“Mr. Brown, you were there. What happened?”
John Brown answered at once. He was standing on the second step. He had not moved from it. The top step ran to meet a pillar. The step on which he stood was the first to reach the balustrade. He said,
“I was here, by the pillar. Lucilla screamed, and I grabbed her. She was over the edge, and I rather thought she was going to take me with her, but I managed to lift her back. That balustrade ought to be higher.”
They all looked at it. Sarah wondered how many of them were thinking what she was thinking. The balustrade was low enough to be dangerous. John Brown was right about that. A plunging fall from the top step might send you crashing over it into the hall below—a break-neck drop. It certainly might. But by no conceivable chance could any fall carry you over the rail at so high a level as the second step. She didn’t think it possible that Lucilla could have been thrown against the balustrade any higher up than the fourth step. She would have put it at the fifth or sixth herself, but even at the fourth step John Brown could not have reached her. She must have been on his own level or no more than one step below, or he could not have saved her. The picture she had seen in the beam of her torch came vividly before her mind. The fair hair hanging down. The body hanging down. John Brown bent over the balustrade, with his hands—holding Lucilla? Or pushing her down? What would have happened if her own hands had really been too cold to find the switch? What would have happened if the light had not gone on just when it did? Would Lucilla be standing there, or would she be lying broken on the floor below? She shuddered inwardly. And in a moment Lucilla was talking fast and eagerly with a bright flame of colour in her cheeks.
“It was too frightfully stupid of me—wasn’t it? Why are you all staring like owls? I’m not hurt. And it’s no use asking me how I did it, because I don’t know. I did a sort of a slide and a sort of a wobble, and I tried to save myself, but that beastly balustrade caught me by the knees and over I went. I thought I was gone—and then someone pulled me back again.”
“It was Mr. Brown,” said Sarah, still in that very clear voice.
No one was prepared for what happened next. Lucilla snatched her hands out of Bertrand’s and, whirling round, flung her arms about John Brown and kissed him.
“Noble preserver!” she said; and then, catching Sarah by the arm, “Darling angel Sarah, let’s go home.”
They went home. There were no stragglers this time. Sarah kept her arm through Lucilla’s, and nobody talked very much.
When they had come about half way across the fields, it began to drizzle with rain. Sarah looked up and saw a thick covering of cloud over the whole face of the sky. It gave her a curious sense of some indefinite lapse of time. The sky had been clear when they came; it was cloudy now. They had not been so long, but everything had changed.
They came out of the fields and on to the road. It would have been the natural thing for Bertrand and John Brown to go on into the village to their lodging at the Cow and Bush, but both turned in at the Red House gate and walked with the others up the steep embanked drive. Sarah thought of Lucilla falling suddenly out of the dark into the headlights of The Bomb. She might have been killed then. She might have been killed twice over, to-day. You can’t, you simply can’t, believe in coincidence to that extent.
Miss Marina was dozing on one side of the drawing-room fire when they came in, and Geoffrey Hildred sat reading The Times on the other. However warm the day was, Miss Marina liked a fire in the evening. She sat with a cushion behind her shoulders and her feet on a little round stool which had been worked in cross-stitch by Guy Raimond’s grandmother about sixty-five years before. The pattern was one of green leaves and fat red roses on a black ground, but the colours were now very pleasantly faded, and no longer contrasted as harshly with the bright yellow maple of the frame as they must have done when they were new. Miss Marina’s auburn front was slightly crooked and her mouth a little open. Her knitting was on her lap, but as she had dropped no stitches, it was fairly certain that she had not been trying to knit.
Geoffrey Hildred turned round with a smile as they came in.
“You got tired of your game very soon,” he said, and at the sound of his voice Miss Marina woke up with a start.
“It’s raining,” said Sarah. It was a stupid thing to say, but she said it because she couldn’t think of anything else.
Miss Marina blinked a little.
“Raining? Then I must insist that you change your shoes—I must insist that everybody changes.”
