Though she was grateful to him for not saying, “I told you so,” she snapped, “Well, I’m sorry now!” There were times when Jarrell could exasperate her beyond belief with his ready advice.
“Eric is like a child, Lisa,” Jarrell said gently, ‘it’s both his most endearing and most unattractive quality. He uses a toy, breaks it, and throws it away so he can go on to another. Right or wrong, I feel responsible for you, and I don’t want him to do it to you.”
“But he could be different,” she burst out. “He’s never had anyone expect anything of him, have faith in him. You’ve all spoiled him.”
“Lisa, Lisa, there is one thing you must learn in this world if you are ever to be happy. Don’t, I beg of you, expect to change anyone. If you can accept a man the way he is, fine, but if you want to change him to fulfill some romantic vision of your own, you will surely end in sorrow. The drunkard will remain a drunkard, the fool a fool, and the lecher a lecher.”
“If you really believe that,” Lisa said levelly, “you must be a very unhappy person.”
Jarrell shook his head in exasperation, but offered no further advice. Why should he, Lisa thought rebelliously; he had gotten his way with her and Eric’s willful help. At least she needn’t have hit Eric — he wouldn’t soon forgive her.
“I remembered something else,” she said suddenly.
He looked an her attentively. “And?” he prompted.
“I was in a room that had an odd ceiling, like an attic, and my Uncle Henry was — was trying to force his attentions on me.” There was some comfort in the formal phrasing.
“Do you remember being frightened?”
“I was terrified. You can’t imagine how repulsive he was.”
“I wonder,” Jarrell said thoughtfully. “It just could be that that is what your memory is balking at. As an intern I saw several rape cases, and I’ll never forget the profound mental effect rape had on the victims, far more than the physical hurt, though in both cases the women were badly beaten. I don’t suppose they would ever have admitted what happened otherwise. One of the women had a complete nervous breakdown in the end. She was lucky her father had some means and could send her to a private sanitarium. You know, her husband refused to see or speak to her after the rape, and the husband of the other victim took her back only with great reluctance, as if she had been discovered with a lover.”
“Why do men have to be so brutal?” Lisa exclaimed, still raw from the incident with Eric. “They do as they like and we have nothing to say about it.”
“Ah, but you women have an enormous weapon if you only know it, and some know it all too well: a man’s need. There are women who can make men dance like puppets just by offering and then withdrawing their favors.”
“And there are women who are forced daily by their husbands, too,” Lisa retorted. “There are still times when I wish with all my heart I’d been born a man. I’d be free now to ride off wherever I wanted to go and work at whatever I liked.”
They drew up in the stable yard and Jarrell dismounted. He looked up at her and put a hand on her knee. “But you are free to go any time, Lisa. I want you to know that. I can see to it that you get a position in Dunwiddleston or Burresford — though God knows I shouldn’t think you’d want to go back there — or anywhere else you want to go. I’ve got all this money that does me no good; I’d like for some of it to mean something to somebody.”
“Dr. Jarrell, I couldn’t possibly accept money from you,” Lisa said, her eyes soft, “but I’m grateful for your offer. If I couldn’t have felt useful, I would have left before this and somehow found a place. But I think Cynthia needs me — heaven knows she needs somebody. Since everyone else in the household has abdicated responsibility for her, it’s up to me to see to it that at worst she doesn’t go on eating herself to death and at best she becomes once more a woman who could be wanted.”
“Don’t work with her in the expectation that I would want anything to do with her; I don’t care how slim and sylphlike you made her.” His voice was cold.
Toby came up to take the horses, but Jarrell shook his head. “Thank you, Toby, but I’m going for a ride after all. It helps me sleep. You can rub Dancer down and put him away, though. He looks as if he’s had quite a day.”
He mounted Cleo again as Toby led Dancer off, but Lisa took hold of Cleo’s rein. “Why did you marry her? If I’m to help her, I must know that.”
“Sorry, Lisa,” he said, “but she’ll have to tell you that, and I have my doubts that she will.” He turned Cleo and centered up the drive, even his back looking stiff and unyielding.
