“No. How?”
“A girl like Elizabeth Shenton is too good for any man who marries her as though—— Don’t you see? Why, the best children—the boldest children—— Think of your history books, Byron. The love children, the bastards. I’m not an old fool, and you would not accuse me of being a sentimentalist, but I do believe——”
Her eyes challenged him.
“What do you believe?”
“That your children are going to be—the better—if you love the mother.”
He was silent awhile, staring at the broken shells on his plate.
“Yes; I had rather a sickener. Love! I’m cautious. But seems to me she’s a fine, clean, wholesome creature. She’ll be the mother of my children. I shall love her for that—respect her.”
“I see,” said his aunt.
She, too, indulged in half a minute’s reflection.
“Well, try and begin it, my dear Ronny, before the children come. Women are human. It will be worth it—every time.”
II
There had been a frost, and the world glittered white when York went down to Beech Hangar under a clear blue sky. He took the path through the beech woods, where the rusty bracken and the fallen leaves glowed below the smooth grey trunks of the trees.
The morning was calm, and he felt its calmness overlying the morning’s purpose. He saw the red and pleasant breadth of the farm-house, its windows a-glimmer, the branches of its orchard all silver rime.
The door opened almost instantly to his knock. It was her sister who opened it to him, the black-headed one, Catharine, the eldest of the Shenton girls. Her eyes had a wise look, but she smiled.
“Mr. Shenton in?”
“No; father’s at market, Mr. York.”
She knew as well as he did that he had not come to see her father. She made way for him; she led him where she knew he wished to go, into the old long parlour, where Bess was sitting at the table covered with the red cloth, dressmaking.
“Here’s Mr. York!”
She closed the door on them, and allowed herself the excitement of lingering in the passage where a faint perfume always floated—a country smell, vague and pleasant.
Elizabeth Shenton had raised her eyes for a moment to York’s face, and had let them fall again, while she resumed her work. She had chestnut hair, dark eyes, and a face like milk—and sitting there she looked a gentle, pleasant, passive creature, beautifully healthy—just a woman, no more and no less. She waited. Her silence seemed to understand.
York had walked to the fire. He stood there for a minute with his back to it, making idle conversation, while the girl’s hands moved at their work. Then he crossed to the window and looked out into the wintry garden, and at the moment of his passing the girl had glanced up quickly and given him one long, deep glance. The quality of that look was lost upon him. It expressed wonder, devotion.
“Bess——” he said.
“Yes, Mr. York?”
“I am going back next month. I have come to ask you whether you will go with me.”
She sat very still, so still that he turned to look at her, and wondered.
“Do you mean, sir——?”
“I’m asking you to marry me.”
She let her hands rest on the table.
“Does—Miss York know——?”
“She does.”
Her eyes rose to his, and as he stood waiting it struck him that this was the queerest love scene imaginable. So quiet. For he felt quiet towards her, kind—— This gentle, dark-eyed creature.
“Miss York approves,” he said. “You see——”
And suddenly she let her head fall on her hands, and her face was hidden. She made no sound, and yet it appeared to him that she was weeping. He was a little shocked, touched. He went to her and gently touched her hair.
“My dear girl, have I hurt you? I——”
She raised her head.
“Oh—Mr. Byron—you—but I’m not——”
“What?” he asked.
“I’m—not your equal.”
He looked down into her deep eyes, and somehow he remembered the words of his aunt.
“No; probably—you are better than I am, Bess. But if——”
She caught his hand in both of hers, and sat rigid, staring at the wall.
“I’ll come with you, Mr. Byron,” she said. “I think I would go with you to the end of the world.”
III
The car drove rapidly along the straight road across the plain, with York and his wife in the seat behind the French chauffeur. In the distance the mountains closed the plain; there was snow upon them, and the great clefts that penetrated between the peaks were full of purple shadows. The plain was a chequer of rich fields, vineyards and orchards, very green in the African spring, and dotted with white farms and houses.
York glanced at his wife. She was sitting very close to him with an air of supreme trust, her eyes alive to all this newness, and her silence the silence of one who was supremely interested. She was not a woman who was given to exclaiming, and her silences became her. Already, York had discovered that he had not married an ecstatic fool.
“Anything like your dreams, Bess?”
Her colour still quickened when he spoke to her.
“It’s wonderful. So green. I thought——”
“That North Africa was all sand?”
“Yes.”
“People do,” he said. “This country used to feed half Rome.”
The car slowed up, and turning into a side road began to climb a long hill that rose like a wave above the plain. Here were vineyards and groves of trees.
“Ours,” said York, smiling at her.
Her dark eyes filled with light.
“Ours,” she echoed devotedly.
He pointed out a great range of white-walled, red-roofed buildings below the hill, standing among planes and eucalyptus trees.
“The farm, the stables, the wine houses. In a minute you’ll see our house.”
It came into view as the car topped the rise, white against a wood of pines, with a glacis of green-grey hillside sloping from it towards the south. It stood very high, looking across the plain towards the mountains, isolated, full in the wind’s eye save when the wind blew from the north.
