by Hugh Walpole
He knocked, at first softly and then furiously; for a moment the voices stopped, and then they began again. No one paid any attention to his knocking. He knew with absolute certainty that in a few minutes the door would open, but first something would happen. He began to beat on the door with his fists and to call out; the house was, for the rest, perfectly silent.
And then suddenly he heard Morelli’s laugh. There was a moment’s silence, and then Tony screamed, a terrified, trembling scream; the door began to open.
Maradick awoke to find himself on the garden seat with his head sunk on his breast and some one looking at him; in the hazy uncertainty of his waking his first thought was that it was Janet — he had scarcely recovered from his dream. He soon saw that it was not Janet, and, looking up confusedly, blushed on finding that it was Alice Du Cane. She was dressed in white, in something that clung about her and seemed to be made all in one piece. It looked to him very beautiful, and the great sweeping dark hat that she wore must have been delightfully shady, but it only had the effect of confusing him still more.
He knew Alice Du Cane very slightly, in fact he couldn’t really be said to know her at all. They said “good morning” and “good evening,” and it had occasionally happened that they had had to talk “just to keep the ball rolling” at some odd minute or other, but she had always given him the impression of being in quite “other worlds,” from which she might occasionally look down and smile, but into which he could never possibly be admitted. He had quite acquiesced in all of this, although he had no feeling of the kind about the rest of the party; but she belonged, he felt, to that small, mysterious body of people who, in his mind at any rate, “were the very top.” He was no snob about them, and he did not feel that they were any the better people for their high position, but he did feel that they were different. There were centuries of tradition behind them, that perhaps was really it, and there were the old houses with their lawns and picture galleries, and there were those wonderful ancestors who had ruled England from the beginning of time.
He had laughed sometimes when his wife had represented to him that certain people in Epsom, alluded to in a hushed voice and mysterious nods, were really “it.” He knew so well that they were not; nothing to do with it at all. But he always recognised “it” at once when it was there. He did not recognise “it” in the Gales; there was a certain quality of rest arising from assurance of possession that they lacked, but Alice Du Cane had got “it,” most assuredly she had got “it.”
He liked to watch her. She moved with so beautiful a quiet and carried herself with so sure a dignity; he admired her enormously, but had been quite prepared to keep his distance.
And then suddenly he had seen that she was in love with Tony, and she was at once drawn into the vortex. She became something more than a person at whom one looked, whom one admired as a picture; she was part of the situation. He had been extremely sorry for her, and it had been her unhappiness more than anything else that had worried him about his part in the affair. But now, as he saw her there watching him with a smile and leaning ever so slightly on her parasol, of ever so delicate a pink, he was furiously embarrassed.
He had been sleeping, probably with his mouth open, and she had been watching him. He jumped to his feet.
“Oh, Miss Du Cane,” he stammered, “I really — —”
But she broke in upon him, laughing.
“Oh! what a shame! Really, Mr. Maradick, I didn’t mean to, but the gravel scrunched or something and it woke you. I’ve been doing the same thing, sleeping, I mean; it’s impossible to do anything else with heat like this.” Then her face grew grave. “All the same I’m not sure that I’m sorry, because I have wanted to talk to you very badly all day, and now, unless you do want to go to sleep again, it does seem to be a chance.”
“Why, of course,” he answered gravely, and he made way for her on the seat. He felt the sinister afternoon pressing upon him again. He was disturbed, worried, anxious; his nerves were all to pieces. And then she did most certainly embarrass him. The very way that she sat down, the careful slowness of her movement, and the grace with which she leant slightly forward so that the curve of her neck was like the curve of a pink shell against her white dress, embarrassed him. And he was tired, most undoubtedly tired; it was all beginning to be too much for him.
And then he suddenly caught a look in her eyes as she turned towards him; something melancholy and appealing in it touched his heart and his embarrassment left him.
“Mr. Maradick,” she began hurriedly, with her face again turned away from him, “you are much older than I am, and so I expect you’ll understand what I am trying to get at. And anyhow, you know all that’s been going on this week, more than anyone else does, and so there’s no need to beat about the bush. Besides, I always hate it. I always want to get straight at the thing, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. It was one of the true things about both of them.
“Well then, of course it’s about Tony. We all want to know about Tony, and nobody does know except you, and everybody’s afraid to ask you except myself, so there you are. You mustn’t think me impertinent; I don’t mean to be, but we must know — some of us, at any rate!”
“What must you know?” he said. He was suddenly on his mettle. He resented the note of command in her voice. About his general position in the world he was quite ready to yield place, but about Tony’s affairs he would yield to no one; that was another matter.
“Why, of course,” she said, looking at him, “what I want to know, what we all want to know, is what he is doing. Of course we have all, by this time, a pretty good idea. I saw him with that girl down on the beach, and it’s been pretty obvious, by his being away so continually, what he is after. No, it isn’t exactly so much what he is doing as whether it’s all right.”
“But then,” said Maradick, facing her, “why exactly are you asking me? Why not ask Tony?”
