by Jane Arbor
Mrs. Tempest’s eyes dropped before the cynicism in his, and she said nothing as he took a pencil and paper from his pocket.
“I suppose I’d better make out Lysbet’s list,” he remarked carelessly. “If you’ll excuse me I’ll find her and give it to her. Although—” he had reached the door and paused there, “although, you know, I shall be surprised if, on consideration, she really wants to make use of it!” He found Lysbet at the door of the long conservatory which adjoined the south wall of the house. A coat was shrugged over her shoulders and she was looking out over the wintry garden. At the sound of Eliot’s step she turned. There was a dark misery in her eyes which even pride could not conceal.
“You wanted this?” He offered the scrap of paper. She took it and read upon it the names of three London papers and the local one he had mentioned.
“Satisfied?” he queried.
She did not answer.
“Well go on! Do something about it. Go to the telephone—tell them the notice was sent in error and that you want a correction printed at once. What are you waiting for?”
Still the girl did not move. She said through lips so stiff that they would hardly frame the words: “And if I do that—what then?”
“What then? Oh—that I’ll have to ask you to leave to my judgment. I shall be free to do what seems best to me—best for E. C. Bradd of course!”
“You mean—that you’d be capable of—of following me to the telephone, for instance, and doing your devilish worst with Aunt Alicia’s reputation? You mean—you’d break your bond with her?”
“I haven’t any bond with Mrs. Tempest any longer. I thought the action had been transferred to you.”
Then Lysbet looked down at the paper scrap which she had been folding and refolding between her fingers and slowly and significantly tore it across.
The tatters of paper fell to the stone-flagged floor and Eliot looked down at them in quiet triumph. So he had been right. The kid had spirit and plenty of courage but just not enough to enable her to dare him too far. He had managed the whole thing very prettily on the whole—with a light, almost careless hand on the rein and with only a touch upon the rare cruelty of the curb. He had travelled the worst country now. He could afford to be indulgent, to give a little...
He said in a voice which sounded almost warm with sincerity: “Lysbet—I’m glad. And you won’t be sorry. You’ve got the kind of courage I’ve always looked for in a woman. I’ll make everything as easy for you as I can. We’ll travel—enjoy life—even if it means sometimes going our own ways—” He came closer to her and laid his hand upon her arm. Beneath his touch her flesh was warm, a challenge to his hitherto dormant desire for her. She had never looked so lovely as she did now in her distress. There was going to be more than money in it for him when she belonged to him...
For a moment she stared at him, wide-eyed and desperate. How could he think she had given in so that he could make love to her! She hated him! Hated his heavy, amorous eyes and his swift assumption of ownership of her. In another moment he was going to kiss her on the lips!
She sprang away from him, her eyes flashing with scorn of him. “I shall be sorry—all my life!” she said. “And if you’re not, it’ll only be that you’re too hard to be able to feel sorrow about anything. I’m doing this because without Richard I don’t care what happens. And I’m doing it for Aunt Alicia, because I daren’t risk what you might be able to do to her if I refused. I daren’t challenge you as far as that. That’s the extent of your power over me, Eliot—you know that I daren’t take the step towards freeing myself—and her—from you. But that’s as far as your power goes. You’ve gained nothing else at all. Just the knowledge that I fear you! I hope it makes you happy!”
Eliot stepped back a pace or two. His rising passion had been checked by her scorn and he said with assumed unconcern:
“Gained nothing? Oh—at least a useful income, I hope!”
She turned on him in fury. “For such as it’s worth you’ll gain that, I dare say. But you’ll never touch me—never!”
She thrust past him and ran out at the open door. A rain that was almost hail had begun to drive horizontally across the garden. Head down into the wind she ran on, too breathless to cry, too wounded to care where she was going. Later she might find that life, however frustrated, could offer a challenge once more. But for the moment, like the wind, it could do to her what it would.