Her knitting slid off her lap on to the white woolly hearth-rug, and as she stooped to pick it up again, her attention veered to her cousin. He had one foot firmly planted on the white curling wool, and the other crossed upon his knee. It was upon the sole of this foot that Miss Marina gazed with some concern.
“But, my dear Geoffrey, your feet are damp too. Was it raining when you came in? And you have not changed!”
Geoffrey Hildred had been holding The Times with both hands. He let the paper slide to the ground and leaned forward to touch the sole of his shoe.
“Nothing to change for,” he said. “No, it was fine enough when I came in. I looked out five minutes ago with the idea of taking a stroll, but it was drizzling, so I went no farther.”
Miss Marina began to tell a horrifying anecdote illustrating the fearful consequences of sitting in wet shoes. Lucilla sat down on the hearth beside her, and presently took her hand and kissed it.
“Darling, what adventurous lives you had in the nineteenth century—too thrilling, really! Think of the risks if you didn’t change your shoes, and wear chest protectors, and respirators, and flannel next the skin! Life must have been one long exciting struggle not to catch cold. Now we wear next to nothing, and don’t bother about our feet at all. So dull of us—isn’t it?”
When John Brown presently took his departure he gave Sarah a small folded slip of paper. It was quite openly given, and his voice was at its usual pitch as he said,
“That’s the name of the book you were asking me about. I think you’ll find it quite interesting.”
Sarah hadn’t the least idea what he was talking about, but she could play up if she was given a lead. She laughed a little and said,
“I don’t suppose I shall read it really.”
Up in her own room, she straightened the paper out. It was a page torn from a note-book with faint blue lines on it. Across the lines John Brown had written:
I want to see you. Same place. Same time.
There was no signature.
She lit a match and burned the sheet to ashes.
She was going to sleep in Lucilla’s room, but she dressed and undressed in her own. She had taken off her tweed skirt and jumper, and was hanging them up, when Lucilla came in with her evening dress over her arm. She was still in the black woollen cardigan suit she had worn all day. Sarah thought she looked very pale.
She said, “What is it?” and Lucilla sat down on the bed with her black georgette frock across her knees.
“I did feel to want to dress in here.”
“All right—dress. It’s about time you did.”
Lucilla shook her head with its fair fluff of hair.
“Oh no—lots of time. You’ve hardly begun yourself, and I dress like a lightning flash.”
“Well, get on with it, my child.”
Lucilla made no attempt to get on with it. She gazed soulfully at Sarah.
“Angel darling, I want to ask you something.”
Sarah was washing at the pink basin. She said, through the sound of the rushing water,
“Ask away.”
“Cross your heart and die—you won’t tell a lie?”
“I won’t if I can help it.”
“Oh, Sarah! And you a governess!”
Sarah laughed.
“I really don’t tell lies. Get on with it.”
“Well then—how passionately do you love Uncle Geoffrey?”
Sarah turned round with a pink
linen towel in her hand.
“I could live without him,” she said.
“I’m serious,” said Lucilla. “Nobody ever thinks I’m serious, but I am—sometimes. Do you love him at all?”
“Lucilla, what are you driving at?”
“I asked you a plain question.” Lucilla’s voice was mournful. “All right, govvy, I won’t press for an answer—I’d hate to make you blush. But if you won’t respond about Uncle Geoffrey, I would like to know what you feel about Mr. Brown.”
Sarah dried her face carefully with the towel, and was glad of it. The most piercingly inquisitive eye cannot see through a yard of pink linen. She said, quite untruthfully,
“I don’t think about him at all.”
“You ought to think about him,” said Lucilla reprovingly. “He’s my Noble Preserver. You ought to be palpitating with gratitude, because if he hadn’t saved my life you’d be out of a job. You know, I did come most awfully near to being the late Lucilla Hildred.”
Sarah put down the towel. Lucilla had her black frock by the shoulders and was dancing it to and fro, making it dip and curtsey. Her face was intent and innocent.
