Part 9 (1/2)
”I remember that money,” Fay interrupted. ”Hugo was so pleased about it, and gave me a diamond chain.”
”Fay, where do you keep your jewellery?”
”There isn't any to keep now. He 'realised' it all long before we left Dariawarpur.”
”What do you mean, Fay? Has Hugo p.a.w.ned it? All Mother's things, too?”
”I don't know what he did with it,” Fay said, wearily. ”He told me it wasn't safe in Dariawarpur, as there were so many robbers about that hot weather, and he took all the things in their cases to send to the bank.
And I never saw them again.”
Jan said nothing, but she reflected rather ruefully that when Fay married she had let her have nearly all their mother's ornaments, partly because Fay loved jewels as jewels, and Jan cared little for them except as a.s.sociations. ”If I'd kept more,” Jan thought, ”they'd have come in for little Fay. Now there's nothing except what Daddie gave me.”
”Are you sorry, Jan?” Fay asked, presently. ”I suppose there again you think I ought to have stood out, to have made inquiries and insisted on getting a receipt from the bank. But I knew very well they were not going to the bank. I don't think they fetched much, but Hugo looked a little less hara.s.sed after he'd got them. I've nothing left now but my wedding ring and the little enamel chain like yours, that Daddie gave us the year he had that portrait of Meg in the Salon and took us over to see it. Where is Meg? Has she come back yet?”
”Meg is still in Bremen with an odious German family, but she leaves at the end of the Christmas holidays, as the girl is going to school, and Meg will be utilised to bring her over. Then she's to have a rest for a month or two, and I daresay she'd come to Wren's End and help us with the babies when we get back.”
Fay leant forward and said eagerly, ”Try to get her, Jan. I'd love to think she was there to help you.”
”To help us,” Jan repeated firmly.
Fay sighed. ”I can never think of myself as of much use any more; besides ... Oh, Jan, won't you face it? You who are so brave about facing things ... I don't believe I shall come through--this time.”
Jan got up and walked restlessly about the verandah. She tried to make herself say, heard her own voice saying without any conviction, that it was nonsense; that Fay was run down and depressed and no wonder; and that she would feel quite different in a month or two. And all the time, though her voice said these preposterously ba.n.a.l things, her brain repeated the doctor's words after his last visit: ”I wish there was a little more stamina, Miss Ross. I don't like this complete inertia. It's not natural. Can't you rouse her at all?”
”My sister has had a very trying time, you know. She seems thoroughly worn out.”
”I know, I know,” the doctor had said. ”A bad business and cruelly hard on her; but I wish we could get her strength up a bit somehow. I don't like it--this lack of interest in everything--I don't like it.” And the doctor's thin, clever face looked lined and worried as he left.
His words rang in Jan's ears, drowning her own spoken words that seemed such a hollow sham.
She went and knelt by Fay's long chair. Fay touched her cheek very gently (little Fay had the same adorable tender gestures). ”It would make it easier for both of us if you'd face it, my dear,” she said. ”I could talk much more sensibly then and make plans, and perhaps really be of some use. But I feel a wretched hypocrite to talk of sharing in things when I know perfectly well I shan't be there.”
”Don't you want to be there?” Jan asked, hoa.r.s.ely.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”It would make it easier for both of us if you'd face it, my dear.”]
Fay shook her head. ”I know it's mean to shuffle out of it all, but I _am_ so tired. Do you think it very horrid of me, Jan?”
In silence Jan held her close; and in that moment she faced it.
The days went on, strange, quiet days of brilliant suns.h.i.+ne. Their daily life shrouded from the outside world even as the verandah was shrouded from the sun when Lalkhan let down the chicks every day after tiffin.
Peter was their only visitor besides the doctor, and Peter came practically every day. He generally took Jan out after tea, sometimes with the children, sometimes alone. He even went with her to the bank in Elphinstone Circle, so like a bit of Edinburgh, with its solid stone houses, and found that Hugo actually had lodged fifty pounds there in Fay's name. The clerks looked curiously at Jan, for they thought she was Mrs. Tancred. Every one in business or official circles in Bombay knew about Hugo Tancred. His conduct had, for a while, even ousted the usual topics of conversation--money, food, and woman--from the bazaars; and an exhaustive discussion of it was only kept out of the Native Press by the combined efforts of the Police and his own Department. Jan gained from Peter a fairly clear idea of the _debacle_ that had occurred in Hugo Tancred's life. She no longer wondered that Fay refused to leave the bungalow. She began to feel branded herself.
For Jan, Peter's visits had come to have something of the relief the loosening of a too-tight bandage gives to a wounded man. He generally came at tea-time when Fay was at her best, and he brought her news of her little world at Dariawarpur. To her sister he seemed the one link with reality. Without him the heavy dream would have gone on unbroken.
Fay was always most eager he should take Jan out, and, though at first Jan had been unwilling, she gradually came to look upon such times as a blessed break in the monotonous restraint of her day. With him she was natural, said what she felt, expressed her fears, and never failed to return comforted and more hopeful.
One night he took her to the Yacht Club, and Jan was glad she had gone, because it gave her so much to tell Fay when she got back.
It was a very odd experience for Jan, this tea on the crowded lawn of the Yacht Club. She turned hot when people looked at her, and Jan had always felt so sure of herself before, so proud to be a daughter of brilliant, lovable Anthony Ross.