Читать книгу Five People - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 7

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ALL these reflections, hesitations, influences and counter influences ended in one clear fact; on a bright afternoon in September, six weeks later, Helen St. Luc drove out to see Pauline; and Louis Van Quellin was with her in the car.

He had defeated her on the subject of Mrs. Falaise; nothing more had been said, for weeks now, about the American faith healer, but he had not been able to defeat her on the matter of Pauline Fermor.

Helen had only been a few days in London when she insisted on seeking out her cousin; Van Quellin had only been able to obtain the privilege of accompanying her; and this had been conceded with reluctance.

"You're hostile, Louis, and it will show," she said. "I don't think it quite fair for you to come."

But he was there, and apparently in the best of good humours; the day seemed brimful of sunshine that overflowed everything with prodigal light, the rich fields, the yellowing trees, the bronze and crimson fruit in the orchards were all drenched in this mellow radiance.

Helen began to lose the sense of the squalor that letter had conveyed; she thought of Pauline in one of these little white cottages, singing at a latticed window while the quiet old mother dozed among the autumn flowers in the garden shaded by an apple tree; and she told Van Quellin, with much enthusiasm, of this picture she had evolved from the inspiration of the delicious countryside.

He smiled, but kindly.

"You forget they live in a town."

But no, Helen was not daunted; the town proved to be wholly charming, with an enchanting high street sloping down to the trickle of the river across the lush meadows.

But Louis still smiled.

There was a pause while inquiries were made for "Fernlea," Clifton Street. Helen refused to recognise the ugliness of these names, or the visible surprise on the part of the inhabitants that such a lady in such a car should ask for them; but directions were at last given and the car turned out of the old streets with the air of spare dignity, into a congerie of modern streets straggling up the hill; and Helen found that there could be dingy, meagre quarters even in the most engaging of ancient towns; and as the car slowly moved down the narrowness of Clifton Street, she began to feel foolishly nervous.

Pauline had not replied to her affectionate letter, promising a visit in the autumn, and she had not let her know of her coming.

This on the stern solicitation of Louis, who did not want a scene staged for their benefit, but to discover these people in the ordinary vocations of their ordinary life; Helen had agreed, for it never occurred to her that a surprise visit could embarrass anyone; she had not the shrewdness that can guess at things entirely beyond personal experience.

But as she realised the dilapidated modernity of Clifton Street, she saw that it was impossible to take either the car or Louis Van Quellin to "Fernlea."

She made the chauffeur back and stopped him at the corner by the pillar box where Pauline had posted her letter to her cousin.

"You must wait here for me," she said hurriedly. "I will go and see what they are like—if they want to see you or not," she added dubiously, for both the magnificence of Louis and the elegance of the car looked cruelly out of place against this background of stingy drabness.

"If you don't return soon I shall come and fetch you," returned Louis; he did not mean to give her more than ten minutes.

Helen went nervously along the wretched little street; conscious of frousy heads behind white Nottingham curtains at the windows, and dirty gazing children at the tiny gates; the sordid air of the city slum dweller was here mingled with the spiritless apathy of the peasant; Clifton Street gained an air of mingy decency by this close proximity to the open country, but also a dullness almost an imbecility, unknown in cities.

Helen found "Fernlea."

The house was incredible to her; or rather not a house, only a portion of a house as a crazy paling bisected the garden and the low windows of the miserable little building, making it into the dwellings.

The low window in "Fernlea" was masked by the lead colour of the badly washed curtains pinned together in the centre, and garnished with a card with the word "Apartments" in silver on a harsh blue ground; the last rain had traced lines on the dirt of the window-pane, dust and soot lay thick on the peeling stucco of the sill.

The door was blistered; neglect had turned the knocker and the letter box acid with verdigris colour, and in the fanlight was another card, "Apartments," hanging slightly crooked.

The small square of garden was a mere tangle of sprawling seeding marigolds, the upper window had the faded blind pulled down.

Helen stepped back to make sure that there was not some mistake; but the word "Fernlea" was written in chocolate brown on either of the short plaster pillars at the gate. There was something so repellent, even sinister, about this blank dismal house that Helen would have turned away, in sheer cowardice, if it had not been for the thought of Van Quellin waiting in the car, and of having to confess her failure to his amusement.

