Читать книгу To Love - Margaret Peterson - Страница 8

Table of Contents

"Love wakes men, once a lifetime each They lift their heavy heads and look.

And some give thanks, and some blaspheme, And most forget, but either way That, and the child's unheeded dream Is all the light of all their day."

The Grants were sitting at breakfast in their small, red-walled dining-room. Richard, commonly called Dick, at the end of the table, Mabel at the one side and Mrs. Grant in the seat of honour at the top. Wherever Mrs. Grant sat was the seat of honour; she was that kind of old lady. Marvellously handsome still, despite her age, with a commanding presence and a nature which had sublime contempt for everyone and everything except herself, she sailed through life exacting service from all and obedience from her children. Why they obeyed her they could not have themselves explained; perhaps it was an inheritance from the dead Mr. Grant, who had worshipped his wife as if she had been some divinity. In her own way Mrs. Grant had always been gracious and kindly to her husband, but he had been altogether a nonentity in her life. Before the children were old enough to see why, they realized that Daddy was only the man who made the money in their house. Mother spent it, buying the luxuries with which they were surrounded, the magnificent toys which they disregarded, as is the way of children, the splendidly expensive clothes, which were a perfect burden to them. Then, just when Dick was beginning to understand, Mr. Grant died.

He had sent for his son—Dick was about eighteen then—and spoken to him just before the end came.

"You will have to look after your mother, Dick," he had said, clutching at the young, strong hands; "she has always been looked after. She has never had to rough things in her life. And you won't be any too well off. Promise me, promise me, you will always give her of your best."

"Of course, I promise, Dad," he had answered.

Further conversation between then had ceased because Mrs. Grant swept into the room, regal even in the face of death. Dick remembered the incident afterwards with a little twitch of his lips because it was so typical of his mother and it was just at this period that he had begun to criticize her. The sick-room had been in shadowed gloom until her entry; the lights hurt the fast-failing eyes.

"I cannot sit in the dark," stated Mrs. Grant, as she settled herself, with a delightful rustle of silk and a wave of perfume, beside the bed. "You know that, Harry. It always has depressed me, hasn't it?"

"Turn up the lights, Dick," whispered the man, his hand had closed on one of hers; happiness flooded his heart at her presence.

"But you know they hurt your eyes," Dick expostulated; he was new to death, yet he could read the signs well enough to know his father was dying.

"Harry can lie with his eyes shut," answered Mrs. Grant calmly. There was no disagreeableness in her tone: her selfishness was on too gigantic a scale for her ever to be disagreeable.

And Dick had turned up the lights and gone fuming from the room, conscious for the time being of a sense of dislike for his mother's perfection!

It soon faded though; he had been trained too thoroughly in his youth. Once he said to Mabel hotly:

"Why does Mother cry for Dad? She did not really love him, and she just delighted in buying all that expensive and becoming mourning."

And Mabel had surprised him by replying: "Mother does not really love anyone but herself."

The remark sounded odd from Mabel, who spent her life slaving with apparent devotion in her mother's service. She was a tall, rather colourless girl, with big grey eyes and a quaint-shaped mouth that was always very silent. She moved through the background of their lives doing things for mother. She had always done that; Dick wondered sometimes whether the soul within her would ever flame into open rebellion, but it never did.

By the time Dick had passed his various exams, and was ready to take up a practice somewhere, Mrs. Grant and Mabel had been practically everywhere on the Continent.

"Money is running short," Mabel wrote crisply to Dick; "cannot you do anything in the way of taking a house and settling down, so as to make a home for Mother and me?"

Dick's ambitions lay in the direction of bachelor's diggings and work in London. He thrust them aside and bought what was supposed to be a very good and flourishing practice at Birmingham. Unfortunately Mrs. Grant took a violent dislike to Birmingham. Their house was gloomy and got on her nerves; the air, she said, was laden with smoke which irritated her throat. She developed a cough, quite the most annoying sound that Dick had ever imagined, and he was not easy to irritate. Mother coughed from the time she woke till the time she went to sleep—coughed and remembered old times and wept for Harry, who would at least have taken care not to expose her to such overwhelming discomfort.

At the end of six months Dick threw up the practice in despair and placed himself at her disposal. They put in a year in London, but what Dick earned was quite insufficient to cope with what Mrs. Grant spent and things went from bad to worse.

Mabel never offered any advice until she was asked but when Dick spoke to her finally she was quite definite.

"You have got to take Mother in hand," she said. "Father never did. He spent his life making money for her to spend, but there is no reason why you should. Get a small practice somewhere in the country where there are no shops and just tell Mother you are going to settle there for five years at least."

"She will get another cough," argued Dick.

