Jan and Her Job Part 9

"I remember that money," Fay interrupted. "Hugo was so pleased about it, and gave me a diamond chain."

"Fay, where do you keep your jewellery?"

"There isn't any to keep now. He 'realised' it all long before we left Dariawarpur."

"What do you mean, Fay? Has Hugo p.a.w.ned it? All Mother's things, too?"

"I don't know what he did with it," Fay said, wearily. "He told me it wasn't safe in Dariawarpur, as there were so many robbers about that hot weather, and he took all the things in their cases to send to the bank.

And I never saw them again."

Jan said nothing, but she reflected rather ruefully that when Fay married she had let her have nearly all their mother's ornaments, partly because Fay loved jewels as jewels, and Jan cared little for them except as a.s.sociations. "If I'd kept more," Jan thought, "they'd have come in for little Fay. Now there's nothing except what Daddie gave me."

"Are you sorry, Jan?" Fay asked, presently. "I suppose there again you think I ought to have stood out, to have made inquiries and insisted on getting a receipt from the bank. But I knew very well they were not going to the bank. I don't think they fetched much, but Hugo looked a little less hara.s.sed after he'd got them. I've nothing left now but my wedding ring and the little enamel chain like yours, that Daddie gave us the year he had that portrait of Meg in the Salon and took us over to see it. Where is Meg? Has she come back yet?"

"Meg is still in Bremen with an odious German family, but she leaves at the end of the Christmas holidays, as the girl is going to school, and Meg will be utilised to bring her over. Then she's to have a rest for a month or two, and I daresay she'd come to Wren's End and help us with the babies when we get back."

Fay leant forward and said eagerly, "Try to get her, Jan. I'd love to think she was there to help you."

"To help us," Jan repeated firmly.

Fay sighed. "I can never think of myself as of much use any more; besides ... Oh, Jan, won't you face it? You who are so brave about facing things ... I don't believe I shall come through--this time."

Jan got up and walked restlessly about the verandah. She tried to make herself say, heard her own voice saying without any conviction, that it was nonsense; that Fay was run down and depressed and no wonder; and that she would feel quite different in a month or two. And all the time, though her voice said these preposterously ba.n.a.l things, her brain repeated the doctor's words after his last visit: "I wish there was a little more stamina, Miss Ross. I don't like this complete inertia. It's not natural. Can't you rouse her at all?"

"My sister has had a very trying time, you know. She seems thoroughly worn out."

"I know, I know," the doctor had said. "A bad business and cruelly hard on her; but I wish we could get her strength up a bit somehow. I don't like it--this lack of interest in everything--I don't like it." And the doctor's thin, clever face looked lined and worried as he left.

His words rang in Jan's ears, drowning her own spoken words that seemed such a hollow sham.

She went and knelt by Fay's long chair. Fay touched her cheek very gently (little Fay had the same adorable tender gestures). "It would make it easier for both of us if you'd face it, my dear," she said. "I could talk much more sensibly then and make plans, and perhaps really be of some use. But I feel a wretched hypocrite to talk of sharing in things when I know perfectly well I shan't be there."

"Don't you want to be there?" Jan asked, hoa.r.s.ely.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "It would make it easier for both of us if you'd face it, my dear."]

Fay shook her head. "I know it's mean to shuffle out of it all, but I _am_ so tired. Do you think it very horrid of me, Jan?"

In silence Jan held her close; and in that moment she faced it.

The days went on, strange, quiet days of brilliant suns.h.i.+ne. Their daily life shrouded from the outside world even as the verandah was shrouded from the sun when Lalkhan let down the chicks every day after tiffin.

