Mr. Waddington of Wyck Part 46

Mr. Waddington was sitting up in his armchair before the bedroom fire.

By turning his head a little to the right he could command a perfect view of himself in the long gla.s.s by the window. To get up and look at himself in that gla.s.s had been the first act of his convalescence. He had hardly dared to think what alterations his illness might have made in him. He remembered the horrible sight that Corbett had presented after _his_ influenza last year.

Looking earnestly at himself in the gla.s.s, he had found that his appearance was, if anything, improved. Outlines that he had missed for the last ten years were showing up again. The Postlethwaite nose was cleaner cut. He was almost slender, and not half so weak as f.a.n.n.y said he ought to have been. Immobility in bed, his spiritual att.i.tude of complacent acquiescence, and the release of his whole organism from the strain of a restless intellect had set him up more than his influenza had pulled him down; and it was a distinctly more refined and youthful Waddington that Barbara found sitting in the armchair, wearing a royal blue wadded silk dressing-gown and f.a.n.n.y's motor-scarf, with a grey mohair shawl over his knees.

Mr. Waddington's convalescence was altogether delightful to him, admitting, as it did, of sustained companions.h.i.+p with Barbara. As soon as it reached the armchair stage she sat with him for hours together.

She had finished the Ramblings, and at his request she read them aloud to him all over again from beginning to end. Mr. Waddington was much gratified by the impression they made recited in Barbara's charming voice; the voice that trembled a little now and then with an emotion that did her credit.

"'Come with me into the little sheltered valley of the Speed. Let us follow the brown trout stream that goes purling through the lush green gra.s.s of the meadows--'"

"I'd no idea," said Mr. Waddington, "it was anything like so good as it is. We may congratulate ourselves on having got rid of Ralph Bevan."

And in February, when the frost broke and the spring weather came, and the green and pink and purple fields showed up again through the mist on the hillsides, he went out driving with Barbara in his car. He wanted to look again at the places of his _Ramblings_, and he wanted Barbara to look at them with him. It was the reward he had promised her for what he called her dreary, mechanical job of copying and copying.

Barbara noticed the curious, exalted expression of his face as he sat up beside her in the car, looking n.o.ble. She put it down partly to that everlasting self-satisfaction that made his inward happiness, and partly to sheer physical exhilaration induced by speed. She felt something like it herself as they tore switchbacking up and down the hills: an excitement whipped up on the top of the deep happiness that came from thinking about Ralph. And there was hardly a moment when she didn't think about him. It made her eyes s.h.i.+ne and her mouth quiver with a peculiarly blissful smile.

And Mr. Waddington looked at Barbara where she sat tucked up beside him.

He noticed the s.h.i.+ning and the quivering, and he thought--what he always had thought of Barbara. Only now he was certain.

The child loved him. She had been fascinated and frightened, frightened and fascinated by him from the first hour that she had known him. But she was not afraid of him any more. She had left off struggling. She was giving herself up like a child to this feeling, the nature of which, in her child's innocence, she did not yet know. But he knew. He had always known it.

So much one half of Mr. Waddington's mind admitted, while the other half denied that he had known it with any certainty. It went on saying to itself: "Blind. Blind. Yet I might have known it," as if he hadn't.

He had, of course, kept it before him as a possibility (no part of him denied that). And he had used tact. He had handled a delicate situation with a consummate delicacy. He had done everything an honourable man could do. But there it was. There it had been from the day that he had come into the house and found her there. And the thing was too strong for Barbara. Poor child, he might have known it would be. And it was too strong for Mr. Waddington. It wasn't his fault. It was f.a.n.n.y's fault, having the girl there and forcing them to that dangerous intimacy.

Before his illness Mr. Waddington had resisted successfully any little inclination he might have had to take advantage of the situation. He conceived his inner life for the last nine months as consisting of a series of resistances. He conceived the episode of Elise as a safety valve, natural but unpleasant, for the emotions caused by Barbara: the subst.i.tution of a permissible for an impermissible lapse. It had been incredible to him that he should make love to Barbara.

But one effect of his influenza was apparent. It had lowered his resistance, and, lowering it, had altered his whole moral perspective and his scale of values, till one morning in April, walking with Barbara in the garden that smelt of wallflowers and violets, he became aware that Barbara was as necessary to him as he was to Barbara.

Her easel stood in a corner of the lawn with an unfinished water-colour drawing of the house on it. He paused before it, smiling his tender, sentimental smile.

"There's one thing I regret, Barbara--that I didn't have your drawings for my Cotswold book."

The _Ramblings_, thanks to unproclaimed activities of Ralph Bevan, were at that moment in the press.

"Why should you," she said, "if you didn't care about them?"

"It's inconceivable that I shouldn't have cared. ... I was blind. Blind.

... Well, some day, if we ever have an _edition de luxe_, they shall appear in that."

"Some day!"

She hadn't the heart to tell him that the drawings had another destination, for as yet the existence of Ralph's took was a secret.

They had agreed that nothing should disturb Mr. Waddington's pleasure in the publication of his Ramblings--his poor Ramblings.

"One has to pay for blindness in this world," he said.

"A lot of people'll be let in at that rate. I don't suppose five will care a rap about my drawings."

"I wasn't thinking only of your drawings, my dear." He pondered. ...

"f.a.n.n.y tells me you're going to have a birthday. You're quite a little April girl, aren't you?"

2

It was Barbara's twenty-fourth birthday, and the day of her adoption. It had begun, unpropitiously, with something very like a dispute between Horatio and f.a.n.n.y.

Mr. Waddington had gone up to London the day before, and had returned with a pearl pendant for f.a.n.n.y, and a green jade necklace for Barbara (not yet presented) and a canary yellow waistcoat for himself.

And not only the waistcoat--

On the birthday morning f.a.n.n.y had called out to Barbara as she pa.s.sed her bedroom door:

"Barbara, come here."

f.a.n.n.y was staring, fascinated, at four pairs of silk pyjamas spread out before her on the bed. Remarkable pyjamas, of a fierce magenta with forked lightning in orange running about all over them.

"Good G.o.d, f.a.n.n.y!"

"You may well say 'Good G.o.d.' What would you say if you'd got to...?

I'm not a nervous woman, but--"

"It's a mercy he didn't get them eighteen years ago," said Barbara, "or Horry might have been born an idiot."

"Yellow waistcoats are all very well," said f.a.n.n.y. "But what _can_ he have been thinking of?"

"I don't know," said Barbara. Somehow the pattern called up, irresistibly, the image of Mrs. Levitt.

"Perhaps," she said, "he thinks he's Jupiter."

"Well, I'm not What's-her-name, and I don't want to be blasted. So I'll put them somewhere where he can't find them."

At that moment they had heard Mr. Waddington coming through his dressing-room and Barbara had run away by the door into the corridor.

"Who took those things out of my wardrobe?" he said. He was gazing, dreamily, affectionately almost, at the pyjamas.

"I did."

"And what for?"

"To look at them. Can you wonder? Horatio, if you wear them I'll apply for a separation."

"You needn't worry."

There was a queer look in his face, significant and furtive. And f.a.n.n.y's mind, with one of its rapid flights, darted off from the pyjamas.

"What are you going to do about Barbara?" she said.

"_Do_ about her?"