A Nightingale in the Sycamore

by Jane Beaufort

  “Because I packed him off to his sister in Kent, and I told Mrs. Banks she could turn up here on pain of being ejected again forcibly! And, as for that confounded cat of yours—”

  “Bartholomew?”

  “Who gave him such an idiotic name? You? You would!” he snorted, as she looked distinctly guilty. “Anyway, I shut him in the larder because he wouldn’t leave me alone, and if he’s cleared up everything in there I don’t mind. He’s a cat with a voracious appetite, anyway.”

  “Naturally he expected to be fed,” Virginia murmured, looking past him into the drawing-room, and feeling slightly appalled by the litter. There appeared to be music scores all over the place, soiled cups, ashtrays jammed with half-smoked cigarettes, and cigarette-ash over everything. On a little table there was a syphon of soda, a soiled glass and the remains of a bottle of whisky.

  Virginia walked up to the little table.

  “Was this your breakfast?” she asked.

  Charles leaned in a weary fashion against the piano. He looked absolutely grey, she thought, and his eyes were desperately unhappy. He made her think of a child who had found things very smooth up till now, and who had suddenly discovered that the world was no longer a pleasant place. That it could even use him brutally.

  “No,” he answered. “I had to have something to keep me going during the night.”

  “Then you’ve been up all night?”

  “Little Sherlock Holmes,” he answered mockingly, “I have!”

  Virginia’s eyes grew softer and more pitying. She decided to tell him one thing at once.

  “I’m not going to marry Martin, Charles!”

  “You’re not?” He seemed to come back partly to life, but it was pathetic life, at that. “Why not?”

  “I decided I wouldn’t—couldn’t—”

  “Why couldn’t you?”

  He straightened himself, and-the dull eyes searched her face.

  “Oh, Charles, darling,” she said tenderly, “you do so badly need looking after! Can’t I do that?—if nothing else!”

  Charles looked at her as if he was not quite sure he was hearing aright. Then his face quivered—again she thought of the little boy who had had to bear too much—and he tried to find a voice to answer her, but it was strained, husky, and utterly unlike any voice she had ever heard from him before, when it came at last.

  “Virginia! ... Do you know what you’re talking about?”

  “Of course!”

  He moved to meet her as she moved to meet him, and he caught her hungrily into his arms, and kissed her wildly, like a man who was starving for her. Her hair, eyes, cheeks, lips—he smothered them with so many kisses that long before he paused to draw breath himself she was completely breathless, but she clung to him as if never willingly would she let him go again, and for the first time for weeks she knew what it was to feel glad that she had been born.

  “Virginia, my loved one, my darling, my precious!” Over and over again he called her the names that were balm, and manna, and solace to her—mid consolation for anything he had caused her to endure. “Oh, Virginia, if you’d married Martin I’d have gone off somewhere at the end of the world and hoped I’d fall off a mountain, or something! Without you life isn’t worth a thing—it’s soulless, empty, useless! I just haven’t got any use for living without you, my own darling!”

  “But, Charles ” She looked up into his face, and her voice was soft as the cooing of doves and pigeons—“You told me you couldn’t bear to part with your freedom! I don’t want to force you to give that up!”

  “My freedom?” He looked down at her as if she was talking the utmost nonsense. “What good is freedom when the woman you love isn’t near you?—When with every breath you draw you want her, and you want her so much you’d like to tie her to you with every bond that was ever invented, and make sure she’d never escape you under any circumstances whatsoever!”

  He laid his cheek against her hair, and he suddenly sounded immensely tired, and utterly weary, but completely, solemnly sure that he was voicing the wisdom of the ages:

  “Sweetheart, I’ve talked so much drivel that you ought to despise me, and be happy if I would go to the ends of the earth and dispose of myself. But if you’ll only marry me—me, and never think again of Martin!—I’ll spend the rest of my life proving to you that I know when I’ve been a fool! Worse than a fool—a deliberately blind idiot!...”

  “We’ll talk about this when you’ve had some breakfast,” she murmured, trying to disentangle herself. “I’ll go out into the kitchen and see what there is that I can cook for you—”

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort. Only an oaf would want breakfast when he could hold you in his arms!”

