by Hugh Walpole
Lady Bell-Hall shook her head. “I daresay you’re right. I’m sure I don’t know, I don’t understand any of you. I’m lost in this new world. The sooner I die the better.” She got up and walked with great dignity across the room. She looked back at Henry rather wistfully. “You do seem a kind young man and Charles is very fond of you. I don’t want to be unjust. I don’t indeed!” She suddenly put up her hand and realized the escaping lock of hair. She cried, “Oh, dear!” in a little frightened whisper, then hurried from the room.
Henry waited a little, then, feeling his own loneliness and desolation in the chilly place, broke out into the garden. He wandered down the paths until he found himself in a little rough-grassed orchard that hung precariously on the bend of the hill, above a little trout-stream and a clumsy, chattering water-mill.
Under the bare trees he stood and stared at himself. As a boy the principal note in his character perhaps had been his suspicion of human nature, and his suspicion of it especially in its relation to himself. The War, his life in London, his close intimacy with Peter and Millie had robbed him of much of this, but these influences had not brought him to that stage of sophistication that would establish him upon such superiority that he need never be suspicious again. He would in all probability never become sophisticated. There was something naïve in his character that would accompany him to his grave; he was none the worse for that.
And it was this very naïveté that Lady Bell-Hall had just roused. As he walked in the orchard he was miserable, lonely, self-distrustful. He seemed to be deserted of all men. Christina was far, far away. Millie and Peter did not exist. His work was nothing. He was out of tune with the universe. He felt behind him the house, the lands, the country falling into ruin. His affection for Duncombe, his master, was affronted by the vision of brother Tom, flushed and eager, selling his family for thirty pieces of silver. He and his generation could assist only at the breaking of the old world, not at the making of the new. . . .
He looked up and saw between the leafless branches of the trees the sky shredding into lines of winged and fleecy little clouds that ran in cohorts across a sky suddenly blue. The wind had fallen; there was utter stillness. The sun, itself invisible, suddenly with a royal gesture flung its light in sheets of silver across the brown tree-trunks, the thick and tangled grass. The light was so suddenly brilliant that Henry, looking up, was dazzled. It seemed to him that for an instant the sky was filled with shining forms.
He had the sense that he had known so often before that in another moment some great vision would be granted him.
He waited, his hand above his eyes, his heart suddenly flooded with happiness and reassurance. A little wind rose, a sigh ran through the trees and drops of rain like glittering sparks from the sun touched his forehead. Shadow ran along the ground as though from the sweep of a giant’s wing.
Strangely comforted he walked back to the house.
Next morning, in the company of Lady Bell-Hall, Lady Alicia and Tom Duncombe, he left for Hill Street.
CHAPTER VIII
HERE COURAGE IS NEEDED
Victoria Platt was seated in her little dressing-room surrounded with fragments of coloured silk. She was choosing curtains for the dining-room. She was not yet completely dressed, and a bright orange wrapper enfolded her shapeless body. Millie stood beside her.
“I know you like bright colours, my Millie,” she said, “so I can’t think what you can object to in this pink. I think it’s a pet of a colour.”
“Pink isn’t right for a dining-room,” said Millie. (She had not slept during the preceding night and was feeling in no very amiable temper.)
“Not right for a dining-room?” Victoria repeated. “Why, Major Mereward said it was just the thing.”
“You know perfectly well,” answered Millie, “that in the first place Major Mereward has no taste, and that secondly he always says whatever you want him to say.”
“No taste! Why, I think his taste is splendid! Certainly he’s not artistic like Mr. Bennett, who may be said to have a little too much taste sometimes ——
“But, dear me, that was a lovely dinner he gave us at the Carlton last night. Now wasn’t it? You can’t deny it although you are prejudiced — —”
“That you gave, you mean,” Millie snorted. “Yes, I daresay he likes nothing better than ordering the best dinners possible at other people’s expense. He’s quite ready, I’m sure, to go on doing that to the end of his time.”
