Still She Wished for Company

by Margaret Irwin

  The stripes of sunlight moved gradually towards the wall, faded finally from the room. Then, when candles were lit in the great rooms below, Monsieur le Due appeared like some beautiful bright moth, arrayed in the finest clothes, his fingers fluttering ceaselessly about the carved head of his “Ethiopian inamorata,” and played cards with the family till far into the night.

  This was the order of his day during his visit. He was completely incurious and had no wish to see his friend’s estate and countryside, nor even the rest of his house. Nor did he evince any more interest in the neighbours that were invited to meet him. Cards were his company, he said, and they most certainly were his friends. George and Vesey found their contempt for “the feather-brained foreigner” rudely shocked by his uncanny skill, a skill that had disagreeable consequences to themselves. As for Lucian, who had been acclaimed on his return as the most brilliant card player in the countryside, he seemed quite accustomed to lose money to Monsieur le Due, whether at ombre or piquet or at whist. Juliana, who was not allowed as yet to play, would sit on her stool and watch and wonder how it was that any man could be cleverer with the cards than Lucian. The odd thing was that while Lucian would laugh and joke about it when he lost, and take it as the most natural and pleasant thing in the world, Monsieur le Due seemed positively to dread winning from him, and would try and avoid playing with him, and when he won be quite out of countenance.

  It was very dull for Juliana. “If it is like this in his own house, I have no wish to marry him,” she said to Lucian, “and he certainly appears to have no wish to marry me. I might have been married to him for ten years already, for all the attention he pays me.”

  “Admirable. That is a foretaste of how you will be able to speak when you are married. You foolish child, do you imagine that your life will be to sit in a corner and watch your husband play? You will hold a great position at the French Court. I know that there is no one there as beautiful as you will be— or as brilliant as, in a little time, you will be. Oh, not with a flashing, obvious brilliance. You will hold your own in your own way, a way new to them, that will surprise and enchant them. In England you might have wealth as great, but not that power and position, the dazzling liberty that you would have in the French Court.”

  “Liberty,” said Juliana thoughtfully.

  “Yes, liberty,” repeated her brother, whose eyes were twinkling so very brightly that she wondered if he were laughing. “A liberty that I trust you will employ by seeing what you can of an idle, sauntering brother who prefers wasting his time in the French capital to anywhere else. I need hardly remind you that if you had married Mr. Daintree you would have been permitted to see scarcely anything of a relative that he dislikes and distrusts so much.”

  “Why does he, brother?”

  “Why? Because he is jealous of me. Oh, no, it is not at all absurd, but quite natural. He fears my influence over you.”

  “And have you influence over me?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Why? Why do you hope it? What do you wish to do with me?” She put her fingers over her eyes to shut out his merry, searching glance, as she tried to think of all the questions that she had wanted to ask him at other times and could never remember when she was with him.

  “I wish”—she began again—“can you not tell me? What use or amusement can I be to you?”

  “And I am to tell you that! My pretty sister, is it your humility that prompts such questions?”

  “No,” said Juliana stoutly,” it is my good sense. I cannot pretend to be an equal companion to you, brother. What is it, then, that we share, and why is it that when you are here I sometimes go—go where I do not know——” She grew con fused. It was of no use. She was stupid and blundering, and Lucian understood everything so much more clearly than she could express it. He understood now, for he took her in his arms very kindly and reassuringly.

  “Would you be less afraid if I came too?” he asked. “I tell you I would come if I could.”

  He spoke these last words with a bitter intensity that astonished her.

