by Jane Arbor
But she did not know that before he left he had delivered his ultimatum ... One evening, against the background of the deep, unnatural silence created by the snow, Mrs. Tempest told her of it.
She said with the nervous uneasiness which was her usual manner nowadays: “Lysbet, before he went away Eliot said that we must come to a—a decision.”
In the grate before which they were sitting a log split suddenly under the heat and sent a shower of tiny sparks leaping towards the chimney. Lysbet watched the last of them twinkle into oblivion before she questioned: “A decision? You mean—about my marrying him?”
“Yes. He wants a date fixed. Before the spring, he said. He mentioned the end of next month, but he said that, within limits, he would be willing to leave it to you.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said—I said that I must leave it to you too. I said that I wouldn’t have you hurried—”
“I see.” It occurred to Lysbet that she might have added in bitter irony: “You would not have me hurried—merely forced!’ But there was nothing in her tone to betray that her illusion of a brief security had been stripped from her like a torn garment. By the spring of the year she might be Eliot Bradd’s wife! But she would fight still.
After a minute or two of silence she said with a forced air of brisk decision which she hoped would give courage to the other woman: “Then as soon as Eliot comes back I shall tell him that we have decided to act. I shall go to a solicitor—tell him the whole story—ask his advice—”
“No—no, Lysbet! You can’t betray me like that! I daren’t risk it!”
Though Lysbet was frightened by the wide-eyed terror in her aunt’s face she pursued relentlessly: “A London solicitor—not a local one. A man who knows nothing about us and who could advise us absolutely impartially. There must be someone like that. He would have all the facts of the case—the full details of my father’s will—”
“And supposing he had to advise that there is nothing we can do? That—that I have laid myself open to criminal prosecution, as Eliot says? What weapon should we have against him then? There would be no bargain that he would have to keep to. He could tell any poisonous tale he wished to tell in Fallsbridge, to all our friends—even if—if he did no worse.”
“But Eliot has laid himself open to a charge of blackmail,” Lysbet reminded her gently. “Dare he risk that?”
“He knows that, whatever happens, we should never bring it against him, that I could never face the publicity. He knows that he can bank on that. That is his safety.”
“Then we must destroy it.” In face of her decision to act Lysbet felt strength and resolution flowing into her. She had waited too long already! Now she was not afraid of Eliot any more. There must be a way out and she was going to find it.
She said quietly: “You know, Aunt Alicia, you’ve never told me the real facts of my father’s will. Have you a copy of it? I should like to see it.”
Mrs. Tempest shook her head in wretched indecision. Lysbet saw with pity that though her hands were tightly clasped they were trembling uncontrollably.
“No,” she said. “Your Uncle Everard would have had a copy, but he never troubled me with business details while he was alive. Then when he died so suddenly I had to take over his power of attorney, but that only meant that I had to endorse the cheques and investment vouchers which came in from South Africa for you. I never remember seeing the will itself.”
“But was that very wise?” put in Lysbet gently. “Oughtn’t you at least to have had a copy of a will you were administering for someone else?”
“I know,” responded her aunt wretchedly. “I believed there had been a copy among Everard’s things, but I had a lot of out-of-date papers destroyed after his death and I supposed the will had been destroyed by mistake with the rest. I always meant to get another copy sent from South Africa, but I didn’t. Everything to do with the money was running smoothly enough, just as it had done before Everard’s death, and it didn’t seem to matter. I always supposed that when you came of age I should have to sign a formal handing-over to you of your estate, but your birthday came and went and though for a long time I expected by every post from South Africa some inquiry about you and the ending of my guardianship, nothing happened. Then I realized that it must rest with me to bring the facts before a solicitor. I had cheated you of nothing before then, Lysbet. But it was upon that realization that I first wronged you. For I did nothing—absolutely nothing. And—you know the rest.”
Lysbet nodded rather absently. Her aunt had appealed for her pity and understanding before, but it was cold facts in which she was interested now.
“You say there was no query from South Africa? Are you sure?” she asked.
“Quite sure. I told you—I was watching for it daily.”
“Then don’t you see,” urged Lysbet eagerly, “that for that reason alone we need advice? We have waited too long already. We must know why you had no notice from South Africa that your guardianship was up; we must know what it is that you should have done at this end. We’ve got to have all the facts at our fingertips before we have to face Eliot again. He must know all the details of the will. How could he have got hold of them?”
“There must be in Cape Town some equivalent of Somerset House over here; by paying a fee anyone can examine a will,” her aunt reminded her.
“Yes, of course. So that when he came to England he knew all about me. But why do you suppose he came at all, Aunt Alicia? What could it have mattered to him that I, practically a complete stranger by that time, had been left a fortune by my father?”
“I think,” answered Mrs. Tempest slowly with more shrewdness that she had yet shown, “that he came to do what he proposes to do now—he came to marry you!”
“But he knew nothing of me—he hadn’t seen me since I was a child!”