Peter was their only visitor besides the doctor, and Peter came practically every day. He generally took Jan out after tea, sometimes with the children, sometimes alone. He even went with her to the bank in Elphinstone Circle, so like a bit of Edinburgh, with its solid stone houses, and found that Hugo actually had lodged fifty pounds there in Fay's name. The clerks looked curiously at Jan, for they thought she was Mrs. Tancred. Every one in business or official circles in Bombay knew about Hugo Tancred. His conduct had, for a while, even ousted the usual topics of conversation--money, food, and woman--from the bazaars; and an exhaustive discussion of it was only kept out of the Native Press by the combined efforts of the Police and his own Department. Jan gained from Peter a fairly clear idea of the _debacle_ that had occurred in Hugo Tancred's life. She no longer wondered that Fay refused to leave the bungalow. She began to feel branded herself.

For Jan, Peter's visits had come to have something of the relief the loosening of a too-tight bandage gives to a wounded man. He generally came at tea-time when Fay was at her best, and he brought her news of her little world at Dariawarpur. To her sister he seemed the one link with reality. Without him the heavy dream would have gone on unbroken.

Fay was always most eager he should take Jan out, and, though at first Jan had been unwilling, she gradually came to look upon such times as a blessed break in the monotonous restraint of her day. With him she was natural, said what she felt, expressed her fears, and never failed to return comforted and more hopeful.

One night he took her to the Yacht Club, and Jan was glad she had gone, because it gave her so much to tell Fay when she got back.

It was a very odd experience for Jan, this tea on the crowded lawn of the Yacht Club. She turned hot when people looked at her, and Jan had always felt so sure of herself before, so proud to be a daughter of brilliant, lovable Anthony Ross.

Here, she knew that her sole claim to notice was that she had the misfortune to be Hugo Tancred's sister-in-law. Fay, too, had once been joyfully proud and confident--and now!

Sometimes in the long, still days Jan wondered whether their father had brought them up to expect too much from life, to take their happiness too absolutely as a matter of course. Anthony Ross had fully subscribed to the R.L.S. doctrine that happiness is a duty. When they were both quite little girls he had loved to hear them repeat:

If I have faltered more or less In my great task of happiness; If I have moved among my race And shown no glorious morning face; If beams from happy human eyes Have moved me not; if morning skies, Books, and my food and summer rain Knocked on my sullen heart in vain; Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take, And stab my spirit broad awake.

Surely as young girls they had both shown a "glorious morning face." Who more so than poor Fay? So gay and beautiful and kind. Why had this come upon her, this cruel, numbing disgrace and sorrow? Jan was thoroughly rebellious. Again she went over that time in Scotland six years before, when, at a big shooting-box up in Sutherland, they met, among other guests, handsome Hugo Tancred, home on leave. How he had, almost at first sight, fallen violently in love with Fay. How he had singled her out for every deferent and delicate attention; how she, young, enthusiastic, happy and flattered, had fallen quite equally in love with him. Jan recalled her father's rather comical dismay and astonishment.

His horror when they pressed an immediate marriage, so that Fay might go out with Hugo in November. And his final giving-in to everything Fay wanted because Fay wanted it.

Did her father really like Hugo Tancred? she wondered. And then came the certainty that he wouldn't ever have liked anybody much who wanted to marry either of them; but he was far too just and too imaginative to stand in the way where, what seemed, the happiness of his daughter was concerned.

"What a gamble it all is," thought Jan, and felt inclined to thank heaven that she was neither so fascinating nor as susceptible as Fay.

How were they to help to set Hugo Tancred on his legs again, and reconstruct something of a future for Fay? And then there always sounded, like a knell, Fay's tired, pathetic voice: "Don't bother to make plans for me, Jan. For the children, yes, as much as you like. You are so clever and constructive--but leave me out, dear, for it's just a waste of time."

And the dreadful part of it was that Jan felt a growing conviction that Fay was right. And what was more, that Peter felt about it exactly as Fay did, in spite of his matter-of-fact optimism at all such times as Jan dared to express her dread.

Peter learned a good deal about the Ross family in those talks with Jan.

She was very frank about her affairs, told him what money she had and how it was invested. That the old house in Gloucesters.h.i.+re was hers, left directly to her and not to her father, by a curious freak on the part of his aunt, one Janet Ross, who disapproved of Anthony's habit of living up to whatever he made each year by his pictures, and saving nothing that he earned.

