Vera

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  This was certainly a dream, thought Lucy. Things didn’t happen like this when one was awake,—grotesque things.

  She turned her head and looked at him. No, it wasn’t a dream. No dream could be so solid as the man beside her. What was he saying?

  He was saying in a tormented voice that he was Wemyss.

  ‘You are Wemyss,’ she repeated gravely.

  It made no impression on her. She didn’t mind his being Wemyss.

  ‘I’m the Wemyss the newspapers were full of last week,’ he said, seeing that the name left her unmoved. ‘My God,’ he went on, again wiping his forehead, but as fast as he wiped it more beads burst out, ‘those posters—to see one’s own name staring at one everywhere on posters!’

  ‘Why was your name on posters?’ said Lucy.

  She didn’t want to know; she asked mechanically, her ear attentive only to the sounds from the open windows of the room upstairs.

  ‘Don’t you read newspapers here?’ was his answer.

  ‘I don’t think we do,’ she said, listening. ‘We’ve been settling in. I don’t think we’ve remembered to order any newspapers yet.’

  A look of some, at any rate, relief from the pressure he was evidently struggling under came into Wemyss’s face. ‘Then I can tell you the real version,’ he said, ‘without your being already filled up with the monstrous suggestions that were made at the inquest. As though I hadn’t suffered enough as it was! As though it hadn’t been terrible enough already——’

  ‘The inquest?’ repeated Lucy.

  Again she turned her head and looked at him. ‘Has your trouble anything to do with—death?’

  ‘Why, you don’t suppose anything else would reduce me to the state I’m in?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said; and into her eyes and into her voice came a different expression, something living, something gentle. ‘I hope it wasn’t anybody you—loved?’

  ‘It was my wife,’ said Wemyss.

  He got up quickly, so near was he to crying at the thought of it, at the thought of all he had endured, and turned his back on her and began stripping the leaves off the branches above his head.

  Lucy watched him, leaning forward a little on both hands. ‘Tell me about it,’ she said presently, very gently.

  He came back and dropped down heavily beside her again, and with many interjections of astonishment that such a ghastly calamity could have happened to him, to him who till now had never——

  ‘Yes,’ said Lucy, comprehendingly and gravely, ‘yes—I know——’

  —had never had anything to do with—well, with calamities, he told her the story.

  They had gone down, he and his wife, as they did every 25th of July, for the summer to their house on the river, and he had been looking forward to a glorious time of peaceful doing nothing after months of London, just lying about in a punt and reading and smoking and resting—London was an awful place for tiring one out—and they hadn’t been there twenty-four hours before his wife—before his wife——

  The remembrance of it was too grievous to him. He couldn’t go on.

  ‘Was she—very ill?’ asked Lucy gently, to give him time to recover. ‘I think that would almost be better. One would be a little—at least one would be a little prepared——’

  ‘She wasn’t ill at all,’ cried Wemyss. ‘She just—died.’

  ‘Oh—like father!’ exclaimed Lucy, roused now altogether. It was she now who laid her hand on his.

  Wemyss seized it between both his, and went on quickly.

  He was writing letters, he said, in the library at his table in the window where he could see the terrace and the garden and the river; they had had tea together only an hour before; there was a flagged terrace along that side of the house, the side the library was on and all the principal rooms; and all of a sudden there was a great flash of shadow between him and the light; come and gone instantaneously; and instantaneously then there was a thud; he would never forget it, that thud; and there outside his window on the flags——

  ‘Oh, don’t—oh, don’t——’ gasped Lucy.

  ‘It was my wife,’ Wemyss hurried on, not able now to stop, looking at Lucy while he talked with eyes of amazed horror. ‘Fallen out of the top room of the house—her sitting-room because of the view—it was in a straight line with the library window—she dropped past my window like a stone—she was smashed—smashed——’

  ‘Oh, don’t—oh——’

  ‘Now can you wonder at the state I’m in?’ he cried. ‘Can you wonder if I’m nearly off my head? And forced to be by myself—forced into retirement for what the world considers a proper period of mourning, with nothing to think of but that ghastly inquest.’