Victoria forgot her silks and looked up at her young friend.
“Why, Millie, what has come to you lately? You’re not at all as you used to be. You’re always speaking contemptuously of people nowadays. And you’re not looking well. You’re tired, darling — —”
“Oh, I’m all right,” Millie moved impatiently away. “You know I hate that man. He’s vulgar, coarse and selfish.”
Victoria was offended.
“You’ve no right to speak of my friends that way. . . . But I’m not going to be cross with you. No, I’m not. You’re tired and not yourself. Dr. Brooker was saying so only yesterday.”
“There’s no reason for Dr. Brooker to interfere. When I want his advice I’ll ask for it.”
Victoria looked as suddenly distressed as a small child whose doll has been taken away.
“I can’t make you out, Millie. There’s something making you unhappy.”
She looked up with a touching, anxious expression at the girl, whose face was dark with some stormy trouble that seemed only to bring out her loveliness the more, but was far indeed from the happy, careless child Victoria had once known.
Millie’s face changed. She suddenly flung herself down at her friend’s feet.
“Victoria, darling, I don’t want you to marry that man. No, I don’t, I don’t indeed. He’s a bad man, bad in every way. He only wants your money: he doesn’t even pretend to want anything else. And when he’s got that he’ll treat you so badly that you’ll be utterly wretched. You know yourself you will. Oh, don’t marry him, don’t, don’t, don’t!”
Victoria’s face was a curious mixture of offended pride and tender affection.
“There, there, my Millie. Don’t you worry. Whoever said I was going to marry him? At the same time it isn’t quite true to say that he only cares for my money. I think he has a real liking for myself. You haven’t heard all the things he’s said. After all, I know him better than you do, Millie dear, and I’m older than you as well. Yes, and you’re prejudiced. You never liked him from the first. He has his faults, of course, but so have we all. He’s quite frank about it. He’s told me his life hasn’t been all that it should have been, but he’s older now and wiser. He wants to settle down with some one whom he can really respect.”
“Respect!” Millie broke out. “He doesn’t respect any one. He’s an adventurer. He says he is. Oh, don’t you see how unhappy you’ll be? You with your warm heart. He’ll break it in half a day.”
Victoria sighed. “Perhaps he will. Perhaps I’m not so blind as you think. But at least I’ll have something first. I’ve been an old maid so long. I want — I want — —” She brushed her eyes with her hand. “It’s foolish a woman of my age talking like this — but age doesn’t, as it ought, make as much difference.”
“But you can have all that,” Millie cried. “The Major’s a good man and he does care for you, and he’d want to marry you even though you hadn’t a penny. I know he seems a little dull, but we can put up with people’s dullness if their heart’s right. It seems to me just now,” she said, staring away across the little sunlit room, “that nothing matters in a man beside his honesty and his good heart. If you can’t trust — —”
Victoria felt that the girl was trembling. She put her arms closer around her and drew her nearer.
“Millie, darling, what’s the matter? Tell me. Aren’t you happy? Tell me. I can’t bear you to be unhappy. What does it matter what happens to a silly old woman like me? I’ve only got a few more years to live in any case. But
you, so lovely, with all your life in front of you. . . . Tell me, darling — —”
Millie shivered. “Never mind about me, Victoria. Things aren’t easy. He won’t tell me the truth. I could stand anything if only he wouldn’t lie to me. I ought to leave him, I suppose — give him up. But I love him — I love him so terribly.”
She did, what was so rare with her, what Victoria had never seen her do before, she burst into a passion of tears, sobbing— “I love him — and I oughtn’t to — and every day I love him more.”
“Oh, my dear — I’m afraid it is a great deal my fault. I should have stopped it before it went so far — but indeed I never knew that it was on until it was over. And I liked him — I see now that I was wrong, but I’m not perhaps very clever about people — —”
“No, no,” Millie jumped to her feet. “You’re not to say a word against him. You’re not indeed. It’s myself who’s to blame for things being as they are. I should have been stronger and forced him to take me to his mother. I despise myself. I who thought I was so strong. But we quarrel, and then I’m sorry, and then we quarrel again.”
