Mary Olivier: a Life Part 94

"It almost looks," Mamma said, "as if Edward might be right."

So right that in his next letter Uncle Victor prepared you for his bankruptcy.

"It will not affect you and Mary," he wrote. "I may as well tell you now that all the Five Elms money has been reinvested, and is safe. As for myself, I can a.s.sure you that, after the appalling anxiety of the last ten years, the thought of bankruptcy is a relief. A blessed relief, Caroline."

All through September and October the long letters came from Uncle Victor.

Then Aunt Lavvy's short letter that told you of his death.

Then the lawyer's letters.

It seemed that, after all, Uncle Victor had been mistaken. His affairs were in perfect order.

Only the Five Elms money was gone; and the money Mark and Mamma had paid back to him. He had taken it all out of his own business, and put it into the Sheba Mines and Joe's Reef, and the Golconda Company where he thought it would be safe.

The poor dear. The poor dear.

VII.

So that you knew--

Mamma might believe what Aunt Lavvy told her, that he had only gone to look out of the window and had turned giddy. Aunt Lavvy might believe that he didn't know what he was doing.

But you knew.

He had been afraid. Afraid. He wouldn't go up to the top-landing after they took Aunt Charlotte away; because he was afraid.

Then, at last, after all those years, he had gone up. When he knew he was caught in the net and couldn't get out. He had found that they had moved the linen cupboard from the window back into the night nursery. And he had bolted the staircase door on himself. He had shut himself up. And the great bare, high window was there. And the low sill. And the steep, bare wall, dropping to the lane below.

END OF BOOK FOUR

BOOK FIVE MIDDLE AGE (1900-1910)

x.x.xI

I.

She must have been sitting there twenty minutes.

She was afraid to look up at the clock, afraid to move an eyelid lest she should disturb him.

The library had the same nice, leathery, tobaccoey smell. Rough under her fingers the same little sharp tongue of leather scratched up from the arm of her chair. The hanging, half-open fans of the ash-tree would be making the same j.a.panese pattern in the top left hand pane of the third window.

She wanted to see it again to make sure of the pattern, but she was afraid to look up.

If she looked up she would see him.

She mustn't. It would disturb him horribly. He couldn't write if he thought you were looking at him.

It was wonderful that he could go on like that, with somebody in the room, that he let you sit in it when he was writing. The big man.

She had asked him whether she hadn't better go away and come back again, and he had said No, he didn't want her to go away. He wouldn't keep her waiting more than five minutes.

It was unbelievable that she should be sitting there, in that room, as if nothing had happened; as if _they_ were there; as if they might come in any minute; as if they had never gone. A week ago she would have said it was impossible, she couldn't do it, for anybody, no matter how big or how celebrated he was.

Why, after ten years--it must be ten years--she couldn't even bear to go past the house while other people were in it. She hated them, the people who took Greffington Hall for the summer holidays and the autumn shooting. She would go round to Renton by Jackson's yard and the fields so as not to see it. But when the brutes were gone and the yellow blinds were down in the long rows of windows that you saw above the grey garden wall, she liked to pa.s.s it and look up and pretend that the house was only waiting for them, only sleeping its usual winter sleep, resting till they came back.

It _was_ ten years since they had gone.

No. If Richard Nicholson hadn't been Mr. Sutcliffe's nephew, she couldn't, no matter how big and how celebrated he was, or how badly he wanted her help or she wanted his money.

No matter how wonderful and important it would feel to be Richard Nicholson's secretary.

It wasn't really his money that she wanted. It would be worth while doing it for nothing, for the sake of knowing him. She had read his _Euripides_.

She wondered: Supposing he kept her, how long would it last? He was in the middle of his First Series of _Studies in Greek Literature_; and there would be two, or even three if he went on.

He had taken Greffington Hall for four months. When he went back to London he would have to have somebody else.

Perhaps he would tell her that, after thinking it over, he had found he didn't want her. Then to-day would be the end of it.

If she looked up she would see him.

She knew what she would see: the fine, cross upper lip lifted backwards by the moustache, the small grizzled brown moustache, turned up, that made it look crosser. The narrow, pensive lower lip, thrust out by its light jaw. His nose--quite a young nose--that wouldn't be Roman, wouldn't be Sutcliffe; it looked out over your head, tilted itself up to sniff the world, obstinate, alert. His eyes, young too, bright and dark, sheltered, safe from age under the low straight eyebrows. They would never have shabby, wrinkled sagging lids. Dark brown hair, grey above his ears, clipped close to stop its curling like his uncle's. He liked to go clipped and clean. You felt that he liked his own tall, straight slenderness.

The big library rustled with the quick, irritable sound of his writing.

It stopped. He had finished. He looked at the clock. She heard a small, commiserating sound.

"Forgive me. I really thought it would only take five minutes. How on earth do you manage to keep so quiet? I should have known if a mouse had moved."

He turned towards her. He leaned back in his chair. "You don't mind my smoking?"

He was settling himself. Now she would know.

"Well," he said, "if I did keep you waiting forty minutes, it was a good test, wasn't it?"

He meditated.

"I'm always changing my secretaries because of something. The last one was admirable, but I couldn't have stood her in the room when I was writing.... Besides, you work better."

"Can you tell? In a week?"