“Oh! you know that would be no good,” she said, shaking her head impatiently. “Tony would tell me nothing. If he wanted to tell us anything he would have told us. You can see how secret he’s been keeping it all. And you’re the only other person who knows. Besides, I don’t want you to betray any secrets, it’s only to tell us if it’s all right. If you say it is then we shall know.”
“And who exactly is ‘we’?” Maradick asked.
Alice hesitated a moment. Then she said, “It’s Lady Gale really who wants to know. She’s suffering terribly all this time, but she’s afraid to ask you herself because you might tell her too much, and then she couldn’t be loyal to Sir Richard. But, you know, she spoke to you herself about it.”
“Yes, she did,” said Maradick slowly. “Then I suppose that this, her sending you, means that she doesn’t quite trust me now. She said before that she would leave it in my hands.”
“Yes. She trusts you just as much, of course. Only — well, you see, you haven’t known Tony all his life as we have, you haven’t cared for him quite as much as we have. And then I’m a woman, I should probably see a whole lot of things in it that you couldn’t see. It’s only that you should tell me a little about it, and then, if Lady Gale sees that we both think it’s all right, she will be happier. Only, she’s felt a little, just lately, that you weren’t very comfortable about it.”
“Is it only Lady Gale?” asked Maradick.
“Well, of course I want to know too. You see, I’ve known Tony since we were both babies, and of course I’m fond of him, and I should hate him to get in a mess”; she finished up rather breathlessly.
He had a strong feeling of the pathos of it all. He knew that she was proud and that she had probably found it very difficult to come to him as she had done.
He could see now that she was struggling to keep her old pride and reserve, but that she found it very hard.
His voice was very tender as he spoke to her.
“Miss Du Cane,” he said, “I understand. I do indeed. I would have spoken to Lady Gale herself i
f she hadn’t begged me to keep quiet about it. Besides, I wasn’t sure, I’m not sure now, how things were really going, and I was afraid of alarming her.”
“Then there is trouble?” Alice said; “you are anxious?”
“No, not really,” Maradick hastened to assure her. “As far as the main thing goes — the girl herself, I mean — it’s the best thing that could possibly happen to Tony. The girl is delightful; better than that, she is splendid. I won’t tell you more, simply that it is all right.”
“And Tony loves her?” Alice’s voice trembled in spite of itself.
“Yes, heart and soul,” said Maradick fervently; “and I think when you see her that you will agree about her. Only you must see the difficulties as well as I do; what we are doing is the only thing to do. I think that to take Tony away now would lead to dreadful disaster. He must go through with it. The whole thing has gone too far now for it possibly to be stopped.”
“Then tell me,” Alice said slowly, “was she, do you suppose, the girl that I saw down on the beach with Tony?”
“Yes,” said Maradick, “she must have been.”
The girl got up slowly from the seat and stood with her back to him, her slim white figure drawn to its full height; the sun played like fire about her dress and hair, but there was something very pathetic in the way that she let her arms with a slow hopeless gesture fall to her side, and stared, motionless, down the path.
Then she turned round to him.
“Thank you, Mr. Maradick,” she said, “that’s all I wanted to know. I am happier about it, and Lady Gale will be too. You’re quite right about taking Tony away. It would only mean a hopeless break with Sir Richard, and then his mother would be caught into it too, and that must be averted at all costs. Besides, if she is as nice as you say, perhaps, after all, it is the best thing that could happen. And, at any rate,” she went on after a little pause, “we are all most awfully grateful to you. I don’t know what we should have done otherwise.”
Some one was coming down the path. They both, at the same moment, saw that it was Mrs. Lester.
Alice turned. “I must go,” she said. “Thank you again for what you told me.”
He watched her walk down the path, very straight and tall, with a grace and ease that were delightful to him. The two women stopped for a moment and spoke; then Alice passed out of sight and Mrs. Lester came towards him.
Some clock in the distance struck six.
CHAPTER XIV. MARADICK IN A NEW RÔLE — HE AFTERWARDS SEES TONY’S
FACE IN A MIRROR
He didn’t precisely know what his feelings were; he was too hot, and the whole thing was too much of a surprise for him to think at all; the thing that he did most nearly resemble, if he had wanted similes, was some sharply contested citadel receiving a new attack on its crumbling walls before the last one was truly over.
But that again was not a simile that served with any accuracy, because he was so glad, so tumultuously and intensely glad, to see her. He wanted to keep that moment, that instant when she was coming down the path towards him, quite distinct from all the other moments of his life in its beauty and colours, and so he focussed in his mind the deep green of the trees and their purple shadows on the path, the noise that two birds made, and the deep rustle as of some moving water that her dress sent to him as she came.
He sat there, one hand on each knee, looking straight before him, motionless.
Mrs. Lester had that morning done her utmost to persuade her husband to “play a game.” She was brimming over with sentiment, partly because of the weather, partly because Treliss always made her feel like that, partly because it was “in the air” in some vague way through Tony.
She did not understand it, but she knew that she had one of her “fits,” a craving for excitement, for doing anything that could give one something of a fling.
