As she passed her arms round his neck, she felt him stiffen and shiver. She nestled closer, and slowly his right hand moved round her waist. But suddenly he withdrew it and, raising it to his neck, tried to loosen the clasp of her arms.
“No,” he said, as if in argument with himself. “No. You and I don’t care a row of pins for each other.”
For days she had been holding back the tears that could so readily have flowed because of her child’s peril. Now her tears might be of use. Her head dropped against Dick’s shoulder and she wept as though her heart would break.
“Don’t,” she heard him say from time to time. “Don’t, Gwen, please don’t… I didn’t mean to be such a beast… I didn’t think you’d take what I said so hard … Gwen, old girl, I say, I’d no idea you were so keen on me still.” He said that! Hysterical laughter mingled with her sobbing. “Gwen dear, I didn’t really mean it.”
To weep was so great a relief that she wept on, though now Dick’s arms were round her and he was holding her close. After a while, her speech coming in broken gasps, she said, “Your handkerchief, please, dear.”
He let go of her with one hand to search in a pocket and to wipe her face. She saw wet pink stains upon the white silk.
“Don’t look at me, dearest,” she besought him. “I must be hideous.”
“You’re not,” he whispered into her ear. “You’re all warm and soft again, as you used to be. How did you manage to keep it up for a whole year? . . And, I say, Gwen, why did you never wear this silky red thing before?”
“D’you like it?” she asked, rubbing her head against his chin.
“Rather! It’s as jolly to touch as your hair.”
She felt his fingers steal over her. When she had ceased crying, she closed her eyes, and raised her face to his. His lips closed upon hers. She returned his kisses hotly, until she felt his ardour grown, and suddenly he forced her body backwards and leaned over her, his heart beating fast against her breast.
“Come on,” she heard him say in the thick voice that he used when Major Stansbury had made him drink more than his weak head could stand. “Don’t let’s be such fools as to quarrel again.”
Again? What did it matter if her purpose were served?
“Come on,” he urged.
“Dick,” she said, “you’re trembling.”
“So are you,” he told her.
“Yes.”
It was true, and it surprised her.
BOOK III
I. She learns to know herself
II. She meets a ghost
III. He receives a warning
IV. She does her duty
V. She sets them both free
Chapter I
SHE LEARNS TO KNOW HERSELF
“The Doctor to see you, Ma’am.”
Bran for the cows’ mash. Maize for the poultry— surely they need not have so much? Horley’s cattle cake—is that really needed? The vet to attend the setter—what’s the use of keeping sporting dogs when Dick is away for half the shooting season? More boot polish! More knife powder! More lamp oil!… Gwenllian raised her eyes from the thumbed slips of paper on her desk and saw Powell standing in the doorway. “The Doctor?” she repeated, dazed with fatigue. “I hadn’t an appointment with him, had I?”
“I can’t say, I’m sure, Ma’am.”
“Oh well, one more or less—”
Nathanial Vaughan, the tenant of Dolwern, had left but a few minutes ago. He had been pleading for a new roof to his barn, and the masonry of his ancient house was again in need of repair.
“If you could put us on a cement face,” he had ventured, leaning forward eagerly from the edge of his chair, a gnarled hand on either knee.
“Indeed and indeed, Mrs. Einon-Thomas, Ma’am,” his wife had quavered, “the rain it do be pouring down on to our bed, rough nights. There’s sitting up with an umbrella I am, and these nasty old rheumaticky pains ketching me something dreadful!”
