§ 2
The old groom who held her horse nodded with satisfaction when he helped her into the saddle. She had not lost her spring and he tightened her girths in a leisurely manner and arranged her skirt with the care due to a fine rider and a lady who understood a horse, yet one who was always ready to ask an old man’s advice. He had a great admiration for Miss Mallett and, conscious of it and rather pathetically glad of it, she lingered for the pleasure of talking to some one who seemed simple and untroubled. He had spent all his life on the Sales estate, and she wondered whether, though, like herself, of a limited outward experience, he also had known the passions of love and disgust and shame. He was sixty-five, he told her, but as strong as ever, and she envied him: to be sixty-five with the turmoil of life behind him, yet to be strong enough to enjoy the peace before him, was a good finale to existence. She was only thirty-one, but she was strong too, and she felt as though she had come through a storm, battered and exhausted but whole and ready for the calm which already hovered over her. She said, “The young are always sorry for the old, but that is one of the many mistakes they make. I think it must be the best time of all.”
“If you have them that cares for you,” he answered.
That was where her own happiness would break down.
There were her stepsisters, who would probably die before herself; there was Henrietta, who would form ties of her own; and there was no one else. If she had had less faith in Francis Sales’s love and, at the same time, had been capable of pandering to it, she might have had his devotion for her old age, the devotion of a somewhat querulous and dull old man. Now she had not even that to hope for, and she was glad. She had always wanted the best of everything, and always, except in the one fatal instance, refused what fell below her standard. She had not realized until now that Francis Sales had always been below it. She had at least tried to wrap their love in beauty, but that sort of beauty was not enough for him. It was her scruples, he said, which had been his undoing, and there was truth in that, but she had to remember that when originally she had disappointed him, he had found comfort quickly in Christabel; when Christabel failed him he had returned to her; and now he had found consolation, if only of a temporary kind, in some one else. When would he seek yet another victim of his affection and his griefs? He was, she thought scornfully, a man who needed women, yet she knew that if he had pleaded with her to-day, saying that in spite of everything he needed her, she would have listened.
She admitted her responsibility, it would always be present to her, for she had that kind of conscientiousness, and having once helped him, she must always hold herself ready to do it again. The chain binding them was not altogether broken, but she no longer felt its weight. She had a lightness of spirit unknown for years; the anger, the jealous rage and the disgust had vanished with a completeness which made her doubt their short existence, and she began to make plans for a new life. There was no reason now why she should not wander all over the world, yet, on the very doorstep of Nelson Lodge, she found a reason in the person of Henrietta—flushed and gay and just returned from a tea party. She had enjoyed herself immensely, but her head ached a little. It had been all she could do to understand the brilliant conversation. There had been present a budding poet and a woman painter and she had never heard people talk like that before.
“I didn’t speak at all, except to Charles,” she said.
“Oh, Charles was there?”
“Yes. I thought it safer not to talk but I looked as bright as I could, and of course I asked for cakes and things. They all ate a lot. I was glad of that. But most of them still looked hungry at the end. And Charles has taken tickets for me for the concerts, next to him, in a special corner where you can sometimes hear the music through the whispering of the audience. That’s what he says!”
“But, Henrietta, I have taken tickets for you too.”
“Thank you, but perhaps they will take them back.”
“Henrietta, you really can’t sit in a corner with Charles when I’m in another part of the hall.”
“Can’t I? Well, Charles will be very angry, but he’ll have to put up with it. If you explained to him, Aunt Rose, he’d understand. And I’d really rather sit with you. I shall be able to look at people and if I crackle my programme you won’t glare. Of course, I shall try not to. Will you explain to him? And I did promise to go to a concert with him some day.”
“Then you must. I’ll tell him that, too. Are you afraid of him, Henrietta?”
“He shouts,” Henrietta said, “and I’m sorry for him. And I do like him very much. I feel inclined to do things just to please him.”
“Don’t let that carry you too far.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. Not him, exactly, but me.”
“I didn’t suspect you of such tenderness. I shall have to look after you.”
“I wish you would.”
“And if you are feeling very kind some day, perhaps you will go and see Christabel Sales. She has promised to behave herself.”
Henrietta’s expression tightened. “I don’t want to go. It’s a dreadful place.”
“I know,” Rose said, and she added encouragingly, “but the cat has gone.”
They were standing together in the hall and against the white panelled walls, the figure of Rose, in the austere riding habit, one gauntletted hand holding her crop, the other resting lightly on her hip, had an heroic aspect, like a statue in dark marble; but her eyes did not offer the blank gaze, the calm effrontery of stone: they looked at Henrietta with something like appeal against this obsession of the cat.