  He hurt her hand, he gripped it so hard.

  ‘If you hadn’t let me come and talk to you,’ he said, ‘I believe I’d have pitched myself over the cliff there this afternoon and made an end of it.’

  ‘But how—but why—how could she fall?’ whispered Lucy, to whom poor Wemyss’s misfortune seemed more frightful than anything she had ever heard of.

  She hung on his words, her eyes on his face, her lips parted, her whole body an agony of sympathy. Life—how terrible it was, and how unsuspected! One went on and on, never dreaming of the sudden dreadful day when the coverings were going to be dropped and one would see it was death after all, that it had been death all the time, death pretending, death waiting. Her father, so full of love and interests and plans,—gone, finished, brushed away as if he no more mattered than some insect one unseeingly treads on as one walks; and this man’s wife—dead in an instant, dead so far more cruelly, so horribly ….

  ‘I had often told her to be careful of that window,’ Wemyss answered in a voice that almost sounded like anger; but all the time his tone had been one of high anger at the wanton, outrageous cruelty of fate. ‘It was a very low one, and the floor was slippery. Oak. Every floor in my house is polished oak. I had them put in myself. She must have been leaning out and her feet slipped away behind her. That would make her fall head foremost——’

  ‘Oh—oh——’ said Lucy, shrinking. What could she do, what could she say to help him, to soften at least these dreadful memories?

  ‘And then,’ Wemyss went on after a moment, as unaware as Lucy was that she was tremblingly stroking his hand, ‘at the inquest, as though it hadn’t all been awful enough for me already, the jury must actually get wrangling about the cause of death.’

  ‘The cause of death?’ echoed Lucy. ‘But—she fell.’

  ‘Whether it were an accident or done on purpose.’

  ‘Done on——?’

  ‘Suicide.’

  ‘Oh——’

  She drew in her breath quickly.

  ‘But—it wasn’t?’

  ‘How could it be? She was my wife, without a care in the world, everything done for her, no troubles, nothing on her mind, nothing wrong with her health. We had been married fifteen years, and I was devoted to her—devoted to her.’

  He banged his knee with his free hand. His voice was full of indignant tears.

  ‘Then why did the jury——’

  ‘My wife had a fool of a maid—I never could stand that woman—and it was something she said at the inquest, some invention or other about what my wife had said to her. You know what servants are. It upset some of the jury. You know juries are made up of anybody and everybody—butcher, baker, and candlestick-maker—quite uneducated most of them, quite at the mercy of any suggestion. And so instead of a verdict of death by misadventure, which would have been the right one, it was an open verdict.’

  ‘Oh, how terrible—how terrible for you,’ breathed Lucy, her eyes on his, her mouth twitching with sympathy.

  ‘You’d have seen all about it if you had read the papers last week,’ said Wemyss, more quietly. It had done him good to get it out and talked over.

  He looked down at her upturned face with its horror-stricken eyes and twitching mouth. ‘Now tell me about yourself,’ he said, t
ouched with compunction; nothing that had happened to her could be so horrible as what had happened to him, still she too was newly smitten, they had met on a common ground of disaster, Death himself had been their introducer.

  ‘Is life all—only death?’ she breathed, her horror-stricken eyes on his.

  Before he could answer—and what was there to answer to such a question except that of course it wasn’t, and he and she were just victims of a monstrous special unfairness?—he certainly was; her father had probably died as fathers did, in the usual way in his bed—before he could answer, the two women came out of the house, and with small discreet steps proceeded down the path to the gate. The sun flooded their spare figures and their decent black clothes, clothes kept for these occasions as a mark of respectful sympathy.

  One of them saw Lucy under the mulberry tree and hesitated, and then came across the grass to her with the mincing steps of tact.

