Twice lost, p.23
Twice Lost, page 23
It was all one; there was no sign of the girl; and distracted, almost out of her senses, she had thrust up and down the street half a dozen times—asked senseless questions of passers-by—had anyone seen a young girl, a short young girl, poorly dressed, standing perhaps at that spot five minutes ago? Most had answered dryly, if at all; one or two had asked questions from curiosity, or perhaps from pity—her sincerity and distress were unmistakable. How was the girl dressed, for instance? In what colour? Strangely enough, she could not say. For was it possible to say pink—bright pink?
Afterwards she could not bear to think of this incident, yet was forced to dwell on it. A certain circumstance increased her horror. It was this. If that air of poverty, of sickliness, had been noticeable before, how much more marked it was now! And her thought was that a young girl friendless in a foreign land, and in all likelihood ill-taught and ignorant, brought to distress by no fault of her own, might easily drift on to the streets in pure desperation. She was ashamed of so readily inclining to this particular dread. But it gnawed at her. From the last glimpse, she had snatched a look of debasement, stamped hard where it had before been shadowed. And the whole range of error and punishment—prison, infirmary, madhouse—which waited on the broken of life, henceforth engaged her fears.
Then the simple, timid, decent woman took to haunting the West End at night, in the artless hope of saving the mysterious one, persecutor or victim, from the classic fate of the lost girl; one who, whether Vivian or not, had appealed to her compassion at least once in vain.
It was no wonder that she had as yet kept all this to herself, for she partly knew her own folly and the fevered tone of her imaginings.
But if the lost would return! Or if the dead would arise to speak one lucid word which would allay for ever killing uncertainty! Once she herself had formed the wild prayer, ‘Vivian, if you are dead, rise up and tell me so.’
Lost in these thoughts, she gazed into the dull, red sun with eyes enlarged as by illness and retaining the fearful and dazed expression of the physically preyed upon.
Keith came quietly to his workroom door, which was ajar, and observed her for a few moments through the crack. Feeling him there—for she had hardly heard him—she laid her hand on the rail and again made it utter the thin, faint cry which sounded plaintively in the triste and sombre setting of the twilight. Then she turned round, smiling.
‘Such a trifle, Keith! Can you really believe Miss Freemantle would have remembered it—just from the kind of casual look round the house which is all we can suppose she ever had? Now, can you? I know one can’t say it’s impossible—but it is nearly impossible. Anyway—what an imagination she would need to see that a thing like that would be so significant! But an exploring child—yes, she’d remember it, to the end of her days. She’d pull and pull at the rail to make the noise again—it would please her.’ And she gave him a friendly, coaxing look, wishing so much to charm away this incomprehensible obduracy. For it was a strange, sulky opposition, really antagonistic, and she had had to face it from the beginning, and it had long tormented her. She suddenly resolved to challenge it now.
‘Did you remember that it creaked, Christine?’ he said rather coldly.
‘Oh, of course, yes, I knew. Living in the house, as I’ve done, time and again, how could I not know?’
‘Yes, you would know.’
Something in his tone struck her more unhappily than ever. She had meant to tell him of the glimpse in Oxford Street; now she felt that it was not the moment. Something else was more urgent. Touching the rail fitfully between her words, she said with great uneasiness, ‘You’ve spoken to me like that more than once—yes, a good many times, I’ve noticed—saying “But you would know”—“You would have remembered” this or that. What do you mean? You’re not suggesting, I suppose, that she could read my thoughts? That she got things out of my mind? A spectacular case of telepathy!’ And she laughed.
Instead of answering or smiling in response, as she had expected, ‘What do you really think of the South American part of the story?’ he asked gravely. ‘Did you really feel that the girl had been in Peru?’
‘Of course!’
Keith stood looking on the ground. ‘Well, I’m not so sure,’ he said in a rather too gentle tone at length. ‘Let me tell you what I think of it. In the first place, their itinerary struck me as peculiar.’
