Читать книгу Five People - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 4

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HELEN received her letters on the eve of her departure for Marli, where the Van Quellins had an elegant little château that had lately pleased the errant whim, the sick mood of Cornelia Van Quellin.

Neither Madame St. Luc nor the Van Quellins followed the conventional conceits of fashion; despite the immense number of their acquaintances and a certain conspicuousness in their position they lived rather apart from other people; and Helen, since her husband's death, had discontinued much of her social life; she, besides, had not much but the paternal fortune; ample, of course, but not sufficient to leave much margin after the ordinary requirements of a wealthy, generous woman had been fulfilled.

During her widowhood she had kept up the flat in London, a flat in Paris, and not lived very much at either, but mostly in quiet and exquisite hotels or with some of her charming and affectionate friends.

She was going now to stay for a few days with the Montmorins, always the friends of Louis Van Quellin and now her friends.

As she motored out of Paris she read the letters her maid had handed her. She had taken them gaily with a sense of pleasure in seeing several familiar writings.

Reading these light agreeable letters occupied her until the car was out on the long straight French road so uniform and exact to a pattern of efficiency, and a cheap envelope addressed in an illiterate hand lay neglected on her lap.

Two of the women who wrote to her asked her when she was going to marry Louis Van Quellin; Helen smiled, she had guessed that she was wearing out the patience of her friends by this prolonged dalliance; and she wondered, as she read these two letters, one after the other, asking the same thing, quite why it was that she did still hesitate, quite why she still kept Van Quellin at a distance, very gaily and tenderly, yet still at a distance.

She thought that it was because of Cornelia; she had always been so sensitive about coming between brother and sister, and from month to month had beckoned a beguiling hope that the girl might suddenly be cured.

And yet it was a little something besides that; something more personal, something that Helen could not quite label, perhaps a little uncertainty as to Louis Van Quellin, perhaps, though this sounded absurd, an indefinite, unacknowledged fear of putting herself wholly and for ever in his power.

Still distracted by this subtle reflection, Helen picked up the remaining letter; she received a certain amount of appeals for charities, and even begging letters, and she thought this was one of them, and opened it with reluctance and a distaste for the vulgar envelope and common handwriting at once sprawling and cramped.

In the shaded electric light that filled the pearl-tinted interior of the car Helen St. Luc read:

My dear Cousin Helen,

I don't know if you you will get this, I don't know your address, I expect that you have hardly heard of me. I am your Uncle Paul's daughter. My mother is blind and crippled and we live together here. I don't suppose you ever come to a place like this. If you ever did it would be nice to see you, as I have no other relations. I often see your picture in the paper. Perhaps if you get this you might let me know.

Your affectionate cousin,

Pauline Fermor.

Madame St. Luc was deeply shocked; she forgot her other correspondents and even Louis Van Quellin as she turned over and over this wretched letter.

An inevitable flush of humiliation coloured her gentle face at his claim of kinship from someone whom she felt to be degraded; absolutely without vanity or arrogance, Helen yet detested, unconsciously and instinctively, all that was vulgar, and brought up as she had been, living as she lived, it could not fail to come as a stab that she was herself related to vulgarity and commonness.

And instantly after this sensation of disgust came, wonder; she stared at the address printed carefully in irregular letters at the top of the letter.

In England? So near to London? Why, then, this silence of a lifetime, why had her father, on the very rare occasions when he had mentioned his brother's family, spoken as if they had gone to Australia—and the mother blind and crippled!

How old would this Pauline be?—her own age or a little younger, and quite illiterate—a council school education, if that—how did she live? What did she do? No one who could write that letter could be much above a servant, and what did she want—why had she suddenly written?

Helen revolved these questions in rapid dismay, but it never occurred to her that she could ignore the letter or fail to be of the utmost possible service to the writer; yet she was both bewildered and aghast at the task, the problem, and, as it seemed to her, the menace, suddenly confronting her; why a menace?

