Her lips relaxed into a sudden smile. In her moment of triumph she could not help saying what she did say, gaily, her eyes almost thanking him for his share of it.
‘All right, Freddy! It isn’t as if I minded, you know! Friends as much as you like, but you know I have your measure!’
And he, as they descended again, said not another word.
5
Gervaise was blythe. She and Lady Harow were the first down from dressing, and she stood behind her mother’s chair. Not one look, word or thought did she want of Freddy Lampeter now. Was not that quietude within her breast more to be desired than that storm-upon-a-storm they called love?
‘What was darling Pamela laughing at this afternoon?’ Lady Harow asked, her fingers delicately over the puzzle.
‘How should I know, mother? I wasn’t there.’
‘Of course not. How forgetful of me. How much did they say the honey weighed?’
‘I haven’t seen the honey, either,’ Gervaise answered. ‘How do I look tonight, mother?’
For Freddy Lampeter’s express benefit she had made of her arms a gratuitous and dazzling insult. Now that she no longer feared him he should have something to look at! Bare to the pits, they issued from the low frock of sooty black, rousing like a trumpet-flourish. Let Blanche match them if she could! The ringlessness of her finger, too, was meant to mock him. A smile played about her lips as she put out her hand to the map.
‘Wait, mother – this piece goes in here – then this – then all that patch will fit in –’
She pushed a little islet of wood to the mainland. She laughed a delighted laugh as she did so. It was almost as if, having dismembered Freddy, she could put him together again or not, just as she chose.
But the white arm was swiftly withdrawn again. Absent-mindedly Lady Harow had touched it with her lips as it had reached over her shoulder to the puzzle. Gervaise’s smile vanished. She did not know why she had not wanted her mother to kiss her arm.
‘Listen – I think I hear them,’ she said in an altered voice.
It was Pamela and Evelyn, with Freddy Lampeter and another man at their heels.
They assembled in the hall about the aperitif-tray, eight or ten of them, gay to the eye as a battle of flowers, noisy as a nest of young birds. One of them was busy with a shaker, and Pamela’s lush, formless little mouth munched cocktail cherries. About her buttercup temples was a wreath of minute flowers, and she steadied herself against Freddy Lampeter’s shoulder as she eased the ribbon of a satin slipper. Gervaise had advanced, and had taken the small glass somebody proffered her. She drained it without a glance at Freddy. She stood near a high wainscot the top of which formed a ledge. Lesson number one for Freddy! Indifferently the arrogant arm reached up. She placed the glass upon the ledge. Pamela could have walked under that up-stretched limb without disturbing a hair of her yellow head.
It was long since Lady Harow had taken the head of the Abbey table. That was Gervaise’s place, and on the previous evening Freddy Lampeter had sat at her right hand. But this night another guest, arrived hardly an hour before, sat in that seat. It happened that to Sir Walter more than an ordinary measure of consideration was due. Moreover, white-haired as he was, it amused Gervaise to think that he was at least a whole man, and not, like the younger man he had displaced, a thing of scattered bits, permitted for decency’s sake to keep the appearance of wholeness. For it was part of her tyranny that nobody else should see how stripped Freddy was. Pamela, for example, her hair almost brushing Freddy’s shoulder a few places down the table, knew nothing of it. It was quite enough that Freddy himself knew.
‘But how dare you show your face here without Auntie, Uncle Watty!’ Gervaise was saying to Sir Walter. He was not really an uncle. He was her godfather. But she never called him anything but ‘Uncle Watty’.
The old man shook his head.
‘Ah, my dear, we’re both a little bit on in years for your sort of party,’ he replied. ‘I shall sit with your mother while you dance. Is it to be dancing?’
Pamela’s high little bosom was thrust half-way across Freddy Lampeter as she interposed.
‘Did Sir Walter say dancing? Oh, but we aren’t going to dance! We’re going to dress up and play hide-and-seek all over the house – we may, mayn’t we, Lady Harow?’