‘Oh, it was all perfectly clear as she told it. And so vivid!’
‘Yes, it was the South American chapter especially which struck me from the first moment as—what shall I say?—derivative. It gave me pause—among the many other doubtful points.’
She hesitated. She was conscious of a shade of bewilderment, of confusion; of a breath of vague, baseless fear stealing about her heart. ‘Oh,’ she murmured, ‘what do you mean by that?’
‘I mean such details can be got from books—that such information is very easily come by—that it might be taken from a dozen among the hundreds of commonplace travel books which are published every year. It consisted of just such a collection of picturesque details, of colourful incidents—judging by your own account, of course. I have nothing else to judge by!… Have you yourself, Christine, ever read any such travel books with that part of South America for its subject? Then you know the kind of thing. Written to popular taste——’
Christine felt an impulse to put her hand to her head, as if she had been asked some very difficult question. ‘No,’ she said finally. ‘No, it all seemed strange to me. And yet I almost felt myself there as she spoke—it was so vivid! You couldn’t suppose she hadn’t seen it all with her own eyes. You could tell—it was true.’
‘It seemed to you true because it was familiar? As familiar things seem?’
‘How could it be familiar?’ she said slowly.
‘Well, well—leave it… No, but you must have considered that anyone wanting to pass as a Vivian Lambert who had been kidnapped and taken to South America might have got all the local colour out of a book. My dear, of course! Of course she would have mugged it all up—got up the subject to impress you and give realism to her story.’
‘Oh, it’s simply that you’ve made up your mind that she’s a pretender—made it up from the beginning! You did not want her to be Vivian—I felt you didn’t, from the first moment. You’ve got some reason—for wishing to make her out a criminal. Oh, I feel it!’ But her breath failed her. Her gentle nature could not endure contest, or to use hard words to anyone.
He said, after a weighty pause, as if reluctantly, ‘A criminal? I may think her something worse than that… But—dear Christine!—never mind, never mind what I think. My views may change. Meanwhile, I’ll keep it to myself.’ He turned away, his eyes still on the ground, while she stared at a grave profile; he moved, he receded, and shut the door of the study as quietly behind him as if he had been shutting it upon a sick-room. This she noted. It distracted her for an instant—a movement so unnatural. However, at last conscious of bewilderment, she found herself asking, ‘Something worse?’ And she stared out at the rayless sun. Then she thought suddenly, ‘Why did I answer “no” about those books? What a lie!’ And she felt shocked and degraded, for she was ordinarily a naively truthful person. She had lied for the reason that children do—because she was afraid. ‘But at least it’s true that I’ve not read such a book for many years,’ she defended herself.
She returned to considering Keith’s manner from the beginning; his reception of her story, and the way he had first reasoned with her, taking great pains to try to convince her that she was deceived. Now she realised that for a long while he had made little attempt to argue; it had seemed as if he no longer tried seriously to combat the evidence she eagerly pressed on him, but merely listened almost with an air of humouring her. Today, for the first time for many weeks, he had reasoned with her again, seriously. Not only seriously—gravely, with a sort of cold displeasure.
Suddenly a painful, incredible suspicion rushed upon her. It was not merely that he did not believe in the girl’s claim. He did not believe herself, Christine. But this was fantastic; Keith could not suspect her of concocting a lying story, of supplying information to back the girl’s tale and help her out! And with what object?
Springing to his door and opening it without ceremony she cried into the room, ‘I can’t hide it from myself any longer! Can you possibly think I’m making up any of it—any of the evidence?’
Keith had switched on the table-lamp. He was standing with his back towards her and had glanced round at her entrance, flicked her one inscrutable look; then with a ducking movement of shoulders and head, which the light behind his figure accentuated, turned round to the desk again, making a play of interest in something there, rustling papers busily.
‘No, I certainly don’t think you have consciously made up anything—not consciously,’ he said in the quietest tone, as if most carefully avoiding any sort of emphasis. But that inadvertent hiding of the head, as it were, took all her horrified attention for the moment; it was so eloquent of surprised treachery.
