‘I’ve told,’ said Lucy, who looked tired.
Then he clasped her with a great hug to his heart. ‘Everard’s own little love,’ he said, kissing and kissing her. ‘Everard’s own good little love.’
‘Yes, but——’ began Lucy faintly. She was, however, so much muffled and engulfed that her voice didn’t get through.
‘Now wasn’t I right?’ he said triumphantly, holding her tight. ‘Isn’t this as it should be? Just you and me, and nobody to watch or interfere?’
‘Yes, but——’ began Lucy again.
‘What do you say? “Yes, but?”’ laughed Wemyss, bending his ear. ‘Yes without any but, you precious little thing. Buts don’t exist for us—only yeses.’
And on these lines the interview continued for quite a long time before Lucy succeeded in telling him that her aunt had been much upset.
Wemyss minded that so little that he didn’t even ask why. He was completely incurious about anything her aunt might think. ‘Who cares?’ he said, drawing her to his heart again. ‘Who cares? We’ve got each other. What does anything else matter? If you had fifty aunts, all being upset, what would it matter? What can it matter to us?’
And Lucy, who was exhausted by her morning, felt too as she nestled close to him that nothing did matter so long as he was there. But the difficulty was that he wasn’t there most of the time, and her aunt was, and she loved her aunt and did very much hate that she should be upset.
She tried to convey this to Wemyss, but he didn’t understand. When it came to Miss Entwhistle he was as unable to understand Lucy as Miss Entwhistle was unable to understand her when it came to Wemyss. Only Wemyss didn’t in the least mind not understanding. Aunts. What were they? Insects. He laughed, and said his little love couldn’t have it both ways; she couldn’t eat her cake, which was her Everard, and have it too, which was her aunt; and he kissed her hair and asked who was a complicated little baby, and rocked her gently to and fro in his arms, and Lucy was amused at that and laughed too, and forgot her aunt, and forgot everything except how much she loved him.
Meanwhile Miss Entwhistle was spending a diligent afternoon in the newspaper room of the British Museum. She was reading the Times report of the Wemyss accident and inquest; and if she had been upset by what Lucy told her in the morning she was even more upset by what she read in the afternoon. Lucy hadn’t mentioned that suggestion of suicide. Perhaps he hadn’t told her. Suicide. Well, there had been no evidence. There was an open verdict. It had been a suggestion made by a servant, perhaps a servant with a grudge. And even if it had been true, probably the poor creature had discovered she had some incurable disease, or she may have had some loss that broke her down temporarily, and—oh, there were many explanations; respectable, ordinary explanations.
Miss Entwhistle walked home slowly, loitering at shop windows, staring at hats and blouses that she never saw, spinning out her walk to its utmost, trying to think. Suicide. How desolate it sounded on that beautiful afternoon. Such a giving up. Such a defeat. Why should she have given up? Why should she have been defeated? But it wasn’t true. The coroner had said there was no evidence to show how she came by her death.
Miss Entwhistle walked slower and slower. The nearer she got to Eaton Terrace the more unwillingly did she advance. When she reached Belgrave Square she went right round it twice, lingering at the garden railings studying the habits of birds. She had been out all the afternoon, and, as those who have walked it know, it is a long way from the British Museum to Eaton Terrace. Also it was a hot day and her feet ached, and she very much would have liked to be in her own chair in her cool drawing-room having her tea. But there in that drawing-room would probably still be Mr Wemyss, no longer now to be Mr Wemyss for her—would she really have to call him Everard?—or she might meet him on the stairs—narrow stairs; or in the hall—also narrow, which he would fill up; or on her doorstep she might meet him, filling up her doorstep; or, when she turned the corner into her street, there, coming towards her, might be the triumphant trousers.
No, she felt she couldn’t stand seeing him that day. So she lingered forlornly watching the sparrows inside the garden railings of Belgrave Square, balancing first on one and then on the other of those feet that ached.
