Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  But those words, so obviously intended to melt his daughter to a like frankness, did nothing but harm. There had been a pleasant touch of grace in the discomfort with which Lois had been listening to the apology of a man so much older than herself. For it was in that light only that she regarded him. He had acquired in her thoughts none of the tender associations of a father. But even that sign of grace vanished from her now. The very hardness of the frozen ground outside the window had its counterpart in her aspect and her voice.

  “Indeed?” she asked.

  “Yes. For I had not one suspicion that I had a daughter at all until your mother told me of you in this room.”

  He saw her body stiffen and her eyes widen in amazement — amazement at his effrontery.

  “You don’t believe that,” he said.

  “No.”

  “It is most important that you should.”

  “How can I?”

  What could he plead? His tenderness to her, his care for her enjoyments and comfort, his pride in her during these last months? But if resentment had blinded her to them, if the little which she may have noticed were set down by her to the account of a forced repayment, of what avail were they at all? The plea would mean just one more profitless humiliation for him.

  “How can I prove it?” he cried, tossing up his hands in a gesture of despair. “I can’t. But—” and he hesitated. But they had come to such a pass that the most sacred reticences must go down in their imperious need. “But I think your mother would tell you that what I am saying is true.”

  Lois flinched as though he had struck her. How she should meet her beloved mother was one of the questions she wanted to reserve until she was alone, and Upper Theign a thing of the past behind her. She had meant to hear no word about her mother from the man who had spoilt her mother’s life.

  “She might — yes,” Lois agreed. “She would take the kind view. But, you see, my mother doesn’t know what I know.”

  Suddenly Mark leaned forward. He was looking for the key to her conduct. He would not believe that a mere passion for money, even a mere resentment against him, had persuaded her so far as theft. There was a secret she was holding back. Any word of hers might let it slip.

  “What do you know, Lois? Tell me! Tell me!”

  For a moment Lois seemed a little less positive. What she knew was shameful to Mark Thewliss. Yet he urged her to tell it. He was all eagerness that she should tell it. There was not a hint of apprehension in his manner. He might have been innocent of what to her was the worst part of the whole business.

  “I had just left school when Henry Perriton told me that I was your daughter,” she explained. “I wanted thirty pounds for a course of shorthand and typewriting, and I went to his office to borrow the money from him. We were poor and I meant to pay it back. But he was in a bad mood that morning and he blurted out who I was. But that wasn’t all. He dragged me to the window and pointed out to me on the pavement opposite your agent Joseph Wyatt.”

  Mark Thewliss started, but it was only with surprise.

  “Perriton had identified him?”

  “He told me that Wyatt came up to Liverpool four times a year to keep an eye on us.”

  “That’s true.”

  “True? You admit it?”

  Lois stared at Mark in amazement.

  “Yes.”

  “Well then...You see.”

  “No.”

  Mark Thewliss was apparently as perplexed as she. Certainly he betrayed none of the discomfort which a man detected in some ignoble precaution might be expected to feel. He was either the perfect actor or — but no, she couldn’t be wrong.

  “I see nothing except some dreadful mistake which has preyed on you, Lois, and warped your life.”

  Lois shook her head.

  “There could be only one reason why Joseph Wyatt was spying upon us in Liverpool. Henry Perriton gave it to me that morning.”

  “Perriton indeed!” cried Mark in a swift burst of anger. “What more harm did he do that day?”

  “There could be only one reason,” Lois repeated steadily. “You were thinking of marrying when you sent Wyatt first of all, weren’t you?”

  “Yes. That was why I sent him.”

  “Exactly. You knew who I was, you knew about us, that we were poor people. You wanted to be sure that we weren’t going to trouble you after you were married.”

  “What?”

  Mark sprang up from his chair. His mouth dropped. He gazed at the girl below him in her chair, as though he could not believe his ears.

  “I sent Joseph Wyatt on his journeys to the North to make sure that you weren’t between you planning to blackmail me? You thought that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And—” Mark’s voice changed. It lost its high note of protest. It sank to gentleness.

  “And you think that, Lois?”

  As once before, during that interview, her self-control broke up.

  “I don’t know,” she cried aloud in a wail of distress. “I did think it when we came into this room. Now I don’t know.”

  For a moment he laid his hand gently upon her shoulder. “I shall tell you why I sent Joseph Wyatt.”

  Lois nodded her head and Mark resumed his seat. He began to tell her of his visit to Tony Westram at Gissens, of his drive back to London, with the thoughts of marriage and a country seat in his mind, of the sudden impulse which had made him drive to Ely Place and make sure first that all was well with Mona Lightfoot. It was a difficult story to tell to Mona’s daughter, and in the telling of it Mark was even more uneasy than he needed to be. He was unconsciously missing something which would have helped him and made more smooth the flow of his words. But Lois knew what it was that he missed.

  “Wait!” she said, and she stood up.