She felt, as if he had suddenly put on a hideous appearance, panic-stricken. Little more than that. And she fled instinctively. She found herself back in the hall, which the lamp in the room had plunged into darkness for her eyes, standing again on the stairs, pulling senselessly at the handrail; and here the words ‘not consciously’ crashed down on her and were like a blow on the head, a stunning blow. Reaching her own room, she did not know how she had come there or what time had passed till the moment when she stood before the dressing-table, saying to herself, ‘What does he think? That I am mad!’ Then, in the last of the faint, rubious light, she saw her own face in the mirror, pale against the interior darkness, calm, mild, quenched—her own face. A face which gave little satisfaction to herself, in spite of its conventional beauty, for she vaguely felt it to be a face negative and unfinished, faded before ever having blossomed, telling no story, having no story to tell. Still—her own face, unchanged, nothing questionable about it. And she whispered, ‘Nonsense, nonsense!’ taking heart.
But there came a misgiving about this very certitude, and therefore about herself. She peered closer. The live eyes glittered, the brows arched widely, as she made the effort to search, in that dusky light, her own expression. Such scrutinies always bring a sense of strangeness, a hint of deeper, sinister knowledge in the image. Pensively she turned on the light.
Panic had burned out now, but she was overwhelmed by a sense of weakness and helplessness.
THIRTY-ONE
A little later in the week of her visit, snow fell from the yellow sky which days past had displayed. The fall was not heavy; but frost bound it hard. And the bitterly raw air came as an invader, with the quality of surprise. Yet the glacial crust which the night had produced, the compressed snow on the paths, could be felt to creak as one walked on it—for whether it was felt or heard was in doubt. The frozen crust was shifting upon the warm earth. The sky darkened, however, and snow dry as powder, small and gritty, was whirled off the upper surfaces in the cold gusts, rising in clouds from the boughs and hedges and blowing like smoke against the umber trees of the distance and the dark and low roof of the heavens, which had a scorched tinge, an inappropriately torrid aspect. The icicles started to drip, yet prolonged themselves. In sheltered corners, the snow surfaces of the ground began to soak, to soften, to attain a semi-transparency, the damp spreading along them like water along blotting-paper. Small drops drilled cavernous holes. A warm earth had received the early and sudden snowfall, and two climates seemed to be contending, the upper air icy, the earth still breathing the garnered warmth of the summer.
In spite of these inclement conditions, there was a hammering at the front door in the late afternoon. A caller with a mission of some urgency seemed indicated. Then a strident voice in the hall, amidst exclamations, amidst questions pitched on a note of surprise, announced Rosalie Lambert. That woman! Hearing the formidable commotion from his workroom, Keith flung down his pen, incapacitated. Impossible to go on! What now? Could it be——? Exasperation, consuming curiosity, not unmingled with foreboding, made him fit for nothing.
Much excited, slightly elevated, as was usually the case nowadays, Rosalie had brought strange news. One of her neighbours professed to have seen the girl ‘with her own eyes’—yes, seen her walking in the snow at noonday, had come face to face with her and would have known her anywhere. But this woman, although actually living in Hilbery at the date of the tragedy, had made, when questioned, several flagrant mistakes about the child’s appearance; and, in short, turned out scarcely to have known the little Vivian Lambert by sight. But superstitious fear had overcome Rosalie’s commonsense. Although scoffing at the neighbour’s tale as she told it, she was plainly impressed; more, she was upset, even scared. Asked in, she was in no hurry to quit cheerful company; and, seated by the fire, kept peering out at the snowy scene and shivering a little, saying she believed she had caught cold. She continued to describe the neighbour’s adventure in a tone of scorn, talking volubly, repeating her facts many times; which nobody minded. Her audience, although sceptical, was an appreciative one. Mrs Jebb, Leslie, Mirry, all the household, gathered to give her hearing.
