Charity Child

by Sara Seale

  “Really?’ she said with her slight, husky drawl. “And are you thinking of leaving her your money, too?”

  “Why not?” Astrea retorted. “You have no need of it now, with, all those dollars.”

  Roma’s gaze focused gently and a little wearily on the old painted face.

  “There aren’t any dollars, Astrea,” she said.

  There was a pause while Astrea irritably jangled her many charms.

  “What do you mean, there aren’t any dollars?” she demanded then. “That old husband of yours was rolling in money—it’s the only reason you married him.”

  Charity went on arranging her flowers, feeling acutely embarrassed, but they had already forgotten her. Roma lay back in her chair and smiled.

  “He changed his will before he died,” she said. “I seem unlucky over the question of wills, don’t I honey?”

  “You mean he left you nothing?”

  “Not a cent, beyond the marriage settlement which he couldn’t touch. When that’s gone—” She spread out her hands expressively, broad, rather ugly hands with predatory fingers, the only blemish in what was near perfection.

  “Who gets the money, then?”

  “His children and his first wife’s family. They never liked me. They paid my passage back to England to get rid of me, and that was all, so you see, dear Astrea, I had to fling myself upon your mercy.”

  “Monstrous!” Astrea cried, her mood completely changing again, and she flung out both her hands in one of her favorite gestures of beneficence. “My poor, poor child! How cruel, how scandalous! But you shall make your home here, as you used to ... you will be my spiritual daughter again ... my lost youth ...”

  “Two spiritual daughters?” said Roma with amusement.

  “Why not, why not?” exclaimed Astrea, clapping her hands. “The stars foretell it, for you are Gemini—Gemini, the twins. You shall be sister to my dear Ganymede, and she to you.”

  Roma’s swift glance in Charity’s direction said plainly that she thought such a conceit preposterous, but she smiled indulgently on Astrea.

  “Do you still rule your life by the stars?” she asked lazily. “You haven’t changed one little bit. May I go to my room and unpack? I suppose it’s the usual one.”

  “No, dear child, Charity has that,” Astrea replied, adding as a reminder that her hasty offer of a home was not to be imposed upon. “You must share and share alike. Charity has first call upon me, now.”

  “I doubt, all the same, if she would care to share my old bedroom, so I’ll settle for the room you’ve chosen for me,” said Roma indifferently, but the glance she gave Charity as she got to her feet was very shrewd and not indifferent at all.

  They met again in the music-room alone, before Astrea joined them for dinner. Roma had changed into something svelte and elegant. She looked expensive and entirely at her ease. Charity, on the other hand, wearing one of the charming but undistinguished frocks Astrea had bought her, felt awkward and immature.

  “Well, my spiritual twin, or whatever the quaint relationship is supposed to be, we’d best get acquainted,” Roma said, and lighted a cigarette. Her hands were well kept, but the faint nicotine stains on her fingers gave evidence that she was a chain-smoker.

  “I’m sure you know Astrea well enough not to take these fancies seriously,” Charity replied. “I—I’d like you to know from the start, Mrs. Nixon, that I perfectly well realize that I haven’t supplanted you.”

  “Very civil of you, but prim and self-effacing like the well-trained companion. Are you a companion, by the way?”

  “Yes, your aunt employs me—oh, I’m sorry, I was getting you confused with Marc.”

  “Marc?” Roma’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Do you call him by his given name, too?”

  “It was Astrea’s wish.”

  “I see. And is it Astrea’s wish that you should also—supplant me—in her nephew’s affections?”

  Charity colored slightly.

  “Of course not! We disliked one another intensely to start with, as a matter of fact.”

  “Yes, he can be pretty riling upon occasion, can’t he? A very biting tongue, has Mr. Marc Gentle.”

  Charity said nothing. She did not want to be drawn into a discussion of this kind with the girl Marc had once wanted to marry, nor did she care for the implication which seemed to lie behind Roma’s perfectly pleasant manner.