  “What,” he continued, “are you surprised that I should find this life tedious? Oh, I am not speaking only of life here at Chidleigh. I have travelled since I was fifteen, I have done all that I wished, there is nothing left for me to try or to discover. Paris, London, Rome, Vienna are as dull as Chidleigh, the people there as interminably the same. I am twenty-six, and I am faced with the prospect of finding nothing new to do for the rest of my life. I am not blessed with the resigned spirit of Saint Aumerle, who, comprehending that there is nothing now left that can divert him, stays in bed and does embroidery in order to pass the time. It is bad enough to be the slave of time, space and circumstance, but added to that we are born in so smug, self-satisfied and prosperous an age that there is not the slightest chance of our living to witness any change in it. When we are old we shall be what our fathers and mothers have been and there’s an end.”

  “Lucian! Mamma is always telling me that the present age is the most enlightened the world has yet seen.”

  “Juliana, that is exactly my complaint against it. It is so enlightened that it can wish for nothing better. We are at the pinnacle of civilization and can only hope to remain exactly where we are. Everything is entirely satisfactory, therefore poetry is dead, religion is démodé, enthusiasm is worse than vulgar, it is ridiculous, the supernatural is for children’s tales, patriotism for troublesome scoundrels, and the Hanoverians remain heavily planted on the throne.”

  Juliana looked up, her eyes shining.

  “Oh, but,” she said, “I know, I have felt so too, indeed I have. I have longed and longed not to have been born in so dull an age, an age when nothing can ever happen and everything is always precisely the same.”

  “Yet you would marry Mr. Daintree and go on being always precisely the same,” he replied quickly.

  “I would not. But for that matter, if I married Monsieur de Saint Aumerle——”

  “Monsieur de Saint Aumerle is a cypher,” he interposed contemptuously. “If you marry him you will be free to do exactly as you please.”

  Juliana was silent. She was not certain that she wished to marry a cypher. Presently she said, “It was not so that you spoke of him to me on the terrace.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. The animation of disgust that had lit up his face when he spoke of his own times, had died out and left his eyes with that dull, opaque look that sometimes seemed to cover them as with a film.

  Juliana looked up at him as he lounged against the window-seat where she was sitting. She noticed that there were many lines in his face; at this moment he had the appearance of a man prematurely old. She put up a hand and timidly touched his arm.

  “I should be glad if I could be of use or amusement to you, brother,” she said.

  That evening when Juliana retired to bed, she found she did not need the glance and pressure of the hand with which Lucian bade her good-night, to tell her that she should meet him in the library, as before. It had grown unnecessary for him to tell her things. She knew.

  As Lucian turned from her she thought that the pale blue eyes of Monsieur le Due, which never seemed to look at anyone, had been looking at them. She did not see him look, nor look away, so that she had no reason for thinking so. In any case, it was of no importance.

  Chapter XVII

  The full moon had risen above the trees in front of the library windows, and in its light the lawn outside looked a pale and unsubstantial grey as though it were the sky.

  As before, Juliana sat in one of the armchairs which had been drawn up with its back to the table and facing the closed windows. Lucian had blown out all the candles but one on the table, and had shaded that, so that she could now see the moonlight in the room, three paths of light from the three windows. The path from the centre window reached just to her feet and shone on her green and silver shoes, while her white dress was grey in the shadow beyond the moonlight.

  Lucian did not appear to
have stirred since he had blown out the candles. He was standing a little way behind her, as before. She did not know what he was doing. The room was very still.

  She seemed to be looking into immeasurable grey space, for the wall and windows in front of her had disappeared. Then something small and white passed in front of her, across the greyness. At first she thought it was an egg, then she saw that it was the face of Monsieur le Due, some way off, with the eyes not quite closed, and a thin red rim showing beneath the lids. It was gone before she could understand what made it look so strange, and the space before her was blank again.

  Then, suddenly and violently, another face pressed through the obscurity, came nearer, close in front of her, stared and gaped at her. The vague immensity rolled away, she saw the door windows of the library before her again, the branches of trees outside them, sharp and black against the moonlit sky, and, outside the window, that same gaping, staring face, the mouth twisted now as though it were shrieking aloud. Yet no sound could be heard. The stillness was as thick, as impenetrable as before. That strange yet familiar thing outside the window raised hands and seemed to strike against the glass, yet again no thud nor rattle could be heard.