This was only the beginning, she thought; this was only the first of many days for her of wandering homelessly round. Her house was too small to hold both herself and love-making. If it had been the slender love-making of the young man who was so doggedly devoted to Lucy, she felt it wouldn’t have been too small. He would have made love youthfully, shyly. She could have sat quite happily in the dining-room while the suitably paired young people dallied delicately together overhead. But she couldn’t bear the thought of being cramped up so near Mr Wemyss’s—no, Everard’s; she had better get used to that at once—love-making. His way of courting wouldn’t be,—she searched about in her uneasy mind for a word, and found vegetarian. Yes; that word sufficiently indicated what she meant: it wouldn’t be vegetarian.
Miss Entwhistle drifted away from the railings, and turning her back on her own direction wandered towards Sloane Street. There she saw an omnibus stopping to let some one out. Wanting very much to sit down she made an effort and caught it, and squeezing herself into its vacant seat gave herself up to wherever it should take her.
It took her to the City; first to the City, and then to strange places beyond. She let it take her. Her clothes became steadily more fashionable the farther the omnibus went. She ended by being conspicuous and stared at. But she was determined to give the widest margin to the love-making and go the whole day, and she did.
For an hour and a half the omnibus went on and on. She had no idea omnibuses did such things. When it finally stopped she sat still; and the conductor, who had gradually come to share the growing surprise of the relays of increasingly poor passengers, asked her what address she wanted.
She said she wanted Sloane Street.
He was unable to believe it, and tried to reason with her, but she sat firm in her place and persisted.
At nine o’clock he put her down where he had taken her up. She disappeared into the darkness with the movements of one who is stiff, and he winked at the passenger nearest the door and touched his forehead.
But as she climbed wearily and hungrily up her steps and let herself in with her latchkey, she felt it had been well worth it; for that one day at least she had escaped Mr We—— no, Everard.
X
Miss Entwhistle, however, made up her mind very firmly that after this one afternoon of giving herself up to her feelings she was going to behave in the only way that is wise when faced by an inevitable marriage, the way of sympathy and friendliness.
Too often had she seen the first indignation of disappointed parents at the marriage of their children harden into a matter of pride, a matter of doggedness and principle, and finally become an attitude unable to be altered, long after years had made it ridiculous. If the marriages turned out happy, how absurd to persist in an antiquated disapproval; if they turned out wretched, then how urgent the special need for love.
Thus Miss Entwhistle reasoned that first sleepless night in bed, and on these lines she proceeded during the next few months. They were trying months. She used up all she had of gallantry in sticking to her determination. Lucy’s instinct had been sound, that wish to keep her engagement secret from her aunt for as long as possible. Miss Entwhistle, always thin, grew still more thin in her constant daily and hourly struggle to be pleased, to enter into Lucy’s happiness, to make things easy for her, to protect her from the notice and inquiry of their friends, to look hopefully and with as much of Lucy’s eyes as she could at Everard and at the future.
‘She isn’t simple enough,’ Wemyss would say to Lucy if ever she said anything about her aunt’s increasing appearance of strain and overwork. ‘She should take things more naturally. Look at us.’ For it was the one fly in Lucy’s otherwise perfect ointment, this intermittent consciousness that her aunt wasn’
t altogether happy.
And then he would ask her, laying his head on hers as he stood with his arms about her, who had taught his little girl to be simple; and they would laugh, and kiss, and talk of other things.
Miss Entwhistle was unable to be simple in Wemyss’s sense. She tried to; for when she saw his fresh, unlined face, his forehead without a wrinkle on it, and compared it in the glass with her own which was only three years older, she thought there must be a good deal to be said for single-mindedness. It was Lucy who told her Everard was so single-minded. He took one thing at a time, concentrating quietly, she said. When he had completely finished it off, then, and not till then, he went on to the next. He knew his own mind. Didn’t Aunt Dot think it was a great thing to know one’s own mind? Instead of wobbling about, wasting one’s thoughts and energies on side-shows?
This was the very language of Wemyss; and Miss Entwhistle, after having been listening to him in the afternoon—for every time he came she put in a brief appearance, just for the look of the thing, and on the Saturday and Sunday outings she was invariably present the whole time—felt it a little hard that when at last she had reached the end of the day and the harbour of her empty drawing-room she should, through the mouth of Lucy, have to listen to him all the evening as well.