  ‘Here’s somebody coming to speak to you,’ said Wemyss, for Lucy was sitting with her back to the path.

  She started and looked round.

  The woman approached hesitatingly, her head on one side, her hands folded, her face pulled into a little smile intended to convey encouragement and pity.

  ‘The gentleman’s quite ready, miss,’ she said softly.

  III

  All that day and all the next day Wemyss was Lucy’s tower of strength and rock of refuge. He did everything that had to be done of the business part of death—that extra wantonness of misery thrown in so grimly to finish off the crushing of a mourner who is alone. It is true the doctor was kind and ready to help, but he was a complete stranger; she had never seen him till he was fetched that dreadful morning; and he had other things to see to besides her affairs,—his own patients, scattered widely over a lonely countryside. Wemyss had nothing to see to. He could concentrate entirely on Lucy. And he was her friend, linked to her so strangely and so strongly by death. She felt she had known him for ever. She felt that since the beginning of time she and he had been advancing hand in hand towards just this place, towards just this house and garden, towards just this year, this August, this moment of existence.

  Wemyss dropped quite naturally into the place a near male relative would have been in if there had been a near male relative within reach; and his relief at having something to do, something practical and immediate, was so immense that never were funeral arrangements made with greater zeal and energy,—really one might almost say with greater gusto. Fresh from the horrors of those other funeral arrangements, clouded as they had been by the silences of friends and the averted looks of neighbours—all owing to the idiotic jurors and their hesitations, and the vindictiveness of that woman because, he concluded, he had refused to raise her wages the previous month—what he was arranging now was so simple and straightforward that it positively was a pleasure. There were no anxieties, there were no worries, and there was a grateful little girl. After each fruitful visit to the undertaker, and he paid several in his zeal, he came back to Lucy and she was grateful; and she was not only grateful, but very obviously glad to get him back.

  He saw she didn’t like it when he went away, off along the top of the cliff on his various business visits, purpose in each step, a different being from the indignantly miserable person who had dragged about that very cliff killing time such a little while before; he could see she didn’t like it. She knew he had to go, she was grateful and immensely expressive of her gratitude—Wemyss thought he had never met any one so expressively grateful—that he should so diligently go, but she didn’t like it. He saw she didn’t like it; he saw that she clung to him; and it pleased him.

  ‘Don’t be long,’ she murmured each time, looking at him with eyes of entreaty; and when he got back, and stood before her again mopping his forehead, having triumphantly advanced the funeral arrangements another stage, a faint colour came into her face and she had the relieved eyes of a child who has been left alone in the dark and sees its mother coming in with a candle. Vera usedn’t to look like that. Vera had accepted everything he did for her as a matter of course.

  Naturally he wasn’t going to let the poor little girl sleep alone in that house with a dead body, and the strange servants who had been hired together with the house and knew nothing either about her or her father probably getting restive as night drew on, and as likely as not bolting to the village; so he fetched his things from the primitive hotel down in the cove about seven o’clock and announced his intention of sleeping on the drawing-room sofa. He had lunched with her, and had had tea with her, and now was going to dine with her. What she would have done without him Wemyss couldn’t think.

  He felt he was being delicate and tactful in this about the drawing-room sofa. He might fairly have claimed the spare-room bed; but he wasn’t going to take any advantage, not the smallest, of the poor little girl’s situation. The servants, who supposed him to be a relation and had supposed him to be that from the first moment they saw him, big and middle-aged, holding the young lady’s hand under the mulberry tree, were surprised at having to make up a bed in the drawing-room when there were two spare-rooms with beds already in them upstairs, but did so obediently, vaguely imagining it had something to do with watchfulness and French windows; and Lucy, when he told her he was going to stay the night, was so grateful, so really thankful, that her eyes, red from the waves of grief that had engulfed her at intervals during the afternoon—ever since, that is, the sight of her dead father lying so remote from her, so wrapped, it seemed, in a deep, absorbed attentiveness, had unfrozen her and swept her away into a sea of passionate weeping—filled again with tears.