There was nothing save what was silly and pitiful in this letter; yet Helen felt that the sheer fact of the existence of this cousin was a threat to her own happiness; she knew dim stirrings of remorse, a doubt as to the past, a wonder as to the events that had made such a cleavage between two women of the same age, the same blood, who were the sole survivors of their family.

"I must ask Louis," thought Helen, "exactly what I ought to do."

And as she thought of Louis Van Quellin she thought of her pink alabaster vase that had been so strangely returned to her; she laughed, though a little ruefully, at herself; but she could not resist connecting this portent with the letter from this cousin Pauline. She observed nothing more of the road, and it was absently that she noticed the car sweep through the wide gates of the Château Montmorin and along the smooth gravel drive; the rich summer air was suddenly bitter sweet with the perfume of box hedges, of lime blossoms and of privet blooming in the star-lit darkness; the long, low gracious windows of the château showed the opal and amber light of hidden lamps and a flare of crimson damask roses in the open casements between the looped back curtains of pale gold silk; through these wide set windows came the intermittent half muted playing of a violin, very exquisite and precise.

As Helen descended from her car Madame de Montmorin was on the terrace steps to welcome her; Helen divined a sort of compassion in this lady's kind greeting.

"You are rather late, my dear child—perhaps you are not too tired to go over at once to Geaudesert? Cornelia"—this a little anxiously—"is urgently asking for you—"

"I will go at once," answered Helen in a slightly absorbed fashion; her mind could not immediately be freed from the thoughts evoked by Pauline's letter, and she was used to Cornelia's moods, depressions and relapses.

"Is Louis there?" she added.

And Madame de Montmorin, still holding her warmly by the shoulders, kissed her again and said:

"Why don't you marry Louis; wouldn't it make things easier all round?"

"Jeanne," replied Helen seriously, "I am afraid things are too easy—for me at least, as they are. Do you know that I was so scared at being too fortunate that I tried to sacrifice my pink alabaster vase—you know, the ring of Polycrstes!"

"You silly child!" The elder woman caressed the soft tender face that looked so audaciously charming and yet so appealingly gentle; there was a peculiarly disarming quality about Helen's beauty; she had never yet evoked jealousy.

"Louis threw it out of my window," she added with a little grimace, "and it fell on some sacking and didn't break. What do you think of that, Jeanne?"

"That you were luckier than you deserved to be—really, Helen, your superstitions are shameless! Now will you go over and see Cornelia, and when she is quieted, Louis can bring you back here to supper—"

"Louis will not like to leave her—"

"My dear," said Madame de Montmorin calmly and firmly, "you must not allow Cornelia to become an obsession. I was telling Louis so to-day; it will be three lives spoiled instead of one if you are not careful."

"That sounds rather brutal," answered Helen wistfully; her emotions always ruled her mind, and her naturally good judgment was usually obscured by sentiment.

"You need saving from yourself," remarked Madame de Montmorin affectionately.

M. de Montmorin had put down his violin and come on to the steps to greet his guest; he brought with him a large gilt basket of peaches adorned with the pure blooms and glossy petals of rose coloured camellias; one of the perpetual offerings that went from Château Montmorin to Beaudesert.

During the few moments' drive Helen was uneasily thinking of Pauline's letter; she felt a rather subtle shame in showing it to Van Quellin; not for herself, but for this unknown cousin; it seemed like an exposure, like an affront, to show that letter to such a man as Louis Van Quellin.

Yet she was too entirely dependent on him to be really able to act without his advice, besides being, by nature and training, the type of woman always to refer all problems to a man.

Beaudesert was a small, elegant, ancient building, something between a toy château and a toy farm. It stood sheltered by a bouquet of tall trees in a gracious and careless little park, and close to the house was a pond, darkened by weeping willows, where the still artificial water, the drooping boughs and the pure whiteness of the swans against the tourelles of the house, were like a scene from an eighteenth-century pastoral; Cornelia's room looked on to this delicate, formal and melancholy view, and Helen found her, late as it was, sitting by the long open window looking out on to the stars and the willow.