“Lucilla—what happened?”
Just for a moment the innocent intentness was broken. Something flickered across it. There was an instant when something wavered. Then all that was gone. Lucilla jumped to her feet with a laugh.
“Nothing happened,” she said. “Hadn’t you gathered that I was still alive? Now you watch me be a lightning flash!”
She slipped out of her skirt, leaving it on the floor, and peeling off the cardigan, threw it at a chair. It caught on the arm and hung trailing.
Whilst Lucilla washed, Sarah picked up the skirt and reached for the trailing coat, catching it up by the sleeve. She had begun to say, “Untidy child!” but her voice suddenly dried up, because something fell from the pocket of Lucilla’s cardigan on to the pink carpet at her feet. To be quite accurate, two things fell. Two little steel screws.
CHAPTER XIX
Sarah looked at the screws. Then she looked at Lucilla, who was drying her hands on the pink towel. She was gay and mischievous. She rolled the towel into a ball, pitched it on to the bed, and began to wriggle into her black georgette frock, which was very tight and slinky, and rather high in the neck. It was the only smart garment she possessed, and it suited her very well.
“Getting into this dress makes me feel exactly like a worm,” she said as soon as her mouth was clear. She wriggled a little more, and the black flares swished down to her ankles. With a pirouette she posed before a long tilted mirror. “Moddom is so slim,” she murmured, and turned with haughty grace to Sarah. “Moddom’s hair, is it not chic like this? A new fashion, Miss Trent—especially designed for moddom by Signor Horrifico himself. You see how it stands on end all over the head? That is Signor Horrifico’s own secret process. All the famous beauties are on their knees to him for it, but it is moddom whom he has selected to demonstrate this new and chic coiffure—What’s the matter, Sarah?”
Sarah had been standing quite still with Lucilla’s skirt in one hand and her cardigan in the other. She let go of them now as if they had suddenly become too heavy to hold. Then she stooped, gathered up the two little screws, and held them out on the palm of her hand. She did not speak, but she looked very intently at Lucilla, who had come to a standstill just out of reach. She saw Lucilla look at the screws, and then she saw the colour come sharply to her face. She knew that colour now. It always meant the same thing—a sudden shock of surprise or fear. She would have given a good deal to know which of the two was sending the blood up to the roots of the fair tumbled hair at this moment.
The moment passed, and the flush was passing too, but as it passed, she met Lucilla’s eyes and surprised in them a look which startled her. It was a sick, frightened look—the look which someone might have who has been hit too hard, and is uncertain of being able to rally from the blow.
Yet Lucilla did rally. She made some effort—Sarah was aware that it was a great effort—and she said,
“What have you got there?”
It was not quite her usual voice, but to anyone who did not know her well it would have seemed like her usual voice.
Sarah said in a quiet, measured way,
“Two screws, Lucilla.”
Lucilla said, “Yes?”
“Your bicycle screws.”
Lucilla said, “Where were they?”
Sarah said, “In the pocket of your cardigan.”
And with that the reverberations of the dinner gong came up from the hall below. It was a very large gong slung between two carved posts, and it made a great deal of noise. No one had any excuse for not hearing it, or for being late for dinner. In fact to be late for any meal was an unforgivable offence both to Uncle Geoffrey and to Aunt Marina.
Lucilla took the screws and put them into one of the small drawers of the dressing-table. Then she picked up Sarah’s brush, smoothed her hair rapidly, and ran out of the room. On the threshold she looked over her shoulder, to see Sarah half way into her dress.
“Hurry,” she said, “or I’ll have to say you’re dead. It’s the only excuse they’ll look at.”
The excuse was not needed. The gong was still swinging when Sarah caught her on the stairs. They entered the drawing-room together, to find Geoffrey Hildred looking at his watch.
