Читать книгу The Kingdom of Theophilus - William J. Locke - Страница 6

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THE unfortunate man had served but a few months of his sentence when Miss Fanny Wavering died of sudden heart-failure. As her nearest relative who was free of movement, Evelina, accompanied by Theophilus, went down to Hertfordshire for the funeral. Theophilus, practical man of affairs, made all the dismal arrangements. The interior of the house known as The Grange, and, in happier times, alluded to by Daphne as The Morgue, with its air of mouldering old age, did not protest, like many a stricken home of brightness, against the dreary solemnities of death. Even the unimpressionable Theophilus felt that the old woman was but moving from one mausoleum to another—an Early Victorian, floridly Gothic family vault in Moorstead Cemetery. For nearly half a century scarcely an article of furniture or a curtain or a carpet had been changed. A staff of servants had kept the place swept and cleaned and dusted—for Miss Fanny Wavering had been a tyrannical woman who exacted the last ounce of service from those dependent on her—so that perhaps Daphne was technically wrong in her impatient designation, the house resembling rather a well-kept museum of the domestic life of the eighteen-seventies. But, after all, a museum is as dead a thing, as far as the inspiration of life is concerned, as an Egyptian tomb, and the transportation of the coffin down the broad staircase and across the gloomy hall was as little discordant with the surroundings as the removal of a mummy.

The family legend went that, in her early days, she had been disappointed in love, which, in the remote Victorian era, seemed to be a valid and respectable excuse for a woman’s subsequent pestiferous behaviour. Be that as it may, she was, at any rate, an unlovely old woman who had devoted her life to the cultivation of a finished selfishness which she was fond of exhibiting with a display of grim humour not unattractive to the cynical. Wherefore Luke Wavering had ever found pleasure in her company; and Evelina, compelled by some fascination—Aunt Fanny had Luke’s glittering hawk’s eyes—or by some subconscious surrender to the power of family wealth, had never dared to break off dutiful observance. She underwent caustic criticism with outward meekness, while abominable anger surged in her breast. Her dislike of the old woman, had it been spread out on a plane surface in arabesque, would have been a work of art.

Theophilus took the head of his wife’s family, as he took most things, at her face value. She had stored her mind during many lonely years with a prodigious accumulation of facts. He could converse easily with her. They did not argue. They exchanged facts. Secretly he rather liked her. On the other hand, his periodical visits to The Grange had never been anticipated by any thrill of delight. As Daphne had once said, how could one enjoy going to a house where even the old servants welcomed you with the disapproving cold eyes of fish?

And now the old Rich Aunt, Fanny Wavering, was dead, and her body was transported from Daphne’s morgue to the church, and from church to the Family Mausoleum. There were not many mourners. In the first carriage sat Theophilus and Evelina and Daphne. In the second, the doctor, the lawyer, and Miss Wilkin, Miss Fanny Wavering’s companion, who had endured thirty years of bitter service. A sprinkling of acquaintances in the neighbourhood turned up in the church, out of some vague notion of respect for the memory of Miss Wavering of The Grange, which was not a mere home but a great estate of many acres. It was a melancholy November day of raw damp and hopelessness. The vicar’s voice suggesting the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to Eternal Life fell flat. It comforted nobody. Miss Wavering seemed to have lived quite long enough.

The due observances accomplished, the occupants of the two carriages, with the exception of the doctor, returned to The Grange. The old servants had set out a conventional luncheon of cold food. The house was warm. A great fire blazed in the wainscoted and maroon-papered dining-room and threw decorous gleams on the dingy gilt frames of black oil portraits of forbidding and happily departed Waverings. For all their cold lack of enthusiasm, the old servants had not been trained to miserliness. On her own creature comforts, such as warmth, soft beds, rich food and good wines, Miss Wavering spent unregarded money. To share these with her, any guest was welcome. At the suggestion of luxuries outside her own horizon of comfort, her imagination boggled.... “Bath-rooms! Curse the fellow!” she had once trumpeted, referring to her favourite, Luke, who had insinuated the desirability of installation of such adjuncts. “I’ve never had a bath-room, and never had the need of one. If he can’t wash himself in the bath-tub put out for him every morning, like his father before him, he can stay away.” So that her nightly peace should not be disturbed, she enjoined that all lights should be out in bedrooms by eleven o’clock. The butler went his solemn rounds like a gaoler. Also, if men wanted to smoke, they could go up into a bleak tower-room furnished, through Luke’s bribery of the butler, with odds and ends of dilapidated furniture disinterred from an attic.