  “How did you meet Astrea?” Roma said, changing the subject. Charity gave her a brief, rather halting account of Astrea’s visit to the shop in the Charing Cross Road and its subsequent results, and saw those delicate eyebrows lift in sceptical amusement.

  “How very opportune for you,” she drawled.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Oh, I believe you, honey, it sounds just the sort of crazy thing Astrea would do. You must have your wits about you more than your looks would imply.”

  “I needed a job,” said Charity bleakly. “When you have your living to earn, Mrs. Nixon, you aren’t so particular as to the way in which a job is offered.”

  “I’m sure,” said Roma with amusement. “And since you seem to be on familiar terms with everyone who visits here, you’d best start calling me Roma. Now, what’s all this about the money?”

  “The money?”

  “Oh, don’t be dumb! Has Astrea changed her will?”

  “I haven’t the least idea.”

  “No? And what has our learned friend to say about this latest foible?”

  “You’d better ask him yourself when he comes down,” said Charity coldly, and Roma laughed and lit another cigarette, offering her case as an afterthought to Charity, who shook her head.

  “No vices?” Roma mocked. “You’re a bit of an oddity, I fancy, Charity Child. Incidentally, didn’t you get teased to death at school about that name? How have you gotten it?”

  “Perhaps my mother had a warped sense of humor,” retorted Charity coolly, and Roma laughed again.

  “Not so dumb after all, are you, honey?” she said. “We should get along.”

  Charity doubted it. Roma Nixon would be pleasant for as long as it suited her, she thought, but she was already making it clear what she considered Charity’s position in the house should be.

  When Astrea joined them, Charity was told to dispense the sherry, but Roma refused.

  “A highball for me, please,” she said. “I never could stand this stuff; it gives me a liver.”

  “Highball?” repeated Astrea vaguely.

  “Scotch. Haven’t you any in the house darling?”

  Charity was sent to fetch a bottle of whisky and they sat for longer than usual over their drinks while Minnie impatiently sounded the gong, then poked her face round the door to say the dinner was spoiling.

  “Good old Minnie, she doesn’t change, either—do you still have those back-chat arguments?” Roma said as they sat down to dinner.

  “One changes less as one gets older, I suppose,” said Astrea, sighing a little. “And you, my dear, dear child—do you think you have changed?”

  “Oh, yes,” Roma answered with amusement. “I’ve changed. Seven years in the States with the Nixon fortune at your back does a lot for a girl, you know. And Marc—has he not changed, either?”

  Astrea frowned into her plate. She was not sure, Charity thought, how she wanted to answer that.

  “Naturally he has altered,” she said then. “I daresay you will find him more to your taste. He’s made a considerable success at the Bar, you know, and is taking silk. He makes a great deal of money these days.”

  “Does he, now?” said Roma softly. “And still unmarried ... should I take that as a compliment, honey?”

  “I wish,” said Astrea irritably, “you would not address me as that—so undignified—so reminiscent of those dreadful American films—and you will take it as a compliment, I don’t doubt, whether it is or it isn’t.”

  “We’ll see,” Roma said, unperturbed. “You’ll have to get used to my Americanisms, I
’m afraid, Astrea. One picks up the idiom so quickly. Charity tells me she dislikes poor Marc.”

  “I said, if you remember, that we both disliked each other to start with,” Charity corrected her, aware of Astrea’s sudden interest.

  “I was forgetting the distinction,” said Roma with an amused smile. “So now you find you don’t dislike our learned friend so much? And have his feelings suffered a sea change, too?”

  Charity was saved from having to reply by Astrea taking it upon herself to settle all their affairs with one of her misleading statements.

  “Marc is quite taken with my little Ganymede,” she said, blowing Charity a kiss across the table. “He comes quite regularly for weekends now. Last time he brought her a present.”

  “Really?” Roma drawled, giving the girl a speculative glance.