Gwenllian had looked at the old woman, dressed in her unpretentious gown of black. An antique gold watch chain was hung round her neck to show how important an occasion she considered a visit to the Mansion. She and her husband, with his grey side whiskers and his Liberal-Conservatism, were of the old-fashioned, respectful yet independent type that Gwenllian approved. It grieved and shamed her to have to say no to them. How patiently they bore the discomfort she could have relieved but for Dick’s wastefulness! It was his fault that these hard-working people were sent away dis- appointed; his fault that the plumber had called pressing for settlement. She ought never to have yielded to his continued demands for “improvements.” But when Richard was born she had been even more weakened than after the birth of her first child. And Dick had again shown signs of repentance during her pregnancy. If she were always in that condition, she thought with a grim smile, she might keep him in order, for he could pity her body when it suffered. For what he caused her to suffer in mind by his spendthrift ways, his drinking and idling with people she despised, his neglect of his children and his home, he had no care. A year ago, when she was still an invalid, though months had passed since her confinement, he had hung about the house, bored, sulky, but ashamed to leave, and she had hoped that, by making him more comfortable, she might, perhaps, win him to stay. Throughout the past summer her extravagances had in conse- quence been added to his. She had allowed the cream to be eaten at tennis-parties instead of having it turned into butter for market. When Dick invited his hotel acquaintances to Plâs Einon, she had raised no objections, but had wasted her time in playing hostess to them. Against her judgment, in desperate hope that he might settle down and cease to be a drag upon their fortunes, she had yielded to his whims and follies. But in the autumn, in spite of her costly concessions, even his interest in his own alterations of the house had begun to flag and his idle need for society to grow.
“Why not shut up the damned place for a couple of years?” he had suggested. “Do the children good to winter in Switzerland.”
“Dick, will you never learn that where your duty lies there you must stay?”
“Oh, all this harping on duty—” he had begun to grumble.
But she had cut him short. “However much it may bore their father, I intend to bring up my children in the place to which they’re bound. They will inherit, Dick; they must know their own people.”
“Go ahead then,” he had retorted. “Bring ’em up as you like. You never consult me.”
“You haven’t shown much interest in them.”
“How d’you expect any father to, when he hears his wife all day long: ‘My children!’…“My nursery ’ … ‘ My son ’ … My heir’!” And, with a shrug of his shoulders, he had slouched off towards the dower house.
In January, in spite of his new radiators, he had had bronchitis.
“I warned you,” she had said as she gave him his medicine, “that they were dangerous, unhealthy things.”
“Oh, for God’s sake don’t stand gloating over my bed, repeating like a parrot, ‘I told you so! … I told you so!’ ”
He had been as nervous about his health as he was irritable; and, as soon as he could travel, had gone off to the South of France, leaving her to settle the doctor’s and chemist’s bills.
These things she remembered with a resentment that bit into her mind. Her thought was full of them as she went down to the drawing-room to meet the Doctor, but she forced a smile of welcome to her guest. He was standing with his back to the meagre fire she allowed herself when she was alone. To- morrow would be the first of April, and she would give up fires altogether. She took the large hand that looked so uncouth and had so healing a touch. Lucky Dick to have been ill, she thought as she let her palm rest in the Doctor’s, to lie quiet for two or three weeks, to be taken care of!
“How are you getting along by yourself?” Dr. Roberts asked. “Don’t you find it a bit lonely? Like to have the wife over to spend a couple of nights here?”
“I should be charmed to see her,”
Gwenllian answered, making her smile more bright. “But you’re not to worry about me. I’m far too busy to have a dull or a sad moment.”
He growled like a faithful dog. “How’s that absentee young man of yours?”
And again, pride compelling her, she lied. “Oh, quite recovered, thank you, and looking forward to coming here. He writes me cheerful letters every day.” He had not written for a fortnight. She was surprised at her own glibness, and she thought: I used to despise liars, but Dick has made me one.
Ringing for tea, she urged her old friend to stay, for she longed to cling for a little while to someone who was fond of her. He sat down, watching her from under grey brows that hung over his eyes like the thatch above cottage windows, and, as he explained the reason for his calling, she knew that he also was concealing the truth. He had called often of late, making one excuse or another to have a look at her.
“Evans Cross-eyes is laid up again. That’s what brought me out here,” he declared.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Is there anything needed?”
“Could you lend him a bed-rest?”
“Of course. And shall I have some of our famous chicken jelly made?”
“I never say no to that for any of my patients, do I?”
She took a pocket book out of the leather handbag that held her many keys and made a note. The Doctor’s eyes were still fixed on her when she looked up again. “I know what you’re thinking,” she laughed, “that I’m losing my memory. I’ve such a host of things to remember.”