But she always agreed, and said, Yes, he was a great dear; for when an only and much-loved niece is certainly going to marry, the least a wise aunt can call her future nephew is a great dear. She will make this warmer and more varied if she can, but at least she will say that much. Miss Entwhistle tried to think of variations, afraid Lucy might notice a certain sameness, and once with an effort she faltered out that he seemed to be a—a real darling; but it had a hollow sound, and she didn’t repeat it. Besides, Lucy was quite satisfied with the other.
She used, sitting at her aunt’s feet in the evenings—Wemyss never came in the evenings because he distrusted the probable dinner—sometimes to make her aunt say it again, by asking a little anxiously, ‘But you do think him a great dear, don’t you, Aunt Dot?’ Whereupon Miss Entwhistle, afraid her last expression of that opinion may have been absent-minded, would hastily exclaim with almost excess of emphasis, ‘Oh, a great dear.’
Perhaps he was a dear. She didn’t know. What had she against him? She didn’t know. He was too old, that was one thing; but the next minute, after hearing something he had said or laughed at, she thought he wasn’t old enough. Of course what she really had against him was that he had got over his wife’s shocking death so quickly. Yet she admitted there was much in Lucy’s explanation of this as a sheer instinctive gesture of self-defence. Besides, she couldn’t keep it up as a grudge against him for ever; with every day it mattered less. And sometimes Miss Entwhistle even doubted whether it was this that mattered to her at all,—whether it was not rather some quite small things that she really objected to: a want of fastidiousness, for instance, a forgetfulness of the minor courtesies,—the objections, in a word, she told herself, smiling, of an old maid. Lucy seemed not to mind his blunders in these directions in the least. She seemed positively, thought her aunt, to take a kind of pride in them, delighting in everything he said or did with the adoring tenderness of a young mother watching the pranks of her first-born. She laughed gaily; she let him caress her openly. She too, thought Miss Entwhistle, had become what she no doubt would say was single-minded. Well, perhaps all this was a spinster’s way of feeling about a type not previously met with, and she had got—again she reproached herself—into an elderly groove. Jim’s friends,—well, they had been different, but not necessarily better. Mr Wemyss would call them, she was sure, a finnicking lot.
When in October London began to fill again, and Jim’s friends came to look her and Lucy up and showed a tendency, many of them, to keep on doing it, a new struggle was added to her others, the struggle to prevent their meeting Wemyss. He wouldn’t, she was convinced, be able to hide his proprietorship in Lucy, and Lucy wouldn’t ever get that look of tenderness out of her eyes when they rested on him. Questions as to who he was would naturally be asked, and one or other of Jim’s friends would be sure to remember the affair of Mrs Wemyss’s death; indeed, that day she went to the British Museum and read the report of it she had been amazed that she hadn’t seen it at the time. It took up so much of the paper that she was bound to have seen it if she had seen a paper at all. She could only suppose that as she was visiting friends just then, she chanced that day to have been in the act of leaving or arriving, and that if she bought a paper on the journey she had looked, as was sometimes her way in trains, not at it but out of the window.
She felt she hadn’t the strength to support being questioned, and in her turn have to embark on the explanation and defence of Wemyss. There was too much of him, she felt, to be explained. He ought to be separated into sections, and taken gradually and bit by bit,—but far best not to produce him, to keep him from meeting her friends. She therefore arranged a day in the week when she would be at home, and discouraged every one from the waste of time of trying to call on her on other days. Then presently the afternoon became an evening once a week, when whoever liked could come in after dinner and talk and drink coffee, because the evening was safer; made safe by Wemyss’s conviction—he hadn’t concealed it—that the dinners of maiden ladies were notoriously both scanty and bad.
Lucy would have preferred never to see a soul except Wemyss, who was all she wanted, all she asked for in life; but she did see her aunt’s point, that only by pinning their friends to a day and an hour could the risk of their overflowing into precious moments be avoided. This is how Miss Entwhistle put it to her, wondering as she said it at her own growing ability in artfulness.
She had an old friend living in Chesham Street, a widow full of that ripe wisdom that sometimes comes at the end to those who have survived marriage; and to her, when the autumn brought her back to London, Miss Entwhistle went occasionally in search of comfort.
