The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

by R. A. Dick

  “I am not an actress,” said Lucy.

  “No,” said the captain, “you damn well aren’t, but you’re an attractive woman, and I’m not in the least surprised at Mr. Sproule’s thoughts.”

  “I’ll never speak to him again,” said Lucy.

  “Oh, yes, you will,” said the captain, “for if you don’t I’ll visit him myself and then the fat will be in the fire.”

  “Perhaps he won’t publish your old book anyway,” said Lucy.

  “He’ll publish it,” said the captain complacently, “and it will be a best-seller, you mark my words.”

  PART FOUR

  I

  It was not for many months that Captain Gregg’s history was published, not until Lucy had had to sell out capital in order to meet her expenses, not until Anna was already earning money at the Sadlers Wells Theatre, not until Cyril had completed his theological course and become engaged to the Bishop’s daughter, who had been left a yearly income of a thousand pounds by her grandmother; not, indeed, until there was no pressing need for the income it brought in. For between the writing of the book by Captain Gregg and the publishing of it by Mr. Sproule, there appeared a deep rift of dissension, bridged indifferently by Lucy whose sympathies were mainly with Mr. Sproule. He maintained that these words must be altered and that incident toned down that the publishing firm of Tacket and Sproule might not be involved in expensive litigation or the book be banned by the censor.

  “Tell the captain that for myself I wouldn’t have a sentence changed,” said Mr. Sproule on one of Lucy’s many visits to his office, “but we can’t risk it as it is.”

  “Tell Sproule that this is a free country and I’ll write what I damn well please,” roared the captain when she returned to Gull Cottage.

  “If only I could meet the man,” said Mr. Sproule.

  “Let me talk to the fellow,” demanded Captain Gregg.

  This Lucy refused to allow. She felt instinctively that if one person were to learn of her astonishing connection with the ghost of Captain Gregg, the whole world would soon hear of it, and there would be an end to all peace and privacy for her.

  “And then there would be a real suicide at Gull Cottage,” she warned the captain, “for I couldn’t face the publicity.”

  “And, indeed,” she said one evening, worn out after a day of particularly stormy meetings with the two men, “I’m not sure that I won’t take that way out anyway, for I am so tired.”

  Which threat so alarmed the captain that he gave in ungracefully and with bitter complaints; and Blood and Swash was published and the first edition sold out and the film rights sold for a fabulous sum in the autumn, which also saw the marriage of Cyril to Celia Winstanley.

  They were all discussing the book at the house party assembled for the wedding at which Lucy was an unwilling guest.

  Seated at the Bishop’s right at the dinner party given the night before the ceremony, she felt so frozen with horror at the situation she found herself in that she was past blushing and beyond speech.

  “A terrible book,” said the Bishop, who intoned his lightest remarks and sent this one ringing down the long table as if it were part of the commination service.

  “What book is that?” asked old Lady Parminster, on the Bishop’s other side.

  “Er—Blood and Swash, Lady Parminster,” replied the Bishop. “I cannot imagine how any decent firm could bring themselves to publish such a book.”

  “I thought it rather fine,” said a colonial bishop on Lucy’s right, a distant cousin of the Bishop’s, whom he had not seen for many years but who, being on leave and presenting Celia with a carved elephant tusk, had been invited to stay for the wedding.

  “There are some wonderful descriptions in it,” he continued, “and the moral outlook is sound.”

  “Pagan, I should call it,” said Cyril.

  “Definitely,” agreed Celia, a fair-haired, well-groomed girl, so polished in appearance and manners that she gave Lucy the impression that she had been brought up in a glass cabinet, with no contact with humanity.

  “Celia dear, I had no idea you had read that nasty book,” fluttered the Bishop’s wife from the farther end of the table, a little wren of a woman who always seemed to be trying vainly to catch up with the company she was in.

  “There are no nice books written nowadays,” said Lady Parminster with a sigh, “not like The Rosary by dear Florence Barclay.”

  “We don’t wish to blind ourselves to facts in these modern days,” boomed the Bishop, “but neither do we wish our literature plastered over with the mud of sordid details.”