‘Of course, darling,’ Lady Harow gave vague and sweet permission. ‘Has Sir Walter been told about the honey that was found, Gervaise?’
They took coffee in the hall. The firelight (Lady Harow liked a fire even in July) gave the wainscot a richer patina and flushed the frocks of the girls like a flower-bed seen at sunset. And as they stood, Gervaise took occasion to give Freddy Lampeter lesson number two. The aperitif-glass still stood on the wainscot ledge where she had set it down. A tiptoe maid was reaching for it. And now she saw that Freddy was watching her. Once more she lifted that arm that a man might have run a mile to see. She handed the glass to the maid, who retired. The next moment he was at her side, and, for the first time since their walk that afternoon, speaking to her.
‘Rather like the princess in the story, what?’ the private voice was saying.
With her head back, she looked along her lashes at him.
‘What story?’
‘Oh, a very old one; don’t you know it?’
‘No. But it’s nice to be called a princess,’ she remarked off-handedly.
The ironical little pit at the corner of his mouth seemed to deepen. His voice was the voice of the Freddy Lampeter who might have lain among cushions all his life.
‘It was their bridal-night, and the lamp in the chamber had to be put out. He was already in her arms. She couldn’t let him go, even for that moment. “Love, it would seem an age,” she whispered to him; and – Freddy’s eyes rested for a moment on the long white arm, and then seemed to make a track across the hall to the staircase at the further end of it – and so she stretched out her arm. And it stretched away from her, out and out, till it reached the lamp. It snuffed the wick. And then it was round him again. Didn’t you know it?’
Low as he had spoken, Pamela must have heard, for she gave a little shriek.
‘Oh, Freddy, how frrrrrightful! He married a ghost woman! Do let’s be ghosts tonight!’
But Gervaise had turned away.
Was it quite so well with her as she had thought?
6
The table with the puzzle had been brought into the hall, and over it Sir Walter and Lady Harow talked. Sir Walter, too, had his gift, of a great simplicity of heart, so that even his learning sat as lightly on him as a garment. He had grown up with these owners of the Abbey. He had taken Gervaise, a puckered pink mite, from her mother’s arms. He had seen her, a little anemone of flesh, in her bath. There was nothing he might not say to this family, so different a man would he have been had he said anything he should not have said.
‘Gervaise is tired out,’ he was saying to Lady Harow.
‘The darling child has so much to do!’ Gervaise’s mother answered serenely.
‘Does she do everything?’
‘Everything! So wonderfully!’
‘Does she happen to be in love?’
‘In love? Gervaise?’ said Lady Harow mildly. ‘She’s more like a man than a woman. She always was. And I’m sure she would never leave the Abbey.’
‘But she says you may have to?’
‘That’s when she looks on the black side. It passes off. A good blow and she’s all right again.’
Sir Walter mused. He understood Lady Harow, but he loved Ger-vaise. Where Gervaise went, there his love was as the air about her.
‘I don’t think she’s in love – ’ Lady Harow’s sentence tailed away.
‘Will you lend her to me for a little while?’
‘Oh, you’d never persuade her!’
‘I might try,’ he said.
‘I think I shall be visiting in Ayrshire this autumn,’ Lady Harow remarked; and she added, as another piece of the puzzle dropped into its place, ‘There! The last one took me three weeks, but I really believe I shall finish this in a week!’
As she spoke Gervaise entered the hall.
7
Ordinarily they played billiards or bridge after dinner, or danced; but no distant click of balls nor strumming of the piano had accompanied Sir Walter’s talk with Lady Harow. Indeed not a sound had been heard since, half an hour and more ago, the party had swept as if before a gale up the staircase that branched off to galleries to right and left. Pamela and another girl, waltzing together across the hall, had tried to waltz up the staircase also; and ‘Darling Pamela – always in such high spirits!’ Lady Harow had smiled as the two girls had come down in a flower-like huddle half way up. Now Gervaise entered alone, crossing the hall on her way to her own sitting-room.