  “But, nevertheless, I think you need something to eat rather badly.” She put up her fingers and stroked his unshaven cheek very gently, and her eyes were pools of quite selfless love and tenderness. “And while I’m trying to find out whether Bartholomew has left anything at all in the larder, you can go upstairs and have a bath and a shave, and I’ll call you as soon as everything’s ready. Charles, darling,” as his eyes devoured her, “please do as I say and be sensible. Please, darling!”

  “Then say ‘Charles, darling,’ again—and add to it that you forgive me!”

  “I wouldn’t have come down here if I hadn’t forgiven you.”

  “No,” he said, looking at her with a kind of reverence, “you wouldn’t, would you? You were wonderful enough for that!”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  When he was bathed and shaved, and seated at the kitchen table because the dining-room was in a state of chaos which Virginia proposed to tackle later, Charles looked a little less as if he had been up all night. But he admitted that he had been up all night, and he admitted that one reason had been because, after Martin’s visit, he had made up his mind to make one last effort to get on with the music for Summer Symphony.

  “But it was no good, Virginia,” he told her, with a faint groan at the recollection of the nightmarish night he had lived through. “How could I compose anything when I had lost you?”

  He stretched forth his hand to her, and she gave him hers with an instant desire to respond to his need.

  “Charles,” she said, a little hesitantly, “are you quite sure you—I mean, I didn’t come down here this morning because I had any reason to believe that you might have changed your mind about—well, about me! I only felt that I had to come and see you!”

  “Darling,” he breathed, paying little attention to the food she had set before him—and, unfortunately, Bartholomew had been able to do very little about a bowl of fresh eggs. “And was this before, or after, you decided not to marry Martin?”

  “I told him I couldn’t marry him at the same time that I told him I was coming down here to you!”

  Charles pushed aside his coffee-cup and went round the table and took her in his arms and held her tightly. She leant against him, inhaling the fragrance of his shaving-cream, and the scent of newly dealt-with hair.

  “Virginia, do you remember what you said to me that night about your father winding up the clocks?—About Martin winding up the clocks! ... And there were other things you said to me about my not needing a real and permanent home, and about your own need for someone to lighten your burdens, and relieve you of your responsibilities. And you also said that Martin would make an ideal husband. Do you remember?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, into his neck, “I remember!”

  His face looked suddenly twisted and hurt, as if even die memory of the things she had said had the power to upset him.

  “If you only knew how all those things you said have haunted me since that night! ... How I’ve thought about them and brooded on them continually! Especially that bit about your own burdens! ... Oh, darling, I’ll probably never compare with Martin as a husband, and if I were less self-centred I’d urge you in your own best interests to stick to Martin, and let me go right out of your life! But I am self-centred, and I ne
ed you desperately—I know that now! But I swear I’ll never fail you over anything important. There may be times when you’ll get tired of me and my music ·”

  “Never, never!” Virginia managed to protest, still into his neck, where her face was held firmly.

  “And you’ll find that I’m moody, and extremely bad-tempered, and usually before a concert I’m pretty unbearable. Harwell could tell you that! ... And all my life I seem to have been waited on by someone, and I’ve got used to taking things and people for granted. I’m impatient, and ungrateful, restless, and frequently filled with the wanderlust—and the only thing I’ve ever stuck to and never grown tired of is music! The only thing I’ve ever craved for is you! I shall never grow tired of you... Do you think that with me you could find happiness, even if it’s happiness that will be clouded sometimes by doubts and misgivings, and sometimes be rather more like unhappiness?”

  Virginia managed to free her head and look up at him. There was pleading in his eyes—and hers smiled at him suddenly through a kind of dewy mist.

  “Don’t you want to hear about all the flaws in my character, too?”

  “There aren’t any!”

  “Oh, yes, there are—lots!” She touched his long eyelashes gently with her finger, and then the corners of the handsome mouth that had the power to set her trembling just because she looked at it. She noted, not for the first time, that he had a very good chin, and a strong, if faintly arrogant, jaw-line. “I’m full of flaws you’ll discover in time, but I’ll try and overcome some of them for your sake. For instance, I’ve a mania for tidiness, and it’s often struck me that you haven’t,” with a dimple appearing at one corner of her mouth. "That might drive you mad if it wasn’t checked!...”

  Then suddenly, with lowered eyes:

  “But, I would like you to tell me one thing, Charles, if you will.”

  “Yes?” he inquired, watching her closely.

  “Why were you in such a hurry that night”—she peeped at him for an instant—“that night you overturned your car?”