As she timidly raised the knocker and saw her beautiful gloved hands resting on that horrible little door she was conscious how out of harmony her clothes were with this visit; she had come dressed plainly, but she had nothing in her wardrobe that would have been suitable for "Fernlea."

She had to knock again before the door was opened; and then it was only moved cautiously, a mere suspicious slit; Helen could not know that the few people who came to this house passed round the back to the door that opened into the scullery.

Helen saw the face of a young woman against the murk of the cramped hall, a peculiar face she thought it, with the grand brows, the scowling eyes and the mass of dried bay leaf coloured hair slipping down her back.

"Is Miss Fermor here?" asked Helen nervously. "Miss Pauline Fermor?"

Pauline opened the door wider; in this slender stranger in the pearl coloured coat and collar of smoky fox fur and the black hat with the single drooping grey plume, she had not recognised her cousin; she thought of a possible lodger, but saw at once that this lady was too fine for "Fernlea," so answered sullenly, without any attempt to please:

"I'm Pauline Fermor."

"Then you are my cousin," said Helen, holding out her hand. "May I come in and speak to you?"

Pauline had something of the sensation of the poor Arabian fisherman who rubbed an old bottle and evoked a genie; her letter to have brought this creature to her doorstep!

Helen had written certainly, and spoken of a visit, but Pauline had never given any credence to that.

She flushed dully, and just touched the outstretched hand with her soiled fingers.

"Please come in." She led the way into the parlour, that was only used by the occasional summer lodger.

The cramped hall, the shabby room, half stifled Helen; the atrocious wall paper, ornaments and fusty furniture, the cheap piano loaded with little vases, the paper flowers in the grate, the stale, rancid, enclosed air she found unbearable.

"It is so strange that we have not met before," she smiled.

"Very," said Pauline.

With keen, swift glances she was noting every detail of Helen's person; the other cousin dare not make this close scrutiny; she had a distressing impression of a shabby serge frock and a dirty apron, ruined hands and a manner of dreadful defiance.

"You said that you would like to see me," she continued, bravely pursuing her point, "so I have come as soon as I returned to London."

"I never thought that you would," returned Pauline bluntly.

"Oh, why?"

"Well—look at us."

Even Helen's ready sweetness could not immediately find an answer to this.

"You would hardly think," added Pauline, "that our fathers were brothers."

And she continued to regard her cousin with those darting glances of hostile curiosity.

Helen could not reconcile this sombre personality with that simple letter; she saw now that Louis was right in believing that epistle to be perfectly insincere, and almost she wished she had not come.

"I thought," she answered, "that you wished to see me; it seems a pity that there are only two of us and that we should be strangers—as for the old troubles, I know nothing of them at all."

"Don't you?" asked Pauline defiantly.

"No," replied Helen, flushing but still gentle, "and I think it foolish to dwell on them—sad things—"

"But you," remarked Pauline grimly, "have no sad things to dwell on, have you?"

It was, to Helen, like her secret conscience speaking; it was an indictment, an accusation; she did not reply.

Pauline pitilessly pursued her advantage.

"Would you like me to tell you something about myself? Will you sit down?" added Pauline, turning round one of the cheap chairs. "I never thought that you would come."

"Why? I wish you had written to me before. I could have come at once if I had known." Helen's sincerity gave her a dignity that balanced her embarrassment and remorse. "You see, Pauline, I really know nothing."

She had taken the offered chair and Pauline was seated on the music stool in front of the shiny piano and the twopenny vases; between them was the heavy square table with the threadbare chenille cloth.

As Helen used her name, Pauline seemed to start or wince.

"Do you really want to be friendly—with me?" she asked.

There was something pleasing about her as she said this; she lost her air of half-savage awkwardness and her accent, so at odds with her appearance, graced her words; she had caught an old-fashioned refinement of speech from her mother, and living so alone had never learnt the easy catch words, the tripping phrasing, of any class; she was largely, through repression and lack of education, inarticulate, but when she felt deeply she expressed herself with an unconscious drama that was not without grandeur.

"Of course," replied Helen earnestly, "I do really want to be friendly with you."

"I've often seen your pictures in the papers and read about you—I've got some idea of what your life is, you can't have any idea of mine."

And she looked sombrely at the gracious tender figure against this atrocious background.

"No," said Helen humbly. "Perhaps not—won't you tell me?"

