Vera Part 15

'Well, that's what I thought,' said Wemyss, mollified. 'I know all I want is you.'

(Was this same parlourmaid here in Vera's time? Lucy asked herself very privately and unconsciously and beneath the concerned attentiveness she was concentrating on Wemyss.)

'What lovely kingcups!' she said aloud.

'Oh yes, there they are--I hadn't noticed them. Yes, aren't they?

They're my birthday flowers.' And he repeated his formula: 'It's my birthday and Spring's.'

But Lucy, of course, didn't know the proper ritual, it being her first experience of one of Wemyss's birthdays, besides having wished him his many happy returns hours ago when he first opened his eyes and found hers gazing at him with love; so all she did was to make the natural but unfortunate remark that surely Spring began on the 21st of March,--or was it the 25th? No, that was Christmas Day--no, she didn't mean that----

'You're always saying things and then saying you didn't mean them,'

interrupted Wemyss, vexed, for he thought that Lucy of all people should have recognised the allegorical nature of his formula. If it had been Vera, now,--but even Vera had managed to understand that much. 'I wish you would begin with what you do mean, it would be so much simpler.

What, pray, _do_ you mean now?'

'I can't think,' said Lucy timidly, for she had offended him again, and this time she couldn't even remotely imagine how.

XVII

He got over it, however. There was a particularly well-made souffle, and this helped. Also Lucy kept on looking at him very tenderly, and it was the first time she had sat at his table in his beloved home, realising the dreams of months that she should sit just there with him, his little bobbed-haired Love, and gradually therefore he recovered and smiled at her again.

But what power she had to hurt him, thought Wemyss; it was so great because his love for her was so great. She should be very careful how she wielded it. Her Everard was made very sensitive by his love.

He gazed at her solemnly, thinking this, while the plates were being changed.

'What is it, Everard?' Lucy asked anxiously.

'I'm only thinking that I love you,' he said, laying his hand on hers.

She flushed with pleasure, and her face grew instantly happy. 'My Everard,' she murmured, gazing back at him, forgetful in her pleasure of the parlourmaid. How dear he was. How silly she was to be so much distressed when he was offended. At the core he was so sound and simple.

At the core he was utterly her own dear lover. The rest was mere incident, merest indifferent detail.

'We'll have coffee in the library,' he said to the parlourmaid, getting up when he had finished his lunch and walking to the door. 'Come along, little Love,' he called over his shoulder.

The library....

'Can't we--don't we--have coffee in the hall?' asked Lucy, getting up slowly.

'No,' said Wemyss, who had paused before an enlarged photograph that hung on the wall between the two windows, enlarged to life size.

He examined it a moment, and then drew his finger obliquely across the gla.s.s from top to bottom. It then became evident that the picture needed dusting.

'Look,' he said to the parlourmaid, pointing.

The parlourmaid looked.

'I notice you don't say anything,' he said to her after a silence in which she continued to look, and Lucy, taken aback again, stood uncertain by the chair she had got up from. 'I don't wonder. There's nothing you can possibly say to excuse such carelessness.'

'Lizzie----' began the parlourmaid.

'Don't put it on to Lizzie.'

The parlourmaid ceased putting it on to Lizzie and was dumb.

'Come along, little Love,' said Wemyss, turning to Lucy and holding out his hand. 'It makes one pretty sick, doesn't it, to see that not even one's own father gets dusted.'

'Is that your father?' asked Lucy, hurrying to his side and offering no opinion about dusting.

It could have been no one else's. It was Wemyss grown very enormous, Wemyss grown very old, Wemyss displeased. The photograph had been so arranged that wherever you moved to in the room Wemyss's father watched you doing it. He had been watching Lucy from between those two windows all through her first lunch, and must, flashed through Lucy's brain, have watched Vera like that all through her last one.

'How long has he been there?' she asked, looking up into Wemyss's father's displeased eyes which looked straight back into hers.

'Been there?' repeated Wemyss, drawing her away for he wanted his coffee. 'How can I remember? Ever since I've lived here, I should think.

He died five years ago. He was a wonderful old man, nearly ninety. He used to stay here a lot.'

Opposite this picture hung another, next to the door that led into the hall,--also a photograph enlarged to life-size. Lucy had noticed neither of these pictures when she came in, because the light from the windows was in her eyes. Now, turning to go out through the door led by Wemyss, she was faced by this one.

It was Vera. She knew at once; and if she hadn't she would have known the next minute, because he told her.

'Vera,' he said, in a matter-of-fact tone, as it were introducing them.

'Vera,' repeated Lucy under her breath; and she and Vera--for this photograph too followed one about with its eye--stared at each other.

It must have been taken about twelve years earlier, judging from the clothes. She was standing, and in a day dress that yet had a train to it trailing on the carpet, and loose, floppy sleeves and a high collar. She looked very tall, and had long thin fingers. Her dark hair was drawn up from her ears and piled on the top of her head. Her face was thin and seemed to be chiefly eyes,--very big dark eyes that stared out of the absurd picture in a kind of astonishment, and her mouth had a little twist in it as though she were trying not to laugh.