  “Personally,” said Sir Everard Parminster, “I never read anything but the Times and Thackeray.”

  “And Dickens,” suggested Eva, who was also of the party, in pale pink satin and her amethysts.

  “No, madam, not Dickens,” replied Sir Everard, “he wrote for the hoi-polloi, not for gentlemen.”

  “Who wrote Blood and Swash?” asked Cyril. “Does anybody know?”

  “The author prefers to remain anonymous,” intoned the Bishop, “and I for one am not surprised. The chapter on Marseille is quite shocking. It would never surprise me if the book were withdrawn from publication. In fact I have written to the papers suggesting it should be withdrawn.”

  “A sure way to increase its sales,” said the colonial bishop. “No doubt the author is deeply grateful to you, Herbert—always supposing the sales need increasing—I notice we all seem to have read the book.”

  “I only skipped through it.”

  “One must know before one can condemn.”

  “I burned the book.”

  “I scarcely glanced beyond the first page.”

  A storm of shrill cries and protestations rose, like the cries of sea-gulls, thought Lucy, disturbed from their feeding to settle again on the Bishop’s sonorous finale.

  “One of us at least would appear never to have opened the book. I refer to Mrs. Muir who has ventured no criticism.”

  “Oh, mother never reads anything but Mrs. Beeton’s cookery book and Home Chat,” said Cyril with affectionate contempt, “though she did start to write a book herself once. What became of that great work, mother?”

  “Don’t tease your mother, Cyril,” Celia reproved him. “Haven’t we all tried to put ourselves on paper?”

  “They say every man and woman has one book in him,” said the colonial bishop. “I wrote mine when I was ten, ‘Black Ben’s Booty,’ it was called, and I wrote it in the Scripture classes at my prep school.”

  “Daddy’s writing a book now,” said Celia, and the sea-gulls fluttered up once more in subdued cries.

  “What is it about?”

  “How marvellous!”

  “Never rests.”

  “So indefatigable.”

  “I must say I should like to meet the author of Blood and Swash,” pursued the colonial bishop. “I suppose his publisher knows who he is.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Eva, “a friend of mine has it on the best authority that the author is a cripple in Soho, who has never been to sea in his life.”

  There was a curious booming sound as she finished speaking, and a rush of air swept through the room, blowing out the tall candles on the dinner table, slamming the door in the face of the butler, who was bringing in the port, so affecting Mrs. Muir that she cried out and, toppling sideways, fell onto the shoulder of the colonial bishop, apparently in a dead faint.

  “How dared you—how dared you?” stormed Lucy as she lay on the sofa in her bedroom, to which haven she had been carried by the colonial bishop, and restored with smelling salts by Mrs. Winstanley, and left by her own request to recover. “You promised me that if I came here you wouldn’t say one word.”

  “Nor did I,” said the captain, “but damn it, Lucy, that was too much, calling me a cripple who had never been to sea in his life—it was too much to bear after all that other bunk. And if you’d seen them all battening on the less savoury bits of the Marseille ch
apter in the privacy of their own rooms—all but the Bishop, and his wife who hasn’t read the book at all and thinks it’s that Blood and Sand work about bullfighters—blasted hypocrites!”

  “Will you please go away?” said Lucy coldly.

  “You know, Lucy, me dear,” the captain went on, taking no notice of this request, “I think we’ve been wrong about the Bishop—I’ve never really listened into him before. Granted he looks like a camel and has the outlook of an earthworm, but at least he’s genuine and would go to the stake for his convictions, which is more than you can say for his colonial cousin George, who has posed so long as a muscular Christian that his beliefs have become muscle-bound.”

  “Will you please go away?” Lucy repeated. “And don’t come near me till after the wedding. I don’t trust you and I don’t like you; in fact I dislike you very much indeed—behaving like a whirlwind!”

  “Winstanley is going to write to the papers about earthquakes,” said the captain, chuckling. “I’ve been called many things in my time but never an earthquake. I wish you could have seen all their faces—I haven’t had such a good laugh for years, and the butler spilled the port all down his shirtfront—who killed Cock Robin?”