  “It was a second-hand book of verse,” Charity said hastily, judging by the glint in Astrea’s eye that she was quite prepared to embroider further.

  “Oh, I see,” Roma replied, with a twist to her full lips. “Marc always did have this dreary taste for poetry. So you play up to him, honey? Well, it’s one way of getting a man, I suppose.”

  “I happen to like poetry,” Charity said stiffly, and Astrea shook an arch finger at them both.

  “Never bicker over a man, my dear, dear children—so bourgeois,” she said. “Aquarius and Gemini do not make for Harmonious Grouping, but you must rise above it. Do you not think, my dear Roma, that Charity has a face like a sad pierrot?”

  “Not particularly,” Roma said shortly. “Is that what Marc says?”

  “No, no, it was my own discovery, but he recognized her by that at the station. I’m surprised you don’t catch the resemblance, dear child. You used to be so quick to follow my word-pictures.”

  “Maybe I’ve lost the art,” said Roma, beginning to look bored. “Let’s talk of something else, dear Astrea—Ganymede, or whatever outlandish name you call her, is looking embarrassed.”

  The talk became general, so far as any conversation which included Astrea could be said to be that. Roma spoke of her life in America and the vast difference in living conditions she had found there. She could talk well, when she chose; her descriptions were economical but vivid, and she brought a pleasing caustic wit to her anecdotes about the people she had met; a wit which, Charity thought, would match Marc’s. She had not, it seemed, thought very highly of the States, despite the comfort and luxury that money had brought. She had been homesick for Cleat, she said, and even the stolidity of English country life.

  “Funny, isn’t it?” she finished, with a wry little smile. “When I was twenty or so, I thought money bought everything. America seemed like a dream too good to be true.”

  “And you found, my child, that money cannot buy happiness,” said Astrea, her eyes moist in the candlelight.

  “Don’t kid yourself, honey, money can buy happiness all right—lots of it,” Roma retorted. “It’s when you’re suddenly left with none that the rub comes.”

  “If you’d stayed in America you could have married more dollars,” said Astrea, suddenly peevish. “With your looks it should not have been hard to find another rich tycoon.”

  “Perhaps,” drawled Roma, with a little sidelong glance at Charity, “I would prefer to marry an Englishman, this time.”

  Charity excused herself early that evening, feeling that there must be many things the other two would want to discuss in private, but upstairs in the delightful room which had once been Roma’s, she sat for a long time before undressing, brooding uneasily upon the future, disturbed, she found surprisingly, more on Marc’s account than her own. She could not care greatly, she told herself reasonably, what became of a man she had, until lately, disliked so much; all the same, she did not want him to be hurt all over again.

  When she was in bed she reached for the anthology of verse he had given her and carefully read the poems he had picked out for her on his last visit.

  Roma, as well as Astrea, breakfasted in bed the next morning, and Charity got up early to give Minnie a hand with the household chores, for, since it was Good Friday, the daily women expected time off. Minnie had always insisted on her rights in the matter of Astrea’s breakfast tray, so Charity took up Roma’s.

  The room seemed filled with cabin trunks and open suitcases, and Roma herself, propped against her pillows with yesterday’s morning paper, waved a helpless hand towards the heap of luggage.

  “How shall I manage?” she’ demanded in mock despair. “I’ve been used to a colored maid all these years--I’m quite out of the way of doing things for myself.”

  “I’ll help you unpack and get sorted out, if you like,” Charity offered willingly.

  “Would you really? That would be kind of you. Can you launder and press efficiently, by any chance?”

  Charity wondered if this was another hint as to the difference of their respective positions in the house, but she answered pleasantly:

  “I see to my own clothes, naturally. I’ll be glad to press anything you may need immediately, but you won’t unpack everything, will you?”

  “Why ever not? My clothes must look like rags as it is, and there’s another cabin trunk coming. The hired automobile couldn’t take it all.”