"There isn't much to say after all. Mother and I have lived in this house ever since I can remember. Mother's been blind ever since I was fifteen. I've looked after her, and done the work and let rooms and given piano lessons when I could get them, which isn't often now that they teach at the schools; we didn't get a lodger this summer, and mother's been ill the last few weeks. I've done a bit of washing for neighbours, a little sewing too, that's all, I think."

She ended with a dry smile and put one scarred rough hand up to the slipping coils of dead coloured hair in the nape of her neck.

"Why didn't you write before?" was all Helen could say.

"Mother wouldn't allow it. I wanted to but mother was too bitter—she wouldn't have anything to do with the Fermors."

"Bitter? I don't understand," murmured Helen, then stopped at a loss; she wanted to say that she could not understand this bitterness because her father had always done his utmost for his impossible brother; but this could not be said, and now that she knew the circumstances of Pauline, Helen was herself bewildered as to why her father had both abandoned these two and kept silence about them.

"I daresay not," replied Pauline, "but she is—she doesn't know I wrote, she mustn't know; it would upset her very much, she wouldn't be able to bear it if she knew you were in the house."

Helen rose.

"Then I will go—you should have told me, and I would never have come."

"But I wanted to see you. I don't know anything about these old things any more than you do." For the first time a slight eagerness touched Pauline's manner, "I've got nothing when mother dies, I go nearly crazy thinking of it—nothing! I thought," she added rapidly, "that I'd just write and see what you were like."

The conclusion ran lamely, and Helen knew that it should have run—"what you would do for me."

"There was no one else," continued Pauline with drooped eyelids and twisting her fingers awkwardly. "I don't make friends—not among these people, and we are relations," she added defiantly.

Yes, they were close kin; the children of the two brothers and of women of equal birth, only if anything Maria Gainsborough had been superior in everything but money to Helene Bonnot—everything but money; there was no difference but money between them, never had been; Helen's advantages, Helen's happiness were due to money. Pauline's miseries wholly to the lack of it; Helen realised this with horror, with almost a self disgust.

"I would do anything for you, Pauline," she answered with a generous haste, "anything I could. You mustn't worry about the future at all." She searched for some means whereby to avoid the hatefulness of alms-giving, to avoid this vital word "money."

"You must come and stay with me. I believe that I could make it pleasant for you; do come, Pauline; we must not lose each other again."

A dull red stained Pauline's sallow face.

"I've got to work," she replied. "I shall always have to work."

"No." Helen brought out the detestable sentence, "I've enough—I'm wealthy; please make me your banker."

To her relief, Pauline, instead of being offended at what, disguise it as she would, was but an offer of charity, seemed to grasp at the opening.

"A little money would mean a lot to me," she said. "If I'd had a few pounds I could have started a little business time and again."

"There's no need," said Helen, grateful that she was not offended. "You must come with me—this isn't your right surrounding; I mean, you can't really like it. Oh, it would be delicious to take you away, Pauline, and to give you a rest and a change from—all this."

Pauline did not relax from her rigid attitude, half watchful, half defiant.

"There's mother," she said dryly.

The charming Helen, who had never been rebuffed nor disliked, was inclined to make light even of this hostile personage.

"Couldn't I see her? She can't really dislike me when she has never seen me. Couldn't we take her away somewhere—if she is not well? France, perhaps. Pauline, do let us be happy together now that we have found each other at last."

As she stood in an attitude both ardent and pleading, trying to woo this stiff gloomy creature, with all the grace and caress of her delicious personality, she was, despite the worldly elegance, the cultured finish of her individuality, a being almost childlike.

But Pauline's expression did not change in response to this generous offer of hand and heart; the sardonic amusement of intelligence confronted by folly gleamed in her eyes—a second and then she was indifferent, quiet again.

"Mother would never come," she remarked.

"Not if you persuaded her?"

"No."

"Could I see her perhaps?" pleaded Helen, with an unconscious confidence in her own powers of conciliation.

"It would be much better if you didn't see her," replied Pauline. "If you want to do anything for me you must do it secretly."

Helen was repelled by this coarse bluntness of speech, this cold reflection of her affection and this grasping acceptance of her favours.

"Of course, as you wish," she assented gently.

"I can't get mother away from here and I can't leave her."

"I understand. But if she would see me, and be reasonable! Any trouble there was, was before I was born."

"Before we were either of us born, I suppose," said Pauline carelessly, "but it affects all one's life, doesn't it? Now, if my father had invented the Fermor brake system—"

Helen did not like this tone, which touched the insolent, and she was surprised at Pauline's knowledge of this patent that had been the basis of the Fermor fortune.