“I was thinking, my dear,” he said, “that you are working too hard. You did in the war and wore yourself to the bone. It’s a pity. There never was a handsomer girl than you were at nineteen.”
She winced. It was when she was nineteen that she had fallen in love. “You can’t expect youth to last,” she said as lightly as she could.
“No. We’re none of us getting any younger. But that’s another reason why you should slacken off. Something will snap if you keep the tension so tight.”
“Nonsense.” She laughed again, but his words touched her with fear. Something would snap! Not her self-control? Not her ability to do right?
“Yes,” he persisted, “you shouldn’t risk a breakdown. It’s harder for you now even than it was when your poor brother was at the front, for now you’re saddled with—”
A husband, she ejaculated mentally.
But the word he said aloud was “children.”
“I like work,” she assured him. “Sugar? And milk?” How heavy the teapot seemed!
“Yes,” he growled, “both, and plenty of ’em. But you ought not to do more than one person’s work—not two or three.”
She tried to change the subject. “This is the cake I invented in the days of rationing. There are no eggs in it. You put in a teaspoonful of vinegar to make it light.”
“Don’t think I’m trying to poke in my old nose where it’s not wanted,” he persisted, “but can’t you teach your husband to pull his weight in the boat?” At that she was shaken by a blast of fury and despair. “No,” she wanted to scream, “No! No! I can teach him nothing, I tell you, nothing! He’s hopeless, useless, a drag on the estate, a burden, an encumbrance!” She bit her lip, though the hot words seethed within her. After a moment of tense silence she took out her handkerchief and, pressing it into a tight ball, passed it across her mouth. “Doctor, bach,” she said in a small voice, “do you mind if we don’t discuss my husband? He’s been wounded and ill. He’s not strong.”
“My dear girl,” Dr. Roberts exclaimed, setting down his tea-cup in haste and sucking at his moustache, “I didn’t mean for a moment to wound your feelings by implying the least thing against him. I realise, of course, that he’s not robust. But you mustn’t be so anxious about him. There’s no occasion in the world to fret.”
And until he left, half an hour later, he tried to allay her supposed fears for Dick. Men whose hearts were slightly defective often lasted longest. There was no reason why her husband shouldn’t live to be eighty. “Bless your soul,” he declared, “there’s no reason why he shouldn’t see us all out!”
When the Doctor was gone, blustering his sympathy for her well-acted concern, Gwenllian lay back on the sofa and closed her eyes. A laugh came from her lips—a jerk of sound with no mirth in it. Jenny, the Sealyham, scrambled up from her place on the hearth, where she had been roasting her stomach, and began to paw at her mistress’s feet. Something must be wrong, her wrinkled twitching nose seemed to say.
Gwenllian took the comforter on to her lap. Something is wrong, she thought. But the Doctor doesn’t suspect it. None must ever suspect. We’re not the class of people who wash our dirty linen in public. A hot tongue licked away the tear that was beginning to trickle down Gwenllian’s cheek. Dick may live on and on, she said, and outlive me and ruin the children and undo all my work. Sometimes I can’t help wishing that he’d die—that he were already dead.
Powell came in to carry out the tea-tray. Her mistress had heard her approach, and was pulling the dog’s ears in seeming good humour when the door opened.
“How the day flies, Powell! Is it really the children’s time already?”
“Yes, Ma’am. Nannie was putting on their drawing-room suits when I looked in.”
As she spoke Illtyd appeared at the door, made the dancing-class bow expected of him, then slid across the polished floor counting very laboriously, “one, two, three-turn! One, two, three-turn! Is that right, Mummy?”
“Quite right, darling. Come and give me a kiss.”
“Mummy, why must the lady start off with the right foot and the gentleman with the left? When horses trot you watch their right shoulder—”
“Their off shoulder,” she corrected.
“Yes. Their off one,” he repeated in his painstaking drawl. “That’s same thing, isn’t it?”
“That is the same thing—try to articulate clearly, darling.”
“You have to watch and rise with it,” he persisted. “Or else you go bumpetty-bump. Do all horses start with the right—the off—foot? Or is it only the lady horses?”
“Mares,” she corrected again. “Come and kiss me.”
