by Hugh Walpole
Behind all the splendour there was, for Rachel, the dark shadow of suspense. Was it going to last? What was to follow it? When would those awkward uncertainties that had once kept her company return to her? Now whatever else might be doubtful about Miss Rand, one thing was certain, that she would last, would remain to the end the same clean, reliable, honest person that she was now.
Imagine Lizzie Rand unreliable and she vanishes altogether! Rachel welcomed this and she also admired the wonderful manner in which Miss Rand accomplished her gigantic task. To run a house like this one and at the end of it all to remain as composed and safe as though nothing had been done!
Rachel herself might carry off a difficult situation by riding desperately at it, stringing her resources to their highest pitch, but afterwards reaction would claim its penalty.
The penalties were never claimed from Miss Rand.
So, gradually, without any definite words or events, almost without active consciousness, they became friends.
Rachel, suddenly, on one afternoon early in July, determined to go and pay Lizzie Rand a visit in her house.
That house in Saxton Square had acquired a new romantic interest since Rachel had learnt that the abandoned, abominable cousin, who defied Grandmamma and whose name one was never to mention, lived there. Rachel had considered this cousin more than once during these last months. She had resented, from the first, the fact that he was to be given, by the family, no chance of redemption. However bad he had been (and he had apparently been very bad indeed) his opportunity should have been offered to him. His life, she knew, had been hard, he was, like herself, an orphan, and he hated, as she did, her grandmother. Of course, then, he interested her.
She did not now say to herself that if this romantic cousin had not been staying in that house she would not have contemplated a visit to Lizzie. The Beaminster in her had just now the upper hand, and the Beaminster simply said that Saxton Square would be a nice place in which Uncle John, who was, this afternoon, taking her out for a drive, might leave her whilst he went to the club; later he could pick her up and take her home.
The Beaminster part of her did not acknowledge the cousin.
Quite casually she said to Uncle John, “I want you to leave me at Miss Rand’s for half an hour this afternoon — she is helping me about some clothes.”
Now Uncle John had during these last weeks continually congratulated himself on the disappearance of Rachel’s irritable, unsettled self. Always lately one had been presented with her delightful young eager self and always she had been anxious to agree with Uncle John’s proposals. The world had been going smoothly for him in other ways of late, and no one had been disagreeable. How pleasant to keep the world in this amiable condition and how dangerous to risk anyone’s displeasure!
He had moreover almost (not quite) forgotten that his rascal of a nephew was living in the same house as Miss Rand, and, even if he did remember it, well, it was quite another part of the house, and in all probability Miss Rand had never spoken to Frank Breton, nor so much as said good day to him.
Finally it was so sumptuous a day, and Rachel was clothed in so radiant a happiness and so fluttering and billowing and chuckling a dress of white and blue, and he himself was looking so handsome in the most shining of top-hats, the broadest of black bow ties, the most elegant of pepper-and-salt trousers and the whitest of white spats, that complaining or arguing or disputing was utterly out of the question.
“Miss Rand’s, my dear? What’s the address?... Right you are—” so off they went.
She arrived to find Miss Rand, a round chubby lady in bright pink, and a stranger having tea together. The chubby lady was Mrs. Rand and the stranger was Francis Breton. She had not expected that her arrival would cause such a disturbance, nor that she herself would discover the right and easy words so difficult to say. The little room seemed to be crowded with furniture and tea-things, and she, quite deliberately, put off any consideration of her cousin until the atmosphere had been allowed, a little, to settle around them.
Miss Rand looked at her almost sternly and was, plainly, at a loss. Mrs. Rand was excited, and so nervous that her tea-cup rattled in her saucer and she stayed for quite a long time with her finger in the tea under the delusion that she was using a teaspoon.
Mrs. Rand’s absence of mind was generally due to the fact that she read one novel a day all the year round and that her thoughts, her hopes, her despairs were always centred in the book of the day, although when to-morrow came she could not tell you the author nor the title nor any of the incidents. Had she been to a play, then, for twenty-four hours following, it was the drama that held the field.
She spent her life in an amiable desire to remember, for the sake of her friends, the plays and books of the past. But she was never successful. As she said, “The attempt to keep up with the literature and drama of the day, although praise-worthy, demands all one’s time and energy.”
The Beaminster family alone of all other interests in the wide world might be calculated to draw her out of the realms of the imagination, and Rachel’s entrance scattered all plots to the four winds.
Rachel sat down and, for a little while, Mrs. Rand held the field. She told them all that this visit of Miss Beaminster was the most wonderful and unexpected thing, that it was like a novel, and that she would never forget it. “But I always do say, Miss Beaminster, that it’s the unexpected that happens. Life’s stranger than fiction is my opinion, and I don’t care who contradicts me I shall still hold it.”
At length Rachel had leisure to consider her cousin and then was, instantly, convinced that she had met him before. She also knew that she could not have met him before.
In the strangest way he was connected with those early dream years which, now, she struggled so sternly to forget. The snow, the bleak sky, the silence, the sleigh-bells, some strange voice speaking high in air as though from a distant summit, and all this coming to her with a poignancy that, even now, brought the tears to her heart and filled it to overflowing.