"It is a question of luck," she replied kindly. "My father was a brilliant engineer, but it was just good fortune that he chanced on something so successful—"

"Oh, yes," echoed Pauline, "good fortune, just good fortune."

"I've been very fortunate," admitted Helen wistfully. "I know that—I've even felt sorry about it, as if I'd had no right to so much ease and pleasure; I've been selfish of course, but now if I could share some of this good fortune with you I should feel so much happier."

Pauline paid no attention; she had risen from the music stool and appeared to be listening.

"That's mother moving," she exclaimed and moved towards the door; but she had heard too late the sound of shuffling footsteps; there was a noise of fumbling round the lock, the handle was turned jerkily, and the blind woman entered with her cumbrous, dragging walk, helping herself by a stick and by the furniture.

"Mother, you should not have come down alone," cried Pauline angrily, while Helen paled at the sight of this blind, crippled creature, so shabby, even ragged, so old and malevolent and idiotic in expression.

"I heard a voice," said Mrs. Fermor, "a lady's voice; one doesn't often hear a lady's voice here—now who is it, Pauline?"

Her daughter had taken her by the shaking arm and was trying to lead her away.

"I thought," added the old woman, "that it was like Mark Fermor's voice—"

Helen, even in the face of this dismal creature, found her spirits.

"I am Mark Fermor's daughter—your niece, Helen."

"Helen St. Luc!" shrilled Mrs. Fermor. "In my house!"

This meant nothing to Helen but a vague horror from which she might quickly get away; the words, the tone, the gesture, were all outside her comprehension, never had she seen such things save vaguely and dimly from a distance, someone shouting at a street corner or at a window as she drove quickly by through her different world. She looked at Pauline expecting to see an echo of her own dismay, but Pauline was merely gazing at her with a stealthy curiosity.

"I must go," murmured Helen, almost with a gasp. "Your mother is not well—"

But the fell figure of the blind woman was directly in her path, for with one hand Mrs. Fermor clutched the table and the other, that grasped the stick, nearly touched the wall, so that Helen could not pass to the door.

"One moment," replied this terrible figure that blocked the way, "and then you shall go—but there are one or two things to be said first—"

"Mother," interrupted Pauline, "Madame St. Luc came here in quite a friendly way."

But she did not speak as if she meant to soothe her mother, but almost as if she would, secretly, goad her to further violence.

"A friendly way!" muttered Mrs. Fermor. "Yes, it would be a very friendly way in which Mark Fermor's daughter would come to see me."

Disgust and alarm had now been overcome by pity in Helen's gentle heart; she trembled with the unpleasantness of her position, but she still strove to conciliate her piteous adversary.

"Mrs. Fermor—indeed I know nothing of any past troubles. They must have been before either Pauline or I was born—"

"It was a few months before Pauline was born," said the blind woman with a clearness of utterance forced by the clearness of the thought that made her, temporarily, like a young and vigorous woman, "that your father turned me out of his office where I had come to beg, to beg, mind you, and called me a blackmailer."

"That is not possible!" exclaimed Helen, while Pauline watched them both, with arid curiosity.

"And now I," continued Mrs. Fermor, relentless and still with that deadly lucidity, "turn you out of my house, calling you the daughter of a thief, a thief—"

"You must tell me what you mean by that," replied Helen proudly. "You seem to know what you are saying, and you must explain that word, please."

Mrs. Fermor had begun to sway on her feet, and Pauline was supporting her, but not endeavouring to silence her, only staring greedily, listening greedily, with a sinister delight in Helen's distress.

"You're a thief, too," answered the old woman. "Every penny you have belongs to Pauline—your father stole those plans from my husband."

"It is difficult to forgive you for saying that," cried Helen. "My father—you don't know what you say."

Mrs. Fermor gave a dreary, forlorn and malicious laugh. "It's been some pleasure to me to turn Mark Fermor's daughter out of my house," she remarked; she began to mumble; the fierce effort that she had made to come downstairs and face her enemy, was beginning to sap her strength; Pauline pushed her, not too gently, into a chair by the piano, and the way being thus free Helen was able to pass to the door.

Pauline called after her:

"I'm sorry; I couldn't stop her, could I? She thinks that what she says is true. She's always been saying that—about the stolen plans."