Lucy looked at her without moving. So this was Vera. Of course. She had known, though she had never constructed any image of her in her mind, had carefully avoided doing it, that she would be like that. Only older; the sort of Vera she must have been at forty when she died,--not attractive like that, not a young woman. To Lucy at twenty-two, forty seemed very old; at least, if you were a woman. In regard to men, since she had fallen in love with some one of forty-five who was certainly the youngest thing she had ever come across, she had rearranged her ideas of age, but she still thought forty very old for a woman. Vera had been thin and tall and dark in her idea of her, just as this Vera was thin and tall and dark; but thin bonily, tall stoopingly, and her dark hair was turning grey. In her idea of her, too, she was absent-minded and not very intelligent; indeed, she was rather troublesomely unintelligent, doing obstinate, foolish things, and at last doing that fatal, obstinate, foolish thing which so dreadfully ended her. This Vera was certainly intelligent. You couldn't have eyes like that and be a fool.

And the expression of her mouth,--what had she been trying not to laugh at that day? Did she know she was going to be enlarged and hang for years in the bleak dining-room facing her father-in-law, each of them eyeing the other from their walls, while three times a day the originals sat down beneath their own pictures at the long table and ate? Perhaps she laughed, thought Lucy, because else she might have cried; only that would have been silly, and she couldn't have been silly,--not with those eyes, not with those straight, fine eyebrows. But would she, herself, presently be photographed too and enlarged and hung there? There was room next to Vera, room for just one more before the sideboard began.

How very odd it would be if she were hung up next to Vera, and every day three times as she went out of the room was faced by Everard's wives.

And how quaint to watch one's clothes as the years went by leaving off being pretty and growing more absurd. Really for such purposes one ought to be just wrapped round in a shroud. Fas.h.i.+on didn't touch shrouds; they always stayed the same. Besides, how suitable, thought Lucy, gazing into her dead predecessor's eyes; one would only be taking time by the forelock....

'Come along.' said Wemyss, drawing her away, 'I want my coffee. Don't you think it's a good idea,' he went on, as he led her down the hall to the library door, 'to have life-sized photographs instead of those idiotic portraits that are never the least like people?'

'Oh, a _very_ good idea,' said Lucy mechanically, bracing herself for the library. There was only one room in the house she dreaded going into more than the library, and that was the sitting-room on the top floor,--her sitting-room and Vera's.

'Next week we'll go to a photographer's in London and have my little girl done,' said Wemyss, pus.h.i.+ng open the library door, 'and then I'll have her exactly as G.o.d made her, without some artist idiot or other coming b.u.t.ting-in with his idea of her. G.o.d's idea of her is good enough for me. They won't have to enlarge much,' he laughed, 'to get _you_ life-size, you midge. Vera was five foot ten. Now isn't this a fine room? Look--there's the river. Isn't it jolly being so close to it? Come round here--don't knock against my writing-table, now. Look--there's only the towpath between the river and the garden. Lord, what a beastly day. It might just as easily have been a beautiful spring day and us having our coffee out on the terrace. Don't you think this is a beautiful look-out,--so typically English with the beautiful green lawn and the bit of lush gra.s.s along the towpath, and the river. There's no river like it in the world, is there, little Love. Say you think it's the most beautiful river in the world'--he hugged her close--'say you think it's a hundred times better than that beastly French one we got so sick of with all those chateaux.'

'Oh, a _hundred_ times better,' said Lucy.

They were standing at the window, with his arm round her shoulder. There was just room for them between it and the writing-table. Outside was the flagged terrace, and then a very green lawn with worms and blackbirds on it and a flagged path down the middle leading to a little iron gate.

There was no willow hedge along the river end of the square garden, so as not to interrupt the view,--only the iron railings and wire-netting.

Terra-cotta vases, which later on would be a blaze of geraniums, Wemyss explained, stood at intervals on each side of the path. The river, swollen and brown, slid past Wemyss's frontage very quickly that day, for there had been much rain. The clouds scudding across the sky before the wind were not in such a hurry but that every now and then they let loose a violent gust of ram, soaking the flags of the terrace again just as the wind had begun to dry them up. How could he stand there, she thought, holding her tight so that she couldn't get away, making her look out at the very place on those flags not two yards off....

But the next minute she thought how right he really was, how absolutely the only way this was to do the thing. Perfect simplicity was the one way to meet this situation successfully; and she herself was so far from simplicity that here she was shrinking, not able to bear to look, wanting only to hide her face,--oh, he was wonderful, and she was the most ridiculous of fools.

She pressed very close to him, and put up her face to his, shutting her eyes, for so she shut out the desolating garden with its foreground of murderous flags.