‘What are they doing now, darling?’ her mother asked. ‘They want the doors unlocked. I’m going for my keys.’ ‘But surely it will be very dark!’ The lighting-system of the Abbey was ancient, the lamps half a day’s work, and family and guests lighted themselves to their rooms with the candles that stood in a long row on the table under the newel-post.
‘The far side will have the moon,’ Gervaise replied.
But before proceeding to get the keys she paused once more before the puzzle table. The map of Iceland was now a sizeable continent, and growing apace as the number of unused jigs diminished. As Gervaise looked her mouth became compressed, and there was a gloom of doubt in her eyes. Yet the lips were not still for all their compression, and neither were the fingers of the hand nearest Sir Walter. Next to him at dinner she had been gay. She was so no longer.
‘I’ve been asking your mother if you could come away with me,’ Sir Walter said.
She made a brave effort to shake off the growing mood.
‘Now? With the house full of people?’ she laughed.
‘Yes, if that were possible,’ he answered simply.
‘But it isn’t possible! And besides, why should I?’
‘For a change, my dear,’ he replied.
She laughed again, but now after quite a different fashion. Change! What else was her life but change – change, yet at the same time foredoomed unalterableness, either or both? To change her scene would not change Gervaise; and what could stop the onrushing changes of the Abbey itself? All this was in her breast; but aloud she merely said, ‘Is Uncle Watty just a little bit fond of me, mother, do you think?’ and she moved away.
And on her return through the hall she did not stop, but brightly waved the cluster of keys and ran upstairs.
For the convenience of the servants, the occupied bedrooms lay together. A single corridor turning a right-angle contained them all, first those of the girls, then those of the men, with Freddy Lampeter’s at the corner. Only Gervaise’s own room lay apart, down a different passage altogether.
She sought the guest-rooms. The first three into which she looked were lighted but empty. She only heard voices as she approached the turn of the corridor. Apparently they had all flocked to Pamela’s room.
It was a theatrical glimpse that Gervaise saw as she pushed at the door, of girls stepping out of this, slipping that over their heads, shaking out their hair, trying on cavalier hats, sashing themselves with impromptu borrowings. One of them, catching sight of Gervaise’s face, held up a shawl that glistened like a wall of Aladdin’s cave.
‘Come along and dress, Gervaise, we’ve kept this for you!’ she cried.
But Gervaise shook her head. First there were the dozens of doors to unlock. She waved to the half-dressed girls and shut them in. No sound came from the men’s quarters as she passed. Only under one door was a crack of light, and somewhere the odour of a Turkish cigarette. Gervaise set out on her journey.
She had provided herself with an electric torch, the beam of which flitted mysteriously over floorboards and skirtings. Certain doors she passed by; they were not essential to the escapade. But elsewhere the light of the torch rested for a moment on locks and fastenings, there was a jingling as she chose the key, and she passed on, leaving the door open behind her. Door after door she opened. High up in the wall of one passage a sort of clerestory of glazing glimmered palely, but this was not yet the moon’s quarter of the heavens. One door which she found open she closed again. It led to the servants’ rooms. It occurred to her that it might be as well to warn the servants of the game about to be played.
Then, at a point where she could travel no farther in a straight line, but must turn sharply to the left, she opened the door of a corner chamber and saw the astounding moon.
She stopped short and drew a deep breath; that rising moon compelled her. It seemed almost near at hand, within a bird-flight, hardly to be believed to be the same that in another hour or two would be riding small and high in the sky. It bulged over the hill, orange and enormous. Such was its solid rotundity that the perspective of its volcano-scape could be traced over its retreating round. It made a glow a quarter of the heavens wide about it, and its effulgence seemed to dye the earth, as the foot of the rainbow tints field and tree and hill. The apartment in which Gervaise stood was a mere plastered cell in the honeycomb of the house, never used; but that hanging bullseye out in space pencilled with shadow every tiniest accident of its walls, and sent Gervaise’s own shadow streaming across the floor and then doubling like a piece of dark folded paper a yard up the skirting.
