Twice lost, p.9
Twice Lost, page 9
ELEVEN
It would not be in Keith’s power to oust a wife, Thomas had fondly supposed. Yet that was what the young man had achieved. Thomas had underrated him. From the first moment of outraged shock, he had been determined to recover his position with his father. He had only just married Helena when the incredible news that Thomas was committed to do the same by a young girl in Hilbery had burst upon him. His first furious conclusion was that Helena was redundant. After viewing the little suburban wife, however, he had seen that the running of his father’s household would not, anyway, be left in the hands of this poor child. Helena would be useful. And for the wretched little stepmother his plans were soon prepared.
But, obliged to give way at the outset, to act gracefully, concealing rage, he had known better than to force himself in while the two innocents were still in the flush of their small triumph. For a judicious space, he had left Thomas to flounder.
What, then, had happened? Christine herself had never known, and never even suspected, the part Keith had played in it.
The marriage had gone wrong; or, rather, it had simply become least painful for two people of hopelessly discrepant age to lead sundered lives. And Keith had gently, subtly assisted the process. It was he who had first made them unhappy about it, filled them with doubts. By hinting, and finally warning Thomas with affectionate candour that his talent was suffering, by working upon an ageing man’s fears of a mental decline, by suggesting that so young a girl had not known what she was doing, that she was unhappy and only put on a happy face in her husband’s presence, perhaps even by insinuating that her heart was elsewhere and that it would be a kindness to release her, he had soon worn away Thomas’s resistance. In fact, it had been all too easy to introduce into that weakening mind suitable ideas.
But the ugly truth was that Thomas was a not unwilling dupe, that his behaviour was weak, selfish and cowardly. He had soon tired of playing the husband; he had wanted to get back to his work—wanted it with increasing impatience—to his whole days and nights of silent productivity. The tension, the nervous and emotional havoc, which checked inspiration induced in his mind had been too much for him. It had become like an illness. A suspicion that his creative powers had in truth declined since his marriage had terrified him and roused up in him, rampant, the selfishness of the dedicated artist, to whose work everything else in life always has been, always will be, pitilessly sacrificed. Then he had desperately missed Keith’s efficiency; he had floundered despairingly in the midst of the terribly laborious business of documentation, for which Keith had such a flair. So when Keith and his newly married wife at length joined the helpless pair at Carlotta House, it was by invitation. Thomas had simply given up—he had had enough of difficulties and confusion; a spoiled and wearied old man who had lost the knack of managing his practical affairs at all.
After that, everything had been easy. With Christine, with that gentle, inexperienced creature, so uncertain of herself, so easily shamed and startled into humility, it had been enough to insinuate that she was hampering a great man.
Yes, it was Keith who had broken the marriage, and he was far from blinking the fact. For he saw nothing wrong in what he had done. He had merely done what was best for her as for Thomas. He had performed a painful little operation for them both, neatly and delicately, with a virtuosity which few could have equalled. The marriage ought never to have been made, and so he had unmade it.
In such wise had every stone been removed from Thomas’s path by his devoted son, his exemplary son—whom, in the end, some twelve years later, Thomas saw fit to reward through an iniquitous will leaving to that son Carlotta House, which that son had always hated, and everything else he possessed to his young widow, carefully tied up so that she should have no power to rectify matters from generosity. Cruel requital for so many years of pure devotion, monstrous ingratitude such as no trusting, honest mind could have foreseen!
Pure devotion? Perhaps Keith had a right to call it so. To steer upon a reputable course a mind subtly swung off its balance, given to sudden gross follies, unseemly impetuosities, and, before the end, to shifts, lies, reprehensible quirks of every description, had been a labour which would have defeated love itself, through love’s very tenderness. But self-love had achieved it. By an exertion of main force, with a desperate determination, he had held the old man upright with the pen still in his hand. For the intellect had remained almost untouched to the end, that department of the mind which had learned its trade so thoroughly, so magnificently, seeming to proceed for a long while under its own power, unaffected by the creeping ruin all about it. This disintegrating personality had been a truly fearful charge. But Keith could not be taxed with heroism, since all he had done for his father he had really done for his own benefit. He did not see it like that. He would declare with modest conviction that no son could have been more devoted.