“Some view,” he said.
She nodded.
A private road cut its way in spirals up the hillside, and she was glancing interestedly at all the wild and flowery tangle about her, the broom and cistus, the waving heaths, the asphodel, the yellow fleur de trefle, the orchids and anemones. Resinous shrubs grew in a green-grey tangle, and above them the pines built a dark barrier against the sky.
They passed two massive white pillars, and were in the garden.
York apologized for the garden.
“A bit rough. I hadn’t bothered much, you know. We’ll see to all that, later.”
The house was half French, half Moorish, and as the car turned into a little forecourt, Elizabeth York felt faintly bewildered. There were so many impressions beating upon her brain.
A group of servants, Arab and French, stood by the arched door; innumerable dogs seemed to be barking, dogs of all sizes and of varying degrees of fierceness, and a wind was blowing. Somehow, she had not realized the wind while they were in the car, but now—the bluster of it filled her with a sudden feeling of unrest.
York helped her out. The servants crowded round, and York, with that grave smile of his, called each by name.
“Bess, I’ll introduce the household. This is Marie—your maid. Here are Ali the cook, and Abdullah the house-boy; Kaled the chief gardener, and Osman and Mahomet the watchmen. And you can hear the dogs.”
The swarthy faces smiled on her, but the face of the Frenchwoman Marie did not smile. She was a little, thick-set woman, lame, with a darkly handsome and sensual face, and eyes whose expression never altered.
“Welcome, madame.”
Elizabeth York’s softer eyes touched momentarily the Frenchwoma
n’s face.
“Thank you, Marie. I have heard of you—all.”
She turned instinctively to her husband, as though aware of a sudden sense of strangeness, and he was the protector, the one English thing.
“What a view, Byron.”
“Yes; no chimney-pots——”
Marie was watching them with her cat’s eyes.
“Shall I make tea, monsieur? It is ready.”
York seemed about to answer her, but glanced at his wife.
“What do you say, Bess? Domestic orders—yours—you know. Tea first, and explorations—afterwards?”
She flushed, and smiled up at him.
“Tea.”
“Well—tell Marie.”
So Elizabeth York gave Marie Delage her first order, and Marie took it with cold gravity.
“Bien, madame, but I have so little English. Did madame—say?”
“Tea—at once, Marie,” said York a little sharply.
Afterwards he showed her the house. It had a bright spaciousness that was strange to her, and the big windows were full of the sky and of the great spaces of the landscape. She heard the wind blowing. The French furniture, the pictures, the rugs, the polished floors seemed so different.
On the broad stairs she held to his arm as though holding to the one sure and familiar thing in the midst of all this strangeness. The hall out of which the stairs ascended was a Moorish central court roofed over, its walls brilliant with tiles, and the upper rooms opened off the gallery above the court.
“A bit different, Bess——”
“Yes; it’s all strange.”
“You’ll soon get used to it.”
Her face grew tender. It was his house, their home, and she was quick to feel his pride in it, and that he wished her to feel the same pride. She did feel it. Nor was she inarticulate.
“It’s beautiful.”
“That’s right.”
He flung open the door of their room, a long room full of sunlight, and a welcoming room, for, to her delight she saw that the furniture was English. She was a little homesick, in spite of her happiness.
“Oh, Ronny, I like it!”
Only twice had she turned the stately Byron into the more intimate Ronny. He patted her cheek. He felt that it was easy to be kind to her.
“Splendid. My dressing-room opens off it, and that door leads to the bathroom. It is rather a jolly bathroom. This room—you know——”
“Yes.”
“Is all yours. I—just sleep here.”
He laughed, and then her glance fell upon an unexpected piece of furniture standing in a corner of the room, a child’s cot, all lace and muslin, and pale blue ribbons. The thing made her hold her breath. It seemed to bring intimate and possible things so near. But, the cot—in their room—already? Perhaps it was a French fashion?
She went to one of the windows, drawing him with her by the hand.
“I’ll—I’ll try to be all—you want me to be, dear.”
“Of course you will,” he said kindly, and bending, kissed her hair.
IV
Byron York was very kind to his young wife, for which kindness he could claim no credit, for she was a peculiarly lovable creature. In fact, the paternal temper of his kindness was a subtle insult to his own understanding. Elizabeth was to be the mother of his children, and as such she had a dignity and a human raison d’être, and in his own self-centred way, York was proud of her, for though she was a farmer’s daughter he had married a finer gentlewoman than he imagined.
Elizabeth had nothing to complain of. Her husband was her senior by some fifteen years; she was no hoyden, and to her York’s dignity, his seriousness, his air of height and of power were attractive. He was her man, her type.
She was one of those women who combine a quick understanding with a capacity for great devotion, and from the very beginning she had given her heart and her head, generously, and with a tenderness that was deep and sure.