To Richard the news of Lysbet’s announced engagement to Eliot came through Caroline.
Caroline was no earnest reader of newspapers. But she never missed the columns known as ‘Hatch, Match and Despatch,’ and she arrived at the surgery that morning bringing The Fallsbridge Gazette with her. Richard was woodenly stubborn about discussing personal affairs at the surgery—the only time he had done so willingly had been when he had told her of his own engagement to Lysbet. But surely he couldn’t refuse an explanation of what had happened now! Why, for all she had known, they were engaged still. And if that were so this notice must either be a ghastly mistake or a particularly embarrassing form of practical joke. Whatever it was it ought to be brought to Richard’s attention, decided Caroline virtuously.
There was just the chance that Lysbet had indeed seen her, Caroline, in Richard’s arms. (Her overture to an unresponsive Richard had already been dramatized in Caroline’s mind into ‘when I was in Richard’s arms’). And the next time they met Lysbet might have made a scene with him about it and have broken her engagement. In that case, she would generously offer to explain everything. The story was already beginning to frame itself in her mind ... How she and Richard were both rather emotionally upset over the sudden death of one of Richard’s patients—she particularly so, because she hadn’t yet learnt the professional callousness about such things—everyone always said she took everything too much to heart—and Richard had been trying to comfort her when Lysbet had arrived. After all, Lysbet would probably have to learn tolerance sooner or later; it wasn’t likely that she and Richard, being old friends and working side by side every day should remain completely unaware of each other. Male and female created He them—and all that...
But nothing, puzzled Caroline, which could account for a broken engagement with Richard could account as well for the indecent speed with which Lysbet had apparently contracted a new one with Eliot Bradd! Surely Richard wouldn’t refuse to explain it all to her or at least to share her own bewilderment about it!
She began tentatively as she put on her overall: “You know, there’s something in the paper today that puzzles me rather, worries me too. I wonder—”
Richard looked up, seeing her not as a woman at all, merely as a messenger whom he could send about urgent work.
“Didn’t the hospital report on the Attenborough X-ray plates yesterday?” he inquired.
With an effort Caroline brought her mind to bear upon radiography. “Attenborough? No—I don’t think so.”
“Well, make sure, will you? If the report isn’t here, ring up and ask when I may expect it. I’m seeing Mrs. Attenborough today and I want it. Oh, and while you’re on the phone—” Richard gave further messages and turned back to his desk, leaving Caroline reluctantly obedient though seething with unsatisfied curiosity. He was thinking, Thank God for work which, if it’s only hard and interesting enough, can go on fulfilling you when everything else in your world has collapsed at the distrust and defection of a woman. Lysbet is still everything, but until we understand each other again at least work fills some of the void...
When Caroline came back from the telephone the steady stream of patients to the surgery had begun. She was busy enough to be able to forget Lysbet’s new engagement until, when the last of them had gone and Richard was ready to set out upon his rounds, she caught sight of the paper which she had brought into the surgery.
She contrived to push it into prominence on his desk as he was gathering his things together. As she had expected and hoped, Lysbet’s familiar name caught his eye and he bent f
orward to read the paragraph.
Caroline watched him anxiously. She told herself that she would know by his face whether the news was a surprise to him, whether she could look to him to satisfy her own curiosity or whether they would be able to go into a cosy huddle of bewilderment together.
But though, she knew he must have read the paragraph more than once, when he turned about his face was hard and expressionless as stone.
Caroline could bear it no longer. “I—I brought The Gazette here this morning because I wondered whether you had seen that notice. It—it worried me a lot, until I realized that it might all be a stupid mistake and that you would laugh with me about it. It is a mistake, isn’t it? But—it’s in the London papers too.”
“Is it?” inquired Richard coldly. “Then it can’t very well be a mistake, can it?”
“I—didn’t know. I thought you would. After all, it can’t mean what it says, because you’re engaged to Lysbet yourself!”
