'That was me choking,' said Wemyss. 'It's all right—it's nothing at all,' he added to Lucy, who was looking at him with a face of extreme concern.
But he felt now that he had had about as much of the death and funeral atmosphere as he could stand. Reaction had set in, and his reactions were strong. He wanted to get away from woe, to be with normal, cheerful people again, to have done with conditions in which a laugh was the most improper of sounds. Here he was, being held down by the head, he felt, in a black swamp,—first that ghastly business of Vera's, and now this woebegone family.
Sudden and violent was Wemyss's reaction, let loose by the parlourmaid's story. Miss Entwhistle's swollen eyes annoyed him. Even Lucy's pathetic face made him impatient. It was against nature, all this. It shouldn't be allowed to go on, it oughtn't to be encouraged. Heaven alone knew how much he had suffered, how much more he had suffered than the Entwhistles with their perfectly normal sorrow, and if he could feel it was high time now to think of other things surely the Entwhistles could. He was tired of funerals. He had carried this one through really brilliantly from start to finish, but now it was over and done with, and he wished to get back to naturalness. Death seemed to him highly unnatural. The mere fact that it only happened once to everybody showed how exceptional it was, thought Wemyss, thoroughly disgusted with it. Why couldn't he and the Entwhistles go off somewhere to-morrow, away from this place altogether, go abroad for a bit, to somewhere cheerful, where nobody knew them and nobody would expect them to go about with long faces all day? Ostend, for instance? His mood of sympathy and gentleness had for the moment quite gone. He was indignant that there should be circumstances under which a man felt as guilty over a laugh as over a crime. A natural person like himself looked at things wholesomely. It was healthy and proper to forget horrors, to dismiss them from one's mind. If convention, that offspring of cruelty and hypocrisy, insisted that one's misfortunes should be well rubbed in, that one should be forced to smart under them, and that the more one was seen to wince the more one was regarded as behaving creditably,—if convention insisted on this, and it did insist, as Wemyss had been experiencing himself since Vera's accident, why then it ought to be defied. He had found he couldn't defy it by himself, and came away solitary and wretched in accordance with what it expected, but he felt quite different now that he had Lucy and her aunt as trusting friends who looked up to him, who had no doubts of him and no criticisms. Health of mind had come back to him,—his own natural wholesomeness, which had never deserted him in his life till this shocking business of Vera's.
'I'd like to have some sensible talk with you,' he said, looking down at the two small black figures and solemn tired faces that were growing dim and wraith-like in the failing light of the garden.
'With me or with Lucy?' asked Miss Entwhistle.
By this time they both hung on his possible wishes, and watched him with the devout attentiveness of a pair of dogs.
'With you and with Lucy,' said Wemyss, smiling at the upturned faces. He felt very conscious of being the male, of being in command.
It was the first time he had called her Lucy. To Miss Entwhistle it seemed a matter of course, but Lucy herself flushed with pleasure, and again had the feeling of being taken care of and safe. Sad as she was at the end of that sad day, she still was able to notice how nice her very ordinary name sounded in this kind man's voice. She wondered what his own name was, and hoped it was something worthy of him,—not Albert, for instance.
'Shall we go into the drawing-room?' asked Miss Entwhistle.
'Why not to the mulberry tree?' said Wemyss, who naturally wished to hold Lucy's little hand if possible, and could only do that in the dark.