  “You talk about me being in the kindergarten,” said Lucy severely, “when I should say you weren’t past the crèche.”

  “I know—I’m bad and don’t seem to get any better,” said the captain impenitently, “and I’m sorry I put you to all that trouble of pretending to faint.”

  “I had to do something in order to be by myself and talk to you,” said Lucy.

  “It was a bit hard on George having to haul you all the way upstairs,” said the captain.

  “I weigh exactly one hundred and seven pounds,” said Lucy, “which isn’t very heavy.”

  “Perhaps not on the flat for anyone in training as a weightlifter,” replied the captain, “but rather different upstairs after a rich dinner—George was puffing like a grampus. And talking of weight-lifters, did I ever tell you of the circus I took out to South America in the Esmerelda?”

  “I have heard all I want to hear about your past,” said Lucy. “It’s got me into a lot of trouble and will probably get me into a lot more. Will you please go away and let me rest?”

  “Anyway, my past is going to bring you in a very handsome income,” said the captain.

  “And I’ll leave all of it and Gull Cottage to Decayed Gentlewomen if you don’t go away and promise not to come back here,” said Lucy.

  “God help us, I believe you would, too,” said the captain. “All right I’ll go—I’ll go,” and his voice vanished on a shrill whistle, leaving Lucy alone.

  But not for long, for presently the door opened and Eva appeared. Closing her eyes, Lucy pretended to be asleep, but it took more than sleep to deter Eva on mercy bent. She straightened the pillow under Lucy’s head, tucked in the rug about her body, and pulled off her shoes with a ruthless hand that would have roused any genuine invalid to protest. Lucy, keeping her eyes firmly shut, gave a gentle snore and apparently slept on securely, and presently Eva tiptoed reluctantly away; and Lucy really did doze off.

  The clock on the mantelpiece was striking eleven when she awoke to hear a tapping on her door.

  “Come in,” she called drowsily, and, the door opening, Celia and Cyril came into the room with faces solemn enough to visit the mortally stricken.

  “How are you feeling, mother?” asked Cyril in a hushed voice.

  “Perfectly well, dear,” said Lucy, imperfectly awake.

  “It’s like you to say so,” said Celia, “but don’t you think you had better see the doctor. Cyril has told me that he has never known you to faint before.”

  “Faint!” said Lucy in astonishment. Then, coming back to complete consciousness, she added hastily, “Oh, yes, of course—but I feel quite all right now. I had a lovely sleep.”

  “You gave us quite a fright,” said Cyril, “and of course it was quite alarming the way all those candles blew out—the Bishop thinks it was some sort of an earth tremor.”

  “A very earthy tremor,” said Lucy.

  “If you really are feeling better, may we come in and have a little talk with you, madre—may I call you madre, Mrs. Muir?”

  “Call me anything you like,” said Lucy and added, “dear,” in case she had appeared too abrupt.

  “Thank you, madre,” said the girl. “And now,” she went on, pulling Cyril down on to the fender-seat with her, “let us sit down and be cosy.”

  They might sit down on the fender-seat side by side, thought Lucy, but she doubted if they could be cosy. As soon expect the steel furniture that was coming into fashion to give ease as for Celia and Cyril to attain the intimate, padded state of comfort that the word cosy implied; but they were very well suited to each other. Perhaps she maligned them, but there was something synthetic about their very emotions, like the sham log fire that flickered with electric heat in the grate behind them. It was true that there was no dirt nor dust with an electric fire, but a turn of a switch would turn it into dead blackness, whereas a coal fire sent out a warm glow even in its dying embers.

  “We want to do the best for everyone, madre,” said Celia, evidently ending quite a long speech and looking fixedly at Lucy, with her pale blue eyes that seemed to be analyzing the cost of her clothing down to her most intimate underwear.

  “And we’ll put Gull Cottage in the hands of the agent at once,” said Cyril.

  “What?” said Lucy, sitting bolt upright and coming back to reality with a jerk.