  In one movement Lucian flung himself across the room, but before he had reached the window the intruder disappeared as suddenly and, it seemed, as violently as it had come. He tore open the window and rushed outside. Juliana heard his steps running swiftly through the garden, she heard him calling, and then she heard nothing.

  She found that she was icy cold and shaking from head to foot. She pressed her hands to her face.” I am afraid—afraid,” she said in a low moan. Then she made a discovery that increased her fear. “ She meant me to be afraid. She was trying to speak to me, to warn me. What did she wish to say?”

  She dared sit still there no longer. She rose and walked about the room, in and out of the three paths of moonlight, her dress now white, now grey, in the shadow, her shoes gleaming on the dark floor.

  She was repeating words to herself, as though she were anxious to tell herself clearly what it was she feared. “It was that same girl. She haunts this house. And she comes nearer. She wishes to enter.”

  She walked more slowly, still repeating the last words. She looked towards the windows, wondering when Lucian would return, then went to the open window and looked out. Would he not come when called, even as she had come to him on the terrace? She wanted him so much. “Lucian, Lucian,” she called at last, aloud.

  But the moonlight lay still on the lawn between the black yew trees, and the air was still. There was no shadow of an approaching form, no sound but the churr of a night-jar far away.

  It was inconceivable that out of so still a night there should have come that face, distorted in a terrified anxiety that was for her, Juliana, and not herself. She sank again into the arm-chair and remained there with head averted from the windows.

  She heard the door handle being turned behind her. But Lucian had locked it; no one could get in. She did not raise her head. There came a persistent scratching, clicking noise at the door. She was now too frightened to go and see what it was. She stayed there in her rigid position, her hands over her face.

  Suddenly, without her having heard its approach, a quick, light step that she knew came in at the window in front of her and at the same moment she heard the door flung open behind her. She took her hands from her face and turned her head. Lucian was just behind her and the room was much lighter, but she could not see who had come in, for Lucian was leaning against the back of the chair between her and the door. She knew that he wished her to remain still.

  “These are strange manners,” he was saying coolly, “to force the lock of a door that you find closed against you. I do not wish to be disturbed.”

  “A thousand pardons,” said the thin, clear voice of Monsieur le Due.

  “Go—and at once,” replied his host.

  There was silence, so deep that it seemed to have lasted for hours. Then suddenly she heard Monsieur le Due laugh. It was the first time she had ever heard him laugh. It was a horrible sound, thin and high, and for some unknown reason it made her feel very cold.

  “But yes,” he said, slowly and distinctly, “I can see very plainly the little green and silver shoes there in the moonlight.”

  Lucian was quite still. Now that she had been seen, should she rise or keep where she was? But there was no need to decide, for Monsieur le Due came forward to the windows so that he looked at her and she at him. He wore his blue night-rail and turban, in one hand he carried a lighted candle and in the other his sword.

  “Yes,” he said, speaking now very fast. “My friend Lord Chidleigh has had uses for us both. I see it well. You go now on his errands as I have done. You go far, very far, farther than I. Your spirit is the better for the purpose—the spirit of a young virgin, a pure child. Mine he has used till it withered. I am not a man—I am a dead instrument. And now I am to be united to you so that your husband may not stand in your way— you shall be free to go where your brother wishes. You may go farther yet, so far that you never return. You may go——”

  “Lucian!” She turned in an entreating question to where he lounged against her chair. “What does he mean?”

  “Nothing, my dear. His spirit, as he is pleased to call it, has never known what it is to be fresh, and therefore could not be withered by me. For some little time I gave him a new interest by employing him on my own pursuits. He was not much use as he has very correctly informed you. Now that he has wearied of it, as of all else, his spirit is exactly what it was before, that is to say practically nothing. You may now leave us, Juliana, and go to bed.”

