by Sara Seale
She thought that for a moment he looked annoyed, as if he resented finding her in his home, or perhaps he had forgotten her existence, but he smiled and sat down beside her, refusing her offers of cake and bread and butter.
“You and Paul have got acquainted, I see. Well, Pierre, have you been good today?” he said.
“I think so. Have I, Baba?” Pierre replied doubtfully, and Paul laughed.
“I’m afraid not many lessons have been learned. Mrs. Travers has quite captivated your son,” he said, and added slyly, “Would you and Mrs. Travers prefer to have your tea in the library, Bart? After all, you’ve only been married two days.”
Lucy looked across at him, and her color rose as she saw his bright, mischievous glance darting between herself and Bart. He was, she knew, enjoying the situation, and she experienced a quite new sensation of resentment against her husband. He might at least have pretended for the sake of appearances, kissed her even; but he had never kissed her and, for all she knew, he might have already explained to Paul the reason for this sudden marriage.
“I don’t think so,” he was replying equably. “Perhaps, later, you will have a glass of sherry with us before you go. Now, Pierre, what have you been doing today?”
But the boy became sullen and tongue-tied. Bart asked his patient questions but got little response, and the friendly tea-time atmosphere, seemed to have dispersed at his coming. Lucy watched him surreptitiously. He was not the sort of man, she thought, one could associate with such nursery occasions. He brought an air of clinical efficiency into the room, a dark suggestion of a different world where pain and suffering and even death were all in the day’s work, and domestic affairs, even though they embraced his own son, were unimportant. He had lost touch with reality, she thought, and knew a sudden fierce anger against the dead Marcelle who had taken his humanity from him and buried it in her own grave.
“You’re looking pensive, Lucy,” he observed. “Have you had a dull day?”
“Oh, no,” she replied quickly, feeling as guilty as if he had read her thoughts. “Mr. Bond showed me the garden and I met Abel and we talked about flowers, and— and—”
His cold eyes rested on her for a moment as if he were seeking a medical reason for her incoherence, but all he said was:
“I think you two had better get on to terms of Christian names. Paul is a distant cousin of mine, you know. Well, I think I’ll leave you all to finish your tea. Bring Paul to the library for that drink later on, Lucy.”
She would have liked to go with him, sensing that he felt himself unwanted, but with the tutor’s perspicacious eyes upon her she could only remain where she was. Pierre, as soon as his father had gone, immediately became excited and talkative, dispensing his favors between them both, and Paul murmured:
“Pity, isn’t it?”
“Do you try very hard to bridge the gulf, Mr. Bond?” retorted Lucy.
“What a high-sounding phrase, and I thought we were told to be on Christian name terms,” he replied lazily. “We are now, you know, related by marriage and are cousins very many times removed.”
“I don’t understand you,” she said, and, indeed, she did not understand him. He seemed to alternate between easy charm and an unexpressed grudge against life, and she was not sure that he considered Bart’s interests at all.
“I’m sure you don’t dear Lucy, but we have something in common. We are both dependent on Travers’ bounty,” he said, and she sprang to her feet with the color flaming in her cheeks.
“That’s unforgivable!” she said. “I don’t know what your private arrangements with Bart are, but no wife is dependent on her husband’s bounty these days.”
“I’m sorry,” he said swiftly, and his blue eyes were contrite and pleading, like the eyes of a naughty child who begs forgiveness. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I say stupid things for effect very often. It’s made me a lot of enemies.”
He sat down again and poured herself out another cup of tea.
“Please—” he said softly—“forgive?”
She smiled reluctantly. One could not be angry with him for long, she thought. He had that slightly outrageous honesty which must, in the end, always turn away wrath.
“What are you quarrelling about?” demanded Pierre, frowning at them both. “Paul, if you are unkind to my Baba I won’t like you any more.”
“You see?” smiled Paul. “The champions are all on your side.”