A couple of years before, Daphne, alone in the morning-room and greatly daring, lit a cigarette. She sat on the fender-seat enjoying her audacity when the door opened and Aunt Fanny appeared on the threshold. Defiant, she continued to puff, her long holder accentuating the monstrosity of the act. The old lady, lean and vigorous, though gasping with indignation, sped towards her, plucked the offence from her lips, threw holder and cigarette into the fire, and smacked her soundly on both cheeks. Daphne, furious, rushed in search of her father, whom she found, cigar in mouth, leaning over a pigsty.

“Serves you damn well right,” said he. “Carry on here,” and he handed her his cigarette case.

Sitting at the repast of funeral baked meats—an excellent cold luncheon—Daphne was anything but defiant. She had lived for many months in the lifeless house, grateful for the seclusion provided by such entombment. Since that day of ghastliness when she had heard the words of condemnation fall coldly from the judge’s lips, she had scarcely regarded herself as a being actuated by any personal desires. At first she flamed with the sense of hideous injustice against which there must be an appeal. But she spent her spirit on impregnable reefs.

“My dear—it breaks my heart to say so,” said the eminent advocate who defended Wavering, “but there are no technical grounds for appeal.”

No old evidence had become discredited, no new evidence could be brought forward, no claim lay against the judge for misdirection of the jury; could partiality be detected in the summing up, it was rather on the side of Wavering. Daphne drooped, withered by the icy logic of a world gone mad. Of her father’s innocence she had no doubt. Aunt Fanny, not inhuman, held her peace, so that the subject was never mentioned, and, as the castaway was too forlorn to stray beyond household regulations, she treated her with such kindness as did not interfere with her own well-being.

A month or so before, however, the sap of youth had begun to revive in her veins, and Daphne emerged from her torpor. She informed Miss Wilkin, the companion, one day, of an uncontrollable desire to seize the soup-tureen from the sideboard, shoot the contents about the room and plant it like a Mambrino’s helmet over Smithson, the butler’s, head. To Miss Wilkin’s dismay she underwent the cure of hysterical laughter. The death of her aunt checked possible folly.

She sat demure and anxious at the luncheon-table, patiently aware of the arid conversation. Evelina, without any emotional display of taking the distracted girl to her heart, had, nevertheless, not ungraciously conveyed to her forgetfulness of past differences, and had gone so far as to offer her shelter in the house in Blackheath, should the atmosphere of The Grange prove too inclement. They had met on only two or three occasions; but the feud was at an end. Up to now, however, they had not much to say to each other. The talk hovered languidly over trade depression, the taxation of land values and the unexploited potentialities of Australia, whither Mr. Widdington (of Widdington, Son & Widdington, Lincoln’s Inn Fields) had journeyed two or three years before. Smithson (obese butler) and Emily (gaunt and grizzled parlour-maid) went through their impeccable service like fish-eyed automata. It was only long afterwards that Daphne found it in her to sketch the scene:

“Corpse of hen, madam, or dead duck?”

“Deadly nightshade, sir, or strychnine and soda?”

It was not a merry meal. The only incident that broke the monotony occurred at dessert, when Miss Wilkin, helping herself to a banana, burst into tears.

“She was so fond of them,” she wailed.

She dabbed her eyes and her little peaky red nose grew redder. Overcome with emotion, she rose. Theophilus sprang to the door. Evelina, after a blank gaze, turned to continue her talk with the lawyer. When Theophilus returned to his place next to Daphne, she whispered with a sudden gleam in her eyes:

“Can’t you hear Aunt Fanny, at the other end of the table?—‘Don’t be a fool, Wilkin!’ ”

She had caught the old lady’s rasping intonation so perfectly that Theophilus laughed.

“Poor Wilkin!” said he.