That long strain, crowned by the shock of Thomas’s vengeful blow and all the resulting trouble, threw Keith into a condition verging on illness. His complexion yellowed. He was inclined to shamble slightly. His attacks of ironical fooling became more frequent.
To the world, he kept up appearances; indeed, at first had put up a brave show in the face of that terrible will, that mocking, humiliating situation; going about in the rather unwholesomely elevated spirits which the death of a dear one who has lingered too long often gives rise to. He had carried himself jauntily.
‘All my friends think it very original of me to choose to live in Hilbery.’ It could be passed off like that. In any case, he did not feel about living at Carlotta House as he had done earlier in life, in the days of his pride, when he had had to overcome a disgust, a chagrin and genuine mortification at being obliged to own to such an address. Carlotta House had its distinction, if Hilbery Village still took some explaining. Walking round his little estate, he was sometimes quite proud of it and indulged in grandiose schemes.
But no scheming, planning or expenditure of charm could cause literary society to flow into such a backwater. Keith Antequin was not, in himself, a magnet of sufficient power to draw such congenial company about him. Stranded here, he was cut off from his proper milieu, from the West End bars and clubs where the artistic, journalistic and stage worlds met, where his own kind congregated, where the useful, entertaining and necessary intelligence circulated; cut off from the pleasant, informal little lunches where the real business was done, where things were managed, the vital contacts made. Among the weeping trees, in the grey, dripping weather, when no one came near the house for days on end, he was a prey to his nerves and the melancholy which so easily afflicted him.
He had only the society of the neighbourhood, the retired professional classes to which the local gentry was reduced. With this, however, he might have had a certain position, oddly enough, both because of Helena’s aristocratic blood and because of his own status as the son of a famous man whose name, to these literary innocents, was still respectably eminent. Only it soon became clear that even such an amelioration was beyond his means. He could not offer these people a good table or a good cellar. Indeed, it was glaringly obvious that a household run by Helena herself with nothing but a little fitful assistance did not permit of entertaining at all. Old friends, visitors who would not mind giving a hand, were all they could manage.
It was Carlotta House itself which he could not afford.
But it was a place abominably difficult to let, as he had experienced; while the sale of such a property was scarcely worth considering as an emergency measure. Unnerved, overstrained, he had acted, perhaps for the first time in his life, with financial folly. Things went from bad to worse, and, a few months later, came to a crisis, when he was thankful to accept Christine’s veiled charity. She had rented the house from him and invited him and his family to stay on there as her guests. It was understood that she herself just at present did not wish to leave London.
It should not have irked him so bitterly. It was a free and willing gift, made in the simple belief that she was acting only fairly, a gift offered with anxious kindness. Moreover, she had already been very generous in doing what she could to counteract the effect of the will.
TWELVE
Mrs Gray, having stopped before the door in the wall, was wondering whether she would take a short cut through the garden. It was a long walk up to Carlotta House, and the twelve or thirteen years since her husband’s death had made her an old woman. And the hill-road was not nowadays the old, rough, country lane to which her memories were attached. It was one of the groomed and carefully tended kind to be found in all such districts of the home counties, with a surface made for expensive cars and verges mown like lawns, not seriously a country lane at all. Yet it was still very pleasant, very lovely, with its large, silent domains at intervals, mysterious behind trees and well-clipped hedges, and now it was filled with the pure, strong, exclamatory cries of a darkling thrush. The bird seemed to be giving voice to an astonished joy—perhaps at that sky. A cloudless, shining, rosy-golden sky which might have overarched paradise.
But suddenly she had felt that a lonely saunter through the garden at this soft, dusky hour would give her intense pleasure. Pleasure? Well, something better than that. A moment of communion.
