Читать книгу The Brading Collection - Dora Amy Elles - Страница 11

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The sitting went very well next day, the morning light not too bad, and Myra Constantine in quite terrific form. The autobiography which had begun with nine people and a slum basement was carried on in a colourful manner. Sometimes Stacy listened, sometimes the words passed her by whilst she registered the play of expression on those dark ugly features, and the snapping malice, the satyric gleam, the blazing enjoyment, which looked out by turns from the big black eyes. With each change she wanted to cry, “Stay!” and felt, between enjoyment and despair, “If I could only get her just like that!”

“Pity the girls don’t take after me, isn’t it? When I said that to Tom Hatton he said, ‘Poor little devils—why should they?’ ‘All right, all right, Tom,’ I said. ‘Beauty’s skin deep, and you’ve got your whack of it, but I’ll have the better time all my life.’ He drank himself to death, you know.... Oh, no, he wasn’t their father. I married when I was seventeen. Constantine’s my proper name. Clerk in an office, Sid was. Nicely brought-up young fellow with no money and no constitution. Just got a cold and died before I was twenty, and left me with two kids on my hands. Het’s his spit and image.”

Her face had fallen into heavy tragic lines. Stacy sat waiting, and in a moment everything was changed. The lines broke up in laughter, the eyes twinkled outrageously.

“I wasn’t having any more husbands after that, and if they wanted anything different, I’d laugh in their faces and tell ’em I was a respectable widow and I’d thank ’em to bear it in mind.” She cocked her head and chuckled. “It didn’t stop ’em of course. Do you know who asked me to go off jaunting to Paris with him, and me never going to see fifty again? Well, maybe I’d better not tell you. But I’ve always had the men after me, and that’s a fact.”

Stacy put up a hand.

“If you could keep that expression, Mrs. Constantine—”

It broke up almost before she had spoken. The big mouth widened in a laugh.

“Well, I can’t, my dear. If you could have seen your face! Did you think I meant your Charles?”

Stacy laughed too, anger just under the surface.

“He’s quite free, if you want him.”

“No, thank you, my dear. And as to being free—well, what do you mean by that? He’s still fond of you—sticks out all over him when he looks at you.”

Stacy put a little distance into her voice.

“Charles looks at everyone like that. It doesn’t mean a thing. He’ll tell you so himself.”

“Have it your own way,” said Myra Constantine. “You needn’t believe me if you don’t want to, but I’m never wrong about this sort of thing. I remember when Henry Minstrell began coming around. I told Milly he was going to ask her, and she said he’d never think of it. ‘Well, someone had better think about it,’ I said. ‘He’ll freeze you, and starch you, and make you over to suit his family, and it won’t be what I should call a gay life, but that’s your look-out, only you’d better get down to it and make up your mind if that’s what you want.’ So she did.” She threw up her head with a jerk. “Lord—I’d have died of it in a week! But she’s Sid’s daughter, not mine—she likes it well enough. Only trouble she’s got is there’s no boy—just a couple of girls at boarding school.” She smoothed all the expression out of face and voice. “‘Yes grandmama—no, grandmama.’” Her hands came together with a smacking clap, her shoulders rose in a shrug. “No blood in ’em, only nice pretty manners—poor Sid to the life, with a good shiny coat of Minstrell varnish! Well, as I’ve said more times than I can count, what’s the odds so long as you’re happy?”

The sitting might be considered to be going well. But which of all these fleeting expressions, these vigorous sudden changes of countenance, was Stacy going to lure to the ivory? She made a dozen sketches on paper, looked at them in despair, and made a dozen more. Myra was vastly pleased with them.

“Ugly old devil, aren’t I? Hit me off to the life, these do. You just go on and you’ll see it’ll come, and it’ll be a smasher. And now you go off and amuse yourself for the rest of the day.”