“I think you’re quite ridiculous,” she said, and turned to smile reassuringly at the boy. “We weren’t quarrelling, darling. Grown-ups say stupid things very often.”
“Do they? Then why do they tell children not to be silly?” Pierre observed, and desired to be given another cake.
“Unanswerable logic, wouldn’t you say?” murmured Paul, and then went out of his way to be amusing and charm his small charge until Smithers came to clear the tea-things and take the boy to bed.
“Will you undress me?” Pierre asked Lucy.
“Not tonight, my poppet. Your father expects us in the library,” she said. “Tomorrow, perhaps.”
“He undressed himself, madam,” Smithers observed with a withering look at Lucy. “There is no need for you to see him into bed. I make sure that his teeth are brushed and his prayers said.”
“But you must have plenty of other things to do,” Lucy protested. “I can at least relieve you of one chore.”
“I do not consider a little child a chore,” said Smithers with sanctimonious awfulness, and shepherded Pierre from the room.
“If you could see your face, Lucy!” said Paul, giving way to helpless laughter.
“That is a most extraordinary person,” Lucy said. “One minute he’s the perfect butler, another he’s Mrs. Mopp, and other times he makes speeches like a very bad ham actor.”
“But that’s what he is—or rather that’s what he wanted to be. Don’t you know about Smithers?” She shook her head. “He was one of the orderlies at St. Minver’s Hospital years ago—that’s where Bart found him. He had tried the stage but, I imagine, found he was no good and had to be content with amateur theatricals in his spare time—still does, I believe. When Bart brought him here he found he was able to switch his personality into any role he wanted to play provided he did his job, so, you see, that’s the explanation of Smithers, whose name is really Smith. He’s peculiar, but harmless.”
“Oh,” cried Lucy, beginning to laugh herself, “poor Smithers! I won’t ever mind him again! Oh, Paul—this is a very odd household!”
He thought how charming she looked with her small nose wrinkled in laughter and the soft hair falling over her forehead in disarray. In her brief skirt and highnecked jersey she looked no more than a schoolgirl. “How old are you, Lucy?” he asked impulsively.
“Twenty. And, you?”
“Twenty-six, eleven years younger than Bert. It’s rather monstrous.”
“What is?”
“The difference between his age and yours. What was he thinking of, for, heaven’s sake?”
“Of his son, as I imagine you’ve already guessed.”
“But you, Lucy, what induced you to—”
But the laughter had died out of her. He had got under her guard because she was incautious and because for a long time there had not been anyone with whom to laugh.
“Bart is a very attractive man. Don’t you think so?” she broke in sedately.
“I suppose so, to some women.”
“I find him so.”
“You haven’t known him long, have you?”
“Oh, dear me, yes,” she said calmly. “We met six years ago. As it happened, he saved my life.”
He looked at her suspiciously as though he suspected she was pulling his leg.
“He never mentioned it,” he said.
“Very likely not He wouldn’t advertise his own heroic deeds.”
“Was it so heroic?”
“Oh, yes. I nearly drowned—along this bit of coast here, it was.”
&n
bsp; “You can only have been a kid. Have you kept up all these years?”
“I was fourteen,” she said firmly. “And now I think we’ve talked quite enough about how Bart and I met. You had better go along to the library and have your sherry.”
Bart was lying back in a chair by the fire smoking his pipe. He had already changed his professional clothes for something more comfortable. Lucy thought he looked tired.
“Help yourself—and Lucy, too,” he said, nodding towards the tray of decanters and glasses. “You’re late tonight, Paul.”
“Well, it was rather an occasion—the new bride and all,” Paul replied, pouring sherry into two glasses and handing one to Lucy.
“Yes, indeed, let’s both drink to her,” Bart said, raising his own glass.
She smiled at them both a little nervously. It was both pleasant and embarrassing to be toasted.
“If you want to take more time off in the future you can, now Lucy’s here to take charge,” said Bart. “There will be no need for you to stay after lunch if you want to get away.”