Helen shuddered, without answering, and went into the close, grimy passage; when her trembling and unaccustomed fingers had pulled open the creaking front door, she saw Louis Van Quellin on the step.

"I've been knocking, but no one heard—Helen, what is the matter?"

Never had she loved him, admired him, wanted him, as at that moment; he typified all that was normal and kind and friendly after the dreadful moments she had been through in the horrible little parlour.

"Louis, it is unspeakable—that old woman there, my aunt, I suppose, turned me out of her house, called me the daughter of a thief—"

She spoke in French, the language she commonly used with Louis Van Quellin, and the more freely for the shield of this tongue which she knew was not understood here—in this barbarous place. Incredulous rage sharpened the young man's face.

"Told you—that?"

"She said," answered Helen, nearly weeping, "that father had stolen the Fermor brake system from her husband—"

Van Quellin's reply to this was swift action; he turned and battered at the discoloured knocker on the still open door.

"Oh, no, let them alone!" pleaded Helen fearfully. "I couldn't see that old woman again—she is blind, you know, and distorted—"

Pauline appeared in the passage; she looked calmly, almost contemptuously, at her cousin.

"Are you Miss Fermor?" asked Van Quellin in his excellent English that was yet not quite the English of an Englishman. And Pauline said "yes," and stared at him as if she had forgotten her mother and Helen; she had, of course, never seen anything like this young man, in his aquiline radiance, his strength masked with fineness and now in the vividness of his wrath, more easily roused and more articulate wrath than the wrath of the Anglo-Saxon.

"Will you please explain what has happened? Madame St. Luc came here with the most generous intentions and has been turned away with insult; will you tell me at once what is meant?"

Pauline quailed before this superb and formidable opponent.

"Won't you come in?" she asked. "We can't talk here because of the neighbours—"

"I couldn't come in again," said Helen. "Not after what your mother said—"

"Mother is still in the parlour," replied Pauline confusedly. "Won't you come round to the back for a moment?"

"Why?" asked Helen, who wanted only to get away; but Van Quellin took her by the arm.

"I must have an explanation," he commanded, and the three ill-assorted people went round the house to the dishevelled little back-yard, where the weary untidiness of the house overflowed and was dammed up in a dismal backwater of rubbish.

Helen still protested:

"Let us go—it was a mistake for me to come. I can do no good here."

But Pauline was taking no heed of her cousin; her whole attention was for Louis Van Quellin.

"I suppose you are a friend of Madame St. Luc?" she asked almost humbly.

He nodded stiffly, disdaining explanations.

"Well, I can't tell you why mother has got this idea in her head," continued Pauline hurriedly. "She's been failing lately and doesn't know what she says perhaps. She really believes it is true—I didn't know she would come down to-day. I didn't know Madame St. Luc was coming."

"There is no more to be said," murmured Helen. "I am sure you disassociate yourself from what your mother said, Pauline."

She would have left it at that, but the man pressed the point home.

"Do you?" he insisted.

Pauline hesitated; she flinched before those pale imperious eyes, yet she longed to pour out her grievances and her hatreds, and her instinct was to say that she did believe her mother's monstrous accusation; but her strong common sense and natural shrewdness checked her; she saw at once that she could not deal with this man as she had dealt with Helen, and that to support her mother would be never to see either of these people again; and in her cousin lay her sole hope of escape from her present torments.

"Of course, I know it can't be true," she answered in a low voice. "But mother's been very unfortunate and very ill, and lives in the past—as for myself, I don't know anything at all—"

"I am very sorry for you, Pauline," said Helen, instantly accepting the awkward, half-hearted excuse, "and if ever I can be of any help—"

"Miss Fermor will, no doubt, let you know when and how," put in Louis quietly, "and now you must not stay here any longer, Helen."

His words, his gesture, conveyed his intense regard for her and his contempt of her surroundings; Pauline was watching him with a dreadful fascination, and suddenly divined that they were lovers.

Helen held out her hand.

"The address on my letter will find me," she said. "I am very sorry for to-day—"

Pauline took no notice of this—no notice of either the fair hand or the fair words.

She did not take her cousin's hand; she appeared to only see the man; she gave him a look of bitter challenge, jerked back her head and went into the house by the scullery door, which she closed sharply behind her; and Louis Van Quellin, extremely angry, said, for once, not what he believed would please Helen, but what he really thought:

"A couple of blackmailers!"