She smiled, wiping her eyes. “Dear Victoria, I’m not so fine as I thought myself — that’s all. You see I’ve never been in love before. It will come right. It must come right — —”
She bent forward and kissed her friend.
“I’ll go down now and get on with those letters. You’re a darling — too good to me by far.”
“I’m a silly old woman,” Victoria said, shaking her head. “But I do wish you liked the pink, Millie dear. It will be so nice at night with the lights — so gay.”
“We’ll have it then,” said Millie. “After all, it’s your house, isn’t it?”
She went downstairs, and then to her amazement found Bunny waiting for her near her desk.
“Why — —” Her face flushed with pleasure. How could she help loving him when every inch of him called to her, and touched her with pity and pride and longing and wonder?
“I’ve come,” he began rather sulkily, not looking at her but out of the window, “to apologize for last night. I shouldn’t have said what I did. I’m sorry.”
How strange that now, when only a moment ago she had loved him so that most likely she would have died for him, the sound of his sulky voice should harden her with a curious, almost impersonal hostility.
“No need to apologize,” she said lightly, sitting down at her desk and turning over the letters. “You weren’t very nice last night, but last night’s last night and this morning’s this morning.”
“Oh well,” he said angrily, still not looking at her, “for the matter of that you weren’t especially charming yourself; but of course it’s always my fault.”
“Need we have it all over again?” she said, her heart beating, her head hot, as though some one were trying to enclose it in a bag. “If I was nasty I’m sorry, and you say you’re sorry — so that’s over.”
He turned towards her angrily. “Of course — if that’s all you have to say — —” he began.
The door opened and Ellen came in.
Millie had then the curious sensation of having passed through, not very long ago, the scene that was now coming. She saw Ellen’s thin body, the faded, grey, old-fashioned dress, the sharply cut, pale face with the indignant, protesting eyes; she saw Bunny’s sudden turn towards the door, his face hardening as he realized his old and unrelenting enemy, then the quick half-turn that he made towards Millie as though he needed her protection. That touched her, but again strangely she was for a moment outside this, a spectator of the sun-drenched room, of the silly pictures on the wall, of the desk with the litter of papers that even now she was still mechanically handling. Outside it and beyond it, so that she was able to say to herself, “And now Ellen will move to that far window, she’ll brush that chair with her skirt, and now she’ll say: ‘Good-morning, Mr. Baxter. I won’t apologize for interrupting because I’ve wanted this chance — —’”
“Good-morning, Mr. Baxter,” Ellen said, turning from the window towards them both with the funny jerky movement that was so especially hers. “I won’t apologize for interrupting because I’ve wanted this chance of speaking to you both together for some time.”
Then, at the actual sound of her voice, Millie was pushed in, right in — and with that immersion there was a sudden desperate desire to keep Ellen off, not to hear on any account what she had to say, to postpone it, to answer Bunny’s appeal, to do anything rather than to allow things to go as she saw in Ellen’s eyes that woman intended them to go.
“Leave us alone for a minute, Ellen,” she said. “Bunny and I are in the middle of a scrap.”
Standing up by the desk she realized the power that her looks had upon Ellen — her miserable, wretched looks that mattered nothing to her, less than nothing to her at all. She did not realize though that the tears that she had been shedding in Victoria’s room had given her eyes a new lustre, that her cheeks were touched to colour with her quarrel with Bunny, and that she stood there holding herself like a young queen — young indeed both in her courage and her fear, in her loyalty and her scorn.
Ellen stared at her as though she were seeing her for the first time.
“Oh well — —” she said, suddenly dropping her eyes and turning as though she would go. Then she stopped. “No, why should I? After all, it’s for your good that you should know . . . this can’t go on. I care for you enough to see that it shan’t.”