  Her movement was hardly deliberate. She wanted to hear his story in all its details, and the habit of months asserted itself — the habit of looking after the little things which made for his comfort and helped him through the puzzles of his work. She went to a side-table, chose a cigar for him from a box of big Cabanas, snicked the end with a silver cutter which lay beside the box, and carried it over to Mark.

  “I’ll light it for you,” she said, and she struck a wooden match and held it to the cigar whilst Mark drew at the tobacco until it was evenly alight. Then she returned to her chair. The tiny incident struck Derek in his corner as oddly significant, because it was so natural, so unpremeditated. Even in the midst of this crisis, when father and daughter were pitted against each other, the customary routine of life had had its way. Lois had done this little service a hundred times. Neither she nor Mark found anything strange in its repetition despite the utter change in their relationship. Neither indeed seemed to notice it at all. It was not a concession on her part. It was hardly an interruption for him.

  “Now,” said Lois, and Mark with a greater ease found the words he needed.

  “When Wyatt brought me word that Mona was married and had a daughter,” and the ghost of a smile flickered over his face, “a crasher, he called you, not homey, not his type, but a crasher, I understood that there was nothing for me to do but to stand aloof and help if I could. There wasn’t much I could do. I put a little business in Perriton’s way. I could and would have put more, but he didn’t welcome it, and since every time Wyatt returned he was confident that your mother was contented and happy.”

  He broke off as he saw the look of pain which gave suddenly to Lois’ face the very aspect of a tragic mask.

  “He told you that!” she exclaimed breathlessly.

  “Yes.”

  “That my mummie was happy!”

  “Yes.”

  “And you believed it!”

  The amazement in her voice grew louder upon every word.

  “Yes, I did. Wasn’t I right? Oh!” and his question ended in a moan of anxiety.

  “Right!” cried Lois. “If twenty years of patient misery mean happiness, then my mother was happy.”

&nbs
p; Mark Thewliss was aghast. He had been accustomed to preen himself a little over his supervision of Mona Lightfoot’s life. Not many men, he would say to himself, would have taken so much trouble. But it was well worth while since it brought to him once a quarter the comfortable assurance that all was well with her. Now his complacency was shattered. He had been feeding on Wyatt’s lies.

  In his distress he caught at another’s evidence.

  “But your mother herself told me in this room, when she brought you here, that her life had been wonderful.”

  A tender smile softened Lois’ face and restored to it its beauty. “I bet she did,” she answered, and the warmth of her heart and all her pride was in the cry. “You knew my mother. She would have died rather than admit to you that she had suffered because you—” She stopped to find a phrase which would not bite too savagely, “because you let her go,” and try as she would she could not keep the bitterness out of her voice.

  There was silence for a little while in the room and then Mark in a voice of compunction and abasement whispered:

  “Tell me, Lois.”

  “I will.”

  It was right that he should know. People couldn’t utterly spoil her mother’s life and get away with it, untroubled and self-satisfied. No, indeed! Lois lifted the blinds of Glebe Villa in Acacia Grove, and revealed a mean, drunken little man with a cheap gift of sarcasm, and a silent woman held to perpetual penance by the threat that the daughter would be told of the stigma on her birth. Lois made a good showman that morning. The sordid wretchedness of that household in a back street of Liverpool lost none of its asperity in the telling.

  “I wanted to be free of it, because I wanted my mother to be free of it,” Lois exclaimed. “Oh, how she had put up with it all those years, I couldn’t imagine! Her courage, her patience! And it was all for my sake! I wanted to make a little home for her, to take her away very far from Acacia Grove, where we could live together — oh, like people in a fairy-book.”

  Lois had quite forgotten herself. She kindled to that old sweet dream of hers as though it were still untried and fresh.

  “And I was seeing my way,” she went on, “all through the War I was saving money. In a very little while I should be able to say ‘Come to me!’ But with the end of the War, the crash came for me,” and the light died out of her eyes, and the tender smile turned to bitterness. “I had a year of disappointments. My savings were going and—”

  Mark finished the sentence for her.

  “And Hoyle came to you with his inducements.”

  “Yes.”

  “So that was it.”

  Mark had got the secret now, and so vast a load was taken from his heart that only then did he understand how deep it had thrust him down.

  “It was for your mother, then,” he cried, and he shook himself like a man set free. But the very relief in his voice was a warning to the girl. She must be wise now for him, for herself. He must make no more pretty images of a dream daughter. He should have the whole truth of her so far as her self-knowledge enabled her to give it.

  “Not altogether for my mother’s sake,” she corrected. “No! I was thinking of myself too. I used a foolish phrase last night about my birthright. You remember! Well, that had been in my thoughts for a long time — ever since I took a holiday a year and a half ago. I hadn’t troubled about it before. But I went to Venice. It was my first real holiday. The first time I had been abroad, and I was taken by some friends to that magical city. For me it was day upon day of wonder and — yes, I’m not frightened by the word — of rapture. But after a while a shabby little thought began to spoil my enjoyment. Everyone I met seemed to come there each year as they chose. For me it was once and perhaps never again or only after an interval of years. Do you understand? I began to blame you, not on my mother’s account as I had done, but on my own.”