"You must let her cough, it won't hurt her," answered Mabel.

Undoubtedly Mrs. Grant did not approve of Wrotham to begin with, but it had its advantages, even for her. She settled very quickly into the role of Lady Bountiful; the villagers gazing upon her with such unmixed admiration that she was moved to remark to Mabel that it was really pleasant doing things for such grateful people. Dick provided her with a victoria and horse in place of the usual doctor's trap, and she could drive abroad to visit this or that protégé in truly regal style. It meant that Dick had to pay all his visits, and some of them very far off and at all sorts of unseasonable hours, on a bicycle, but he never grudged making sacrifices of that kind for her. No one admired his mother in the abstract more than Dick did.

Mabel perhaps resented the extra work it entailed on him, for she loved Dick with the whole force of her self-restrained heart. But, as usual, she kept silent. The villagers could see that she drove out in attendance on Mrs. Grant, but to them she was only an uninteresting shadow that waited on the other's splendour. They often wondered among themselves how Mrs. Grant could have a daughter as drab and uninteresting as Miss Grant; they did not realize how, like a vampire, the older woman lived upon the younger one's vitality. People like Mrs. Grant exist at the expense of those they come in contact with. You either have to live for them or away from them.

On this particular morning Dick finished his breakfast before either his mother or sister, and pushing back his chair, asked, as he had always asked since the days of his childhood, if he might rise.

"Before I am finished, Dick?" remonstrated Mrs. Grant; "it is not very polite, dear."

"I know," Dick apologized, "but the truth is I have an early call to pay this morning. The people of the Manor House have sent for me; Miss Rutherford the younger is not awfully well, or something."

"Miss Rutherford the younger?" repeated his mother; "I did not know there was a younger; I have never seen her, have I, Mabel?"

"I don't suppose so," Dick answered for his sister; "she has been away in London."

"What is the matter with her?" asked Mrs. Grant. "Why do they want you to see her?"

"I can't know that till I have seen her, can I? Last night she happened to come into the Rendle cottage just after they had brought that poor girl home, and the sight must have upset her; anyway she fainted. I expect that is what Miss Rutherford is worried about."

"It is hardly polite of her not to have brought her niece to call on me," said Mrs. Grant. "Still, if you are going there, dear, and the girl doesn't seem well, tell them I shall be only too happy to come and fetch her for a drive some afternoon. I daresay my carriage is more comfortable than that ramshackle old trap of theirs."

"You are a dear to think of it," he said, stooping to kiss her good-bye. "If you can spare Mabel this afternoon, Mother, I thought perhaps she might come into Sevenoaks with me. I have got to attend a meeting there, and it will be an outing for her."

"If Mabel would like to go, of course she must," Mrs. Grant agreed. "I shall be a little lonely, and to-day is the day I am supposed to have my hair shampooed. Not that it really matters."

"I could not go any way," Mabel put in for herself. "Mr. Jarvis is coming to tea, Dick; he asked himself last week."

She followed her brother out to the front door.

"The day is going to be full of disagreeables for you," he said, as they stood waiting for his bicycle to be brought round. "Mother's shampoo, I know what that involves, and Mr. Jarvis. Nuisance the fellow is; why can't he see that you dislike him?"

"Oh, I don't exactly," she answered, without meeting his eyes.

She hated him like poison, Dick knew. He wondered rather vaguely why Mabel had lied to him, generally speaking they were too good friends for that to be necessary. Then he dismissed the subject, and his thoughts turned again to the girl he was on his way to see. He had been thinking a great deal of Joan since he had first seen her. The startled, child-like face, the wide frightened eyes, had impressed themselves on his mind the night before. He had lifted her in his arms and carried her outside; the poise of her thrown-back head against his arm stayed in his mind, a very warm memory. Poor little girl, it must have been horrible for her to have come in from the gay placidness of her own life and thoughts to the stark tragedy of Bridget Rendle's death.

He was very ignorant and very reverent in his thoughts about women. He could imagine Joan's sweet, well-ordered life, the fragrance of youth hung about his idea of her. Bridget Rendle had been a girl too, younger perhaps than the other one; but Bridget had dipped into the waters of life, and sorrow and sin had closed over her. The two girls were as far apart as the poles, it seemed almost irreverent to think of them in the same breath.

Aunt Janet met him in the hall when she heard of his arrival.

"I have not told my niece about sending for you," she said; "it might only make her nervous. I am very alarmed about her, Dr. Grant. She has been home now three weeks and she is really not at all like herself. Then that faint last night. I am afraid of fainting-fits; my mother, I may as well tell you, died very suddenly from a heart-attack."

