“You needn’t ask—because you know.”
They had lowered their voices, and Lady Tetterley was listening with interest. It was not until Rosamund turned away that she made a restless movement towards Nan.
“Oh, by the way, Basher told me to be sure to ask you about your people.”
Nan gazed at her. She did not repeat the word Basher, but she contrived to produce the impression of having done so.
Mabel Tetterley jerked her emaciated shoulders.
“Basher’s my husband. He’s got it into his head that you may be related to some Forsyths he used to know. I told him it was most improbable, but he said I was to ask. I believe he was in love with one of them. They used to live at a place called Glenbuckie, and one of the sons went off digging up Old Testament places in Chaldea. Basher says he was quite well known in his own line.”
“Nigel Forsyth,” said Jervis.
Mabel Tetterley nodded.
“That’s it. He wrote books about it. You know—all sherds, and cuneiform, and bits of the Tower of Babel, and Abraham’s cooking-pots, and Japhet’s wife’s nose-ring. I don’t read them myself, but Basher gloats over them, and he particularly said I was to find out if you were related to these Glenbuckie Forsyths.”
Nan’s colour rose.
“Yes, I am.”
“Not really!” Her tone made this an impertinence.
“Nigel Forsyth was my father.”
Lady Tetterley knocked the ash off her cigarette and said, “Damn!” Then she repeated her “Not really!” and added, “Basher will be thrilled.”
After which she turned with one of her abrupt movements and declared that they ought to have gone ten minutes ago.
Neither she nor Rosamund took any leave of Nan, who was left uncertain of whether to cross the lawn with them or to remain where she was. She made a tentative movement to follow them, but they were already some distance away; she would have had to run to catch them up. No one of the three looked around. She hesitated, stood looking after them for a moment, and then returned to the tea-table with a growing certainty that she had done the wrong thing. When, a few minutes later, she saw Monk and Alfred advancing to remove the tea things, she got up and walked to the house, her cheeks burning and her courage very low.
She met Jervis in the hall, and he looked at her with cold anger.
“Why didn’t you come to see them off?”
“You went without me.”
“You should have come too.”
She said, with a simplicity that checked him, “I am sorry. You went off so quickly at the end, and I thought it would look foolish if I ran after you.”
He passed on without another word, and she did not see him till dinner.
XX
The evening was very hot. Monk brought them iced coffee in the library. It was still broad daylight, the terrace and the long slope to the ravine in full sun, and the shadows on the lawn dead still.
Jervis went out on the terrace, and Nan picked up a book. As long as Monk was in the room they had talked quite easily and pleasantly; when Monk was gone there seemed to be nothing to say—or too much. It was a relief to go through the pages of a book into another world. She had read no more than half a chapter, when she heard Jervis come back.
He rang to have the coffee taken away, and stood by the window smoking a cigarette until the door had closed behind Monk. Then he came over to where Nan sat by a window facing the shadowed lawn. He stood looking down upon her.
“Rather unwise of you to commit yourself like that to Mabel Tetterley.”
Nan looked up. If she was startled, she did not show it. Her eyes had the wide, steady gaze which roused something in him. Anger? He took it to be anger.
“Dashing of course—but a bit unwise, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know at all what you mean,” said Nan.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“I’m afraid you’ve a bad memory. It was quite amusing to see you call Mabel Tetterley’s bluff, but I think you’d better have held your tongue. You see, she’s only got to look up an old Who’s Who to score you off rather badly. And as it happens, Basher is the sort of fellow who would be sure to have cartloads of old encyclopedias and Debretts and Who’s Whos knocking about the place.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He sat down on the arm of a big chair and leaned towards her.
“Oh, I think you do. Mabel’s as inquisitive as they’re made. She’ll go home, and she and Basher will look up the appropriate volume—I forget what year Nigel Forsyth died?”
“Nineteen-nineteen,” said Nan.
“Oh, you’ve mugged it up?”
“You didn’t finish what you were saying.”
“Need I?”
“Please.”
He laughed, got up, crossed the room, bent to one of the lowest shelves, and came back with a red book in his hand.
“All right—you’ve asked for it. Here we are! My grandfather was a bit of a collector too. Here we have Who’s Who for nineteen-eighteen.”
He flicked over the leaves. “Here goes!—‘Forsyth, Nigel Darnaway. Third son of Alistair Darnaway Forsyth of Glenbuckie. Forfarshire. Born 1875. Education Winchester—Cambridge. Fellow King’s Coll:—’”
“Why are you reading all that?” said Nan.
“You mean that it isn’t news to you—you’ve been there already—you know all about the ‘British Ass:’ and ‘Excav: Chal:’”
Nan had turned pale. She said.
“I would be likely to know.”
He laughed.
“Meaning that it was premeditated, and you naturally got up the documentary evidence! But now we come to the important part—‘Married 1908 Constance Lavington.’”
“Yes,” said Nan—“my mother.”
He clapped the book to and dropped it into the seat of the chair beside him.
“It won’t do,” he said. “You were a little fool to think you could pull it off.”
Nan stood up.
“You don’t believe me?”
He smiled.
“Why don’t you believe me?”