Millie came forward into the centre of the room that was warm with the sun and glowing with light. “Look here, Ellen. We don’t want a scene. I’m sick of scenes. I seem to have nothing but scenes now, with Bunny and you and Victoria and every one. If you’ve really got something to say, say it quickly and let’s have it over.”
Bunny’s contribution was to move towards the door. “I’ll leave you to it,” he said. “Lord, but I’m sick of women. One thing after another. You’d think a man had nothing better to do — —”
“No, you don’t,” said Ellen quickly. “You’ll find it will pay you best to stay and listen. It isn’t about nothing this time. You’ve got to take it. You’re caught out at last, Mr. Baxter. I don’t want to be unfair to you. If you’ll promise me on your word of honour to tell Millie everything from first to last about Miss Amery, I’ll leave you. If afterwards I find you haven’t, I’ll supply the missing details. Millie’s got to know the truth this time whatever she thinks either of me or of you.”
Bunny stopped. His face stiffened. He turned back.
“You dirty spy!” he said. “So you’re been down to my village, have you?”
“I have,” said Ellen. “I’ve seen your mother and several other people. Tell Millie the truth and my part of this dirty affair is over.”
Millie spoke: “You’ve seen his mother, Ellen? What right had you to interfere? What business was it of yours?”
“Oh, you can abuse me,” Ellen answered defiantly. “I’m not here to defend myself. Anyway you can’t think worse of me than you seem to. I waited and waited. I thought some one else would do something. I knew that Victoria had heard some of the stories and thought that she would take some steps. I thought that you would yourself, Millie. I fancied that you’d be too proud to go on month after month in the way you have done, putting up with his lies and shiftings and everything else. At last I could stand it no longer. If no one else would save you I would. I went down to his village in Wiltshire and got the whole story. I told his mother what he was doing. She’s coming up to London herself to see you next week.”
Millie’s eyes were on Bunny and only on him in the whole world. She and he were enclosed in a little room, a blurring, sun-drenched room that grew with every moment smaller and closer.
“What is this, Bunny?” she said, “that she means? Now at last we’ll have the whole story, if you don’t mind. What is it that you’ve been keeping from me all these months?”
He laughed uneasily. “You’re not going to pay any atte
ntion to a nasty, jealous woman like that, Millie,” he said. “We all know what she is and why she’s jealous. I knew she’d been raking around for ever so long but I didn’t think that even her spite would go so far — —”
“But what is it, Bunny?” Millie quietly repeated.
“Why, it’s nothing. She’s gone to my home and discovered that I was engaged last year to a girl there, a Miss Amery. We broke it off last Christmas, but my mother still wants me to marry her. That’s why it’s been so difficult all these weeks. But — —”
“So you’re not going to tell her the truth,” interrupted Ellen. “I thought you wouldn’t. I just thought you hadn’t the pluck. Well, I will do it for you.”
“It’s lies — all lies, Millie. Whatever she tells you,” Bunny broke in. “Send her away, Millie. What has she to do with us? You can ask me anything you like but I’m not going to be cross-questioned with her in the room.”
Millie looked at him steadily, then turned to Ellen.
“What is it, Ellen, you’ve got to say? Bunny is right, you’ve been spying. That’s contemptible. Nothing can justify it. But I’d like to hear what you think you’ve discovered, and it’s better to say it before Mr. Baxter.”
Ellen looked at Millie steadily. “I’m thinking only of you, Millie. Not of myself at all. You can hate me ever afterwards if you like, but one day, all the same, you’ll be grateful — and you’ll understand, too, how hard it has been for me to do it.”
“Well,” repeated Millie, scorn filling every word, “what is it that you think you’ve discovered?”
“Simply this,” said Ellen, “that last autumn a girl in Mr. Baxter’s village, the daughter of the village schoolmaster — Kate Amery is her name — was engaged secretly to Mr. Baxter. She is to have a baby in two months’ time from now, as all the village knows. All the village also knows who is its father. Mr. Baxter has promised his mother to marry the girl.