“I don’t suppose that to a man of Eliot’s purpose it mattered very much. He must have been desperate for money, and he would have been able to calculate about how old you would be. We know that he is a gambler by nature; he must have been prepared to stake everything on the chance of finding you still unmarried, and he intended to depend on that easy charm of his to do the rest for him. Instead—” Mrs. Tempest’s voice cracked upon a note of self-reproach, “he found me and a situation which was better for his purpose that he had ever dreamed! Lysbet—can you ever forgive me? Then Eliot would have had to take his chance for your love; now he has all the power to force you!”
Lysbet shook her head stubbornly. “No. He may have everything on his side but now we’re going to fight him. Tomorrow I shall begin to take steps to end all this—even if it means beginning something which we—for I shall be with you, Aunt Alicia!—shall have to fight later. Whatever we must face, we shall be together.”
She paused, looking towards her aunt, half-expecting another outburst of protestations, of pleading. But the other woman sat, silent and resigned at last, as if broken upon a wheel of circumstances which she could no longer control. “What will you do?” she whispered at last.
Filled with new hope at the promise of action Lysbet said confidently: “Everything—everything that’s possible in the world to defeat Eliot. I shall begin by cabling out to South Africa for a copy of the will—and that no later than tomorrow.”
But the ‘tomorrow’ of that promise was to hold other things in store for them both.
In surgery Richard picked up his diary and looked at the unusually long list of calls entered in it. There had been very few patients at the surgery itself this morning—in any weather like the present, people expected the doctor to call on them! He consulted his watch. If he left now Caroline could attend to any belated clients and a careful arrangement of his housebound patients, by district and by right of urgency, should, with luck, enable him to make and keep another appointment which had nothing to do with his professional case-book.
He turned to Caroline, putting the diary into his pocket and picking up his gloves.
“When I have gone,” he said, “I want you to ring up Falcons and ask Mrs. Alicia Tempest if she will be good enough to see me today at any time suitable to her from, say, three o’clock onwards.”
Caroline’s jaw dropped with astonishment.
“Mrs.—Mrs. Tempest?” she stammered.
“Mrs. Tempest,” confirmed Richard briskly.
“But—if you are leaving now on your round how shall I confirm with you the time of the appointment, Doctor Guyse?”
Richard whipped out the diary, consulted it briefly. “I expect to reach Mrs. Osborne’s by noon. You can ring me there and tell me the time Mrs. Tempest has fixed.”
Caroline made one more effort to gain normal support in the execution of this strange order. “You—you wouldn’t like me to ring Falcons now, so that you could speak to Mrs. Tempest yourself?” she suggested faintly.
“No, I would not.” Richard’s tone was decided. He turned towards the door, but at the threshold he looked back over his shoulder at his secretary. He added drily: “And you needn’t bend over backwards in your eagerness to take ‘No’ for an answer, Caroline mine! I want ‘Yes’ and, between ourselves, I expect to get it!”
All the morning his attention was occupied with his patients and with his car’s negotiation of the icy roads. But as noon approached he knew that he was waiting upon Caroline’s message with almost uncontrollable impatience.
When it came his voice was no longer jaunty but sharp with anxiety.
“Well?” he snapped in answer to Caroline’s tinkling soprano.
“I’m sorry, Doctor Guyse, but I wasn’t able to speak to Mrs. Tempest herself.”
“No? To whom, then?”
“Well, Lys—I mean Miss Marlowe answered the telephone, and when I asked for the appointment she said that Mrs. Tempest was ill, could see no one.”
“Ill?? What is the matter with her?” It was the doctor in Richard which asked the question.
“Miss Marlowe didn’t say. She told me that she had tried to get in touch with Mrs. Tempest’s doctor, a London man, but that London calls were being badly delayed owing to the weather.”
“Then why hasn’t she called in a local doctor?” demanded Richard irritably.
There was silence from Caroline’s end as if this were a problem which was either beneath her notice or beyond her intelligence.
Richard went on: “Well, what happened then? Were you able to make an appointment for me or not?”
“No, I’m sorry, Doctor. Miss Marlowe was quite firm. She said that she wouldn’t allow Mrs. Tempest to see anyone. And of course I knew that it wouldn’t be correct to suggest that you should see Mrs. Tempest professionally—”
“No, of course not.” (At least Caroline had acquired that much sense of professional etiquette!) “So I suppose you had to leave the matter there?”
“I’m sorry, Doctor,” said Caroline again.
“Well, thank you for trying. I had a business matter to talk over with Mrs. Tempest, but I shall have to write it, that’s all.” With that Richard hung up the receiver but for long minutes he did not leave the draughty hall where he stood. At last he left the house, went out to his car and turned it nose-about towards the Brackenbury Road.
After he had gone, his patient, Mrs. Osborne, remarked mildly to her daughter: “Dear me, Doctor has left his stethoscope and his blood-pressure gadget behind! I hope he’ll miss them before he needs them.”
But ‘Doctor’, determined upon a more nearly unprofessional thing than he had ever expected to be guilty of, was currently intent upon nothing so much as the reaching of Falcons before his resolution gave out.
At the house, the maid who answered the door so far forgot herself as to stare at him in open astonishment. (The drama of kitchen gossip had it that ‘poor Doctor Guyse’ had sworn he would never cross the threshold of Falcons again’). But he said brusquely: “Miss Marlowe is expecting me” and walked past her into the hall.