And thereafter, as she passed along the moonlit wing, leaving door after door wide open behind her, sometimes two rooms, sometimes three, were as curiously patterned with light and dark as if the eye had peered down the shining barrel of a gun.
8
Already she would have given a good deal to have been excused her part of the harlequinade; but what was the good of moping? Pamela’s way was the sensible way – to laugh till the tears came into the eyes, dress up, have a fling! Here were the moon-flooded rooms, and the doors stood open. Romp through them, then, and let cares take care of themselves!
But one does not become a Pamela on quite such easy terms as that. One is perhaps less a Pamela than ever when one has to tell one’s self these things. Gervaise, reaching the ballroom with the chandeliers and the mirrors in which she had gazed at herself that afternoon, knew that she could no more be Pamela than Pamela she. We are born ourselves, die ourselves, and are nothing but ourselves in the space between.
Honey of the richest, but locked up in the interior of a wall!
But at least one can always take one set of clothes off and put others on. For the matter of that, if this whim was her guests’ choice, she herself must most conspicuously dress up and be one of them. Her round of the doors had taken some time. She was still far from her own room. Their fantastic game of ‘Puss-in-the-corner’ might already have begun. She had better hasten.
With the beam of the torch wavering like a will-o’-the-wisp about her feet she hurried in the direction of her own room.
She did not intend to wear the shawl they had kept for her, that looked like a wall of Aladdin’s cave. She had had a gayer inspiration. At some time or other in the past, she had forgotten for what tableau or amateur performance, she had made herself a gown, not (to be sure) very accurately the Lady Jane’s of the picture in the little gallery, but near enough, the slightness of the occasion taken into account, to pass muster as a representation. She had long since forgotten all about this costume. She had no idea where it was, supposing her still to have it; and things lost in that rambling Abbey were best looked for by daylight. But she remembered it now. Pamela, little
mayfly that she was of moist mouth, satiny textures and artless sprawls, got her effects after a fashion, but there was more of dateless beauty in one of Gervaise’s Pheidian arms than in the whole of Pamela’s putting-together. So – the Lady Jane be it.
And if Freddy Lampeter’s inquisitiveness about the picture really had been an experimenting with Gervaise herself; and if she should happen to surprise him in moonlit chamber or dark corridor, that would be lesson number three for him.
Her luck stood by her. In an oaken room of cupboards, by the light of the electric torch, she put her hand upon the costume straight away. Then, seeking her own room, by fire and lamplight mingled, she looked in the glass, first at those arms of hers that issued from the sooty black, and then at the stuffed and quilted sleeves of the tableau-dress. And her thought must have pleased her, for she smiled. From what she knew of Freddy, arms that he did not see might well be more interesting to him than those displayed in their beauty before his eyes. She had taken care that he should see them from armpit to finger-tip once that evening. Let him make what he could of the Lady Jane and her padding now!
But as she still stood in the sooty black with the firelight warm on the ceiling and her image in the tilted glass sloping towards her as if to fall upon her, again she paused. Her arms? What was that story about arms he had whispered so privately into her ear? Who was this princess of his tale, who could not spare her lover from his warm place by her side, no, not for the mere moment it would have taken to put out a light? What eternity in an instant was this he had hinted at? What this urgency of passion, this ghost-woman’s arm long enough to have gone nine times round him? Had he meant her and himself? And had he actually had the effrontery to tell her so?
As if she had been dealt a blow, all at once she knew why she had paused at her mother’s puzzle-table on her way through the hall. She knew why her compressed lips had quivered and her hands had not been still. He was not dismembered. He was whole once more, with the old, easy, scoffing, familiar power over her. All was to begin anew. Once more she was to know those perturbed moments of meeting, the pain at her pent heart, the flushings, the exhausting resolve, his re-demolishing. The two or three hours in which she had been rid of him were over, and when next they met it would be she who would have to beware, not he.
The Dead of Night Page 19