Cornelia Van Quellin was eighteen years old and had something of the sad beauty of anaemia, the pallid loveliness of the disease that used to be masked under the gentle word "decline"; her Irish mother had died of tuberculosis at twenty-four, having captured the fastidious taste of her husband by precisely this unearthly fragility, this exquisite and fatal bloom.

All her life Cornelia had been ill, and as well as the symptoms of hereditary weakness, she was afflicted with a definite injury to the spine, the effect, as was generally believed, yet sometimes doubted, of a fall. Louis Van Quellin, a boy of sixteen, had taken the baby, his step-sister, tossed her up and dropped her, with the consequence of this disablement of body for her and a disease of the soul for him; several doctors had assured him that if this poor child had been healthy, the injury would have healed easily enough and that her present state of health was due to her disease, not to her injury; the remorse was ineffaceable; years of lavish care, of prodigal expenditure, had not balanced the boyish carelessness in Louis Van Quellin's sensitive mind, and he evinced for this pathetic child of his father's second marriage a devotion and a solicitude that touched the fantastic.

Cornelia did not, as so many chronic invalids do, possess any remarkable gifts of character or personality. Her spirit was as faint and ineffective as her body, her mind seemed as helpless as her limbs. She was gentle and affectionate and her own passion was the absorbing desire to be "cured"; from her couch, her chair, her carriage she frantically pursued the gleaming wings, the averted face of Hope.

Helen placed the basket of peaches on the table by the bed.

"I have just arrived, Cornelia. I came over at once. How beautiful your room looks, darling. M. de Montmorin sent you some of his peaches; see they are the same colour as the camellias—"

She lifted out two of the pure rosy blossoms and placed them on the girl's knee; Cornelia moved her head, heavy with fallen wreaths of glossy chestnut hair, on the cushions.

"I wanted to see you," she whispered, "and now you have come lam too tired to talk."

There was a nurse in the room, one of the two who were always with Cornelia, and Helen glanced at this woman apprehensively; surely the girl looked, even for her, very ill.

"Louis is on the balcony in the bedroom; don't you want to see him?" murmured Cornelia.

"Presently—when I have seen something of you—"

Helen sat on a low bergère by the invalid's sofa; she felt to-night, and for the first time, curiously unable to cope with the sick girl's melancholy; it must be, she thought, Pauline's letter like a weight on her spirits, usually so volatile.

This little room, which was circular, being in one of the tourelles, was entirely furnished in giltwood and orchid-tinted satin, and over-loaded with exotic flowers—carnation, jasmine, tuberose, verbena and roses, Cornelia's one definite taste; these stood on little shelves and brackets in crystal vases that they entirely hid, so that the sprays and cascades of blooms seemed to grow from the satin walls. Through the open inner door showed the palest lilac blue of the bedroom, the great uncurtained windows open on to the immaculate purity of the night, and a hanging lamp of such vivid glass that the light seemed to shine through a bed of tulips.

Cornelia wore a lace robe, a jacket of white fur and held spread over her knees a wrap of opal coloured velvet, on which the two red camellias showed with rich intensity; she had the long curved throat, the full red lips, the heavy eyes, the transparent carnation and the abundant reddish hair that is the beauty of decadence and sometimes even of imbecility.

Helen, so alert, so vivid, with her quick movements and changeful face, always flushing and smiling into animation, was a piquant, perhaps cruel contrast to the sick girl, as her quiet grey wrap and long swathed grey motoring veil were in contrast to the exaggerated luxury of the room.

Cornelia closed her eyes with an air of exhaustion, and Helen sat silent, looking out on to the pond and the willows faintly visible below.

She knew that Louis was standing on the light iron balcony of the inner room; she could see when she turned from where she sat, the long graceful line of his figure, and she knew also that he must be aware of her presence; from the fact that he remained on the balcony she guessed that he was in one of those strange moods when he seemed isolated in an impenetrable loneliness which her warmest affection was powerless to combat.