A fat old sexless cat, lying on its lifelong cushion in front of the fire, stretched out its legs, rose to an arch and surveyed the company with a speculative stare.

“There’s something wrong with the world,” it said. “What is it?” It blinked wisely. “I think I know. I’ve warmed my back too long; now I must give my belly a chance.”

Whereupon it curled itself round again in luxurious suppleness.

Daphne’s was the interpretation of the egotistic animal’s manœuvre.

“Funny, isn’t it?” she said in Theophilus’s ear. “Poppy—what a name for a tabby cat!—was the only thing she really loved. She sat up all night with him a month ago when he had eaten some filthy stuff outside that nearly poisoned him, and kept the whole house awake bringing fomentations and so on—and he doesn’t care a hang. And there’s poor Wilkin, whom she used to treat like a black-beetle, crying her silly eyes out.... I wonder what I ought to do?”

The question was beyond the philosophy of Theophilus. Within himself he had just been appreciating the nice decorum of the girl’s demeanour.

“She showed you a good deal of kindness,” said he.

“That’s the devil of it,” cried Daphne, in a higher tone.

“That’s the devil of what?” asked Evelina, turning from her neighbour.

“Everything,” said Daphne.

Smithson came round with the port, and filled the men’s glasses, the ladies declining, and set the decanter on the table.

“Shall I serve coffee here or in the drawing-room, miss?”

Mr. Widdington consulted his watch. He must catch the three-twenty to London. Meanwhile, if he could have a few minutes’ talk with Mr. Bird... ? He half rose, and solved the butler’s question. Evelina and Daphne went to coffee in the drawing-room. While he attended the ladies to the door, Theophilus admired him for dismissing Evelina with such urbane courtesy.

“This,” said Mr. Widdington, raising his glass after a smell and a sniff, “is some of Miss Wavering’s famous Taylor 1870, laid down by her father, and only opened by her on great occasions. I hope you appreciate Smithson’s psychological motives in giving it to us to-day. His mistress would have wished, on the Greatest Occasion of all ... you see?” He sipped again. “A perfect bottle. Possibly the good old man sacrificed one, if not two, which were not so perfect.... I’m glad to say that Smithson will have no reason to be dissatisfied with the old lady’s will.”

“Oh, yes—the will,” said Theophilus, to whom Venerable Port was just port wine. “I suppose that was what you want to talk to me about.”

He was not greatly interested. Apart from a Puckish delight, queerly dissonant from his general asceticism of thought and habit, in concealing from Evelina his Luke-gotten little fortune, he cared little for money.

“Just so,” said the lawyer “You and I are joint executors and trustees.”

“I presume,” said Theophilus, honestly taking the aunt’s disposition for granted, “that the will is in favour of our—our unfortunate cousin, Luke Wavering?”

The lawyer threw up deprecatory hands.

“That’s where you’re wrong. That’s why I wanted to have this little talk with you.... It’ll be a shock for Daphne—Miss Wavering now....”

“What do you mean?”

“I did my best to dissuade her from altering her former will,” said Widdington—he was a man of fifty, stout and hearty—“and to be frank, I was acting against your interests—but she was a woman of iron. Listen to the preamble.”

He drew the will from his breast-pocket and read.

In terms of common speech, Miss Fanny Wavering revoked all former wills whereby she had made Luke Wavering heir, in consequence of the misery into which he had callously plunged thousands of homes and the disgrace with which he had stained the name of an honourable family, and started afresh on a new disposition of her wealth.

“I think it’s damnable,” cried Theophilus. “Luke was more sinned against than sinning.”

“No one more than I appreciates your point of view, Mr. Bird. Perhaps I had better read on.” He tapped the document.

Item succeeded item; minor though substantial legacies to servants; a provision for the amorphous cat during its lifetime; a sum of money to the Medical Research Society against the anti-everything obscurantism of scientific progress—there was a long list of them. “A hard, clear-headed woman, you must admit,” said the lawyer. “A life income of five hundred a year, free of income tax, to her niece, Daphne Wavering....”

“I’m glad to hear that, at any rate,” said Theophilus.

Mr. Widdington took another sip of port.