‘What in the whole world puts such a gulf between two affections and comprehensions as a new love?’ she asked one day, freshly struck, because of something Lucy had said, by the distance she had travelled. Lucy was quite a tiny figure now, so far away from her had she moved; she couldn’t even get her voice to carry to her, much less still hold on to her with her hands.
And the friend, made brief of speech by wisdom, said: ‘Nothing.’
About Wemyss’s financial position Miss Entwhistle could only judge from appearances, for it wouldn’t have occurred to him that it might perhaps be her concern to know, and she preferred to wait till later, when the engagement could be talked about, to ask some old friend of Jim’s to make the proper inquiries; but from the way he lived it seemed to be an easy one. He went freely in taxis, he hired cars with reasonable frequency, he inhabited one of the substantial houses of Lancaster Gate, and also, of course, he had The Willows, the house on the river near Strorley where his wife had died. After all, what could be better than two houses, Miss Entwhistle thought, congratulating herself, as it were, on Lucy’s behalf that this side of Wemyss was so satisfactory. Two houses, and no children; how much better than the other way about. And one day, feeling almost hopeful about Lucy’s prospects, on the advantages of which she had insisted that her mind should dwell, she went round again to the widow in Chesham Street and said suddenly to her, who was accustomed to these completely irrelevant exclamatory inquiries from her friend, and who being wise was also incurious, ‘What can be better than two houses?’
To which the widow, whose wisdom was more ripe than comforting, replied disappointingly: ‘One.’
Later, when the marriage loomed very near, Miss Entwhistle, who found that she was more than ever in need of reassurance instead of being, as she had hoped to become, more reconciled, went again, in a kind of desperation this time, to the widow, seeking some word from her who was so wise that would restore her to tranquillity, that would dispel her absurd persistent doubts. ‘After all,’ she said almost entreatingly, ‘what can be better than a d
evoted husband?’
And the widow, who had had three and knew what she was talking about, replied with the large calm of those who have finished and can in leisure weigh and reckon up: ‘None.’
XI
The Wemyss–Entwhistle engagement proceeded on its way of development through the ordinary stages of all engagements: secrecy complete, secrecy partial, semi-publicity, and immediately after that entire publicity, with its inevitable accompanying uproar. The uproar, always more or less audible to the protagonists, of either approval or disapproval, was in this case one of unanimous disapproval. Lucy’s father’s friends protested to a man. The atmosphere at Eaton Terrace was convulsed; and Lucy, running as she always did to hide from everything upsetting into Wemyss’s arms, was only made more certain than ever that there alone was peace.
This left Miss Entwhistle to face the protests by herself. There was nothing for it but to face them. Jim had had so many intimate, devoted friends, and each of them apparently regarded his daughter as his special care and concern. One or two of the younger ones, who had been disciples rather than friends, were in love with her themselves, and these were specially indignant and vocal in their indignation. Miss Entwhistle found herself in the position she had tried so hard to avoid, that of defending and explaining Wemyss to a highly sceptical, antagonistic audience. It was as if, forced to fight for him, she was doing so with her back to her drawing-room wall.
Lucy couldn’t help her, because though she was distressed that her aunt should be being worried because of her affairs, yet she did feel that Everard was right when he said that her affairs concerned nobody in the world but herself and him. She, too, was indignant, but her indignation was because her father’s friends, who had been ever since she could remember always good and kind, besides perfectly intelligent and reasonable, should with one accord, and without knowing anything about Everard except that story of the accident, be hostile to her marrying him. The ready unfairness, the willingness immediately to believe the worst instead of the best, astonished and shocked her. And then the way they all talked! Everlasting arguments and reasoning and hairsplitting; so clever, so impossible to stand up against, and yet so surely, she was certain, if only she had been clever too and able to prove things, wrong. All their multitudinous points of view,—why, there was only one point of view about a thing, Everard said, and that was the right one. Ah, but what a woman wanted wasn’t this; she didn’t want this endless thinking and examining and dissecting and considering. A woman—her very thoughts were now dressed in Wemyss’s words—only wanted her man. ‘“Hers not to reason why,”’ Wemyss had quoted one day, and both of them had laughed at his parody, ‘“hers but to love and—not die, but live.”’
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