Читать книгу Nothing Venture - Dora Amy Elles - Страница 5

Table of Contents

“I haven’t found it,” said Miss Villiers. “What time did you say it was? One o’clock? My! Well, that means I’ll have to give up lunch and go on looking for it. Regular old Bluebeard, I call him, to keep me starving, while as likely as not he’s drinking port and champagne and eating the best of everything. I know what I’d have if I was him—chicken and mushrooms, and one of those ice puddings like they gave the recipe for in last week’s Ladies’ Friend—pineapple and cream inside, and a hot chocolate sauce all over.” She sighed voluptuously. “One thing, going without lunch is good for the figure. I say, dear, you wouldn’t like to stay and help me, I suppose?”

Nan shook her head. She was pulling on a small black hat. She picked up her hand-bag and made for the door.

“I’ve got to get home,” she said.

Miss Villiers stared.

“What do you want to do that for? If you bus it, it costs you as much as the difference between feeding at home and feeding out, and if you walk, why it’s as much as you’d do to get there and back in the time.”

Nan nodded absently.

“Right as usual, Villiers,” she said.

As a rule she brought sandwiches to the office, or had a cup of tea, and an egg if funds were high, or a bun if they were low, at a tea-shop round the corner. She only went home when it seemed impossible to leave Cynthia for the whole day. Today was one of the days when it did not seem possible. She committed the extravagance of taking a bus, because this would give her forty minutes with Cynthia. She had ten minutes to put Jervis Weare out of her thoughts, and get the colour back into her cheeks. She rubbed them vigorously as she climbed Mrs Warren’s stair, which smelt of lodgers’ dinners, to the room at the top of the house which had been home for the last two years.

She opened the door, and if she had had a thought to spare for herself, she would have known at once that, like Miss Villiers, she would probably have to go lunchless today. She had told Cynthia that she was coming back. They would have scrambled eggs and mashed potatoes, cooked on their gas ring. Cynthia was to buy the eggs, but it was quite obvious that Cynthia had not done so, since she was still in her dressing-gown.

Nan took a breath, and shut the door behind her.

“Well, Cynthy?” she said.

Three months ago Cynthia Forsyth had possessed the frail, translucent beauty which compels a startled admiration and an almost terrified sense of its evanescence. The bloom on a wild flower, the iridescence of flung spray, the passing colours of sunrise and sunset, have this same power to astonish and to charm. Now she was just a too thin, too pallid girl with fair hair, a smooth skin, and rather appealing dark eyes reddened by hours of weeping. She sat on the floor, leaning sideways with one arm on the rickety double bed which the sisters shared at night, her faded blue dressing-gown falling away and showing a torn night-dress that had once been pink. On the honeycombed coverlet lay a pile of letters.

“Now, Cynthy!” said Nan.

Cynthia looked up.

“I’m sorry, Nan—I didn’t mean to.”

“You promised you wouldn’t,” said Nan gravely. She came across to the bed and began to pick up the letters. “You’d much better burn them and have done with it.”

Cynthia’s hand tightened on the soaked handkerchief which she held squeezed up.

“Nan, you won’t!”

“No, of course I won’t—but I wish you would.” She sat down on the bed and pulled Cynthia’s head against her knee. “What’s the good of keeping them, my child? You lock them up, and you promise me you won’t look at them, and when my back’s turned you get them out and cry yourself to a jelly.”

Cynthia turned and clutched at her with a wild sob.

“It’s so hard—when we love each other—when it’s just money! If he didn’t love me, I’d—I’d try—to get over it—I would—I really would! But when we love each other—” Her voice was choked, her hot thin hand was clenched on Nan’s knee.

Nan stroked the damp fair hair.

“It would be better to try, Cynthy,” she said.

Cynthia shivered.

“I don’t want to. If I can’t marry Frank, I want to die—only it takes such a long time. In books people die quite quickly when their hearts are broken, and I’m sure my heart’s quite as broken as anybody’s in a book—and yet I’m quite strong. I’ve lost my colour, and I’ve lost my looks, and my hair won’t curl any more—but I’m not dying.”

Nan’s heart gave a foolish little jump. It was silly to mind Cynthy talking like that. She said,

“You’d feel better if you washed your face, ducky.”

Cynthia sniffed and dabbed her eyes.

“Yes, you would. And did you get the eggs?”

Cynthia dabbed again and shook her head.

“Then I must fly, or we shan’t have anything to eat. We’ll have to have them boiled. Now, up you get and put on the saucepan! I won’t be a minute. Perhaps the old rabbit will oblige.”

Mrs Warren having duly obliged, Nan returned with a couple of eggs, only to find that Cynthia had neither washed her face nor put on the saucepan. She had got up from the floor and was gazing tearfully out of the window.

Nan pressed her lips together and said nothing.

Whilst she put on the eggs, Cynthia walked up and down talking in a soft exhausted voice.

“You can have both eggs—I don’t want anything. It’s all very well to say pull yourself together, but Frank’s just as miserable as I am, and I’m not only thinking about myself, I’m thinking about him. And in ten days he’ll be gone to Australia, and I shall never see him again. And to think that it’s just money that’s keeping us apart! If his uncle hadn’t changed his will at the last minute, he’d have had two thousand pounds and been able to buy that partnership.”

“Your egg’s done,” said Nan. “I don’t know why you like them nearly raw.” Frank Walsh’s nonexistent two thousand pounds was a subject to be escaped from with all possible despatch.

“If I only had two thousand pounds!” said Cynthia. She stood still in the middle of the floor and flung out her hands. “Isn’t there anything one can do to make money quickly?”

“I don’t think there’s anything you can do, ducky,” said Nan.

Cynthia turned away with a sob. She went back to the window and stood there twisting her fingers and crying. Through the faded dressing-gown Nan could see her shoulder-blades moving as she drew quick sobbing breaths. She went on speaking in a matter of fact sort of way.

“Cynthy, you really would feel much better if you would dress and have something to eat. Sitting and thinking about things makes them a hundred times worse.”

“It’s all very well for you,” said Cynthia in a hopeless voice. “You don’t know what it is to want someone all the time, and to know that he’s going right away and that you’ll never see him again. You’ve never been in love, so you don’t know.”

“No,” said Nan. “Cynthy, do come and eat your egg or it will be cold, and a cold egg is simply unutterable.”