay long there, I don’t suppose. I dare say you’ll be the favoured one to-day, Mrs. Ambrey.”
The little nurse did not seem at all able to understand that one might not feel an unprofessional conversation with Dr. Gardner to be the honour and pleasure that she herself evidently considered it.
Mrs. Ambrey smiled faintly, so as not to disappoint her, but in her heart she hoped that the little tonsils-and-adenoids boy might detain the doctor a long while.
“Does Dr. Gardner like children?” she asked hopefully.
“He ought to. He’s had a lot of them himself — seven or ei
ght, I believe. And he’s a grandfather too. His eldest son’s wife had a baby only last year. But he’s not like some men, making a lot of fuss about kiddies. Sister’s the one for that. When we’ve got a child in here, we always know where to look for Sister. Why, I remember —— — —”
She had remembered so many other anecdotes just like that — it was difficult to pay very much attention. Besides, the little thing didn’t really know, or care, whether one was listening or not. It was only necessary to smile from time to time, and to exclaim a little.
There came the sharp knock at the door that still made Mrs. Ambrey start slightly, though perhaps rather from an entirely undefined apprehension than from its actual suddenness.
Sister preceded the doctor into the room, very tall, and slender, and starched, and tightly gowned. Her gold hair made her face look brick-red, and the brick-red of her face, in turn, transformed her narrow blue eyes into flames.
She stood at the foot of the bed, and the little nurse, attentive and humble, stepped behind her. The doctor came in.
“Good-morning,” he said, in his deep, grave voice.
“Good-morning,” repeated Mrs. Ambrey, looking up at him.
The blackness and glossiness of his morning clothes made him look sleek, like a seal. But his pale, astute eyes behind rimless glasses reminded Mrs. Ambrey of agates, seen through a clear window-pane.
His white, square-tipped hands, with a gold ring upon the little finger of each, took it in turns to pull gently at the sides of his dark, short moustache.
When he had looked at the temperature chart, and Sister had made her bright, perfunctory observations, the doctor pulled forward a chair and sat down.
So he was going to stay and talk.
The little nurse glanced her congratulations at the patient, and then she followed Sister out of the room, and Mrs. Ambrey was left with Dr. Gardner.
She avoided his eye for a moment that seemed to her intolerably long, and then, reluctant but compelled, she turned her head on the pillow.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 558