Читать книгу Five People - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 6

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MADAME DE MONTMORIN rose.

"Helen, lam sure that you are very tired—that long motor drive and then going straight to Cornelia—it is really late, and you are to come upstairs at once."

Helen was glad of these affectionate commands; she was not only tired, she wished very much to be alone and to read quietly again the letter of Pauline Fermor; as the men watched the pale, soft dresses of the women fade into the dusk beyond the saffron of the lamplight, M. de Montmorin said:

"Helen agitated! I have never noticed that before."

And Van Quellin, immovable, pushed back his easy chair in the shadow by the balustrade:

"The poor child has two worries—the first is purely chimerical; Cornelia took a fancy to calling in that American faith healer, Mrs. Falaise' and Helen thinks she ought to be indulged." He lit a cigar and the spurt of the light showed his long hands. "Of course it is impossible, and I fear that Helen thinks me a brute."

The elder man made a little gesture that regretfully dismissed a charming feminine folly.

"The other," continued Van Quellin out of the pleasant dusk, "is more important—a cousin has appeared out of nowhere."

"Helen's cousin? I did not know that she had any relations."

"Nor I till the other day; this is the only one, the daughter of an Uncle Paul."

"Why is it a trouble to Helen?"

A slight silence fell; it was tacitly understood between the two men, both of noble birth, that the beloved Helen was of a meaner origin than the admiring people among whom she moved, but it had, naturally, never been mentioned.

Now, Van Quellin at length said to this old friend of his, who had also been the friend of M. St. Luc:

"Helen's father was an engineer, you know, a mechanical engineer, the son of a gentleman farmer I think; there were two brothers, and the other, Paul' was a scoundrel; he seems to have died under disgraceful circumstances, leaving a widow and this daughter unprovided for."

"Wasn't the other M. Fermor a very wealthy man?"

"Yes, after the success of his new brake system, the patent brought him in hundreds of thousands. I never met him; he died soon after Helen's marriage—he seems to have lived very quietly and to have made few friends. Helen has an etching of him. I like his face."

"Didn't he help his brother?" asked M. de Montmorin.

Van Quellin shrugged his shoulders.

"Helen believes so; of course she only knows what her father chose to tell her, and there was, at any rate, a complete cleavage between the two. Helen is—as you see her, and this woman writes a letter like a kitchen-maid from a back street in an English country town."

M. de Montmorin was shocked.

"That is disgusting," he remarked.

"Yes. There is something behind it too, after a silence of thirty years!"

"Afraid to approach the father perhaps?"

"But M. Mark Fermor has been dead eight years."

M. de Montmorin reflected a moment; then asked:

"What do you make of it?"

"I don't quite know till I've heard something more about M. Paul Fermor. I'm going to make inquiries in London; if he was a real outsider this girl may be as bad, and I don't know anything about the mother. She is blind, by the way."

"How do they exist?"

"I don't know at all; I didn't like the letter. It seemed to me artificial and sly. Hopelessly illiterate."

"How horrible for Helen," said M. de Montmorin. "And for you," he added carefully.

"Yes. You can understand the appeal to one of Helen's temperament! The poverty, the blind mother, the only relation she has in the world, and so on. Helen's so tender-hearted and romantic—will just allow herself to be tormented and despoiled."

"You must prevent that."

"Yes. It isn't so easy without hurting Helen. It is a delicate matter too. They are not my relations, and Helen has her own money."

"If she only gives them money," suggested the elder man, "it will not so much matter, but I fear, with Helen, it will not stop at money."

"Of course not," replied Van Quellin calmly, "she will overwhelm them with attentions. Naturally they are entirely unpresentable."

"The girl might not be, she's Helen's cousin."

"My dear Montmorin, you have not seen the letter she wrote!" replied the young man dryly. "The mother must have been of the lowest class to have allowed them to sink like this, the father was a drunkard and a wastrel, and the Fermors," added the aristocratic Fleming unconsciously, "were hardly gentle people; Helen is scarcely prepared for what she will find."

"You must not allow them to see her alone."

"Certainly not. I hope she won't see them at all; but she is bent on it, as soon as she returns to London in September."

M. de Montmorin could deeply sympathise with the acute though well-concealed annoyance of Louis Van Quellin; he was a wide-minded, sensible, tolerant man, and could easily appreciate the present-day discount of aristocracy, yet himself a cadet of one of the oldest French families, he must appreciate the vexation that a man of Van Quellin's birth must always have felt at Helen's frankly middle-class origin; fine breeding was a tradition and a natural tradition with the Van Quellins and the mother of Louis had been a rather austere and narrow English patrician.

While Helen stood absolutely alone this question of her antecedents had been a very deeply concealed irritation; now, it had come, with the discovery of these incredible relations, very prominently to the front.

M. de Montmorin, with an elderly Frenchman's fine flavour for subtle emotions, wondered if Helen quite knew what her championing of these relations would mean to Louis Van Quellin; he would never be able to tell her, and she—and that was where the middle class would show in sweet Helen—would never be able to guess.

"It is a thousand pities," remarked the old man sincerely, "that this has risen."

The seriousness with which he spoke showed Louis that he had been completely comprehended; M. de Montmorin had appreciated the sting about which neither of them could speak.

"Helen," said the young man slowly; he always lingered a little over her darling name, for sheer pleasure in the sound, "is too good-hearted; wherever she goes she comes back with an empty purse; she always spies out some recipient for her alms."

"Without you these people would have found an easy victim—do they ask for any help?"

"No. I feel that is to come, the letter is very cautious. Of course the woman would never have written if she had had any decent reserves—what could," added the young man impatiently, "she have brought herself to the notice of Helen for, if not for some hoped-for benefit?"

"Exactly. I don't understand the long silence; even if they dared not approach M. Fermor, they must have been easily able to trace Helen's movements since her marriage."

"Of course. I am sure there is something unpleasant behind that letter. I'm afraid that Helen feels that also—she is so superstitious," he smiled tenderly. "She really was in earnest about her vase, and then when I brought it back whole—the ring of Polycrates, you know, she was quite disturbed."

"You should have broken the vase yourself, Van Quellin."

The young man shook his head.

"You can't cheat with Helen."

M. de Montmorin saw that; impossible to deceive that fine candour, that complete trust.

"That will make it more difficult as regards this cousin," he remarked.

"Ah, yes, you may be sure that Helen will have her own way," and he spoke regretfully, as if he did not altogether care for the prospect of Helen having always her own way.

Madame de Montmorin joined them; she took the chair that Helen had left between the two men.

"Helen is very tired," she said. "Something is troubling her. What was it that Cornelia wanted to see her about so urgently?"

"A certain Mrs. Falaise, a faith healer; Cornelia had the caprice to want to try the woman; of course impossible."

Jeanne de Montmorin took this very seriously.

"Louis, you must be very careful that Cornelia never meets a person like that; she could not endure the excitement. I am quite sure that it would kill her."

"Naturally I should not think of it," replied Van Quellin briefly.

He rose and went to the terrace balustrade that still seemed to hold the warmth of the long day's sun, and looked across the dark park to where Helen had looked; he guessed that she had been thinking of Cornelia, and he allowed himself to dwell on the fact that the sick girl, for all her slightness and humility, was powerfully affecting them both.

And he decided that this poignant burden was enough; he would have nothing to do with Helen's obscure cousin.

Even as he was resolving this, Helen, upstairs in her bedroom, was writing an affectionate letter to this same cousin.