Helen, looking through the lamp-lit room at that motionless masculine figure, almost like a shadow, felt, for the first time during her relations with Louis Van Quellin, a tiny thrill of fear, an absurd fear, a grotesque fear—the fear of losing his love.

She had been always so sure of him that she had become almost indifferent to the value of this man as complete security and long use will breed a certain indifference even towards the most magnificent possessions.

Now, from this trivial fact that he had not come forward at once to greet her, she suddenly, in a chill clearness visualised a world without the love of Louis Van Quellin and found it intolerable.

If Cornelia had not been there she must have risen at once and gone to him; as it was it cost her an effort to remain placidly by the sick girl.

Cornelia looked up suddenly; the lustre of her large eyes, heightened by the wild rose flush on the pale cheek beneath had that over-luxuriant life that breeds death.

"I have something important to say," she whispered.

Helen endeavoured to dismiss all thoughts of Louis and to concentrate on Cornelia; this was more difficult as, for the first time, she found the exotic atmosphere of this sick room oppressive, the perfume of the masses of hothouse flowers too violent, and the unearthly beauty of the invalid girl too unnatural and painful; she would have liked to have escaped into the cool of the garden and sat alone under the willows that enclosed the pond, in the tranquil stillness of the murmuring evening.

"Something important, Cornelia?" She took one of the invalid's pallid damp hands in her firm fingers.

"Yes, I was afraid to speak to Louis—so I had to wait till you came and to-night you are late," complained Cornelia fretfully.

"Afraid to speak to Louis? But why?"

"He would not do what I wanted."

"But, Cornelia, he always does what you want."

Helen spoke very gently, but she was thinking of what Madame de Montmorin had said of Cornelia becoming an "obsession."

"He wouldn't allow this," replied Cornelia. "I know Louis—"

"What is it?" asked Helen; she had never known Louis flinch from any extravagance to gratify Cornelia.

"I wish to try a faith cure," said the girl most unexpectedly. "I was reading in the paper about a Mrs. Falaise, an American, who had the gift of healing—people are going to her from all over the world."

Helen was truly dismayed; she now agreed with Cornelia that this was the one thing that Louis would refuse his sister: Mrs. Falaise, whether sincere or not, had a flamboyant reputation and had more than once been in the courts as a witness at the inquests on her patients; yet that sparkling Hope they all pursued, might, to Cornelia, wear, for a space, even the aspect of a charlatan, and Helen could not endure to check this piteous enthusiasm.

"Mrs. Falaise?" she hesitated. "Perhaps there is something in her, Cornelia. Of course there is a great deal in a faith cure, but I think it is your own faith and the faith of those who love you—"

"But that hasn't cured me, has it?" interrupted the sick girl restlessly. "I don't really get stronger, Helen, it is all pretence that I do; every day I think—tomorrow—but to-morrow is just the same, and I'm grown up now. There is so much to learn. I want to dance, to play games, to drive a car—and I can't learn anything till I can walk, can I? I would like nice dresses too, not just these dressing-gown things, and oh, Helen! I would like the pain to stop!"

Her head drooped back on the pillows as if she was exhausted with so long a speech.

Helen thought that she would willingly give her anything, even the services of Mrs. Falaise.

Cornelia opened again her pathetic eyes, so unhealthily luminous behind the fringe of thick lashes.

"I get so tired of the pain, Helen, headaches and aches in my back and on my chest. I don't tell Louis about it, he gets so frantic, but it is there and I am so weary of lying down."

"But you are so much better this summer, all the doctors say so."

"I don't feel it—and even if I did, what is the use if I can't walk? I don't want to be better just lying on a sofa—I want to be like other girls."

Helen's heart contracted with anguish; "like other girls!" Could this ever be possible, whatever "cure" was effected? The very shape and look of Cornelia marked her out as one apart, dedicated her to disease and suffering, the commonplace joys she longed for could never be hers; at the very best she would always be languid, frail, ailing, only kept alive by all the resources of science and wealth.

Looking up into Helen's grieved face, the sick girl continued:

"And there is another thing. If I was well you would marry Louis at once, wouldn't you?"