“And now comes the most delicate part of all from your point of view. You, my dear sir, are personally the residuary legatee. It’s a large fortune. Over half a million. Read for yourself.”

Mr. Widdington handed him the will, took off his glasses, and drank port. That which Theophilus read made him one of the most worried husbands on earth. Evelina’s name was only mentioned casually—“Theophilus Bird, husband of my niece, Evelina.”

“But why? Good God!” cried Theophilus.

“Again I must speak frankly. I know it’s a delicate position all round. We’ve been the family lawyers for over fifty years. I pleaded naturally for the family. Forgive me—but I hadn’t the pleasure of knowing you. I said this, that and the other. Six months ago. As I said just now, Miss Wavering wouldn’t budge an inch.”

“But why should I inherit and not my wife?”

“Mrs. Bird,” replied the comfortable lawyer, “is a public character. Miss Wavering—let us put it this way—had old-fashioned ideas, and didn’t approve of women being public characters.... Besides, if you’ll allow me to say so, I didn’t gather that Mrs. Bird and Miss Wavering were in very great personal sympathy.”

“That I can possibly understand,” said Theophilus. “But why me?”

He tapped his chest with his finger-tips—an unusual gesture for Theophilus, the Official. The other sketched a shrug and pointed to his glass.

“This,” said he, with an air of mellow comfort, “is comprehensible, in spite of its mystery. But women, my dear fellow”—perhaps the genial transition from the formal “sir” to cordial “fellow” was due to the glow of God’s gift in the wine—“I’ve nothing to say against them, of course. I’ve been married twice, and I have seven daughters. What I don’t know about women oughtn’t to be knowledge. But I’m as ignorant of the workings of their minds as any innocent lamb of sixteen.... You happened to be persona grata, indeed gratissima, to Miss Wavering, and so she has left you her money. That’s all there is to it.... It’s the Unforgivable Sin to leave this decanter.”

“I’m somewhat dazed,” Theophilus confessed. “You say that I, personally, come into all this”—he waved a vague hand—“and half a million of money. The position is, to say the least of it, difficult. There’s Daphne and there’s my wife.”

“We had better get it over,” said Mr. Widdington.

They found the three ladies mutually remote black figures in the great, unwelcoming drawing-room. Theophilus went up to his wife.

“I think, my dear, I must have a word with you.”

She accompanied him outside into the hall. When she saw him mop his face nervously with his handkerchief on that chill November afternoon, she knitted her brows in perplexity. He answered her mute question.

“I’ve seen the will. Luke’s disinherited.”

A nervous laugh acknowledged the shock of surprise.

“Serve him right. The old woman had some sense. Daphne gets it, I suppose, which after all comes to much the same thing.”

“She doesn’t. She’s provided for, of course.... Five hundred a year....”

Her eyes caught the handkerchief in his nervous hand.

“Then?” she said, with a little gasp.

“The estate comes to us.”

“Good God!” cried Evelina. “I never dreamed of such a thing.”

She was staggered for the moment. All that she had expected was some trifling legacy, on the possible amount of which she had been too proud and indifferent to speculate. She had regarded the grim Aunt Fanny as a reactionary, a stuffed brain of the past, the incarnation of all in Victorianism that is anathema to modern woman. And she knew that Aunt Fanny loathed the sight and the sound of her....

“One never knows,” she said lamely, answering her own thoughts. “I suppose it’s a lot of money?”

“Round about half a million.”

Evelina steadied herself against an ebony negro holding up a hall lamp.

“I never thought she was as rich as all that.”

“It’s great wealth, isn’t it?” said Theophilus.

“Somewhat overwhelming,” she admitted.

Silence followed. Theophilus went over to the fire beneath the great stone chimney-piece, for the high hall with its staircase and balcony and domed roof was draughty and bleak.

“I’m worried about Daphne,” said he, without looking round.

“Daphne? ... Daphne’s all right. She has nothing to complain of.”

He turned round and fronted her.

“Don’t you see, the fact of Luke being cut out is an added disgrace to the poor child?”

She came to him and laid her hand on his sleeve. “My dear Theophilus, don’t be sentimental.”

“Still....”