Paul lost color, and he swallowed his sherry at one gulp and helped himself to another.
“Is that your tactful way of breaking the ice? Are you wanting to get rid of me?” he asked a little truculently.
Bart’s black eyebrows rose in surprise.
“Good heavens, no, my dear fellow!” he protested mildly. “I only thought you might be glad of your afternoons free. The question of pay, I may add, would remain the same.”
“I, see. Well, thank you. I’ll think about it.”
“You could, possibly, find part-time work elsewhere in the afternoons which would help expenses.”
“Thanks for the hint. I’ll have to consider it.”
“It’s entirely as you like, of course,” the older man assured him.
“Thanks,” Paul said again, and putting his empty glass back on the tray, muttered a goodnight to each of them and left the room.
“Put my foot in it, did I?” Bart said, but he did not sound much perturbed.
“I think he misunderstood you,” said Lucy, finishing her sherry slowly. “Perhaps he’s sensitive because he hasn’t got much money.”
“Paul isn’t really the sensitive kind, you know,” he said. “Still, perhaps I gave him a wrong impression. I gather you like my young relative.”
“I’ve only known him a day,” she said cautiously.
“You had only known me fourteen days when you married me,” he retorted. She was silent, and he shot her a wry little look of commiseration.
“Run along and get ready for dinner,” he said, and his voice was suddenly dry. “Tonight we’ll have that twice postponed evening together and retire to bed like a respectable married couple.”
III
Dinner, however, was scarcely a sparkling success. Bart sat silent and preoccupied at the head of the long table, drinking his wine abstractedly, frowning a little when Lucy declined to have her own glass filled. Was he, she wondered, searching vainly for a topic of conversation, just as she was, and finding his mind a blank? She had a frightening vision of their future; a vista of endless meals together, two strangers who had nothing to say to each other, with Smithers in the background making an uneasy third.
“You’re not eating, Lucy,” Bart said abruptly, and she became guiltily aware that he had already finished and was waiting for her. She gobbled her food like a greedy child, aware that Smithers was hovering disapprovingly to snatch away her plate, and in her haste she knocked over a wine glass.
“Don’t choke yourself,” said Bart mildly. “Smithers, give Mrs. Travers half a glass of wine.”
“No, thank you,” she said nervously, but the wine had already been poured and she did not like it.
He saw the small grimace of distaste as she took a sip and said with a touch of impatience:
“You must learn to appreciate good wine, my dear, it’s the natural accomplishment to good food. No Frenchman would dream of not marrying the two.”
It seemed to Lucy as If the ghost of Marcelle leaned over her shoulder, sharing that glass of wine, taking it finally from her and gently pushing her from the place she had usurped at Bart’s table. It was of her that he had been thinking, of course, throughout that silent meal, and Lucy knew that if the occasion was strange for her, it also was strange for him, the first meal shared in that house with another woman for seven years.
She was unaware that she was gazing at him a little distractedly over the rim of her glass and that her eyes seemed wide and troubled in the candlelight, making him move uneasily.
“Don’t finish it if you really dislike it,” he said kindly, and she put the glass down carefully beside her.
“It isn’t that—” she began, but could not, after all, voice her thoughts. Smithers was out of the room fetching the next course, but it was not possible to express a more intimate opinion.
“What is it, then? Am I proving a dull host?”
That, of course, was what he was and always would be; her host and never her husband.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Tell me about some of your cases, Bart. I’m very ignorant about orthopaedic surgery.”
“Bones,” he said, smiling at her brave attempt to make conversation. “I don’t think you would find it a very interesting subject.”
Smithers came back into the room and they both fell silent again. It was a relief when the meal ended and they repaired to the library for coffee, but Lucy wondered how the rest of the evening could possibly be spent. She must, she knew, be an unwarrantable intrusion on his privacy, a guest in his house who should find an excuse to go to her room as soon as the meal was finished.