“Yes, sir. I’ll tell her you are here,” said the maid, supposing, as Richard had hoped she would, that Lysbet had indeed sent for him after failing to get into touch with Mrs. Tempest’s own doctor.
While he waited he took off his gloves, thrust them into the pockets of his overcoat and tried, for his own reassurance, to behave as if he were upon an ordinary professional visit But all the time he was waiting for only one thing—to hear Lysbet’s footsteps and to see her at last with whatever poverty of welcome there might be in her eyes.
When she came she was flushed from having hurried; and Richard thought she had never looked so lovely. She stood holding the door-handle with one hand, the other upon the lintel as she said: “I didn’t send for you.”
“I know. I haven’t any right whatsoever to be here,” answered Richard quietly. “But come in, Lysbet. Shut the door. I have something to say to you. What is the matter with Mrs. Tempest?”
Lysbet closed the door slowly and came forward, but she said stubbornly: “I’ve been able to get in touch with her own doctor now. He will be coming down to see her tomorrow.”
“But oughtn’t you to have advice now—today? You consulted me about her once because you said you were worried about her nervous condition. Would you care for me to see her again?”
“Do you mean—professionally, or upon the errand about which Mrs. Ware rang up?” asked Lysbet coldly.
“That must be for you to say. If you need my professional advice you have only to ask for it. But I’ll admit that when I heard your aunt was ill I came to see you on an intuitive idea that my other errand might have some bearing on her illness. It’s rarely safe to act upon intuition, but I did it, and here I am.”
The girl stared at him bewilderedly. “I don’t understand. What ‘bearing’? I think Aunt Alicia is on the verge of a bad nervous breakdown. How could I have let you see her on a ‘business matter,’ which is what your message said? She cried uncontrollably for hours early this morning; she was shivering from head to foot, and though I have given her brandy and piled blankets on her, she is still having bouts of this shaking every now and then. I—I’m terribly worried about her. But she is sleeping now.”
It was as if trouble had broken down the defence she had set up against Richard and his heart ached for her as much as it knew love for her and a longing to take her into his arms.
He ventured to move towards her, to hold out his hand. “Lysbet,” he pleaded, “will you let me help you? Mrs. Tempest has been terribly worried, hasn’t she? Increasingly so, ever since you spoke to me about her, and even more so since—since our engagement was broken? That is intuition on my part, not knowledge. But I suspect very shrewdly that you know the cause of her worry. Will you tell it to me? Then I believe I may be able to help you—and her. Because that was the purpose of my ‘other errand.’ Will you confide in me so far, believing that all I want is to help you both?”
Sincerity rang in his voice and Lysbet stared at him, shaken by his selfless concern for her as she would never have been stirred by his criticism.
“I—I—” she began and stopped, biting her lip to hold back the tears.
Richard could bear it no longer. “Lysbet—dear Lysbet! For the sake of what we were to each other, if for nothing else, I’d give all I have to help you! You know that, don’t you?”
With both hands upon her shoulders he held her at arms’ length, felt an anguish of pity for her as her head drooped slowly in assent.
“Then let me do what I can! I know something of Mrs. Tempest’s troubles—never mind how, for the moment. But all I’ve got is a sort of jigsaw pattern with a lot of the pieces missing. I believe that she can supply them if she will.”
“I think I can tell you anything that she could. There are no secrets between us now—none,” Lysbet said quietly.
“I thought there might not be. Listen, Lysbet. I think I know quite certainly what Eliot Bradd’s motives were in coming to England in order to seek you out. He believed he would find you your father’s heiress and
he meant to marry you if he could. How right am I?”
“You are right, I think.”
“But he didn’t find what he expected. Instead, he found you still dependent upon your aunt. That puzzled him probably, though it served him too, in a way. But it meant that he had to arm himself with the details of the will before he could ask you to marry him—”
Lysbet looked up. “He must have known the contents before he came over here.”
“No. That I do know. He had to cable back to South Africa for them. He cabled—” Richard was watching her carefully, “to a girl in Cape Town, a girl whom he had promised to marry and whom he should have married long ago. She got the information he wanted and cabled it back to him. Her name is Elsa Geraint and she is in the hospital here at this moment.”
“Here? I mean—in Fallsbridge?”
“Yes. She followed him to England, believing that if she could only find him, he would go back to her. But—he was engaged to you!”
Lysbet moistened her dry lips. “Yes—he was engaged to me,” she echoed. “Go on, please. What else do you know?”
“Well, this is where my pattern breaks, though, strangely, it is, by date, about where you first told me of your aunt’s ‘nerves.’ I can only guess at the next part, unless you can help me. Did Eliot ask you then to marry him—while you were engaged to me?”
But Lysbet stood silently, and it was only at the faintest pressure of his hand upon her shoulder that she said slowly: “Eliot never asked me to marry him. He—demanded it.” If she had looked then into Richard’s face she would have seen there something which boded very ill for Eliot Bradd. But he said only, in a voice well under control: “He demanded it as a price for something?”