With a deep sigh, Gwenllian shut out the haunted evening and turned to meet the nurse who was carrying in Richard. She criticised the new smock he was wearing and stroked the fair fluff on his head, telling herself that she need not fear he would grow up like Dick.
“Children’s colouring changes so,” she said. “He may be quite dark when he’s a man.”
“Oh no,” Nannie protested with the truthfulness that had won her testimonials and lost her situations, “he’s the living image of his father.”
Gwenllian was glad when an hour later the children had been kissed and were gone. It was hard to do a man’s and woman’s work as well, and she was tired. Lying on the sofa she closed her eyes, hoping that it might be long before the solicitor came. She was almost asleep when Powell’s voice disturbed her:
“Mr. Price to see you, Ma’am.”
Once more Gwenllian put on her smile and extended her hand. “How kind of you to come all this way! You ought to have sent for me to your office.”
“Not at all,” he protested, fidgeting with a dispatch-case. “It’s a pleasure. I so rarely have the privilege of meeting you now. In the old days we often had a chat out otter hunting. Now nobody seems to have the time or the heart. I don’t know what’s come over the countryside.”
She saw that he was nervous and distressed. More worries, she thought. But not until the curtains were drawn cosily, the gentle lamps glowing within their pink silk shades, and Powell gone from the room, did she cease to make polite conversation. Then she asked wearily: “What was it you wished to consult me about?”
He cleared his throat and gave his high collar a jerk. What a lean neck the man had: “This business of your husband having to raise five hundred pounds immediately,” he said. “It comes at a most unfortunate time.”
She tried to swallow and almost choked.
The lawyer’s voice continued. “He’s written to you about it, of course? You transact the business while he’s away, so I assume—”
“Oh yes,” she managed to gasp out. “But tell me what he said exactly—to you, I mean.”
While he was explaining in his dusty tones, she rose and paced about the room. They will fetch something at Christie’s, she thought, staring at the Bow and Chelsea figures on the mantelshelf. How she had admired them as a child! Now their bland complacence would be imprisoned in the glass case of a museum for the mob to gape at. She imagined this dear room stripped of all that made it lovable and lovely. The paper was so faded that there would be staring patches on the walls where pictures had hung, portraits of their ancestors whom now her children would forget.
“But I use the cob for driving produce into Llanon,” she heard her own voice saying. “Oh yes. I keep detailed accounts. That pays its way . . We’ll advertise the fishing at once then, and the shooting for next autumn… No, I should doubt whether he’ll winter here. He was very much knocked about in the war, you know.”
Why, oh why, had he not been killed outright? But, if he had, she would never have been mistress of Plâs Einon and mother of its heir. It was now that he ought to die—now, now, before he did irreparable harm. She wanted her husband to die. With the whole force and fury of her nature she desired it, as she dug her nails into the palms of her hands in an effort to keep her voice calm. Somehow she managed to give her orders to the family solicitor. Afterwards, she could not recall exactly what she had said, but knew that she had spoken with creditable discretion. When he rose and pressed her hand in his bony fingers, she had held her head high.
“There’s been a mortgage on the estate before,” he had ventured with a look of sympathy.
She had managed to smile. “Oh yes. We all have ups and downs.”
He should not think that her spirit was broken, this man of inferior station who, years ago, if he had dared, would have asked her to marry him. He was said to have thousands. She would have done better to marry him than the suburban governess’s son. He was no whit more common; she could not have loved him less. And he had the merit of being much older than herself. He would have died and left her his wealth. In another year or two she might have been sitting in her widow’s weeds, smiling to see her cousin Dick squander his fortune. And when he was bankrupt, she would have bought back Plâs Einon for her own—her own.
She watched Mr. Price take his leave. His skin was wrinkled and yellow. They said he had cancer. Widowhood was the only estate fit for a proud and able woman.
She rang the bell and told Powell: “I won’t have dinner to-night. I shall lie down here quietly until it’s time to go to bed.”
But when she was alone she did not rest. Swiftly she went to the door and locked it, took a wax candle from its silver stick and set it on the hob of the old-fashioned fender to melt. What she was about to do was so fantastic that it made her flush and laugh in stealthy excitement like a cruel child planning a forbidden jest. It had been “Martha the wise’oman” who had taught her how to cast a spell. As a little girl she had taken a Christmas pudding to the witch’s tumbledown cottage with greenish thatch overhanging its two tiny windows. Martha wore her grey rags of hair loose upon her shoulders and had the flashing eyes of a kestrel. Her features were aquiline, sharp cut like Gwenllian’s own. She must have been handsome as a girl. Even in age and squalor, she was of commanding appearance. The servants whispered that her mother had been a gentleman’s light o’ love, but they never would tell whose—Gwenllian’s own great-grandfather’s, she had imagined sometimes, prompted by a study of his portrait. The neighbours paid Martha in kind, butter and eggs and milk, to keep her evil eye from them and their cattle. They feared her. But Gwenllian had not been afraid of anything except her father’s displeasure. Martha seemed to her to have stepped out of a picture in a fairy-tale book. She laughed and clapped her hands, and Martha had praised her boldness.