“Anybody with a grain of sense will see that no woman in common decency could leave all this money to a convicted swindler. Besides, my dear—I’m sorry—but, after all, isn’t this really my business rather than yours? I think we’d better go in and hear what Mr. Widdington has to say.”

She crossed the hall, flung open the drawing-room door, Theophilus following her, embarrassed by the still impending explanation. They came upon Daphne standing wet-eyed and defiant before a perplexed lawyer. On seeing them she sped forward, her hand clenched, her eyes burning.

“You’ve heard of this iniquitous will? ...”

Said Evelina, conciliatory: “My dear, there’s no iniquity in people disposing as they like of their own property.”

“Who cares for property?” cried Daphne, tragic. “Do you imagine I’m thinking of the money? I hate it, I loathe it. I won’t touch a penny of it. It’s the insult to my father.” Her voice shook. “When he was prosperous, she was all over him. She worried him to death about her financial affairs. She made hundreds of thousands out of his advice. She used to declare to his face that that beastly cat and he were the only things she loved in the world. And now he’s down and out, she has no use for him. Let him rot. What does she care? Oh, my God!”

She held her head high and stalked about the room, as though defying them all to suspect that she was on the verge of breakdown. Theophilus went up to her.

“Of course I admit that the will was cruel....”

Daphne turned on him. “Cruel! It was the work of an old devil. In that beastly thing there”—she pointed to the blue corner of the document protruding from the breast-pocket of Mr. Widdington’s black coat—“she has condemned him twice over. She followed the horrible people who said he was guilty. If I had dreamed that she had cast him out like this I wouldn’t have remained another minute in this damned house.... We never spoke of it.... She was old and self-centred, and I was proud ... but I never imagined....”

Evelina interrupted. “My dear child, do listen to me for a minute. We can’t help what people think.” Daphne regarded her with momentary scornful tolerance, her young bosom heaving. “After all, Aunt Fanny has treated you very kindly. From what you’ve told me yourself, she played the part of a great lady and all these months scrupulously avoided hurting your feelings, in spite of her own opinion as to the rights and wrongs of things. And she has made ample provision for you.”

“She can keep it and give it to the worms to play with. I won’t have it.”

“It’s quite natural for you to be upset,” said Evelina, advancing a conciliatory hand which Daphne shook off her arm, “but we can’t settle all these important matters off-hand, in a few moments of stress and excitement.... Surely, my dear”—her voice and manner and intention were of the kindest—“all of this is a family affair. We can meet later and come to some arrangement. God knows I don’t want all the money....”

The girl, at breaking point, laughed ungenerously.

“You haven’t got it. She didn’t leave you a penny. It all belongs to Theophilus.”

Evelina turned to Theophilus with a voice nervously shrill: “What’s that?”

The lawyer intervened, perplexedly genial—for here were the materials for a first-class family upheaval. He wouldn’t for a moment suggest that the late Miss Wavering was not capable of making a will; she was more than capable; but with advancing years her characteristic eccentricity had certainly developed. Recent untoward circumstances had not been without their effect on the testator, and she had insisted on making a fresh will while under the first painful impressions. In making Mr. Bird residuary legatee, her intention, as he could vouch professionally, was a legacy common to them both ... and so on and so forth.

Evelina, a little red spot burning in her sallow cheeks, stood silent and dignified during the good man’s harangue, while Theophilus maintained the apologetic air of the official bound against his will by departmental rules of procedure. Daphne had turned away and, staring out of the long window at the dripping yews on the lawn, was silhouetted black and slender against the light. Miss Wilkin, forgotten, sat in a far corner still dabbing her eyes and wondering how she could bear the terrifying independence assured her by her legacy of one hundred and fifty pounds a year free of income lax.

The sprawling clock on the mantelpiece, incongruously embraced by adipose Cupids, struck three. Mr. Widdington started. His three-twenty train! He must fly. He made hasty adieux.

“Dear Miss Daphne,” said he, going to the girl by the window, “I’m sure you’ll think better of it.”

“I’ll think worse and worse of it every hour and every day,” said Daphne.

He said in a half-whisper:

“Look on me, my dear, as a human being, a friend, and not as a stuffy lawyer, and come and see me when you feel like it. I’ve got girls of my own—of your age. Just make believe to be one of them.”