“Are you going to work?” she asked with a glance at the pile of correspondence on his desk.
“Not tonight, I think,” he replied, stirring his coffee lazily. “You seem nervous, Lucy.”
“Not exactly nervous,” she said, “but—but I think you’re finding all this a little awkward, aren’t you?”
“Are you?”
“Yes, I suppose so. I hadn’t realized, you see—I mean I—I just don’t want to be in the way.”
He passed her his cup for some more coffee and said a little wearily, “Look, my dear, I think we had better get things clear. I’ve married you and you have the rights of mistress of this house. You mustn’t feel in the way, neither must you be too humble. I won’t, I’m afraid, be much of a companion for you, but the security of my home is yours and anything I can do to make life easy for you, well, you have only to ask.”
“Thank you,” she said, handing him back his replenished coffee cup. “I’m humble, you know, only in the sense of feeling inadequate. You didn’t want to marry me, did you?”
“I would hardly have done so if I’d had objections, would I?” he replied with a lift of the eyebrows.
“I don’t know. You’d do most things for Pierre’s sake, I think. Only why didn’t you just employ me as nursery-governess?”
“It wouldn’t have been at all the same. You are part of the family now—Pierre’s stepmother. To a young child that should mean a great deal. I am, I hope, bringing security to both of you.”
“And you?” she asked, and he smiled with a certain bitterness.
“I? I scarcely count any longer in the sense you mean,” he answered. “Don’t fret on my account, Lucy. I’ve, had my life, and the future holds work and yet more work. There is a certain satisfaction in proving useful to the community, you know.”
To Lucy at twenty it sounded sad and resigned and a denial of life itself. “But you’re not old, Bart!” she cried. “You can still be of service to others, and—and have fun yourself.”
His black eyebrows met in a single line of displeasure. “Fun!” he exclaimed bitterly. “That’s all your generation thinks of. You—Paul—have fun, you say. What do you suppose you mean by that?”
She shrank back in her chair in dismay at his unexpected attack, and observed with distress the harsh, bitter lines of h
is dark face. Such an innocent remark could upset him and provoke that edged sarcasm.
“I—I don’t know. I think I only meant happiness—pleasure in another’s company,” she stammered, and his mood changed again.
“Poor Lucy Lamb,” he said with gentleness. “You haven’t had a great deal of fun in your life, have you? Forgive me for being a boor.”
She sighed, and he got up to remove the coffee tray out of the way, then leaned over her, supporting his weight with one hand on the back of her chair.
“If we are to live together we must try to know each other, Lucy,” he said. “I would hate you to have regrets so soon for that hasty action in marrying me.”
“Was it hasty?”
“I think so. I probably took advantage of you.”
“No,” she said, restraining an impulse to reach up and touch the dark cheek so close to hers. “I knew what I was doing.”
“I wonder. Well, it’s too late for doubts now, isn’t it? We must both make the best of our bargain.”
“You talk,” said Lucy bleakly, “as if it were you who was having the doubts.”
“Only on your behalf.” He straightened up and stood looking down at her. She seemed very small to him, curled up in the big chair. Until he had seen her with Paul that afternoon he had not appreciated either her youth or her individuality. “Try to bear with me, my dear. I’m away from home a good deal and Paul can be trusted to brighten the days for you.”
She glanced at him under her lashes. Was he deliberately relying on his cousin to provide the companionship which he felt himself unable to offer, or did he just not care?
“As you pointed out to him earlier, there’s no need for him to remain here in the afternoons,” she said.
“True, but I think I hurt his feelings all the same. Paul can be touchy, and it’s a break for him to get away from the old aunt in Merrynporth. She brought him up and spoilt him abominably and now he’s saddled with her.”
“What is she like?” Lucy asked curiously.
Paul had not mentioned that he lived with an aunt; he had not, in fact, given her any indication of his background.