"My little girls are safe, anyway," he always said. "Their mother's money is tied up on them, though they don't get it except with my sanction till my death. I can't touch the capital. Why, then, shouldn't we have an occasional flutter when I have a good year, while we are all young and can enjoy things?"

They had a great many flutters--for Anthony's pictures sold well among a rather eclectic set. His portraits had a certain _cachet_ that gave them a vogue. They were delicate, distinguished, and unlike other work. The beauties without brains never succeeded in getting Anthony Ross to paint them, bribed they never so. But the clever beauties were well satisfied, and the clever who were not at all beautiful felt that Anthony Ross painted their souls, so they were satisfied, too. Besides, he made their sittings so delightful and flirted with them with such absolute discretion always. The year that Hugo Tancred met Fay was a particularly good year, and Anthony had bought a touring-car, and they all went up to Scotland in it. The girls were always well dressed and went out a good deal. Young as she was, Jan was already an excellent manager and a pleasant hostess. She had been taking care of her father from the time she was twelve years old, and knew exactly how to manage him. When there was plenty of money she let him launch out; when it was spent she made him draw in again, and he was always quite ready to do so. Money as money had no charms for Anthony Ross, but the pleasures it could provide, the kindnesses it enabled him to do, the easy travel and the gracious life were precious to him. He abhorred debt in any form and paid his way as he went; lavishly when he had it, justly and exactly always.

On hearing all this Peter came to the conclusion that Hugo Tancred was not altogether to blame if he had expected a good deal more financial a.s.sistance from his father-in-law than he got. Anthony made no marriage settlement on Fay. He allowed her two hundred a year for her personal expenses and considered that Hugo Tancred should manage the running of his own house out of his quite comfortable salary. He had, of course, no smallest inkling of Hugo's debts or gambling propensities. And all might have gone well if only Anthony Ross had made a new will when Fay married; a will which tied up her mother's money and anything he might leave her, so that she couldn't touch the capital. But nothing of the kind was done.

It never occurred to Jan to think of wills.

Anthony Ross was strong and cheerful and so exceedingly young at fifty-two that it seemed absurd that he should have grown-up daughters, quite ludicrous that he should be a grandfather.

Many charming ladies would greatly like to have occupied the position of stepmother to "those nice girls," but Anthony, universal lover as he was within strictly platonic limits, showed no desire to give his girls anything of the sort. Jan satisfied his craving for a gracious and well-ordered comfort in all his surroundings. Fay gratified his aesthetic appreciation of beauty and gentleness. What would he do with a third woman who might introduce discord into these harmonies?

Fay came home for a short visit when Tony was six months old, as Hugo had not got a very good station just then. She was prettier than ever, seemed perfectly happy, and both Anthony and Jan rejoiced in her.

After she went out the Tancreds moved to Dariawarpur, which was considered one of the best stations in their province, and there little Fay was born, and it was arranged that Jan and her father were to visit India and Fay during the next cold weather.

But early in the following November Anthony Ross got influenza, recovered, went out too soon, got a fresh chill, and in two days developed double pneumonia.

His heart gave out, and before his many friends had realised he was at all seriously ill, he died.

Jan, stunned, bewildered, and heart-broken, yet contrived to keep her head. She got rid of the big house in St. George's Square and most of the servants, finally keeping only Hannah, her old Scottish nurse. She paid everybody, rendered a full account of her stewards.h.i.+p to Fay and Hugo, and then prepared to go out to India as had been arranged. Her heart cried out for her only sister.

To her surprise this proposition met with but scant enthusiasm. It seemed the Tancreds' plans were uncertain; perhaps it might be better for Fay and the children to come home in spring instead of Jan going out to them. Hugo's letters were ambiguous and rather cold; Fay's a curious mixture of abandonment and restraint; but the prevailing note of both was "would she please do nothing in a hurry, but wait."

So, of course, Jan waited.

She waited two years, growing more anxious and puzzled as time went on.