  “We’ve been telling you, mother,” said Cyril patiently, “that we don’t think it right that you should live alone in that isolated house at Whitecliff—after all, dear, you aren’t as young as you were.”

  “I’m scarcely fifty,” said Lucy.

  “Of course that isn’t really old nowadays,” said Celia tactfully, “but too old, don’t you think, to live alone and do all your own work, especially if you are subject to these fainting attacks?”

  “But I am not subject to fainting attacks,” declared Lucy. “I never fainted in my life.”

  “Until this evening,” said Cyril.

  “That was nothing,” said Lucy.

  “It’s no use being too brave about it, madre,” said Celia.

  “I’m not being brave,” said Lucy in exasperation, “I just had a—well a slight shock. Perhaps I had too much wine.”

  “You only had one glass,” said Celia, “that wouldn’t account for it—no, dear madre, Cyril and I don’t think you are fit to live alone and we’ve made a plan. You are coming to live in Whitchester with us.”

  “In your own old home that Father built for you,” added Cyril triumphantly.

  “Yes,” said Celia, “it’s been such a secret. Daddy heard about a month ago that there was a curate needed at St. Swithins—you know, on the hill above your old house—and he asked me what I should like for a wedding present on the day that Cyril was appointed to St. Swithins, and we found out that Ivybank was for sale and he bought it for me, and you are coming to live in it with us.”

  “But Cyril won’t stay a curate at St. Swithins forever,” said Lucy, panic-stricken yet unable to quench completely the glow of altruistic virtue in their upturned faces.

  “I should say not,” said Cyril, “but it will be lovely to feel that we have a settled home to come to.”

  “With you in it, always ready to take the children whenever we want a little jaunt abroad,” said Celia.

  “It’s very sweet of you to think of it, dears,” said Lucy, trying to put the fervent gratitude she was so far from feeling into her voice, “but it would never do—young people should have their own home.”

  “But it would be our own home,” said Celia.

  “Not with a mother-in-law in it,” said Lucy.

  “But we would get on beautifully,” said Celia, “I know that we should——”

  “You can’t possibly tell how you would get on with a person at breakfast, sev
en days a week, when you have only had dinner and lunch with them occasionally,” said Lucy.

  “I’ll come and have breakfast with you in your room to-morrow and see how we get on.” Celia smiled.

  Lucy shook her head. “No,” she said, “you are dutiful, kind children, but things are better as they are.”

  “It isn’t duty, madre, we want you to come,” said Celia, pouting with lips that were too thin to pout. An only child, thought Lucy, and a spoiled one, always used to getting her own way.

  “No,” she said more firmly still, “I am a selfish old woman, set in her own ways, and they are not the ways of this generation.”

  “You would have your own sitting-room,” said Cyril.

  “No,” said Lucy, “it is very very kind of you to think of it, but I will stay where I am, at Gull Cottage.”

  “Your mother is tired, dear,” said Celia with some asperity. “We will talk of this another time—perhaps daddy will be able to persuade her that it is the right thing to do.”

  “Perhaps he will,” said Lucy with no conviction in her voice as she raised her cheek for their good-night kisses, but I wouldn’t mind betting, she added to herself as they left the room, that it would take more than a bishop to change my mind.

  II

  In the turmoil of all the last minute preparations for a large wedding, Lucy hoped to escape the persuasions of Celia’s father and his advice as to the right thing to do.

  She breakfasted in her bedroom and remained in seclusion till the booming of the gong called her to the cold luncheon spread in the Bishop’s study, since the dining-room was already prepared for the wedding feast. There she hid with a plate of cold tongue behind the bust of Milton, until she was sought out by cousin George with a dish of fruit salad and a flood of information concerning the marriage customs of the Bantus, which kept her effectively submerged until they left for the service in the cathedral.

  It was a cool sunlit day in early October, and the sun’s rays striking down in dusty bars of gold and colour through the age-old stained glass windows lit up Celia and her train of white-clad attendants as if they, too, were transformed out of their clear-cut modernity into the gentler graciousness of the past, as if the ancient cathedral had enclosed part of the century of its building within its grey stone walls, with the magical power to translate all its occupants.