Richard said nothing and Caroline went on wildly: “You see, I’ve got to know whether it is true or not because if—if anything has happened between you and Lysbet I can’t help feeling that I may be responsible. I mean, if she did see me in your arms that night, well, she might think that you are in love with me! And if she did think so and you’ve quarrelled about it, the least I could offer to do would be to go to her and explain everything!”
“Me—in love with you} Don’t be silly, Caroline!” The blunt emphasis of the words were scarcely flattering, but Caroline turned eyes full of liquid appeal upon him.
“I know. It’s quite ridiculous, isn’t it? But something must have happened between you and Lysbet or she couldn’t have had a notice like put into the papers. Richard—won’t you tell me about it? I don’t know anything and I might have been able to help you!”
“There’s nothing to tell and you couldn’t have helped. The rest is Lysbet’s business.” Richard looked about for his gloves. He had had enough of Caroline for one morning. Not for worlds would he give her the satisfaction of thinking that he and Lysbet had ‘split’ on the very issue which she herself had shrewdly suspected. Indeed, since reading that incredible notice in The Gazette, he had begun to wonder how much Lysbet’s accusations about an affair with Caroline had been the girl’s real motive for quarrelling with him. He couldn’t think clearly yet, but at the back of his mind was a suspicion that was beginning to gnaw... He couldn’t yet believe it, but supposing—only supposing—that she had discovered she had made a mistake—that she didn’t want to be a doctor’s wife, that she preferred Eliot, flourishing in the glamour of a life in South Africa on the wealth that he appeared to possess, and that she had trumped up this story of an affair with Caroline purely with the idea of putting him in the wrong, so that she might break her engagement with him upon a note of self-righteousness?
His reason was clamouring in answer: “That’s impossible! You might expect that sort of thing from a scheming designer—someone like Caroline for instance—but not from Lysbet! Lysbet couldn’t do a thing like that!”
But suspicion was to eat a little further ... The whole quarrel was stupidly trivial—too trivial to be genuine, perhaps? And Lysbet had behaved oddly—hadn’t been at ease with him all the evening. And now this notice in the paper—barely a week after she had broken her engagement.
At that point he refused violently to think any more. Later he would have to beat out the whole thing within his consciousness. But to hell with it for now! He had work to do. Work was all that mattered. If you gave yourself to it fully it gave everything back in return.
He became conscious of Caroline still standing by the desk, fingering the edge of the newspaper and watching him with frightened eyes.
“What—what are you going to do, Richard?”
“Do—about what?”
“About—this.” The newspaper rustled gently.
“Nothing.” There was a crisp note of warning in his tone which Caroline, however, ignored.
“But—she can’t do this sort of thing to you and expect to get away with it! I’ve a good mind to go to her and ask for an explanation myself! I’d tell her that if it were anything to do with me, I—I’d be willing to go right out of your life!” declared Caroline dramatically.
“You’ll do nothing of the sort! When I want you to fight my battles for me, I’ll ask you. Until then you’ll hold your tongue.” Richard looked desperately about him, feeling that if he stayed in the room a moment longer he would box the woman’s ears. His glance fell upon a pile of papers upon her own work table and he said coldly: “How about those immunization reports? I’ll need them when I get back.”
Then he picked up his bag and strode towards the door, v but could not resist a parting shot for Caroline. He added: “And, here and now, you can discard any illusion that you’re ‘in my life’—or even have been—in that way!”
Then he was gone, leaving Caroline feeling cheated, frustrated and with her curiosity completely unsatisfied.
Why, everyone in Fallsbridge would be sniggering about Lysbet Marlowe’s volte-face from Richard Guyse to Eliot Bradd! They would expect Caroline to be able to give them all the details of the cause and effect—and what had she to offer? Nothing. What indeed had she achieved even for herself? Again nothing. Only a series of snubs from Richard and not so much as the warm satisfaction of knowing that she had the distinction of being ‘the other woman’ in the case! It was indeed a bitter medicine to swallow, thought Caroline as she set about the dull routine of immunization reports with an extremely bad grace.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Lysbet—you’ve promised him?” The words were no more than a whisper.