“If ever you should have a mortal enemy, my dear,” she had said when they were grown friends, “this is how to bring about his death, see?”
Gwenllian took the wax as the witch had done, and twisted it and crushed it in her hands until it had the semblance of a little man. Her pinching fingers gave him a long thin neck and a small head without any chin. They made his chest narrow, his shoulders sloping like a girl’s, his hands large and foolishly adangle. Knock knees they fashioned him and a slight body that leant to one side, seeking for a wall to lean up against, she thought. When her puppet of wax was finished, she held him out at arm’s length and surveyed him with scorn. “Dick,” she said, and, taking an old garnet brooch from her breast, she wrenched off the pin and stuck it through her mannikin’s heart. Now melt, she said within her, melt and die. On the hob she set him, close to the flames and watched his slender little body list yet further to one side. Tears of wax began to trickle down him. You’re sorry now, are you, that you made an enemy of me? With a ridiculous pathetic gesture he wilted and sank lower and lower into the pool of grease at his feet. Then he dropped on his knees, and slipped right down into it, and became a dripping candle end. Now you’re in your winding sheet, she thought, ready for your coffin. At last he fell away to extinction in the fire and only the pin that had transfixed him remained. She stared at it, sick and fascinated, as at a knife with which she had done murder. Shuddering violently, she seized the poker and scraped both pin and grease off the hob into the consuming flames. Their heat scorched her face as she crouched over the grate. She was burning with shame for this act of folly and peasant witch-craft to which she had stooped, and because he had brought her to it, she hated Dick the more.
The turning of the door-handle made her start up, flushed with guilt.
“Who’s there?” she cried out.
Powell’s voice answered with its accustomed deference. “The vicar, Ma’am. Shall I say you’ve too bad a head to see him?”
“No no,” exclaimed Gwenllian hurrying to the door. It must not get about the parish that she locked herself into the drawing-room or it would be said she drank.
“Come in, Mr. Evans
,” she called. “I’ve been overdoing it and had to take a rest. But I’m never too tired to hear if there’s anything I can do for you or your wife.”
Smiling obsequiously, he shambled towards her, apologising in his bland Carmarthenshire accents. It was of no importance, no indeed! He ought not to have called after dinner at night. But, really, one did not know when to catch so busy a lady at home and at leisure. There was a saying of Jeremy Taylor’s— She lost the thread of his discourse.
My hands smell of blood—of grease, I mean, she thought, rubbing them hard together. Would the old fool never have done and go? At length he came to the point—something towards the sale of work in aid of the Church Lads’ Brigade. She tried to smile and wondered whether she had made an awkward grimace. Rubbing her hands still harder, she hurt them, and became aware that they clutched the brooch without a pin. She held it out to the vicar.
“I’m afraid I’ve no time to spare for making things, and no money either, these days, but will you accept this? Mrs. Roberts always admired it so much. I think she might give you two or three pounds—”
She saw it shining darkly, like a drop of blood, in the palm of his plump white hand. With the pin torn from that brooch she had sought by incantation to murder her own husband. She could never endure to look upon the thing again. The vicar’s thanks flowed over her, soft as warmed honey. He was praising her generosity, protesting that she was too good, much too good. She caught at the word good and repeated it in her mind. She was not evil. She was not evil but good. The virtue of her actions must guard her against her secret thought.
Chapter II
SHE MEETS A GHOST
She sat before the mirror, dressing and redressing her hair until it had the neatness of a wig. Two candles burned on either hand, and silver vessels gleamed upon the muslin-draped table. Her big white room was dim as a church at vespers where only one altar is lit. Grave and careful to do all things in order, a priestess ministering to pride, she put on her black velvet gown. It had come out of its lavender-scented bag two or three times every winter since it was bought, five years ago, for the future Lord Llangattoc’s coming of age. Last week the dressmaker from Llanon had been fetched in the luggage cart to bring it up to date. But still it did not look quite in the fashion. That was as it should be, Gwenllian told herself. Half the better people at tonight’s Hunt Ball would be what Dick called dowdy. Had she the money to waste, she would not make herself look like a milliner’s assistant to please him. Plain black enriched the cross of antique emeralds she was hanging about her neck and the long ear-rings hooked through the pierced lobes of her ears. Perhaps, she thought, staring gloomily at their winking reflections, she was wearing them for the last time. They were the only heirlooms left in her jewel case.
For she had sold her own and her mother’s brooches—sapphires held with claws of gold to a bar, a flying pheasant and a fox’s mask in diamonds. Her grandmother’s amethysts, in their ponderous setting, bracelets, necklace and lockets heavy to wear—she had sacrificed them all, first taking out the locks of family hair and burning them, that they might not fall into the hands of strangers. Her great-grandmother’s fragile seed pearls were gone, too, her empire tiara and fan-shaped combs of inlaid tortoiseshell. It had torn Gwenllian to part with each of these possessions, but since she had two sons and would never have a daughter, it was better to sell jewellery than land. Money must be raised somehow, for, though she saved, Dick spent.
She might more easily have forgiven him the large debts he incurred when he went abroad “for his health,” than his incurable self-indulgence and folly in small matters. Had she not told him, “we can’t afford to go to the Hunt Ball this year?” Yet go he would, and take Frances with him.
