Part 24 (1/2)
Mollie, I saw, was dismayed. The triumph had been too complete. She could not keep up with it.
”I am sure that Lady Vera is very badly overwrought about something,”
she said. ”She wanted particularly to be alone and she found us there, and it put her on edge.” Actually she was trying to patch up his fallen angel for him.
”But she told me to wait there for her.--Sent me off to wait for her when those people came,” said Clive. ”It seems to me that it was you she minded finding. And yet she's been going on about your never coming to talk to her. She's been going on about it like anything.” He caught himself up, blus.h.i.+ng, and I saw that Vera was all revealed to him. I hardly needed to pluck another pinion from her, though I didn't resist the temptation to do so, saying:
”You see, Vera is rather jealous. She can't bear sharing things--her friends of her dream-garden. She liked to have you there, but she didn't like to have Mollie there. Did she tell you she wanted to make friends with Mollie? She's never taken any pains to show it, has she?”
”Oh, please, Judith!” Mollie implored.
”But he sees it all now, Mollie, so why shouldn't I say it?” I inquired.
”Her point has been, Captain Thornton, to keep you in and to keep Mollie out, and she very nearly succeeded in doing it.”
”Please, Judith! It's not only that. She's been such a real friend to you, Clive! I'm sure she is overwrought about something, and it will be all right when you next meet her.” But Mollie pleaded in vain.
”I'm hanged if it will be all right!” said Captain Thornton.
Vera made no attempt to reinstate herself. It was part of her strength never to try to recover what was lost. She kept up appearances, it is true, but that was for her own sake rather than in any hope, or even wish, to regain his good opinion. When we all met at tea, she came trailing in, with Chang under her arm, and as she sank into her place, diffusing the suavest unconsciousness, she said to Mrs. Travers-Cray:
”Charlie Carlton's been killed, have you heard? This war is something more than I can bear.”
Charlie Carlton, as I knew, was a cousin of the recent callers and a most remote friend of Vera's; but it was the best that she could do for the occasion, and all that she was inclined to do, though a melancholy smile, as impersonal as it was impartial, was turned more than once on Captain Thornton and Mollie as she inquired whether they liked sugar in their tea or had enough cream. She had made their tea for six weeks now, and after the first week she had never forgotten that they both liked sugar and both disliked cream. But she thus washed her hands of intimacy while keeping up the graces of hostess-s.h.i.+p. They might have arrived that afternoon.
Mollie and her husband rose beautifully to the situation, for their last two days at Compton Dally; that is, Mollie rose, for the husband at such times has only to follow and be silent. I don't think that she could have shown a grace and a distance as achieved as Vera's had it not been for those charming clothes of hers. You must have something to rise from if you are to float serenely above people's heads; otherwise you merely stand on tiptoe, very uncomfortably. Mollie and Vera might have been two silken balloons, pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing suavely in the dulcet summer air. And on the last day Vera's sense of dramatic fitness prompted her, evidently, to the most imperturbable _volte-face_: she showed to Mollie a marked tenderness. To Captain Thornton she was kind, perfectly kind, but that she found him rather dull was evident. It might have been Mollie with whom she had spent all those hours in the dream-garden.
”Must you really go, dear?” she asked.
Mollie said that she was afraid they must. She had heard from her aunt, who was waiting to take them in, and, owing to all Vera's kindness, Clive was now quite strong again. Vera did not insist.
”I've _so_ loved getting to know you!” she said, holding Mollie's hand at the door of the motor on the morning of their departure. ”It's been _such_ a pleasure. You must often, often come to Compton Dally again.
_Good_-bye, dear!”
But Mollie knew, and Vera knew that she knew, that never again would they be asked to Compton Dally. Meanwhile, if the war isn't over and Jack hasn't come back, I'm to go and stay with them next spring on the chicken-farm.