“Yes. You’re safe for the moment.” There was a bitterness in Lysbet’s voice which did not escape the older woman. Her whole manner was a travesty of her earlier, assured arrogance and her face twisted in self-pity as she pleaded:
“Don’t blame me too much, darling. I—never meant it to come to this.”
“And yet you went on—until it has come to this! Aunt Alicia, how could you? Why didn’t you trust me? Why did you ever give Eliot the first penny that gave him this power over you—the power that he has now got over me through you?”
“Because I was frightened then and I’m frightened now. Lysbet—how far does he believe you? How far is he convinced that—that you’ll go through with it?” The woman’s fear for herself was pitiful to witness, and Lysbet felt for her a sudden rush or shame which itself changed almost immediately to pity.
Her own head went up proudly. “I gave him my word,” she said.
“Then you will go through with it? And no one need ever know what I did, except you and Eliot?”
“If there’s no other way out I must go through with it. But Aunt Alicia, are you really willing that I should?” It was something which Lysbet needed, yet dreaded to know.
Mrs. Tempest’s head went down into her hands. “No—oh Lysbet, I don’t know, I don’t know!” she cried in an anguish of doubt. “If it came to that, would it be so very terrible for you? Between you, you’d have money—Eliot wouldn’t want to stay in England—South Africa would be an entirely new country for you. Out there you could begin a new life, forget everything that happened here because of me, and one day you would be happy again. Could you do it—for my sake?”
Lysbet, utterly bewildered by such a blind optimism which could claim to see a ‘happiness’ for her beyond the involved misery of the present, said gently: “But how, knowing Eliot for the man he is, can you possibly hope that I could be happy with him in marriage? Even if he hadn’t wronged us I don’t love him—I never could!”
“But it needn’t last!” He said so himself!” said Mrs. Tempest wildly. “You could divorce him—and then you’d be free!”
To that Lysbet found no answer. So ‘marriage’—the magic word which had once spelt ‘Richard’—was to be, for her and Eliot, something ‘which need not last’ once it had broken all her dreams. But she knew that which sh
e had had to know—that fear had brought Mrs. Tempest to the point where nothing but her own safety counted with her. Even Lysbet herself could be sacrificed to it.
“All Eliot wants is money,” Mrs. Tempest went on urgently. “He said so. But if you won’t go through with it—or even if he suspects that you won’t—I shall never be safe! Lysbet, don’t you see that I must know before long that Eliot is powerless to take any action, powerless even to talk about me in Fallsbridge? I must know—or I shall go mad!”
“You can’t know—until I am actually married to him,” said Lysbet wearily. “Even if you can know for certain then. But his best prospect at the moment is marriage to me and he has my word about that. He will wait a little. He won’t jeopardize his chances simply for the sake of exposing you.”
A gleam appeared in Mrs. Tempest’s eye. “So you are doing as I suggested—seeking to gain time? Lysbet, dare you play with Eliot like that? It—it frightens me.”
Lysbet shook her head and watched the light of hope die out of her aunt’s face. “No, I had to give my word honestly or not at all. But that wouldn’t prevent my acting if and when I can see any other way out for us. I’ve got to think. There must be some way—there must! But if I find it I shall have to be honest with Eliot again. I shall tell him what I mean to do, tell him that he must release me from my promise—”
“But you can’t! That would be madness! He would forestall anything you meant to do!”
“I should have to chance that.”
“But I couldn’t afford to let you! You couldn’t afford to risk it, for my sake!”
Lysbet sighed in utter despair. There was no argument that would serve against such complete self-absorption as sheer fear had led Mrs. Tempest to. There was no use in going on talking at all. It took them nowhere.