But her talk with her husband had also partly arisen from her realisation of her feeling for Maradick. She was not a very serious woman, she took life very lightly, but she knew that her affection for her husband was by far the best and most important thing in her.
She knew this through all the passing and temporary moods that she might have, and she had learnt to dread those moods simply because she never knew how far she might go. But then Fred would be so provoking! As he was just now, for instance, paying no attention to her at all, wrapped in his stupid writing, talking about nerves and suggesting doctors.
But she had tried very hard that morning to awaken him to a sense of the kind of thing that was happening to her. She had even, with a sudden sense of panic, suggested leaving the place altogether, hinting that it didn’t suit her. But he had laughed.
She had, in fact, during these last few days, been thinking of Maradick a great deal. For one thing, she hated Mrs. Maradick; she had never in her life before hated anyone so thoroughly. She took people easily as a rule and was charitable in her judgment, but Mrs. Maradick seemed to her to be everything that was bad. The little woman’s assumption of a manner that quite obviously could never belong to her, her complacent patronage of everybody and everything, her appearance, everything seemed to Mrs. Lester the worst possible; she could scarcely bear to stay in the same room with her. She had, therefore, for Maradick a profound pity that had grown as the days advanced. He had seemed to her so patient under what must be a terrible affliction. And so “the game” had grown more serious than usual, serious enough to make her hesitate, and to run, rather as a frightened child runs to its nurse, to Fred for protection. But Fred wouldn’t listen, or, what was worse, listened only to laugh. Well, on Fred’s head be it then!
She had not, however, set out that afternoon with any intention of finding him; she was, indeed, surprised when she saw him there.
They both, at once, felt that there was something between them that had not been there before; they were both nervous, and she did not look at him as she sat down.
“How lazy we are!” she, said. “Why, during the last week we’ve been nothing at all but ‘knitters in the sun!’ I know that’s a nice quotation out of somewhere, but I haven’t the least idea where. But, as a matter of fact, it’s only the irresponsible Tony who’s been rushing about, and he’s made up for most of us.”
She was dressed in her favourite colour, blue, the very lightest and palest of blue. She had a large picture hat tied, in the fashion of a summer of a year or two before, with blue ribbon under her chin; at her belt was a bunch of deep crimson carnations. She took one of them out and twisted it round in her fingers.
She looked up at him and smiled.
“You’re looking very cool and very cross,” she said, “and both are irritating to people on a hot day. Oh! the heat!” She waved her carnation in the air. “You know, if I had my way I should like to be wheeled about in a chair carved out of ice and sprayed by cool negroes with iced rose water! There! Isn’t that Théophile Gautier and Théodore de Banville and the rest? Oh dear! what rot I’m talking; I’m — —”
“I wish,” he said, looking her all over very slowly, “that you’d be yourself, Mrs. Lester, just for a little. I hate all that stuff; you know you’re not a bit like that really. I want you as you are, not a kind of afternoon-tea dummy!”
“But I am like that,” she said, laughing lightly, but also a little nervously. “I’m always like that in hot weather and at Treliss. We’re all like that just now, on the jump. There’s Lady Gale and Sir Richard and Alice Du Cane, and Rupert too, if he wasn’t too selfish, all worrying their eyes out about Tony, and there’s Tony worrying his eyes out about some person or persons unknown, and there’s my husband worrying his eyes out about his next masterpiece, and there’s you worrying your eyes out about — —” She paused.
“Yes,” said Maradick, “about?”
“Oh! I don’t know — something. It was easy enough to see as one came along. I asked Alice Du Cane; she didn’t know. What was she talking to you for?”
“Why shouldn’t she?”
“Oh! I
don’t know; only she’s on the jump like the rest of us and hasn’t honoured anyone with her conversation very much lately. The place has got hold of you. That’s what it is. What did I tell you? Treliss is full of witches and devils, you know, and they like playing tricks with people like yourself, incredulous people who like heaps of eggs and bacon for breakfast and put half a crown in the plate on Sundays. I know.”
He didn’t say anything, so she went on:
“But I suppose Alice wanted to know what Tony was doing. That’s what they all want to know, and the cat will be out of the bag very soon. For my part, I think we’d all better go away and try somewhere else. This place has upset us.” Suddenly her voice dropped and she leant forward and put her hand for a moment on his knee. “But please, Mr. Maradick — we’re friends — we made a compact the other day, that, while we were here, you know, we’d be of use to each other; and now you must let me be of use, please.”
That had never failed of its effect, that sudden passing from gay to grave, the little emotional quiver in the voice, the gentle touch of the hand; but now she was serious about it, it was, for once, uncalculated.
And it had its effect on him. A quiver passed through his body at her touch; he clenched his hands.
“Yes,” he said in a low voice, “but I don’t think you can help me just now, Mrs. Lester. Besides, I don’t think that I want any help. As you say, we’re all a little strained just now; the weather, I suppose.” He paused and then went on: “Only, you don’t know what it is to me to have you for a friend. I’ve thought a good deal about it these last few days. I’ve not been a man of very many friends, women especially little.”