“Mares,” he murmured. “Do gentleman horses, start trotting with the left foot, Mummy?”
“Near, not left, when you’re speaking of a horse,” she told him.
She saw a worried look, followed by one of resignation, pass over his pale little face. His big eyes brooded darkly on the mysteries of the universe.
“You haven’t kissed me yet,” she insisted. “Come here, and I’ll try to explain.”
But he had lost heart. He put up his face, but only, she perceived, because he had been trained to obey. Soon he wriggled away from her embrace to make discoveries of his own in a distant part of the room.
“This is a dog that has been very, very naughty,” she heard him whispering as he pushed great-aunt Emily’s beaded footstool into a comer. “He chasted sheep, and chasted and chasted them, ’cos it was fun to see them running and running with their silly tails wagging. And he wouldn’t come when he was called. Now he’s going to be shut up in prison like people who steal jam and tell fibs, and never, never let out again.”
Anxiety about her children gnawed at the root of Gwenllian’s love for them whenever she was more than usually tired. She feared that Illtyd was going to prove imaginative, dreamy. Frances loved him and urged that he should be left alone to develop in his own way. He must not be left alone.
“Fetch your bricks from the toy cupboard,” Gwenllian commanded, “and I’ll shew you how to build a house.”
“I can’t leave this prison door,” he objected, “’cos you see, I’m a shepherd. And I’ve got to punish this naughty dog for doing what he was told not to.”
“That’s a silly game,” Gwenllian said. “Come along and we’ll make something together.”
“I don’t want to make anything. I’m a shepherd like Dan Owen. I order dogs about and drive sheep.”
For once his mother did not insist. She rose wearily and, going over to the French windows, stared out, feeling more than ever forsaken and miserable because her child, like his father, wished to play his own games. Since her husband did not love her and she was too virtuous a woman to have thought of a lover, she craved morbidly for her children’s attention. Often she felt a stab of jealousy when she saw them caress their nurse. They were hers, hers alone; all that she had left in life except the property she was fighting to save.
I deny myself everything for Illtyd’s sake, she told herself as she pressed her forehead against the cooling glass. It’s only for him and in a lesser degree for baby that I struggle on as I do. So often had she said this that she believed it, forgetting that for her the estate had come first and that her children had been called into existence only as heirs to the estate. He ought to be very grateful to me when he’s old enough to understand, she thought But would he be? She knew what men were—what her father had been—and the child did not greatly love her.
She was overwrought tonight. He was a dear, good little boy, though not demonstrative. His love for her, and his ability to show it, would grow. Illtyd shall love me, Gwenllian vowed, clenching her fists. He shall be all in all to me, and I to him. But she knew that there was room in her hungry heart for a lover as well as a son. Her child should have been the fruit of married love, not a substitute for it.
Memories were tormenting her. When she pushed open the windows, there flowed in upon her the melancholy of a chill evening after rain and the restless scent of growth. A blackbird was crying over the past: “Sweet, sweet, sweet.” Somewhere she had read a poem—was it of Mary Magdalene or of some other wanton shut out of Paradise.
She is sorry, sorry, sorry, piped the blackbird. Let her in.
The lines might have been written of herself. She, too, had let the gates of Paradise close against her long ago. “Let her in,” sang the blackbird. But though God might pardon all the repentant harlots, and heaven be full of them, a good woman, who had denied her love for the sake of a house and a posi- tion, would never enter into her bliss. Never in this life. “Never, never, never,” mourned the blackbird. And in the next life there would be neither marrying nor giving in marriage. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” cried the blackbird. And once his song had been a song of gladness! Once, such a spring twilight as this had seemed lovely, peaceful, full of promise. Now she felt only the weariness of the day’s close, of the grey sky washed pale by rain and the approach of night. The air was laden with the fragrance of wallflower and hyacinth, drowsy as that of lilies on a coffin. Beneath the shelter of the house, daffodils hung fragile and pale on their slender stalks, and primroses looked up, glistening. The blackbird sang no longer “Sweet, sweet, sweet,” for a spring that was over twenty-five years ago, but “Sad, sad, sad,” for the present and the future.
The Soldier and the Gentlewoman Page 15