And Christine, silent in their midst, felt her heart beat fast. Why should not the report be true? Thus did her longing, and her secret panic, make the crude tale seem possible.
The room grew shadowy, the fanning light of the flames began to pulse visibly upon walls and furniture, and with backs turned to the wintry garden they did not realise how much of the suspended daylight was due to the reflection from the snow outside the large bay which came down to floor level. The soft and blanching light under a dark sky had endured from early morning, scarcely changing. Tea had been brought in, Keith called and apprised briefly of Rosalie’s story—and in the midst of the slight bustle, the little petulant treble of Mirry was suddenly uplifted.
‘Mummy, there’s someone out there, a girl. Standing in the snow.’
The clatter of the china abruptly ceased, everyone turned his head and held a rigid pose, staring. And in a silence suddenly grown tense, Keith got up and strolled towards the window, remarking, ‘Why, yes, we have a visitor. Who is it?’ He went right up to the window and peered outward, with his face close to the pane. They all looked towards the spot on the other side of the lawn to which his attention seemed to be directed. ‘Where, Keith?’ cried Helena. ‘I can’t see where you mean.’ Keith was suddenly silent.
In that black and white picture, everything was drawn with extreme clarity, shadowless. Yet there were gaps amongst the evergreens, there were sheltered bays and nooks, holes in the bushes, strips of trunk, arbitrary patches of darkness—surfaces from which the snow had already slithered or melted; and the whole scene, with features which appeared so pure and clear-cut, so exceptionally unambiguous, was in fact very confusing at a distance. The air also through which it was seen was many shades darker than one had realised.
If some person had issued from the shrubbery at the edge of the lawn, it looked as if that person had caught sight of their party in the firelit window, seen them all turn and stare, and Keith rise and point, and had taken fright and retreated; retreated so swiftly that not every pair of eyes in the room had had time to see him. Or so some of them thought. The visitor, whoever it was, had had only to take a few paces to pass out of sight behind a great conifer, the lowest branches of which swept the ground. And this she had evidently done.
‘Mirry?’ Helena said in a hoarse whisper.
‘Gone now,’ replied Mirry stolidly. ‘Ran away—ever so quickly.’ The child had returned to bending her head over a small puzzle she had brought in with her, and seemed absorbed in it.
Rosalie had leaned sharply forward at the first alarm with eyes screwed up and a protrusion of the lower lip denoting scepticism in suspension. She now moved and sat back. It was she who broke the shocked pause and broke it with a shocking statement.
‘Oh. that wasn’t Vivian. Vivian would have been tall. She had those long hands and feet. She would have been tall, like her father.’
‘Why, Rosalie, did you think it was?’ Helena began on a top note of excitement.
But in a voice so breathless and aghast that it caused all eyes to turn on her, ‘Are you sure it was not Vivian?’ Christine said. ‘It was my girl!’
There was a general gasp of astonishment, of credulity and incredulity mingled; but in fact their attention was at once transferred to Rosalie. And Rosalie’s face had already changed; an expression of doubt and alarm had replaced the scornful assurance of the first moment. Still, she repeated, ‘I tell you, she’d have been lanky, like her father.—Didn’t she sprint, though?’ she added, with a hiccup of laughter, which she stifled with her handkerchief.
Mirry looked up and eyed her with contempt.
‘Now, what made her do that?’ Mrs Gray asked brightly, screwing up her eyes like Rosalie a minute before and stooping forward to peer through the window with elaboration, as if she still hoped to discern a figure walking towards them if only she looked carefully enough. ‘She must have seen us. How I wish I’d waved!’
All were then silent again in a sort of unconscious tension, waiting for the figure to appear on the other side of the tree. But they waited in vain. Then Helena declared that she must have gone round the back of the house, down the holly walk. The mouth of this path, which opened off the drive and led to the kitchen garden and the back entrance, was hidden by the tree. So this seemed likely. Tongues were loosened and everyone gave rein to wonder, but in a somewhat hushed fashion.