“If you won’t ask your sister to stay for Christmas, I shall,” he had blustered.
“Why should we have her again? Once a year is quite enough.”
“Because it’s a pleasant change to hear someone laughing in this tomb of a place.”
“You used to say my sister talked the most arrant nonsense,” she answered.
To this he had made no reply, and she had repeated in rising anger what he had said five or six years ago. “You called her London friends ‘a lot of queer fish, and her children ‘unlicked cubs,’ and her husband ‘ a highbrow prig ’ who wore his hair too long. You were surprised that a man who had been in the Navy—”
“Oh, shut up,” Dick had interrupted with the schoolboy rudeness that had lately become his habit. “Frances is a damned good sort. I wish you were more like her.”
She had been furious. But better Frances, she had decided, than one of those dancing partners with peroxide curls whom Dick picked up in the South of France; and with an ill grace, she had yielded. Now Frances must needs bring her husband with her and all three of her hungry children, who read the most unsuitable books in the library and put them back in the wrong order.
“As Stanley’s come, you’ll have to go to the ball with us to make our numbers even,” Dick had said with an obvious lack of enthusiasm, and she had answered curtly that he had no need to instruct her in her duties as a hostess.
To make matters worse, Dick had broken the back axle of his car, and a hired taxi must take them twenty miles into the county town. More money would be thrown away. Why had he allowed that accident to happen? Why had he been driving over to the Lewis Vaughans’ at all, Gwenllian enquired of her frowning reflection? Since their noisy neighbour had married the prettier of the two Williams girls, Dick was to be seen with them at point-to-point races, at sheep-dog trials, at agricultural shows, at the picnics at which these silly young people squan- dered their time. What a fool he looked, carrying wraps and baskets for the bride, or keeping her sister amused with the inane prattle that a giggling flapper enjoyed! There was nothing wrong in it, perhaps, but that made it harder to forgive. Gwenllian would have respected him more if violent passion for another woman had made him unfaithful to herself, for, beneath her conventional abhorrence of lax morals, was an unconfessed sympathy with the splendid sinners of romance. But for a petty philanderer, who wasted the deep river of love in babbling, shallow streams of flirtation, she had nothing but scorn. She wondered disdainfully, as she swept downstairs, who would make a fool of Dick this evening—the bride, or her silly sister, or some new girl, empty and vulgar as all the girls were whom the Goldmans brought in their train.
Frances was in the hall, laughing and dragging her husband through the tango. Her gown was patterned in autumn leaves, red, gold and copper. Gwenllian thought it too florid, and her amber beads unsuitable for a full dress occasion. Like a Bacchante she looked, with her unruly black hair, her animated face and lithe movements. How crimson her lips were, how richly tawny her cheeks. Gwenllian did not like to see her sister look so naturally young. She frowned, but had to concede that Frances was handsome to-night.
“Hello,” called a happy voice from below, and Frances danced to the foot of the stairs. As she raised her head the lamp light shone on the long curve of her throat, golden with health. “My dear,” she cried, her bright eyes according the admiration which Gwenllian had grudged to her, “you look magnificent—like an Empress.”
And for an instant Gwenllian perceived that, if she herself had been a happy woman, she might have liked her handsome younger sister. But such bitter insight did not outlast dinner. Frances chattered foolishly, Gwenllian told herself, to account for her own irritation. What bad taste it was to mimic Lady Llangattoc merely because she was a trifle self-important! Throughout the long cold drive that followed Frances continued in irrepressible high spirits, keeping Dick and her husband in perpetual laughter. Stanley was a lean brown man with a tight mouth and very blue eyes. He spoke little except when he was defending his Utopian reforms. Gwenllian dismissed them all under two heads: “pampering criminals and naughty children instead of punishing them as they deserve; and fancying he can stop war by allowing a lot of deceitful foreigners to argue.” She never listened to him when he
was talking such nonsense, nor did she think much of him at any other time. He was a fool, she considered, to take Frances seriously when she ought to have been laughed at, and to laugh at her, as he was doing tonight, when he should have reproved her lack of dignity.
“My dear goose, you are funny,” he exclaimed once. And Gwenllian, sitting erect in her comer, as far as possible from Dick, thought contemptuously, Fancy that joke not having grown stale yet! For Frances and Stanley had been married years longer than she and Dick. She grew increasingly bored and annoyed by the nearness of three such fools, laughing, laughing at nothing at all, in the cramped jolting darkness of the taxi. To her the drive seemed unending.
But they ceased, at last, to be flung against one another, and instead of the rutted roads and dark hedgerows, Gwenllian saw the sleek wet pavements of the town. Brightly the shops flashed by in a blur of raindrops on the window-panes. At the entrance to the old coaching inn, a crowd of simple folk waited to see what little they could beneath their neighbours’ umbrellas of the gentry with whom they were not privileged to dance. As the Llanon taxi slowed into its place in the queue of motor-cars that were crawling up, one by one, to a muddy strip of red carpet, Dick craned out of the window.
The Soldier and the Gentlewoman Page 16