She stepped back into the road and looked up. Laden with their tiers of candles in fullest flower, the massive, rounded heads of the horse-chestnuts towered above the wall, with a few great conifers in the background, black, loftier still, prick-summitted—vast trees, forest trees, they banished petty thoughts and expanded the human scale, they instructed the sense of the majestic; they exalted and solemnised. Their blossoms were shadowy against the sunset, their beauty seemed veiled, mysteriously, as if at the light of a superior glory. The paradisial air of the whole scene brought the Garden of Eden to her mind.
She would go through the garden, she had chosen.
But it was a moment to be cherished, so, suddenly fearing that the door might be locked, she lingered to enjoy the fancy that in another moment she would be walking so close under the massive, drooping boughs that she could touch the flowers. The beauty of the evening filled her with a serene, prayerful happiness—she was a woman with a mind so steeped in the Bible that half her thoughts clothed themselves naturally in biblical phrases. With all this she was so intent that she was not aware of someone coming up behind her, walking soundlessly on the grass verge. In the lane, under the overhanging boughs, it was now so dusky that this person had drawn in upon her like a shadow, with the slinking, all but invisible progress of a black cat over a lawn at night.
Only when quite close did he speak and wish her good-evening. But his greeting had an uncertain note and sounded abrupt, as if he had intended to add a name and had only at the last moment realised that he did not know it; or else had suddenly perceived that she was someone other than he had thought. It did not matter. Mrs Gray, a little hard of hearing, remained unaware of his presence.
With her face still raised, ‘They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day,’ she said in distinct, low tones.
‘Eh? What’s that?——Oh, good-evening! (Rather an anticlimax, I fear),’ the stranger sang out with a touch of impertinence; and he came forward, strolling on the grass verge towards her. ‘Sorry I forget what was said on that occasion, or I’d have played up to you in the role of the Lord God.’
Mrs Gray was of course startled, but did not start noticeably. Her nerves were good. ‘Ah, I thought I was alone,’ she said with serene good-humour. ‘I have this habit of speaking to myself.’
‘A bad habit, of course.’
‘I suppose it is—but I don’t know why.’
‘Well—as you see—someone may be there unknown to you and may be encouraged to answer.’
‘And thereby some have entertained angels unawares,’ she murmured, being still alone in spirit.
The young man, now standing more in the open, could be seen to smile; a deep, sneering fold from the nostril to the corner of the mouth indicated this. Mrs Gray perhaps took in his presence properly for the first time.
‘Were you thinking of cutting through here?’ he asked briskly.
‘Yes—yes, really I was wondering——But perhaps it is locked. Perhaps I had better go by the road.’
‘Well, let’s see.’ A cautious twist of the handle disposed of this question; and having pushed open the door and thrown a glance inside, he stood back with an inviting gesture which had a little impudence in it.
Mrs Gray, however, made no move and was silent. Now that her exaltation had faded, more wide-awake now, she was attacked by a deep reluctance, a disappointment so keen, so impassioned, as to proclaim an evil origin—so she assured herself—at having to share her little coveted, precious, almost mystical experience with a companion—with such a companion, one so uncongenial, as the young stranger seemed likely to prove. So she remained silent, praying against this infirmity of spirit.
Had she been a more worldly person, more concerned with purely reasonable affairs, she might have felt at this juncture a little uneasy wonder as to whether this young man really had the right of entry to her relatives’ household. But any judgment she might bring to bear would be moral. And her mild, ‘You’re a friend of the family, I suppose? I think we haven’t met before——’ was innocent of any catechising note.
‘Oh I know old K. very well,’ was the answer, uttered carelessly.
She had almost at once recovered from her disappointment—or, rather, she had thrust it behind her as something less than worthy and believed that she had purged her mind of human antipathy. In two minutes, she stood there prepared to love the sinner and hate the sin. As this is, of course, not really possible, Mrs Gray deceived herself. She had taken a keen dislike to the young man in the depths of her soul; she experienced a sense of repulsion. She therefore resolutely turned on him a courteous attention and submitted herself to contact with him. At the same time, she studied him as well as she could for the growing dusk. That profile, with its loose lips and receding chin, with its small, deep eye set too close in to the base of the nose, a nose large and Punch-like, was not an endearing one. It made a poor claim on sympathy.