“Where have you been?” Cynthia shouted at her. “Do you want me to starve?”
After all you ate in the middle of the night, it would take weeks for you to starve,” Lisa said unsympathetically. “You can have some clear soup and one slice of meat.” She went down to tell Priddy, who happily had some chicken stock already made. “And don’t forget, lots of tea,” she reminded her. “Have Amy or Annie bring a new pot every few hours.”
Cynthia was mollified by the modest offering long enough for Lisa to go downstairs for dinner. The ride had made her very hungry indeed, but though lunch was served late, neither Jarrell nor Eric put in an appearance, leaving Mrs. Lewis, Mrs. Stephens, and herself to converse as best they could. It gave Lisa an uncanny feeling to see Eric’s grey eyes looking at her with such cold dislike from Mrs. Stephens’ face.
“I’ve been trying to think,” Mrs. Stephens said, “who you remind me of. There is something very familiar about you that I can’t put my finger on.”
“No doubt you saw her somewhere in Dunwiddleston,” Mrs. Lewis remarked idly.
“Perhaps,” Carrie Stephens said. “Where’s Eric?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Lewis answered. “I suppose he could have decided to go to Burresford, but he usually tells me, so we don’t plan on him for meals.”
Mrs. Stephens unaccountably smiled a smug, satisfied smile that marred her beauty with a touch of slyness. “How was your ride this morning?” she asked Lisa in a suddenly friendly way. “Weren’t you nervous riding Dancer?”
“It was all right,” Lisa replied evenly. “He’s a marvellous jumper. I never jumped a horse before, and I love it.”
“Where did Eric go?”
“Oh, he went on to Dunwiddleston,” Lisa invented. “He didn’t say what for.”
“Dunwiddleston or Burresford?” Mrs. Stephens inquired sweetly.
Mrs. Lewis rescued her. “Well, whichever, I’ll give him a piece of my mind for not telling anyone how long he’ll be gone. With his appetite, it makes a great deal of difference to the amount of food we need.”
After the meal, Lisa herself carried up the first pot of tea. She then got Annie to help her carry a small bed from one of the spare rooms into Cynthia’s room, and make it up. Cynthia lay in bed drinking her tea and watching them with ill-disguised irritation. No more midnight feasts for her with her gaoler sleeping right there in the room. Tommy, on the other hand, watched with great interest and finally had to be tossed off the new bed so that they could finish making it.
“All right, Cynthia,” Lisa said at last after thanking Annie and letting her go, “it’s time to get up.”
The little eyes in their folds of fat widened. “You must be mad. It’s been years since I left this bed.”
“Then it’s high time you did,” Lisa retorted. “I’ve got chairs out in the garden. No one should waste a beautiful day like this in bed.”
“But I’m ill,” Cynthia wailed. “You’ll kill me, I know you will, if you make me get up.”
“Poppycock,” Lisa said firmly, pulling the covers off her. “Here, I’ll help you.” She pulled Cynthia to a sitting position, put her arms in a belted pink negligee she had found in the closet, and hauled her to her feet.
She was tying the negligee belt when Cynthia moaned, “I feel faint. I’m going to fall. Oh, I’m so weak.”
“Of course you’re weak. But I
know you can walk across the room because I’ve seen you at the window from the stables. Now come on, here we go.”
Leaning heavily on Lisa, she tottered out the door and down the hall to the stairs, followed by a fascinated Tommy. At first she balked, but at Lisa’s determined urging she negotiated the stairs one at a time, sending forth a steady stream of protest. They were crossing the lower hall to the dining room, which opened out on the garden, when Jarrell came across them on his way back from the stables.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he muttered predictably. “You must have had a rope and pulley to get her up.”
Cynthia burst into tears. “You see why I want to stay in bed?” she wailed.
“Don’t be cruel,” Lisa admonished Jarrell. “It won’t be long before you have a brand new, lovely wife. Am I not right, Cynthia?”
“Heaven forbid,” Jarrell replied and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
Lisa and Cynthia made their way out to the garden, where one of Hallie’s boys, hired to take the place of the truant gardener, was weeding. When he saw the great billowing vision in pink, his eyes widened and the clippers hung forgotten from his fingers. Lisa ignored him and sat her charge in a wrought iron chair with a cushion, but not without difficulty, since Cynthia could barely squeeze between the arms.