As she saw his thin body, his eyes, his head and the attitude of the boy in all his movements and gestures she knew that, for her, he belonged to that earlier world. She knew it so certainly that, although he had not yet spoken, she could be sure of the exact quality that his voice would have.
And confused with this recognition of him was the alarm that she always felt when her early life returned to her.
Also she was young enough to be pleased at the agitation into which her coming had thrown him. It meant, plainly, so much to him; although he was silent he leant forward in his chair, with his eyes fixed upon her, waiting for his opportunity.
Miss Rand, watching him, saw how tremendously this meeting with one of the family excited him, and, seeing him, her heart filled with pity. “He’s so young. It is hard. He does want someone to look after him.”
Rachel’s happiness had, now, returned to her. She liked them all so much, it was all so cosy, it was so good of them to wish to see her. She talked with Mrs. Rand about the theatre and the opera.
“We’re going to the opera to-night — the Meistersinger. I’ve heard it in Munich twice, but never with Van Rooy, who’s singing to-night. I believe that’s an experience one never forgets — —”
Mrs. Rand did not really care about opera; everything in opera happened so slowly, except in Carmen, and even that was better simply as a play. She liked musical comedy because there you could laugh, or plays like The Mikado, for instance.
She was vague as to the Meistersinger and she had never heard of Van Rooy, but she said, “I agree with you, Miss Beaminster. There’s nobody like him.”
At that Breton struck in with something about music that he had heard in strange places abroad, and then Rachel, looking in his face for the first time, asked him about his travels.
As their eyes and voices met she was again overwhelmed with the vivid consciousness of their earlier meeting. She thought, “If I were to ask him whether he remembered that same
snow and silence he would say yes — I know he would say yes.”
Miss Rand, with eyes that were kind but very, very sharp, watched them. She noticed the eagerness of Breton and wished that he did not seem quite so anxious to please. “But that’s because he’s young,” she thought again.
And, now that he had begun, the words poured from him. With gesticulation that was faintly foreign, ever so little dramatic, he unpacked his adventures. He spoke as though this were, beyond all time, the moment when he must make his effect.
He did it well, a born teller of tales. And yet Miss Rand wished that he had not had to do it at all, that there had been more reserve, less drama, less volubility.
Mrs. Rand, an older Desdemona, listened spellbound. This was as good as getting a circulating library without paying a subscription. As she said to her daughter afterwards: “He really was as good as those novels by what’s his name — you know who I mean — those delightful stories about those foreign places — and the sea.”
He spoke of the first time that he had actually been conscious of the jungle. “Of course I’d been into it dozens of times — often and often. But there was a day — I remember as though it were yesterday — when we went up in a boat — some river or another — That river was the most secret and sleepy green, and the place all closed about it as though we’d gone into a box, and they’d closed the lid. Nothing but the green river and all the forest getting closer and closer and darker and darker, all blacker than you can imagine, and worse still when it was lighter — a kind of twilight — and you could see enough to make you shiver — no sound but the animals, and the branches and the great plants and brilliant flowers all creeping and crawling — Suddenly — all in a flash — I wanted a lamp-post and a public house, a wet night shining on streets, the rattle of a hansom — I was suddenly ghastly frightened, and we got deeper and deeper into it, and human beings further and further behind, and only the beastly monkeys and the alligators and the hideous flowers. I can feel it still — —”
Rachel was enthralled. He called up, on every side about her, that stern life of hers. He knew and she knew — they alone out of all the world. All her gaiety, her happiness, her interest of the last weeks went now for nothing beside this experience. He was not now related to the Beaminsters — to Grandmother, to Aunt Adela, to Uncle John — but to her and to that part of her that had nothing to do with the Beaminsters at all. The room, the commonplace furniture, the pictures of “Lodore Falls” and “The Fighting Téméraire,” the little glimpses of the square beyond the window, these things shared in the mystery.
Miss Rand had seen her caught and held. “She’s very young too,” she said to herself a little grimly and a little tenderly also— “All too sensational to be true,” she thought. “There’s a little bit of unreality in him all the way through.”
Mrs. Rand said: “What do you think of alligators, Miss Beaminster? Don’t you agree with me that they must be most unpleasant to meet? I always dislike their sluggish ways when I see them in the Zoological Gardens.”
Then upon them all broke the little maid with a husky “Miss Beaminster’s carriage, please, mem.”
Rachel, as she said good-bye, was aware of him again as “her scandalous cousin.” He too was now awkward and embarrassed. They said good-bye hurriedly and there was between them both a consciousness that no word of the family or their relationship had been mentioned.
“Well,” said Mrs. Rand, when the door was closed, “no one in the world could have been pleasanter....”
III
They did not arrive at the opera that night until the beginning of the second act. It was Lady Carloes’ box and she and Uncle John and Roddy Seddon were Rachel’s companions.
All the way home in the carriage Rachel had been silent and Lord John, perceiving uneasily that some of the old Rachel was back again, had said very little.