Startled, Helen answered:

"You must not think of that, dear."

"But I know that you don't want to take him away from me."

"I could never do that," replied Helen warmly. "You will always be first with Louis."

"But that isn't right, is it?" asked Cornelia with amazing clearness of judgment. "I want to be well so that Louis doesn't have to care for me so much."

"Dear child," protested Helen, troubled, "you must not think of such things."

"But I do, I have so much time for thinking. Louis loves me—to make up, because he is so sorry. I want to set Louis free from that—I want someone to love me just for myself."

She pressed her handkerchief to her glazed lips and her eyes flashed through the crystal of tears.

"My darling, that will not be difficult." Helen had never seen so far into this wounded child's soul and she was confused and overwhelmed.

"Some people might think me pretty," continued Cornelia wistfully. "That is why I won't have my hair cut off, though it does make my head ache."

"You are lovely," said Helen softly. "Everyone thinks that, dear."

And in her romantic, sensitive and emotional mind she was thinking that surely it would be easy for some man to love Cornelia even as she was, to take over Louis's task of consoler and protector; Helen, though she knew that the idea would have been considered impossible, crazy and wrong, would willingly have seen Cornelia loved and even married; it was this isolation from all hope of the dearest relation in life that was thwarting the girl's chance of health; to Helen the role of Cornelia's lover did not seem impossible; but there was no such lover; the girl was dedicated to the nunnery of her sick chamber.

"Will you speak to Louis about Mrs. Falaise?" persisted Cornelia. "Tell him that I have set my mind on it—even the chance makes me feel happy—tell him that."

She was moving restlessly on her cushions, the pearly drops of weakness showed on the brow beneath the cherished crown of hair and the incredible scarlet of the lips were trembling.

"Of course I will speak, now, at once, if you like."

Cornelia pressed her hand, but did not answer; she was suddenly too exhausted to speak, and huddled together in her pillows, with closed eyes fell asleep at once. Helen crossed over to the nurse who sat near the bedroom entrance with the unobtrusive needlework.

"You heard what she said, nurse?" whispered Helen. "What do you think of it?"

The pleasant efficient woman rose.

"Of course there is nothing in it, Madame St. Luc."

"But if she believes there is, might not just that confidence do her some good?"

The nurse shook her sensible head.

"I'm afraid not. I've seen that sort of thing tried; you see, there's the reaction; perhaps these people work on them until they think they are better, there is a fearful lot of excitement and then a dreadful relapse. Miss Van Quellin," added the Englishwoman seriously, "couldn't stand anything like that—I'm sure any doctor would say so—and that is another difficulty you'd have. If you called in anyone like Mrs. Falaise, no doctor would go on with the case. I wouldn't care to nurse Miss Van Quellin myself, with anyone like that about," she finished firmly.

Helen was helpless before this combination of professional prejudice and sheer common sense.

She sighed. "I am sure that Mr. Van Quellin will not allow it," she answered, "but it is such a pity that she has set her heart on it."

"A great pity," agreed the nurse and went quickly across to her patient, while Helen entered the inner bedroom where Louis Van Quellin was still waiting on the low fronted balcony.

She had two troubles to bring him; Pauline's letter, which seemed so alien to this life, and this unfortunate business of Mrs. Falaise; that perfect happiness that had frightened her when she tried to sacrifice the vase was not hers to-night; in the light of the lamp, the bedroom showed large and pale in faint hues and sparse of furniture, to balance this the lamp gave a false rosiness; here were neither carpets, curtains nor flowers allowed, the two big windows stood perpetually open, and yet neither fresh air nor perfume could efface a faint clean odour of drugs.

At Helen's step in this room Louis Van Quellin turned and came in from the balcony; she knew at once that he had been waiting and listening, and she checked her advance with a queer sense of something formidable in her way. As she almost imperceptibly paused Louis Van Quellin came close to her and took her in his arms with a gesture that was, for him, impatient, yet sullen.