Daphne, emotional, responsive, surrendered to the kindly man. No true lover of God’s great gifts, sunshine and wine and good oil for salad, can be other than a kindly man. She met smiling, rather tired elderly blue eyes. The tears started.

“I rather need a friend——”

“Then that’s all right. And my first word as a friend is to tell you to crucify your pride for your father’s sake and keep the legacy. He may have bitter need of it.”

He wrung her hand and turned away brusquely.

Theophilus accompanied him to the waiting car.

“Whew!” said Widdington “Thank God you’re not one who combines the functions of family lawyer and family friend. I’ve had a rotten day.” He drove off. Theophilus returned to the drawing-room from which Miss Wilkin had slid silently, never more to be heard of there, into fairy realms of her own. The day before she had confided to Daphne her never-to-be-realized dream of joining an elderly cousin in a small villa on the outskirts of Swansea where she was born.

Daphne marched up to Theophilus as he entered and held out her hand.

“Mr. Widdington has convinced me that common-sense is the only quality that separates woman from the beasts that perish. I accept the situation. As executor you needn’t worry.”

“I’m immensely relieved to hear you say so.”

“And I, too, Daphne,” said Evelina. “It’s foolish to fly in the face of Providence.”

“Quite so,” said Daphne.

She hesitated between them like a dark flower on a tall stem, bent by the wind, swaying, as it were, towards Theophilus. She smiled wanly.

“I think I’ll go now and have a rest.”

“I’m sure you need it,” said Evelina kindly.

“Yes. It has been a bit trying, hasn’t it?”

“Tea about five?”

“Yes—thanks so much—about five.”

Theophilus accompanied her to the door. It was a long walk from the fireplace where they stood, at the far end of the stately yet lifeless and hideous museum of a drawing-room. She swung him suddenly into the hall, out of sight and hearing of Evelina, and raised a tense face, and clutched him by both shoulders.

“Luke’s out of it, I know. I’m nearly mad, but I can understand. If she had left things to stray cats or Evelina, I’d have gone out and drowned myself. I’m glad you’ve got the money. Stick to it. Don’t let her have a bean. Have a hell of a time with it.”

She broke down, and he could do nothing but catch her sobbing in his arms.

“There, there, my dear,” he said, impotently patting her back.

She released herself suddenly, and rushed to the foot of the hall stairs. She turned.

“You’re the dearest fool in the world, but for God’s sake have a hell of a time with it.”

She flitted upwards, a black shadow in the twilight.

Once again Theophilus entered the drawing-room. Evelina confronted him, dark, unemotional, intellectual.

“Poor child, I’m very sorry for her.”

“So am I,” said Theophilus.

There was a silence during which tricksy Fate wove an imperceptible curtain between them. They talked, and the voice of each seemed absurdly remote in the ears of the other.

“There’s not much to discuss, my dear,” said Theophilus, “but don’t you think that an hour’s sizing up things independently would be for the best? ... Supposing I went for a little walk—the fresh air, you know?”

Evelina agreed. Wisdom counselled an hour’s quiet reflection. Having a splitting headache, she professed gratitude for his tactfulness. Any other man would have distracted her with argument. She dismissed him with the reminder that Smithson had ordained tea for five o’clock.

At five o’clock, Theophilus, official automaton, presented himself in the drawing-room, where the massive silver and dainty Worcester tea-service, with adjuncts of sandwiches and scones and buns and cakes, were formally displayed.

“I’ve had a good walk,” said Theophilus, “but I almost lost my way in the woods.” He sank into a chair. “Yes, I would like a cup of tea.”

She, officiating priestess, seized the handle of the tea-pot, and turned to Smithson who had entered, chief hierophant.

“Will you call Miss Daphne?”

The elderly, roseate, perfect butler stared at her in reproachful astonishment.

“Miss Daphne? But, madam, it never occurred to me that you didn’t know. Miss Daphne took the four-thirty train to London with all her luggage. She said it was all arranged, and you were resting and not to be disturbed.”

When he retired, with the air of the perfect butler, the two stared at each other. Then, after a few moments, Evelina poured out tea.

“The ungrateful little hussy,” she said.