  ‘Oh,’ she murmured, ‘how good you are——’

  It was Wemyss who had done all the thinking for her, and in the spare moments between his visits to the undertaker about the arrangements, and to the doctor about the certificate, and to the vicar about the burial, had telegraphed to her only existing relative, an aunt, had sent the obituary notice to The Times, and had even reminded her that she had on a blue frock and asked if she hadn’t better put on a black one; and now this last instance of his thoughtfulness overwhelmed her.

  She had been dreading the night, hardly daring to think of it so much did she dread it; and each time he had gone away on his errands, through her heart crept the thought of what it would be like when dusk came and he went away for the last time and she would be alone, all alone in the silent house, and upstairs that strange, wonderful, absorbed thing that used to be her father, and whatever happened to her, whatever awful horror overcame her in the night, whatever danger, he wouldn’t hear, he wouldn’t know, he would still lie there content, content ….

  ‘How good you are!’ she said to Wemyss, her red eyes filling. ‘What would I have done without you?’

  ‘But what would I have done without you?’ he answered; and they stared at each other, astonished at the nature of the bond between them, at its closeness, at the way it seemed almost miraculously to have been arranged that they should meet on the crest of despair and save each other.

  Till long after the stars were out they sat together on the edge of the cliff, Wemyss smoking while he talked, in a voice subdued by the night and the silence and the occasion, of his life and of the regular healthy calm with which it had proceeded till a week ago. Why this calm should have been interrupted, and so cruelly, he couldn’t imagine. It wasn’t as if he had deserved it. He didn’t know that a man could ever be justified in saying that he had done good, but he, Wemyss, could at least fairly say that he hadn’t done any one any harm.

  ‘Oh, but you have done good,’ said Lucy, her voice, too, dropped into more than ordinary gentleness by the night, the silence, and the occasion; besides which it vibrated with feeling, it was lovely with seriousness, with simple conviction. ‘Always, always I know that you’ve been doing good,’ she said, ‘being kind. I can’t imagine you anything else but a help to people and a comfort.’

  And Wemyss said, Well, he had done his best and tried, an
d no man could say more, but judging from what—well, what people had said to him, it hadn’t been much of a success sometimes, and often and often he had been hurt, deeply hurt, by being misunderstood.

  And Lucy said, How was it possible to misunderstand him, to misunderstand any one so transparently good, so evidently kind?

  And Wemyss said, Yes, one would think he was easy enough to understand; he was a very natural, simple sort of person, who had only all his life asked for peace and quiet. It wasn’t much to ask. Vera——

  ‘Who is Vera?’ asked Lucy.

  ‘My wife.’

  ‘Ah, don’t,’ said Lucy earnestly, taking his hand very gently in hers. ‘Don’t talk of that tonight—please don’t let yourself think of it. If I could only, only find the words that would comfort you——’

  And Wemyss said that she didn’t need words, that just her being there, being with him, letting him help her, and her not having been mixed up with anything before in his life, was enough.

  ‘Aren’t we like two children,’ he said, his voice, like hers, deepened by feeling, ‘two scared, unhappy children, clinging to each other alone in the dark?’

  So they talked on in subdued voices as people do who are in some holy place, sitting close together, looking out at the starlit sea, darkness and coolness gathering round them, and the grass smelling sweetly after the hot day, and the little waves, such a long way down, lapping lazily along the shingle, till Wemyss said it must be long past bedtime, and she, poor girl, must badly need rest.

  ‘How old are you?’ he asked suddenly, turning to her and scrutinising the delicate faint outline of her face against the night.

  ‘Twenty-two,’ said Lucy.

  ‘You might just as easily be twelve,’ he said, ‘except for the sorts of things you say.’

  ‘It’s my hair,’ said Lucy. ‘My father liked—he liked——’