  But Juliana was looking at Monsieur le Due whose face seemed to have grown smaller and narrower as though it had been screwed up. He said almost in a whisper—

  “I serve your purposes no longer, Lord Chidleigh.”

  Juliana wanted to shriek out, to tell her brother to escape while yet he could, so dreadful was that look on the face of Monsieur le Due. The next instant she did indeed cry out, for there was a gleaming flash before her eyes as their guest, without warning, lunged at Lucian. There was a sharp sound behind her chair, Monsieur lunged again, but this time the sword clashed on steel. She sprang up.

  Monsieur le Due was leaning against the wall, his hands to his throat. Lucian stood in front of him, his drawn sword in his hand, and the point of it was red. The Frenchman’s eyes stared, his mouth gaped. He was breathing with a shrill whistling noise such as Juliana had never heard.

  “Lucian,” she stammered. “Lucian!”

  “It is done now,” said her brother.

  He wiped the point of his sword on his lace handkerchief, then rammed it back into its sheath. But Juliana still did not understand. It had all happened so quickly. She had thought it was, Lucian who was hurt, perhaps killed. The Frenchman could not be badly hurt, there was no wound to be seen, no blood. Yet his face was ghastly, and he was staggering; he could stand no longer.

  Lucian helped him to the chair where Juliana had sat. His hands had fallen to his side and revealed a narrow, red wound in his throat that bled hardly at all.

  “What can we do?” said Juliana. “The doctor—some cordial—mamma’’

  “They would none of them be of any use,” said Lucian, “it is done now.”

  Monsieur le Due looked up at him and his lips moved but no sound came. Then in a low, voiceless whisper, he succeeded in saying, “I will not forget.”

  There was a rattle in his throat, his head fell back. Lucian bent over his face, then pressed the eyelids down over the staring eyes. But they were not quite closed, and a thin, red rim showed beneath the lids.

  “He is dead,” said Lucian.

  He remained standing by the chair, looking down at the dead man, and presently he spoke again, the words dropping from him slowly, consideringly, as though he were weighing the matter with himself.

  “I once saved his life,” he said, “and I saved it in more ways tha
n one. Since then I was his master. He did what I chose. And now he would have done so no longer—he had reached the breaking point—very suddenly. I did not think he would do that so suddenly. It was foolish of me. It is well I killed him, for he would not have been safe after that. But I am sorry that you should have been here.”

  She accepted his statement without wonder or attempt at comprehension. She was too much stunned for that. Monsieur le Due had seen her shoes in the moonlight and had laughed. He had attacked Lucian and Lucian had killed him.

  These events were acted over and over again in her mind without meaning, without sequence or connection. As isolated sounds and pictures they repeated themselves before her until it seemed that she had stood there for some hours looking at the figure in the chair.

  She had been taken into the room to see her father when he was dead, but that had been so different.

  She heard Lucian’s voice speaking to her again, but she did not hear what he said. He stood in front of her and taking her by the shoulders, thrust her gently into a chair. She shuddered as he touched her, but his eyes were fixed on hers and presently she had to look at them. They were close to her, two hard, dull pebbles. “You will sleep now,” he said, “and forget.” The eyes receded until they were mere points, motionless, devoid of light and colour. She saw nothing else, and the sights and sounds that had been so vividly imprinted on her mind faded into a blurred and painful impression. Then even that disappeared.

  Chapter XVIII

  Juliana woke late the next morning. She would have liked to have slept again for she was very tired, and she was sure she had had bad dreams though she was glad she could not remember them. But she wondered that Molly had not brought her chocolate, for it was long past the time for it. She sat up in bed and listened. There was some commotion going on downstairs. People were hurrying, running up and down, calling in an odd, subdued way. She began to tremble violently, and pulled at the bell, tugging it persistently until Molly burst into the room, her eyes very round, her mouth open, her usually red cheeks quite pale.