Her mind was confused. At one moment she felt that she did not want to see him again, that he disturbed her peace and worried her with memories that were better forgotten. At another moment she could have returned, then and there, to ask him questions, to know whether he felt this or that: had he ever pictured such a place? Had he...?
And then sharply she dismissed such thoughts. She would think of him no more — and yet he did not look a villain. How delightful to persuade the family to take him back. Why should she not help towards a reconciliation? She was herself so happy now that she could not bear that anyone should feel outcast or lonely — they were all very hard upon him.
It was not until she heard the voices of the apprentices that thought of her cousin left her. As she groped her way in the dark box and heard Lady Carloes’ stuffy whisper (she had the voice of a cracknel biscuit), “You sit there, my dear — Lord John here. That’s right — I knew you’d be late because ...” she was gloriously aware that quite close to her the music that she loved best in all the world was transforming existence. She touched Roddy’s hand and then surrendered herself.
She had been to Covent Garden now on four or five occasions and from the first the shabby building with its old red and gold, its air of belonging to any period earlier than the one it was just then amusing, its attitude, above all, of indifference to its aspect — all this had attracted her and won her affection. London, she discovered, was always best when it was shabbiest and one could not praise it more highly than by declaring, with perfect truth, that it was the shabbiest city in the world. Now, feeling instinctively that English apprentices (she had had already some taste of the Covent Garden chorus) would act too much or too little, she closed her eyes.
Now, as the music reached her, the old red and gold seemed a cage, swinging, swinging higher and ever higher with old Lady Carloes and Roddy Seddon and all the brilliant people in the stalls, and all the enthusiastic people in the gallery, swinging, swinging inside it. She could feel the lift of it, the rise and fall, and almost the clearer air about her as it rose into the stars.
Then there came to her the voice for which she had surely all her days been waiting. It enwrapped her round and comforted her, consoled her for all her sorrows, reassured her for all her fears. It filled the cage and the air beyond the cage, it was of earth and of heaven, and of all things good and beautiful in this world and the next.
For the second time to-day her early years came back to her; the voice had in it all those hours when someone’s tenderness had made Life worth living. “Life is immortal,” it cried. “And I am immortal, for I am Love and Charity, and, whatever the wise ones may tell you, I cannot die.” She felt again the space and the silence and the snow, but now with no alarm, only utter reassurance. And the cage swung up and up and there were now only the stars and the wind around and about them.
Then, in an instant of time, the cage, with a crash, was upon the ground. Across her world had cut Lady Carloes’ voice— “Oh yes, and there’s Lord Crewner — no, not in that row — the one behind — next that woman with the silver thing in her hair — four from the end — —”
And Roddy Seddon’s voice— “Yes, I see him. Who’s he got with him?”
Lady Carloes again: “I can’t quite see — Miss Mendle as likely as not.... You know, old Aggie Mendle’s daughter....”
Rachel felt in that moment that murder was assuredly no crime. Her hands shook on her lap and one of those passions, that she had not known for many months, caught her so that she could have torn Lardy Carloes’ hair from her head had the chairs been happily arranged.
Fortunately the interruption had been accompanied by Beckmesser’s entrance: that other voice was, for the moment, still. Then, as Sachs caught up Beckmesser’s serenade, there came again:
“Well, of course if you can’t go that week-end I dare say she’ll give you another. Only I know she’s settling her dates now.”
“Yes, but it’s a bore havin’ to fix up such a long way ahead and you don’t know what old stumers you mayn’t be boxed up with — —”
Oh! It was abominable! She had be
en seeing a great deal of Roddy during these last weeks, and ever since that visit to Uncle Richard she had been conscious of an intimacy that she had certainly not resented.
But any favour that he may have had with her was certainly now forfeited. His voice was again superior to Beckmesser:
“And so of course I said that if they would go to such shockin’ rot I wasn’t goin’ to waste my evenin’s — —”
She pushed her chair back against his knees: “Beg pardon, Miss Beaminster, afraid I jolted you — —”
“Oh! Keep quiet! Keep quiet!”
Her whisper was so urgent, so packed with irritation that instantly there was, in the box, the deepest of silences.
She sat forward again, anger choking her: she could not recover any illusion. She hated him, hated him! The crowd came on with a whirl. Then there was that last moment when the old watchman cries to the genial moon and the silvered roofs.
Then the curtain fell.
Without a word, her face white, her hands still trembling, she rose to leave the box. She passed out into the passage and found that Roddy was by her side.
“I say, Miss Beaminster, I am most awfully sorry, most awfully. I hadn’t any idea, really, that I was kickin’ up that row. I could have hit myself.”
She walked down the passage and he followed her. She was superb, she was indeed, with her head up, that neck, those hands, those flashing eyes. He had never seen anyone so fine. She ought always to be enraged. That instant decided him. She was the woman for a man to have for his own, someone who could look like someone at the head of your table, someone with the right blood in her veins, someone....
“I could beat myself,” he said again.
“How dared you — —” she broke out at last. They were, by good luck, alone in the passage. “How could you? What do you come for if you care nothing for music at all? If you can hear a voice like that and then talk about your own silly little affairs.... And the selfishness of it! Of course you think of nobody but yourself!”