‘My name’s Shelley,’ the profile added. A most unlikely name, anyone else would have thought it. Mrs Gray merely wondered incuriously whether he was a descendant. She thought of all extra-biblical poets as small fry.
But now, behind her as they entered, the young man was saying in a tone of artless disgust, ‘Lord, do we plough through all this stuff? Must be chock-a-block with midges.’ Beams of light escaping through the trees streamed away across the long grass and searched it like shining water in which the green blades stood upright, translucent and glowing, and in this lovely dazzlement thousands of little common flowers were netted, and the fallen florets, all transfigured. ‘There is a path,’ she said, and they came upon it, threading a way under the trees.
‘Let me take that bag. Have you walked up from Hilbery? Or did you come by bus? Quite a stretch, either way.’
‘It’s not at all too heavy for me—but as you please.’ She yielded up the bag without further protest. Another little trial, welcomed if sent. And so, with the door quietly closed behind them—for the young man’s movements tended to be cautious, she noticed, he insinuated himself, there was something of a prowler’s air about him—they began walking through a green darkness under the sweeping boughs. Doves murmured aloft in a world of leaves; up where the rosy light lingered, birds continued to cry out; the small flowers, the pale discs, the lacy cow-parsley, seemed to swim off their stems above the grass in the dark places. But all the value of the scene was lost to her. It had not lain in mere sensuous images, and communion was destroyed for the moment.
They came in five minutes to the holly-hedges and followed a winding path within these, very close and dark, and arrived presently at a big expanse of mown lawn where stood an immense black obelisk of a conifer to mark the point where the avenue from the gates ended and the drive branched. Flanking trees half obscured their sidelong view of the building with the flat cornice and central bow. Here they both stopped and seemed like people who had the purpose of saying something further before venturing out of cover. With Mrs Gray, however, this was not so; she had stopped, with a little secret impatience, and was merely waiting for her companion.
The sun had withdrawn completely from the deep green garden, and the house had a pallid, bluish shade, the eastern sky being still suffused with a little brightness behind it. Then a light went on, and the delicate trellis piers of the verandah on the first floor showed like black lace. Other gleams escaped through the leaves. Opening straight on to the lawn, the ground floor windows were dark, peering under the shadowy limbs of the trees with the enigmatic gaze of eyes in the gloaming. They two, on their side, lost in the dusk, merged with a leafy background, were probably invisible. Mrs Gray had a strange feeling that their approach was secretive. She felt bodiless as a shade.
‘Well,’ the young man said in an easy, jocular tone, though softly (and she realised that he had not spoken for some moments and was like a person taking his bearings), ‘Keith has a nice little property here. Phew, that must take some keeping up. It’s quite a little mansion. He must be filthily rich.’
She was surprised and felt she must correct him. ‘But of course Thomas left Keith nothing but the house. (Thomas died, you know, about a year ago.) And we all thought that rather odd, rather naughty of him, for he must have known that Keith never liked the place. And, anyway, how was he to afford its upkeep? It seemed almost like an unkind joke. My daughter, however, has rented the house from him. It was a way she saw of helping him—for of course she doesn’t really need such a place and rarely stays here long. But then, so far—or perhaps just temporarily—Keith and his wife and family are staying here. Yes, it’s really a little topsy-turvey! Or so it seems to me. But I dare say Keith is hard up… We knew the Antequins many, many years ago when they lived in Hilbery, before Thomas became famous, and I was so fond of his dear wife,’ she said with emotion (for she had come to think that this was true). ‘Christine prefers to live in London nowadays, but she often visits Hilbery. Keith and Helena are so fond of her. We are all great friends——’