[Ill.u.s.tration: decorative bar]
EVENING PRIMROSES
IT had been a hot day and there seemed to be thunder in the air, but she was afraid there would be no rain that night. The abandoned garden needed it sadly; though, as she reflected, rain would encourage weeds rather than the few remaining flowers. Poppies had sown themselves everywhere, degenerates of the s.h.i.+rleys which, three years ago, had spread their silken cups in the large bed at the foot of the lawn. Their withered stalks cracked beneath her steps in the paths and glimmered under the unpruned branches of the cordon apple trees. There were thistles, too, sorrel, and tall nettles, a matted carpet of bindweed and groundsel in the little kitchen-garden, once so neat, and, of course, as poor Charlie had predicted, the Michaelmas daisies had eaten up nearly everything in the herbaceous border. That was one of the last questions he had written to her: ”How are my pink phloxes? Have the Michaelmas daisies smothered them?” They had. It was the season at which the phloxes should be in fullest flower, but not one was to be seen; the dense, fine foliage of the daisies had advanced in a wall of green nearly to the border's edge.
It was still oppressively warm. A toad hopped indolently away and paused at the box edging, lying up against it, his front feet extended, as if so wearied by the heat that he took his chances of discovery. She stopped to look at the clumsy creature, in which so little of nature's accurate grace was expressed; and as she stood there, a sudden rustle in the box betrayed another inhabitant--this time a baby hedgehog which, too young for fear, moved busily about among the flat dandelion plants that rosetted the path, and even, encountering the tips of her shoes, stopped to examine them carefully before moving on again. The baby hedgehog would have amused Charlie. He had always been delightful about animals; he and the boys had always had that great interest in common.
Yes, the bird-boxes were still there. She could see one in the big apple tree and one fixed to the porch of the house, under the rose. How well she remembered the frantic delight that hailed the hatching of the first brood of t.i.ts. And the day when Charlie had deemed it prudent to withdraw the door for a peep at the beautifully fitted mosaic of bright little heads and bodies within, lifting up Giles in his holland pinafore for a long, blissful gaze. Six years ago that must have been.
The light was altering now, and when she turned at the end of the path, a great moon had risen across the lane and seemed to hang in the branches of the walnut tree that grew in the field beyond. A great, s.h.i.+ning, heavy moon, and mournful, it seemed to her; her desolate thoughts, she was aware, lending their colour to everything. Heavy, mournful, desolate; that was the rhythm of her own steps pa.s.sing along in the twilight, pursued by the unformulated consciousness that lay behind all these pictures of the past; pausing at last, as if to let the d.o.g.g.i.ng sorrow overtake her, as she came to where, near the summer-house, against the wall, the evening primroses grew.
It was years since Charlie had first planted them there, and she had said to herself at the time that they would never be rid of them, tenacious, recurrent things, sowing themselves patiently, and coming up loyally even when there was no one to wish them well. She felt touched by their presence; for though she had always found them untidy and uninteresting, she saw, really now for the first time, that they could be beautiful. Homely, loyal flowers; yet--was it the invading sense of sorrow colouring them, too?--a little uncanny, showing at this neutral hour of mingled dusk and moonlight their pale, evident gold; becoming conscious, as it were, becoming personal at the time when other flowers became invisible. Not that it was a sinister uncanniness; not that of ghosts; of fairies, rather; the very strangeness, sadness, sweetness of the moon, to which, from them, she lifted her eyes. And they reminded her of something, but what, she could not say. Not of Charlie. There had never been anything strange or sad about Charlie, except the fact, pursuing her now in his deserted garden, that he was dead and would never see it again.
It was a year to-day since he had been killed, and she had come down to the country with the sense of commemoration. She wanted, alone in the little place so full of thoughts of him, to find him, to recall him; and she had been doing that at every turn. Yet the evening primroses s.h.i.+ning there brought a pang deeper than any vision of him. They, though so homely, seemed to personify loneliness; they seemed to be missing something; and although she was desolate because Charlie was dead, because he would never again delight in his garden, it was, in a sense, for him rather than for herself that she sorrowed, and, in a sense, she did not miss him at all.