Читать книгу Nothing Venture - Dora Amy Elles - Страница 4

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Nan Forsyth looked up from her typewriter and dropped her hands from the keys. He was coming out. Half an hour—twenty minutes—ten..... She really did not know how long it was since he had come in with his frown and the jerk of the shoulders which said, as plainly as any words, “For heaven’s sake let’s get this over!”

He always came in like that; and then, after ten—twenty—thirty minutes, out again, with his black head up and the frown gone, as if he had got rid of something, for the moment at any rate. He never spoke to her except to ask for Mr Page, and then he might as well have been speaking into a telephone. Even on the day when Mr Page had been kept by old Sir Elphinstone Brady, who never stayed less than an hour, Jervis Weare had merely stood by the window drumming on the sill with a lean brown hand and frowning, as Nan put it, like a complex depression likely to break at any moment into local thunder.

It was a false alarm. He wasn’t coming after all, though she had certainly heard him push back his chair a minute ago. This was his last visit. She and Miss Villiers had been called in to witness his signature to the deed of settlement. Miss Villiers, who had typed the deed, had been loud in praise of its generosity—“My, dear! She’s a lucky girl! Five hundred a year just to spend on herself! And just as likely as not she’ll have no idea of how to do it justice. Why, some of these high-up people are right down dowdy, and not half the looks of others that’s got to dress themselves and pay their board and maybe help to support a poor invalid mother on three pound ten a week and no pickings.” After which Miss Villiers surveyed herself in a pocket mirror and began absently to touch her lips with a Coraline caress-proof lipstick.

“If Mr Page catches you using lipstick in the office—” said Nan warningly.

Miss Villiers sighed.

“Sorry dear, I forgot. A perfect beast—isn’t he?” She wiped off the Coraline, took a last lingering look at her pretty peaked features and rolling blue eyes, and slipped the glass back into her hand-bag. “Well, she’s a lucky girl, money or no money. I’m crazy about him myself. Aren’t you, dear? I do like a man that looks as if he could just strike you down with one blow of his fist and scarcely know he’d done it, so to speak. Don’t you?”

Nan burst out laughing.

“What an ass you are, Villiers!” she said. “Look here, have you found that mortgage Mr Page was asking for?”

“My! No! I clean forgot.”

“Then you’d better go and look for it.”

Villiers went reluctantly.

“And as likely as not I’ll miss him when he goes, and next time—if there is a next time—he’ll be a married man.” She paused with her hand on the door which led into the room sacred to deed-boxes and office files. “Are you going to the wedding?”

Nan shook her head. The keys clicked under her fingers.

“I’m going,” said Miss Villiers. “I shall wear my new hat—you know, the one I got for two and eleven pence halfpenny in the Sales, and I’m sure it looks like a three guinea model. P’raps I’ll get taken for a bridesmaid—I shouldn’t wonder if I did. Yes, I’m going. I say, dear, if there’s one thing I envy that girl besides the money and the man, it’s her name. Rosamund—Veronica—Leonard—Carew. Fancy being able to stand up in church in a gold tissue that cost goodness knows what, and a point d’Alençon train, and a halo of orange-blossom, and say, ‘I, Rosamund Veronica Leonard, take thee, Jervis!’ Funny, his only having one name—isn’t it?”

Nan went on typing.

“Ass!” she said. “Sorry to repeat myself, but you are—and if Mr Page asks for that mortgage again and you haven’t found it, I should say the odds were that you’d be an ass out of a job.”

Miss Villiers giggled tolerantly and shut the door. Desperately Nan hoped that she would not find the mortgage until Jervis Weare had come striding through the room. She wanted just that one moment—to see the inner door open, to see him come out, to see him pass, to see him go, to know him gone. It was going to hurt horribly. She wanted it even if it hurt her beyond everything she knew or could guess about pain. But you mustn’t be watched when things are hurting you like that—you mustn’t have people looking on and chattering—it wasn’t decent.

Nan waited for her moment. Would he look very happy and relieved now that all the tiresome business connected with his marriage was done? Would he look very happy on his wedding day? By an hour or two after this time tomorrow he would be married to Rosamund Veronica Leonard Carew.

Nan tried to picture him looking happy, and failed. She had seen him frowning, she had seen him bored, she had seen him angry; and once, for a moment, she had seen him with a lost, hungry look that caught her heart and turned it in her breast. That was when he had stood at the window looking out and drumming on the sill. There was just that one moment when the drumming fingers stayed, the impatient frown smoothed out, and a lost child, hungry, bewildered and astray, looked out of the dark eyes. Nan’s heart ached still when she thought about that look. It was one of the things that could not be borne, and yet had to be borne.

She took up one of the sheets that she had been typing and began to correct it. And then quite suddenly the inner door was opened and Jervis Weare came out. Mr Page was behind him, ruddy, smiling, and bland; his horn-rimmed spectacles pushed up; his head slightly thrown back as he talked to the tall young man who preceded him in what the late Mr Ambrose Weare would have described as his best bedside manner.

“Not at all—not at all. You’ve been most patient. A very troublesome business getting married.” Mr Page laughed his mellow laugh.

Jervis Weare did not laugh, but neither did he frown. He turned with a trace of effort and said, speaking quickly and boyishly.

“It’s you who have been patient, Mr Page. I—I’m afraid I’m not a very patient person. I—I’d like to say thank you for all the trouble you’ve taken.” And with that he shook hands impetuously and was gone. The door slammed.

Mr Page put up his hand to his glasses.

“Dear me!” he said. “Very like his grandfather—but I think more heart. Well, well, he is marrying a very charming girl—quite beautiful in fact. A most satisfactory affair in every way. Yes—yes. Ah, Miss Forsyth! Do you know whether Miss Villiers has found that mortgage I was asking for? The Heaston estate. Gross carelessness if it has been mislaid—very gross carelessness indeed. What is the matter, Miss Forsyth? You look extremely pale. Are you ill?”

“Oh no, sir.”

“You look extremely pale. It would be most inconvenient if you were to be ill at this juncture, but I do not want you to work if you are not feeling fit.”

“I am quite well.”

The outer door had shut with a clang. It was this clang that had shaken her, and shaken the room so that everything in it was trembling just a little. The door-frames, and the window-sill, and the table at which she was sitting were all moving, shaking, trembling, as if she was seeing them through a shimmering haze. She bit hard into her lip and bent forward over the table. The room cleared; the furniture and the door-frames became solid and distinct.

Jervis Weare had gone out of her life.