“Oh, I’m glad the cat’s gone,” Henrietta murmured. “What happened to it?”
Rose shook her head. “It disappeared.”
They stared at each other until Henrietta said, “But all the same, I don’t want to go.” And then, because Rose would not help her out, she was obliged to say, “It’s Mr. Sales.” Her voice dropped. “I haven’t seen him since I hit him.”
Rose turned to go upstairs. “I shouldn’t think too much of that.”
“You don’t think it matters?”
“No.”
Henrietta looked after her and followed her for a step. “You think I may go?” Her voice was dull under her effort to control it. She felt that the stately figure moving up the stairs was deliberately leaving her to face a danger, sanctioning her desire to meet it. She felt her fate was in the answer made by Rose.
“I think you can take care of yourself perfectly well, Henrietta,” and like a sigh, another sentence floated from the landing where Rose stood, out of sight: “You are not like me.”
This was a mysterious and astonishing remark. Henrietta did not understand it and in her excited realization that the door so carefully locked by her own hand had been opened. Aunt Rose, she did not try to understand it. Aunt Rose had said she was able to take care of herself, and it was true, but honesty and a weak clinging to safety urged her to answer, “But you see, you see I don’t want to do it!”
These words were not uttered. She stood, looking up towards the empty landing with a hand pressed against her heart. It was beating fast. The spirit of Reginald Mallett, subdued in his daughter for some months, seemed to be fluttering in her breast and it was Aunt Rose who had waked it up. It was not Henrietta’s fault, she was not responsible; and suddenly, the ordinary happiness she had been enjoying was transferred into an irrational joy. She went singing up the stairs, and Rose, sitting in her room in a state of limpness she would never have allowed anybody to see, heard a sound as innocent as if a bird had waked to a sunny dawn.
Henrietta sang, but now and then she paused and became grave when the spirit of that mother who lived in her memory more and more dimly, as though she had died when Henrietta was a child, overcame the spirit of her father. Her mission was to be one of kindness to Christabel Sales, and if—the song burst out again—if adventure came in her way, could she refuse it? She would refuse nothing—the song ceased—short of sin. She looked at herself and saw a solemn feminine edition of the portrait hanging behind her on the wall. She was like her father, but she took pride in her greater conscientiousness; her vocabulary was larger than his by at least one word.
A few days later she set out on that road and past those trees which had been the safe witnesses of so much of Rose Mallett’s life, but their safeness lay in their constant muteness, and they had no message for Henrietta. Walking quickly, she rehearsed her coming meeting with Francis Sales, but when she actually met him on the green track, on the very spot where Rose had pulled up her horse in amazement at the scene of transformation, Henrietta, like Rose, had no formal greeting for him.
She said, “The trees! What are you doing with them?”
“Turning them into gold.”
“But they were beautiful.”
“So are lots of things they will buy.” She moved a little under his look, but when he said, “I’m hard up,” she became interested.
“Really? I thought you were frightfully rich. You ought to be with all these belongings.” She looked round at the fields dotted with sheep and cattle, the distant chimneys of Sales Hall, the fallen trees and the team of horses dragging logs under the guidance of workmen in their shirt sleeves. “I know all about being poor,” she said, “but I don’t suppose we mean the same thing by the word. I’ve been so poor—” She stopped. “But there’s a lot of excitement about it. I used to hope I should find a shilling in my purse that I’d forgotten. A shilling! You can do a lot with a shilling. At least I can.”
“I wish you’d tell me how.”
“Pretend you haven’t got it. That’s the beginning. You haven’t got it, so you can’t have what you want.”
“I never have what I want.”
“Then you mustn’t want anything.”
“Oh, yes, that’s so easy.”
“Well”—she descended to details with an air of kindness—“what do you want? Let’s work it out. We’d better sit on the wall. After all, it’s rather lovely without the trees. It’s so clear and the air’s so blue, as if it’s trying to make up. Now tell me what you want.”
“Something money can’t buy.”
“Then you needn’t have cut down the trees.”
“I shouldn’t have if I’d thought you’d care.”
She said softly but sharply, “I don’t believe that for a moment. Why don’t you tell the truth?”
“Do you want to hear it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Then I’ll wait while you make up your mind.”
Sitting on the wall, his feet rested easily on the ground while hers swung free, and while he seemed to loll in complete indifference, she was conscious of a tenseness she could not prevent. She hated her enjoyment of his manner, which was impudent, but it had the spice of danger that she liked and it was in defiance of the one and encouragement of the other that she said, “I’m sure you would never talk to Aunt Rose like that.”
“I should never give your Aunt Rose my confidence,” he said severely.