  Lois was putting her case crudely, cruelly, as she could not but see from the distress upon Mark Thewliss’ face.

  “You see, it would have been my birthright to have gone there and to the other joyous marvellous places, had — well, had you married my mother instead of leaving her to be wasted with Henry Perriton. There was one day in particular. We went in a large party down the lagoon to Chioggia, and on the way back picnicked under the stars on another little island whilst some Italian sailors sang to us. The warmth of that night, the trembling little lanes of starlight on the dark sea, the music, the joyous friendliness of everyone — it was a revelation of loveliness, but of loveliness embittered by the thought that such loveliness was really a right of mine, of which I had been cheated.”

  She saw Mark wince as she uttered the word.

  “Yes! It sounds horribly ignoble to me now,” she went on. “But there it was. I had that envy of my friends, that resentment against” — and she dropped her voice to a whisper— “against my father. There was another night, my last night. A great singer sang to Venice in the Piazza late at night. It was — unimaginable. The big exquisite square filled with people all silent and spellbound, a moonlit sky overhead, St. Mark’s cupolas at the end and the singer’s voice soaring above the moan of the violins — oh, I can remember it now as sheer beauty. But then I thought that I was going home to-morrow to tramp from office to office in the search for work. I, Mark Thewliss’ daughter.”

  Behind her Derek Crayle had suddenly a vision of that square and of a girl’s face that grew wistful and utterly sad, and of a pair of eyes which filled with tears, as the last notes of Aïda died upon the air. He had often wondered what bitter recollections had brought that unforgettable look into Lois’ face. As for Mark, he could only repeat:

  “I didn’t know you were my daughter. I didn’t know!”

  But he could have known, if only twenty-five years ago he had not been so careful to give a wide berth to the Dean’s Elbow. And the knowledge that he could have known was staring at both of them. But there was a truth still harder for Mark to listen to; and though it was spoken reluctantly and in a voice which had now grown gentle and without a note of resentment, the words struck the more sharply on that account.

  “You see,” she continued, and broke off, “I don’t think I can tell you. It’s all done with now. Let it lie, please.”

  But Mark would not.

  “I must know,” he said obstinately.

  “I never meant to say a word of this.”

  “Better to say it than to let it rankle unsaid.”

  “Very well. But it’s difficult.”

  She paused, seeking words which would express her meaning and yet wrap it round with the seemliness which befitted a girl speaking to her father. For in this half-hour her heart had softened to him. But they were both in such dire straits that there were no words of the kind she wanted, no minimising twists of phrase, no suggestions but were liable to be misunderstood. She had to lay bare her thought as simply as she could.

  “I thought that we had both, my mother and I, been deprived of our places in the world because you were in a hurry. You must have everything yourself, and as quickly as possible. You wouldn’t marry my mother, wonderful though she was, because you must marry in the world of greater opportunity. You couldn’t be content to leave that to the second generation. For that’s the way the great families are built up, isn’t it? Gradually, generation by generation, each one like people on a snow-slope, treading down the snow and making it firmer for those who followed. The way of nature. But no, you wouldn’t have that. It must all be done within your single lifetime, and so my mother and I must go to the wall.”

  The indictment was not to be denied. Mark Thewliss bent his head before it. He had no answer, and silence descended upon the room. For a little while he stared into the fire. Suppose that he had shut his eyes and his ears and his heart to his consuming passion for the sensation of power! Suppose that he had repaid Mona Lightfoot for the sacrifice of herself with what he had to give! He speculated upon the different life which would have been his with Lois his acknowledged child and woke to wo
nder whether the speculation was a treachery to Olivia or no. He woke, too, to see that Lois was standing up.

  “So I tried to steal from you,” she said, and she took a step towards the door.

  XXVIII. AND THE TERTIUM QUID

  BUT DEREK CRAYLE rose up in his corner at the same moment. This was his appointed moment. Before Lois could reach the door he was in her path.

  “You can’t go, my dear, like that. It’s not so simple.”

  Lois drew back.

  “Oh, Derek,” she pleaded, and he shook his head stubbornly.

  “But I must go. After what I’ve done, even if you and I and my father were alone, I shouldn’t find it possible to stay. I think that I’m somehow horrid in myself. I should see in every kindness a charity, and I can’t bear charity. But we three are not alone, and it’s doubly impossible.”

  There was no need for Lois to cross her t’s. Even if Olivia buried her hatchet and Lois could subdue her nature to meekness, there would be such a tension upon all, such a need of circumspection and delicate treading that life in that household would be intolerable.

  “I don’t say that you mustn’t go, Lois,” he replied. “But you mustn’t just go off, You see, you and Mark have said to each other what you had to say. No doubt it had to be said. But it’s done with. I’m not done with.”

  “Oh, Derek!”

  She spoke his name in a whisper, and very tenderly. The last hard tone had gone from her voice, her great dark eyes were dewy, her face unutterably wistful.

  “I’m beginning, Lois. Or rather, I began when you came into the dining-room. I love you very dearly.”