“We finished David Copperfield, so we’ll begin a new one, Jane Eyre, that Mrs. Lewis says she’s sure you’ll like.”
“Which means I’m not likely to enjoy it at all,” Cynthia observed sullenly. “Mrs. Lewis detests me, she always has, as if it was my fault I married her wretched doctor.”
“Well, wasn’t it?” Lisa asked mildly. “You could always have said no, couldn’t you?”
“You don’t understand anything about it,” Cynthia said petulantly. “My parents made me marry him.”
Aha, thought Lisa, wondering how long after the marriage the dead child had been born. So the virtuous Dr. Jarrell had perhaps not always been so virtuous. Somehow it made him more human to her. Could it be shame that made him so repelled by Cynthia that she took to her bed?
“Well, that’s all over and done with,” she told Cynthia. “You’re going to look the way you did before you married him. Would you like that?”
“I can’t remember what I looked like before I married him,” Cynthia replied sulkily.
“Then we’ll have to refresh your memory, won’t we?” Lisa smiled.
She herself became fascinated with Jane Eyre’s problems with Mr. Rochester, and the afternoon shadows were long on the lawn when they began the slow trip back to the room. Though she had obviously enjoyed the outing, she was now really tired, and the going was very slow indeed. Tommy, who had had a grand time chasing butterflies and stalking birds, kept running ahead and then turning around, puzzled as to why they came on so slowly.
At the stairs, Cynthia balked again. “I just know I can’t make it,” she whined. “I’ll fall and break my neck.”
“Of course you can make it,” Lisa encouraged her. “Hold on to the bannister with one hand and me with the other, like this.”
But Cynthia was at the end of her tether. “I can’t do it,” she wailed, “I just can’t.”
“Please try,” Lisa coaxed, thinking of enlisting Toby’s aid if necessary.
“Looks as if you could use a little help.” Jarrell’s amused voice came from behind them. He had emerged from his study and stood watching them with a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
“Well, don’t just stand there, come help us then,” Lisa snapped, exasperated.
Jarrell’s smile broadened, and he sauntered over and put a shoulder under Cynthia’s voluminous rump. Lisa pulled, Jarrell pushed, and amid shrieks and protests Cynthia found herself being propelled step by step up the stairs.
When they reached the top and rested for a moment, they became aware of a fascinated audience below them made up of Priddy, Mrs. Lewis, Amy, Annie, Toby, and Hallie’s boy. Cynthia’s shrieks must have been audible clear to Dunwiddleston, Lisa thought wryly. She looked at Jarrell and they both burst out laughing, joined surprisingly enough by a sheepish Cynthia.
She toddled quite cheerfully down the hall to her room, while Jarrell went back downstairs, still laughing and shaking his head. That night Lisa let her have two spoonsful of trifle as a reward. She had gotten some medicine for sleeping from Mrs. Lewis, for she wanted no repetition of Cynthia’s midnight feast. She herself was a sound sleeper, especially with all the riding and emotional turmoil, and she didn’t want her charge waking with hunger and setting forth to enlist her unknown ally’s aid in satisfying it.
Cynthia was already snoring gently and Lisa was about to get out of her clothes when there was a rain of pebbles on the window. Her heart lurched. Could it be Eric? She looked out to discover the view toward the stables illuminated by a brilliant cold light from a moon nearing full. However, it was not Eric below but Toby, the moonlight shining on his flaxen hair. She signalled that she would be down, and giving a last look at the snoring Cynthia and sleeping Tommy, she tiptoed out.
She crossed the moonlit garden and came up to Toby, who smiled at her and flung his arm out toward the foothills that rose from the little valley behind the house and stables. She felt wide awake and exhilarated by the brilliant night. Why not take a run with Toby? It was better than lying in bed eating her heart out over Eric.
“Let me borrow your pants and shirt again,” she said to Toby, and we’ll be off.”