It was impossible not to feel a warmth of satisfaction, and she asked shortly, “Why not?” “She wouldn’t understand. You’re human. I’m devilish lonely. Well, you know my circumstances.” A shadow which seemed to affect the brightness of the autumn day, even deadening the clear shouting of the men and the jingling of the chains attached to the horses, passed over Francis Sales’s face. “One wants a friend.”
A cry of genuine bewilderment came from Henrietta. “But I thought you were so fond of Aunt Rose!”
From sulky contemplation of his brown boots and leggings, he looked at her. His eyes, of a light yet dense blue, were widely opened. “What makes you think that? Did she tell you?”
Henrietta’s lip curled derisively. “No, it was you, when you looked at her. And now you have told me again.” She had a moment of thoughtful contempt for the blundering of men. There was Charles, who always seemed to wander in a mist, and now this Francis Sales, who revealed what he wished to hide. He was mentally inferior to Mr. Jenkins, who had a quickness of wit, a vulgar sharpness of tongue which kept the mind on the alert; but physically she had shrunk from Mr. Jenkins’s proximity, while that of Francis Sales, in his well-cut tweeds and his shining boots, who seemed as clean as the air surrounding him, had an attraction actually enhanced by his heaviness of spirit. He was like a child possessed, consciously or unconsciously, of a weapon, and her sense of her own superiority was corrected by fear of his strength and of the subtle weakness in her own blood.
She heard a murmur. “She has treated me very badly. I’ve known her all my life. Well—”
Henrietta, with a gentleness he appreciated and a cleverness he missed, said commiseratingly, “She wouldn’t let you take her hand in the wood.”
“What on earth are you talking about? Look here, Henrietta, what do you mean?” There had been so many occasions of the kind that it was impossible to know to which one she referred, and, looking back, his past seemed to be blocked with frustrations and petty torments. “What do you mean?” he repeated.
“Never mind.”
“This is some gossip,” he muttered.
“Yes, among the squirrels and the rabbits. Woods are full of eyes and ears.”
“Well,” he said, “the eyes and ears will have to find another home. There will soon be no wood left.”
So he had tried to take Aunt Rose’s hand in this wood too! She laughed with the pretty trill which made her laughter a new thing every time.
“I don’t see the joke,” he grumbled.
She turned to him. “I don’t think you’ve laughed very much in your life. You’re always being sorry for yourself.”
“I have been very unfortunate,” he replied.
“There you are again! Why don’t you tell yourself you’re lucky not to squint or turn in your toes? You’d be much more miserable then—much. But thinking yourself unfortunate, when you’re not, is a pleasant occupation.”
“How do you know?”
“I know a lot,” Henrietta said. “But I never thought myself unfortunate, so I wasn’t.”
“Very noble,” Sales said sourly.
“No. I told you it was exciting to be poor. You’re not poor enough. A new dress,” she went on, clasping her hands; “first of all, I had to save up—in pennies.” She turned accusingly. “You don’t believe it.”
“It must have taken a long time.”
“It did, but not so long as you would think, because it cost so little in the end. I saved up, and then I looked in the shop windows, and then I talked about it for days, and then I bought the stuff. Mother cut out the dress, and then I made it.”
“And the result was charming.”
“I thought so then. Now I know it wasn’t, but at the time I was happy.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s very interesting, but it doesn’t help me.”
“But I could help you if you told me your troubles. I should know how.”
“Telling my troubles would be a help.”
“Here I am, then.”
“What’s the good?” he said. “You’ll desert me, too.”
“Not if you’re good.”
“Oh, if that’s the stipulation—” He stood up. His tone, which might have been provocative, was simply bored. She knew she had been dull, and her lip trembled with mortification.
“Why, of course!” she cried gaily, when she had mastered that weakness. “Aunt Caroline warned me against you this very afternoon. She said—but, never mind. I’m not going to repeat her remarks. And anyhow, Aunt Sophia said they were not true. Aunt Rose,” Henrietta said thoughtfully, “was not there. I don’t suppose either of them is right. And now I’m going to see Mrs. Sales.”
He ran after her. “Henrietta, I shouldn’t tell her you’ve seen me.”
She frowned. “I don’t like that.”
“It’s for her sake.”
Henrietta turned away without a word, but she pondered, as she went, on the dangerous likeness between right and wrong and the horrible facility with which they could be, with which they had to be, interchanged. One became bewildered, one became lost; she felt herself being forced into a false position: she might not be able to get out. Aunt Rose had sent her, Francis Sales was conspiring with her—she made her father’s gesture of helplessness, it was not her fault. But she made up her mind she would never allow Francis Sales to find her dull again, for that was unfair to herself.