  Charity glanced with slight dismay at the hanging accommodation of Astrea’s spare room. The cupboards were adequate but not designed for an extensive wardrobe.

  “I only thought that if you are just on a visit, there must be a good deal of stuff you wouldn’t need,” she said, and Roma ran an idle hand through the burnished waves of her magnificent hair.

  “What makes you think I’m just on a visit?” she asked with a yawn. “Didn’t you hear me tell Astrea I had nowhere else to go? This used to be my home, you know.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Charity, flushing. “Well, I expect Noakes can move another wardrobe in from one of the disused rooms.”

  “I shouldn’t bother,” Roma said. “In a little while we’ll change over, don’t you think? Astrea furnished your room for me, you know.”

  “I did offer—” began Charity uncomfortably, but Roma broke in with a dazzling smile:

  “Of course you did, but we couldn’t upset poor Astrea my very first evening, could we? Things will adjust themselves, you’ll see.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Charity stood a little uncertainly, wondering whether to go or not. There was something odd about the other girl’s face this morning, and she realized with a small sense of shock that, like many red-haired people. Roma had colorless brows and lashes. Without the beautifully applied pencil and mascara, her face looked strangely naked.

  “You needn’t wait,” she said, returning to her paper, leaving her breakfast to get cold. It was quite pleasantly spoken, but Charity left the room feeling rather like a dismissed lady’s maid.

  She spoke to Minnie about the problem of the luggage, but the old woman merely grunted.

  “It can bide where it is,” she said. “You can hang clothes in them cabin trunks, can’t you? No call to turn the house upside down for a visit.”

  “I think she means to stay,” Charity said, and Minnie grunted again.

  “That’ll be for Madam to decide,” she sniffed, “and if she’s any sense she won’t start all that nonsense over again.”

  “But things aren’t as we supposed,” Charity said, feeling that, unwelcome though she might be, Roma needed some support. “There aren’t any dollars, after all.”

  “So I believe—so now she’s after m’lady’s little bit, and Mr. Marc’s too, I shouldn’t wonder. Them Yankee in-laws got browned-off, and the old man, too.”

  “Oh, Minnie, that’s not very kind. I thought you used to like Mrs. Nixon.”

  “I know her better than you do, young miss. Liking is one thing, trust is another. Miss Roma wouldn’t have made many bones as to what she was after, and they saw through her,” Minnie said, and stumped off to the kitchen to attend to her own chores.

  Charity
spent the early part of the afternoon helping Roma unpack, marvelling at so much lavishness.

  “You look sad,” Roma said a little mockingly. “Does all this make you envious?”

  “No,” Charity answered simply. “I was sorry on your account. It was very wrong of your husband, I should have said, to—to give with one hand and take away with the other.”

  “Would you, Charity? But life is like that, haven’t you found—or are you still too young?”

  “No, but I don’t think I’ve ever wanted the same things as you.”

  “That’s just as well,” Roma observed with a certain dryness. “For then we won’t tread on each other’s toes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Only that I mean to get what I want, and if it happens to be what you are after as well, it will be just too bad.”

  “If you’re thinking of Astrea’s money—” Charity began with the candid baldness of an adolescent, and Roma smiled and patted her cheek.

  “I wasn’t thinking of Astrea’s money,” she said with that attractive, husky drawl. “There might be other concerns of mine to keep your hands off, too, honey. Now, be a dear and give some of these things a press for me, or I won’t have a decent thing to wear when Marc comes.”

  He was to arrive on Saturday, Charity knew. She had looked forward to the Easter Vacation, the walks on the downs, the poetry readings, the renewal of a companionship which she was already beginning to confuse with that of her father, but now she was doubtful. It had, of course, been quite unnecessary and rather ridiculous for Roma to have issued veiled warnings where Marc was concerned, but she was not going to enjoy the role of gooseberry which was bound to be forced on her from time to time.