He laughed.
“Let’s drop it! But if I were you, I should leave the ancestry vague. Nigel Forsyth is just a bit too well known.”
Nan put her hands behind her back. They were shaking, and she didn’t want him to see them shake.
“Nigel Forsyth was my father, and Constance Lavington was my mother. My father’s people were furious about the marriage because my mother was on the stage. She died when Cynthia was six months old, and my father never forgave his father for the things he had said about her. He went out to Mesopotamia, leaving us with a sort of aunt. Her name was Mrs Whipple—she was my mother’s half-sister and the widow of a Major Whipple of the Indian Army. She brought us up. My father only came home once after the war. He died at Baghdad in nineteen-nineteen. There was only a very little money. Mrs Whipple—” She hesitated. “I can’t be fair to her, because she made Cynthia very unhappy. I think she tried to do her duty. There was only a little money, and she wasn’t fond of children. She wasn’t fond of us, and she didn’t understand Cynthia. That’s why I went to Solano’s as a dancing partner—I simply had to get Cynthia away.”
The ash from Jervis’s cigarette fell and powdered the carpet. He had been looking at her hard. His expression changed suddenly.
“You mean it’s true?”
“It’s quite easy for me to prove that it’s true. I have my father’s letters—I can show them to you.”
His face changed again. The momentary embarrassment passed. He looked like a triumphant schoolboy.
“I’ve fallen on my feet! I congratulate myself—you’re too angry to do it for me of course—but I’m about to apologize.”
She took a step away from him and said in a low voice,
“Why didn’t you believe me?”
He came nearer and took her by the arm.
“You saw Rosamund
.”
“Yes.”
“What did you think of her?”
“She’s beautiful.”
“Yes. What else?”
“I don’t know.”
“I thought I did. I thought I’d known her for ten years. I thought I could have said just what she would do and just what she would say in any given circumstances. I thought she was beautiful, rather cold, fond of the good things of the world, indifferent to public opinion; not a great brain, but socially clever; truthful enough, and quite honest, as far as honesty goes; and with a decent family feeling for my grandfather and the place, and perhaps something a little warmer than that for myself. We got on well. We didn’t make demands upon one another, but we behaved affectionately. I wasn’t in love with her, and she wasn’t in love with me; but we were pretty good friends, and I had a theory that friendship would make a better foundation for marriage than a lot of what passes for falling in love—and if I’d been the blindest young jackass that ever went chasing after a chorus girl under the impression that he was following an angel into the Garden of Eden, I couldn’t have come a more colossal crash. To say that Rosamund let me down simply doesn’t come within a hundred miles of it, and I’m not taking any more chances. She didn’t break my heart, because she hadn’t got it to break. And now I’ll beg your pardon—provisionally—ratification to follow when I’ve actually seen those letters from your father.”
He had been holding her lightly all the time he spoke. Now his hand dropped from her arm.
“Are you going to make me pay for what Rosamund did to you?” said Nan. She had not meant to say it, but the words said themselves hot and quick.
“Probably,” said Jervis.
When his eyes laughed and the corners crinkled, Nan had it in her heart to pay her uttermost farthing without counting the cost. She said,
“And if I won’t pay?”
Jervis did not answer in words. He frowned, turned abruptly away and, picking up the volume of Who’s Who, went over to the shelf and put it back in its place. He stood for a minute or two looking at first one book and then another and whistling softly to himself. The tune bothered Nan because she couldn’t put a name to it.
She would have given the world twice over to undo what Rosamund had done to him. She wondered whether she would ever be able to undo it. Just now, when his eyes had laughed, she had seen the bitterness and the hardness that were under the laughter. It hurt more than when he frowned. He frowned easily, and it meant very little; but when he laughed, her heart ached for him.
He turned away from the book-shelves and came back to the window. His face wore a bantering look.
“Well? What’s the great idea? I should really like to know.”
She said, “What do you mean?”
“Well, I’d like to know just why you married me, and just what’s at the bottom of all this nonsense about Robert Leonard. A deaf and dumb idiot can see that you’ve got it in for him—and I must say I’d like to know why.”
Nan tipped her head back, met his eyes, and said seriously,
“He’s trying to kill you.”
“Yes, you said that before—he rode me down in a taxi, and he arranged for the bridge over the ravine to rot in the spray. Come, you know, it’s not good enough! But what I do want to know is why. What has poor old Leonard done to be cast for the part of first murderer? It seems a bit far-fetched, don’t you think? And it would interest me quite a lot to know what put it into your head.”
“It’s no use my telling you,” said Nan—“you wouldn’t believe me.”
“I’m afraid I shouldn’t. But you’re probably of a very hopeful disposition—you might try.”
She shook her head.
“It wouldn’t be any use.”
“How can you tell if you don’t try?”
A smile just touched her lips and was gone again.
“You’re never going to believe anyone again. It would be waste of time.”
“You might convert me.”
“Could I, Jervis?”
“I don’t think so, Nan. But then that makes it all the more exciting for you. There’s always an off chance.”
She had been standing looking up at him; now she came a step nearer.
“He is trying to kill you.”