She admired York intensely, yet not like a fool. She admired him on horseback, or among his dogs, or sitting at the head of his table, or giving curt orders to the Arab servants. She was practical as well as full of understanding, and her devotion took his life and made it hers.
She worked hard at her French. She took the management of the household into her capable hands. She had a natural taste for dress, and an instinctive hatred of anything that was loud and tawdry. She could sit still and be silent with dignity.
People called from some of the other estates. They were French or cosmopolitan Scotch. They found York’s new wife charming. It was agreed that he had done very well for himself, and that his wife’s looks flattered his age.
“She is charming and she is good.”
Very obvious praise no doubt, but true all the same, and the virtue of her was recognized by one or two irresponsible gentlemen who had too much spare time on their hands.
“Une dévote. No use hunting there—my boy.”
Old Madame Le Noir, whose rich estate touched the mountains, winked a wicked, kind old eye.
“There will be many children. Monsieur York wants children. Yes; he will get them——!”
In the household itself the native servants soon became devoted to her. Her voice and smile made life pleasant; and she was no fool. The dogs were as wise as the Arabs, from Jean the big mastiff to Pom-pom the fox-terrier. When she went out to the great wired enclosure near the pinewood where the larger of them lived during the day there was an immense hubbub.
At night, Jean, and the two Alsatians were let loose to roam about the place, and shared with one of the watchmen the business of keeping off prowlers. Elizabeth would rather have had it otherwise, but York had to assure her that North Africa was not England.
“It is necessary.”
“I saw Osman with a gun.”
“That’s so, Bess. And sometimes he uses it. If you hear a shot at night, just turn over and go to sleep again.”
The knowledge that fierce dogs were loose at night, and that a watchman went his rounds with a gun, kept the place’s strangeness before her consciousness, and prevented her from sinking herself in it with that wholly satisfying completeness.
She, too, was a stranger; and there were two people about the place who would not let her forget it: Marie, the Frenchwoman, and Louis Proyart, her husband’s manager and agent. She was an interloper, and she divined their hostility, nor was it a temperamental antagonism. Bess felt that there were reasons.
Marie’s reasons were obvious. She had acted as housekeeper; she had handled the money; she was lame, and a woman with a physical flaw is a woman with a grievance against other women. Logical, lustful, acquisitive, it is more than probable that she had had ambitions; the one white woman—and a provocative one at that—who had lived in a house with a lonely man.
“This butter and cream wife who was to bear children.”
Proyart was a big, expansive creature with blue eyes that squinted slightly. He was extremely polite. He streamed candour, but from the very first Elizabeth had mistrusted him. The Arabs were afraid of Proyart. He was a bully. They called him “Le Commandant.”
But York spoke of him as a good fellow.
“Knows how to handle the men. No nonsense about Proyart.”
His wife was ready to agree that there was no nonsense about either of these two. What she felt about them was that they had very definite ideas, and too suggestive an understanding. It was an invisible partnership, uniting the various passions of both.
But, on the whole, she was very happy during those first two months. A rich and fragrant spring was with them, an African floweriness; the heat and the dust had not yet come. And York was very kind to her. She had not quite realized as yet the almost fanatical purpose behind that kindness.
A certain incident brought it to the centre of her consciousness. York was a great lover of horses, and he rode out over the estate each day on big black Cæsar. He was a fine horseman.
What more natural than that
his wife should wish to ride with him? She could not ride, but she would learn.
“Ronny, mayn’t I have a horse? Odgers says that there is a very quiet one.”
Odgers was the English groom, a laconic and surly person—a much better fellow than his manners suggested.
She was surprised at her husband’s grave face.
“Odgers had better mind his own business.”
“But, dear, I should soon learn. I want to ride with you.”
She was aware of his intent look.
“I think—better not, Bess. I’m not much of a believer in the saddle for women—when——”
“Ronny——!”
“Yes, a woman—ought to be careful.”
She understood—and was silent. She had begun to realize that his thoughts were set on her having a child.
V
The sign of that African house was the empty cot. And in her husband’s eyes Elizabeth divined a waiting look. It was there when York himself hardly realized that it was there. He was for ever expecting her to tell him something, and when he had been out half the day riding, or away at Mida in the car, he would return and look at her as though she must have something to tell him. It was an obsession and, being the woman she was, she loved him for it.
Yes; even though she had begun to wonder whether he had married her for the sake of the child she could give him. She thought it rather splendid of him, this desire for a child. It did not rouse in her any feeling of jealousy, for she was not a jealous woman, and she, too, wanted a child. She was made for motherhood.
Yet, nothing happened, and she felt the suggestion of a shadow stealing over their relationship, an anxiety that was mutual yet unconfessed.
It hurt her.
For yet another incident quickened her realization of his purpose. York had been away for two days on business to Algiers, and during his absence Bess had had a letter from England from a younger sister who had been married a year ago, a joyous and happy letter. And when York returned and she met him walking up through the garden, she was unthinkingly full of this other woman’s happiness.
“Such good news, Ronny.”
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 85