She knew she made an odd figure with the clothes that were so much too big for her, but they were comfortable and far better than tucking her long skirts up under her belt, which left her legs vulnerable to the gorse thorns. They trotted down a path behind the stables, crossed the valley, and headed up into the hills. The gorse and bracken turned to solid heather, but Toby had evidently been exploring already because he unhesitatingly found paths winding through the dense growth. A fox barked in the distance, and Lisa started as a pair of small bats dipped and flitted overhead. The cold light of the moon cast hard black shadows at their feet, and it seemed at times as if they were wading in an inky sea.
Toby pulled some rabbit snares from his pocket and stopped every now and again to set one until he had put down ten of them. All at once he took her hand and motioned her to stop. Hand in hand they crept forward until she could hear an irregular, soft thumping sound.
“The rabbits do be dancing for the moon,” he whispered in her ear.
Sure enough, they came within sight of a clearing covered with short grass. Some twenty wild rabbits of all sizes pranced and danced and thumped, drunk with the night and the moonlight. Toby slowly drew out his slingshot, but she took his wrist and shook her head. Let the poor things dance, she thought. Every creature in the world should have a time when it could forget being hunted. They watched for a time, then silently stole away, leaving the rabbits to their moonlit play.
When Lisa returned to Cynthia’s room, she was too tired to do anything but fall into bed. Cynthia was still snoring, but the rhythmic wheezes didn’t keep Lisa from falling into a deep sleep, where she dreamt she was scrubbing and scrubbing to get up the blood from the dripping plates while the footsteps of something gruesome came nearer and nearer.
8
The next day Lisa got Cynthia downstairs to the garden again, though she took the precaution of seeing to it that Toby was present during the trip down and back. This time she made Cynthia walk up and down the garden for half an hour, during which she and the entire household were treated to loud exclamations of misery. However, she coerced her to persevere by threatening not to continue reading Jane Eyre, having prudently stopped at an exciting part. The trip up the stairs was accomplished with a minimum of difficulty, since Toby all but carried her up, and she ate her meager lunch without nearly the complaints she had heretofore offered. Lisa had hopes that the idea of personal vanity was becoming more appealing to her than the idea of hiding behind all of her fat. In this respect, Jarrell’s laughter may
have proven a powerful force which moved her to wish to improve her appearance.
When she came downstairs to eat, not wanting to eat in front of Cynthia, she found Jarrell and Mrs. Stephens in a violent argument. What was there about this family that fostered such verbal violence? In the period of a week she had been treated to more stormy differences of opinion than in all of her years with the Prices.
“As long as I am head of this mad household,” Jarrell was saying heatedly, “I am going to follow my judgment, such as it is. I will not put a stop to it.”
“She’s your wife,” Mrs. Stephens replied, “don’t you care that she’s being made a spectacle for the benefit of the servants?”
“As a matter of fact, I don't care — now that you ask. That tub of lard has gotten out of her room for the first time in some years, and I applaud it.”
“I know you don’t love her, Mark, but how can you be so cruel to her, to starve her and make her risk her life on those stairs? She doesn’t even have a room to herself anymore.” Mrs. Stephens had softened her tone to wheedling.
“I tell you, Carrie, this is the best thing that has happened to her for years. Far from feeling sorry for her, I think she’s damned fortunate.”
So the battle lines were drawn, Lisa thought. It would be interesting to know whether Mrs. Stephens was more concerned with Cynthia’s welfare or with putting Cynthia’s unwelcome companion in a bad light. As she entered the dining room, Mrs. Stephens bit off whatever further she was going to say. Mrs. Lewis winked at Lisa surreptitiously, and Jarrell looked amused as he asked her how the morning garden session had gone. Mrs. Stephens sat silent at her place, almost visibly steaming.
“I think Cynthia may be coming around to caring what she looks like,” Lisa offered.
“See, Carrie?” Jarrell said. “It never was natural for a twenty-eight-year-old woman to mope about in her bed — alone, that is. We medicine men know little enough about the physical body, but nothing at all about the mind. It takes a slip of a girl not yet twenty to do what none of us here could do in seven long years.”
Lisa Page 11