“How intriguing! Have you any notion why?”
“It’s something to do with the money.”
“I’m afraid that’s where you slip up. Poor old Leonard’s not in the running—he wouldn’t get a penny. It’s distinctly to his interest to let me linger on and touch me for an occasional fiver.”
“Does he do that?” (That meant that he was hard up—perhaps desperately hard up.)
“He does,” said Jervis. “So you see I’m more use to him alive than dead.”
“If he killed you—” said Nan. She stopped, because it was a dreadful thing to say.
“Yes—do go on. If he killed me?”
“Rosamund would get everything.”
He gave her a sharp glance. So she was working round to his will. She evidently didn’t believe in letting the grass grow under her feet.
He nodded.
“You seem to know all about it.”
“I typed Mr Weare’s will.”
“Well?”
She looked at him in silence.
“You’d got as far as ‘Rosamund would get everything.’ Aren’t you going on?”
“No—it’s no use,” said Nan.
Jervis laughed.
“Rosamund gets everything—so in case Robert Leonard should feel an overpowering urge to remove me and marry Rosamund, it might be a good plan if I put temptation out of his way by making a will in your favour. Is that it?”
Nan felt as if something in her must break. She didn’t know whether it was her pride or her love. There was a feeling of anguished strain.
She said, “No!” with a little cry.
“Unfortunately my hands are tied, so I can’t oblige you. I can make a settlement on my wife, but King’s Weare and enough to keep it up on goes to Rosamund under my grandfather’s will, failing a direct heir.”
“I knew that.”
“Then I don’t quite see what you were driving at.”
She came quite close.
“He is trying to kill you,” she said. “I don’t know why—I think it’s because of the money. Perhaps he wants to marry Rosamund—I don’t know. But I know that he’s trying to kill you.”
He looked down at her with hard amusement.
“You’re very serious over it.”
“I am very serious.”
“And why? Don’t you want to be a widow?”
“No,” said Nan, very pale.
Jervis laughed outright.
“What an odd taste, my dear!”
Before she knew what he was going to do, he took her by the elbows, swung her off her feet, and kissed her on the mouth. He was still laughing when he put her down. She was as white as a sheet and trembling violently.
“Why, what’s the matter?” he said.
She turned and ran out of the room.
XXI
Jervis stood frowning at the door. What a to-do about a kiss! He threw up his head and laughed. He didn’t know why he had kissed her, and he certainly didn’t know why she had run away. One could not have expected a shrinking delicacy from the girl who had offered herself to a stranger for two thousand pounds on the nail and a settlement of five hundred a year. No—to do her justice, she hadn’t asked for the five hundred a year; she had only stood out for her two thousand down. Still, she could hardly expect to be considered unapproachable. And after all, what had he done? Swung her off her feet, kissed her lightly, and put her down again. Yet he felt an undoubted sense of guilt, and it angered him. Her lips had been soft and cold; he had felt them tremble; when he put her down, she had the look of a child unbearably hurt. Preposterous! She had offered herself to him; he had married her—and she was to look like that for a kiss!
He s
tepped over the low window-sill and walked up and down the terrace smoking, until the sun went down into a rose-coloured haze.
Monk found him there watching the sunset. He presented a long envelope and a message.
“Mrs Weare has gone to bed with a headache, sir—and these are the papers you wished to see.”
Jervis took them to the study.
So she had gone to bed with a headache. He wondered if he had made her cry. A faint tinge of triumph just touched his mood. He had lived ten years in the same house as Rosamund, and he had never seen her weep. He had kissed her a hundred times, and he had certainly never felt her tremble. Nan’s lips had trembled when he touched them—she had trembled from head to foot and had run away—she had looked as if she was going to cry. Perhaps she was lying in the big four-post bed crying her heart out. He had a picture of her in his mind, lying there in the shade of the red curtains, with her head on her arm and her face hidden, weeping scalding tears. For some obscure reason the picture gave him a feeling of pleasure.
He tore open the long envelope which she had sent him. There were half a dozen letters on thin foreign paper, and a slanting pencil scrawl signed Nan. It said:
Here are my father’s letters—some of them. Please let me have them back.
There was a blister on the corner of the paper. It looked as if a drop of water had fallen there.
He sorted out the letters and read them through. They were the rather stiff letters which a man writes to children with whom he has no other than a formal relation.
I hope you and Cynthia are doing well at school. There’s nothing like a good grounding. Your aunt says Cynthia is very backward and does not try to learn. I am very sorry to hear this. You will both have to earn your living some day, as I have nothing to leave you. Life out here is precarious.
Jervis had a tenderness for children. He frowned at the letter as he read it. It was dated July 1919. Nan would have been eleven. Good Lord! What an exhilarating letter for a kid of eleven to get from a father on the other side of the world! It must have been about the last letter he wrote her too.
He turned to another.
Your aunt says Cynthia is troublesome. I don’t know what to do about it. I can’t possibly get home until the war is over—and one can’t say when that will be. I can be of use here because the Arabs know me. You must try and manage Cynthia and not let her worry your aunt, for if she doesn’t see her way to continuing to take charge of you, I do not really know what I can do.
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