Before this advice could be taken Stacy was called to the telephone. She felt a little surprised, for she could not imagine who could have tracked her here—so unless it was Charles—

It wasn’t Charles. The sort of voice that suggests horn-rimmed glasses and an intellectual brow enquired,

“Is that Miss Mainwaring?”

Stacy knew it at once. As a matter of fact a large portion of the English-speaking public would have known it, since it was in the habit of making announcements to them over the air, not on the most important occasions, but in what may perhaps be described as the donkey-work section.

“Tony! How on earth did you know I was here?”

Mr. Anthony Colesfoot sighed and said,

“Elementary, my dear Watson. You said you were going to Burdon. Enquiries gave me the number. The number said you had come to Warne House. So here we are.”

“Where are you?”

“I have an aunt who lives at Ledstow. I’ve got three days off and I’m staying with her. I suggest that you dine with me tonight. There is, I believe, a place in Ledlington where the food doesn’t exactly poison you.” He spoke in a gentle, drawling manner and broke off to cough. “I beg your pardon, as they say on the air. I keep on doing it, which is really why I’m here. What about my calling for you at seven? I’ll rake up a conveyance.”

Stacy hesitated.

“Well, it’s very nice of you, Tony. Look here, I’m going out in the afternoon, and I don’t know when I shall get back, and I shall have to dress. I think you’d better make it half past.”

“Say the quarter.”

“All right.”

She was just turning away, when the bell rang again. It was probably for someone else, but with just the chance that Tony might still be on the line she picked up the receiver and heard Lilias Grey say,

“Can I speak to—Miss Mainwaring?”

There was just the little significant pause before the name. With an inward feeling of having stepped back a pace Stacy said in what she could hear was a really horrid telephone voice,

“Speaking.”

There was an involuntary “Oh!” And then, “It’s Lilias Grey.”

“How do you do, Lilias?”

“Oh, how do you do?”

Lilias was fluting, a sure sign that she was nervous. Her voice became higher, and sweeter with every sentence.

“My dear, I didn’t have a word with you last night. It wasn’t possible at dinner, and then you disappeared. But I do so want to see you, and to show you what we have been doing to Saltings.”

The “We” was a little barbed arrow that drew blood. Stacy found an arrow too.

“Yes—Charles was telling me.”

“Yes? So nice we can all be friends, and such a relief, isn’t it? It does simplify everything, don’t you think? So much more civilized. That is why I felt I could ring up like this. I do want you to see my flat and all we’ve done up here, so I wondered if you would come and have tea this afternoon.”

“I’m afraid I can’t this afternoon. I’m going out.”

“With Charles? Of course—how stupid of me! Then what about Saturday? He won’t be here, I’m afraid—some tiresome business or other. But if you can put up with just me—”

Stacy made an angry child’s face at the telephone and said,

“It would be very nice.”

“Then about half past four. You know where to get off the bus. There’s one every twenty minutes as long as the holidays last.” She rang off.

Stacy stamped her foot, looked at the receiver rather as if it were a snake in disguise, and hung it up in a despising manner. Lilias might or might not be a snake. The mere fact that she was in love with Charles didn’t make her one. Adopted sister or no adopted sister, she had always been in love with Charles. They both had flats at Saltings. And Lilias had said “We”. Why on earth had she said she would go there to tea? If there was a place in the world she ought to stay away from, it was Saltings. If you’ve been put to the rack, you don’t go and have tea in the torture chamber. Or do you? The plain fact was that she hadn’t had the guts to say right out, “I never want to see the place again—or you—or you.” Because Lilias had looked on whilst she was tortured. Kindly? Sympathetically? Regretfully? There was a question in each of these words, and it was a question to which Stacy had never been able to find an answer. It didn’t matter now. What mattered was that Lilias had been there—she had seen her on the rack.

And yet—and yet—she would go to Saltings tomorrow. Lilias would show her “what we have done” to the place which was to have been her home with Charles. In the name of folly, why?

The answer came out of deep places, “Because I’m a fool—because I can’t keep away.”