"It is not likely to be anything of that sort," he told her. "Yesterday's tragedy was quite sufficient to upset very strong nerves."

"I hope not," Aunt Janet agreed; "anyway, I shall feel happier once you have seen her. Will you come this way?"

She led him through the house to a room on the other side of the drawing-room which had been fitted up as a special sanctum for Joan since her return from London.

"I am nervous," she admitted to the doctor with her hand on the door-knob, "she will perhaps be annoyed at my having sent for you." Then she opened the door and they passed in.

Joan was sitting in the far corner near the open window, a book on her lap. But she was not pretending to read; Dick could have sworn that she had been crying as they came in. As she saw her aunt was not alone she stood up quickly and the book fell unheeded to the floor.

"This is the doctor, dear," Aunt Janet began nervously. "I asked him to call and see you. You need a tonic, I am sure you do."

"You sent for him," whispered Joan. Dick felt horribly uncomfortable; it was impossible not to sense the tragedy which hung heavy in the air. "Why, oh why, have you done that, Aunt Janet?"

"I was afraid," the other began; "last night you——" Rather waveringly she came to a full stop, staring at Joan.

The girl had drawn herself up to her full height. She faced them as someone brought suddenly to bay, her hands clenched at her sides, two flags of colour flaming in her cheeks.

"I was going to have told you," she said, addressing herself solely to Aunt Janet, "now you have brought him in he must know it too. But I do not need him to tell me what is the matter with me; I found it out for myself last night. I am not ashamed, I do not even hold that I have done anything wrong; I would have told you before only I did not know it was going to come to this, and for the rest it was like a shut book in my life that I did not want to have to open or look at again. I am like Bridget Rendle," she said, head held very high. "I am going to have a baby. Bridget was afraid and ashamed, but I am neither. I have done nothing to be ashamed of."

The telling of it sapped at her much boasted courage, and left her whiter than the white wall-paper; Dick could see that she had some ado to keep back her tears.

Aunt Janet seemed to have been paralysed; she stayed where she was, stiff, stricken, and Dick, glancing at her, thought he had never seen such anguish and terror combined on a human face. He felt himself completely forgotten in this crisis. The two women stared at each other. Twice Aunt Janet moistened her lips and tried to speak, but the words died in her throat. When she succeeded at last her voice was scarce recognizable.

"You said—like Bridget Rendle," she whispered; "did you mean what you said?"

"Yes," answered Joan.

The older woman turned towards the door. She walked as if blind, her hands groping before her. "God!" Dick heard her say under her breath, "Dear God, what have I done that this should come upon me?"

As she reached the door Joan called to her, her voice sharp with fear. "Aunt Janet, Aunt Janet, aren't you going to say anything to me?"

"I must hold my tongue," the other answered stiffly, "or I shall curse that which I have loved." Suddenly the anguish in her flamed to white beat. "I would rather have known you dead," she said, and passed swiftly from the room.

Joan took a step forward, and her foot touched on the book she had let fall. Mechanically she stooped to pick it up, then, because her knees were in reality giving way under her, she stumbled to the chair and sat down again. She seemed to have forgotten the man standing by the door, she just sat there, hands folded in her lap, with her white face and great brown eyes looking unseeingly at the garden.

Dick moved uneasily. He had not the slightest idea what he ought to do; he felt horribly like an intruder. And he was intensely sorry for the girl, even though behind this sorrow lay the shock of a half-formed ideal which she had shattered in his mind. Finally he submerged the man in the doctor and moved towards her.

"I am most awfully sorry for you," he said, "will you let me help you if I can? There may be some mistake, and anyway I could give you something to help with those fainting-fits."

Joan brought her eyes away from the garden and looked at him. "No," she said, "there is no mistake and I do not make a habit of fainting. Yesterday it was different, perhaps I realized definitely and for the first time what it would all mean. I saw Aunt Janet's face as she spoke of the dead girl, and … I do not know why I am telling you all this," she broke off, "it cannot be very interesting, but I do not want you to think that I feel as Bridget Rendle felt."

"No," he agreed, "you are facing it with more courage than she had been taught to have."

"It is not a question of courage," Joan answered. He was not understanding her, she realized, and for some stupid reason it hurt that he should not, but she must not stoop to further explanations. She stood up, making a stern effort at absolute calmness.

"Good-bye," she said, "I am sorry you should have been troubled to come and that you should have had to go through this sort of scene."

"Good-bye," was all he could answer.

At the door he turned to look back at her. "If you should need help of any sort at any time," he said, "will you send for me? I should like to feel you were going to do that."

"I cannot promise," she answered, "you see, I shall probably be leaving here quite soon."

And with that he had to be content to leave her.