There are some evenings which seem quite interminable. The clock ticks, but the hands seem to get no nearer bed-time. This was one of those evenings. Geoffrey Hildred retired into The Times. Ricky sulked over a book whose pages he would either turn three or four at a time or else leave unturned for half an hour. Lucilla produced a canvas strip with a thunder-and-lightning design stamped upon it. A single orange flash was all that she had so far achieved, but it appeared that it was to be a bag. “For my grandchildren,” she explained with a small resigned sigh, after which she sat in silence, with a medley of orange and brown wools upon her lap, her needle moving very slowly and carefully, her fair head bent and her attention apparently concentrated upon her work.
Sarah detested needlework and never attempted it. She sat by Miss Marina and heard the thrilling story of how Maurice Hildred had cut four teeth before he was five months old—“A most precocious child, Miss Trent, and so very sweet-tempered. I remember when he was four years old he fell and cut himself very badly indeed upon the arm. It was the gardener’s fault, for of course he should not have left the edging-shears lying on the path like that—a piece of gross carelessness, and so I told my cousin John Hildred at the time. And we had to have the doctor to Maurice. It was old Dr. Redman, whom we all liked so much. He died just before the Armistice. He was a widower, and he lost his only son in the war. And of course we like Dr. Drayton very much indeed, and I feel that in some ways he understands me better than Dr. Redman did, but after so many years it was a sad break and very upsetting for all his old patients.… Where was I, my dear?”
Sarah was giving her a most flattering attention. Her eyes were positively sparkling with interest, and her voice thrilled as she said,
“You were telling me about the cut on Maurice’s arm. Was it very deep?”
“My dear, it was terrible. The point of the shears went right in. But I can’t tell you how good he was, hardly crying at all after the first fright was over. Dr. Redman had to take three stitches, and it left such a scar. I can remember saying to his poor mother, ‘Well, my dear, you wanted a girl, but you may be glad that he isn’t one, because he’ll never lose that scar.’ Of course it didn’t matter at all for a young man, but it would have looked very bad in evening dress if he had been a girl—a nasty three-cornered jag just above the elbow. And she was most indignant, and declared that she had never wanted a girl at all, but of course she did, and quite natural with two boys already—Henry and Jack were older, you know. But then once Maurice was there, he was such a particularly engaging child that no one could have wished for any change in him.”
Miss Marina dropped half a
dozen stitches and let her knitting fall. She began to fumble in a black velvet bag with an oxidised silver handle for the handkerchief which she always needed when she talked about Maurice. Her sandy lashes were wet, and half a dozen round tears rolled down her plump, pale cheeks.
Sarah found the handkerchief and picked up the knitting. Then she had to pick up the stitches too. Geoffrey Hildred looked over the top of The Times, cleared his throat as if he was going to say something, but thought better of it and went back to an article on Debt Settlement.
Miss Marina said, “Thank you, my dear. It is stupid of me to talk about Maurice, because it always makes me cry. You see, I remember him as such a very dear little boy. I suppose he was eighteen when he went out to the war, but I had hardly seen him for some years before that. I used to visit his mother a good deal, but she died and he went to school, so I always think of him as the little boy I knew, and it seems so dreadful to think of him—missing.” She dabbed her eyes as she spoke. “Henry and Jack were older—it doesn’t seem so dreadful for them. And Henry always had rather an aloof disposition. I remember someone saying once that he looked as if no one was quite good enough for him to speak to.”
Sarah had had a question burning her tongue for the last five minutes. She got it out now.
“Were they tall? Lucilla’s tall, and Mr. Hildred, and Ricky.”
Miss Marina dropped another stitch.
“Oh, my dear, if you wouldn’t mind—I think these polished needles are to blame. I really like the old bone ones better, but they are so unreliable since the war. What was it you asked me? Oh well, Henry was about an inch shorter than Geoffrey, and he was the tallest of the three boys, but I believe he got to stoop very much. And I always think Maurice would have grown—he was still so young. Now let me see … Geoffrey is five foot eleven—so that would make Henry five foot ten—and last time I saw Jack and Maurice they were certainly not quite so tall, but there wasn’t a great deal of difference.”
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