  Charles grinned with an unexpected touch of impishness.

  “Hasn’t Annette already given you a reason for that?”

  “Y-yes—she did!...”

  “I thought as much!” His smile developed, and .the impishness with it. “Well, it wasn’t in order to beg her to marry me—as I imagine she told you!—but, actually, quite the reverse! I like Annette—she’s amusing, and entertaining, a wonderful artiste, her voice is entrancing, and sometimes her ways remind me of a highly purposeful kitten—but, in common with most kittens, she possesses claws! She managed to get hold of a key to my flat, and she was threatening to camp out there unless I returned at once! Knowing the effect her occupation of my flat would have on people like my mother, I decided it would have to be at once!”

  “Oh!...” Virginia exclaimed, and it was rather a long-drawn-out ‘Oh! ...’ Her eyes were almost starry as she looked up at Charles. “And you haven’t—you didn’t?”

  She could not go on, but he understood.

  “No,” he said, very gently, stroking her upturned cheek with his long and flexible forefinger, “I haven’t, and I didn’t! I was always a little mistrustful of Annette—perhaps I recognised the claws even in the beginning! But, in any case,” holding her with sudden closeness, “what is past is past, Virginia, and we’ll both forget all about it, won’t we? Our future won’t have the remotest connection with anything that happened to me up till the time that I met you.”

  “No,” she agreed, on a quivering breath, “I suppose it won’t.”

  He took her face between his hands and looked at her tenderly.

  “And, on the whole, you think it’s safe to take a risk? You’re prepared to take a risk?”

  “I’m prepared to love you—all the rest of my life!” she told him huskily. But there was one other thing she had to know. “You mentioned your mother, Charles,” she said. “Will she—?”

  “She’ll be eating out of your hand in no time,” he assured her. “Once you’re my wife you’ll find any hostility you may have sensed in her will evaporate like morning mist, because anything I’ve ever wanted to do she’s come round to in the end. I expect that’s one reason why you find me a bit impossible at times—or you will,” he promised, with a touch of his old mockery, before he yielded to the temptation to kiss her violently.

  There was a highly satisfying interval during which they clung together deliriously, and then Charles said in a none-too-steady voice:

  “Well, you’re committed now, my darling, and we’ll get married just as soon as it’s possible to get hold of a special licence. We’ll have a week-end in Paris, as a foretaste of our honeymoon, and then we’ll come back here and I’ll finish the music for Summer Symphony. After that we’ll go right away together for a time—at least,” remembering Midge and Iris, “we will when we’ve done something about those responsibilities of yours.”

  And then Virginia told him that Iris was to marry Colin, and that meant that one responsibility would not be hers for very much longer.

  “Then that leaves only Midge,” Charles said. He smiled in the way she liked best. “I shall never be able to do enough for Midge—he introduced me to his Auntie Jinny, and that means I owe him a great deal. A very great deal!” He traced the delicate outline of her lips with a possessive finger, and then tilted her chin. “You will marry me at once, darling heart?” he begged, against her lips. “I can’t wait for you!”

  “How long can you wait?” she inquired tenderly, with a soft little smile.

  “I’ve told you—only until I can get a special licence. Twenty-four hours at the outside!”

  “That’s not a very long time.”

  “No.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll run you back to town now, and start looking for the licence straight away.”

  But Virginia insisted on making a clearance of the kitchen before they left, and although he helped her with the washing-up—and she thought it extremely odd to see him with a tea-towel in his hands—while she quickly restored order to the dining-room he returned to the drawing-room, and presently she heard the sound of his music reaching her.

  She tip-toed to the drawing-room and looked in on him. He was absorbed where he sat on the piano stool, and melody—entrancing melody—rippled from his fingers and she realised that for the time being she was forgotten. She crossed the room like a small shadow and curled herself up in an arm-chair to listen, relaxed and utterly happy, even although he was hardly aware of her. And when at last he half turned and said:

  “Darling, I’d like to put in an hour or so on this, if you don’t mind,” she answered with absolute placidity:

  “Of course, darling. There’s no hurry.”

  But he rose with a swift movement from the piano stool and came across to her.

  “Hurry?” he echoed. He put out a hand and almost snatched her out of her chair. “Of course there’s any amount of hurry! Summer Symphony can wait, but my wife can’t! I want my wife, and I’m not going to wait for her!”