The Oyster Part 41

"Esme!" Bertie raised his white face.

"Bertie! Have the Germans taken London, or is Lloyd George made Regent?

Or--you're not ill, Bertie?"

"We can't go on, Esme," he said. "I saw your account on your bureau there. Esme, I can't pay it, unless we sell everything--go away."

He saw her hand clench, but she did not look at him.

"How dared you pry?" she began, then checked herself. "Paul Pry!" she mocked. "Paul Pry! But I can pay it."

"You? How?" he asked, getting up.

"How? I've won a lot lately," she said, after a pause. "I got some tips. I can pay it, Bertie."

"You've got money to your account, then?" he said, for he knew that she was lying again.

"Not now."

"Bookmakers," said Bertie, "pay on Mondays. Who is your man?"

"Oh! _don't_ bother, Bertie." Her hands shook as she began to write.

"Denise did the bet for me. I'm writing to ask her to send it on now."

"Oh!" he said, more quietly still.

"I backed first one and then another," she said; "got it that way. So don't fret, Boy."

"But if you had not won," he said softly. "The account is not new, Esme."

"I chanced it! I let the winnings go on to other gees." He could hear the anger rising in her voice. "I chanced it. Don't bother now, I'm writing."

"But I must bother, Esme. We can't go on like this. We're getting poorer every day. If we had a child things would be different, but as it is Hugh Carteret will leave me Cliff End and what he allows me now--four hundred a year."

"And you'll be Lord De Vinci," she said.

"With a t.i.tle and two mortgaged places, and every penny left to the girl. Esme, if you can't pull in we must give up London."

"Not until London gives me up," she flashed out. "Leave me my own affairs, Bertie. If I make a bit it doesn't hurt you. You don't have to pay then."

"You're mad, b.u.t.terfly," he answered, "to dream of living by backing horses. Look here! Nothing's ever been the same since I went away that time. Esme, we're young. Let's start again." He came nearer her.

If he had taken her in his arms she might have fought down the restless demon of anger and resentment which was tearing at her. But he did not touch her.

"Start in a sand castle by the sea," she mocked, "with limpets for friends and neighbours." And then suddenly her self-control gave way.

She burst out hysterically and told him he wanted to make her miserable, to imprison her in the country; cried tears of sheer peevish temper; swore that all the world's luck was against her; that she had no pleasure, no real fun; that even a few rags paid for by herself were grudged to her.

After a little Bertie turned away, went out so quietly that she did not hear him go, and left Esme raving in an empty room, until Marie with a tabloid came to soothe and comfort.

Bertie walked swiftly across London, up through the roar of Piccadilly, with its motor monsters, diving, stopping, rus.h.i.+ng, with its endless flight of taxis, its horse vans out of place in the turmoil. It was cold, a thin rain falling; he walked on to narrower streets, and came to the grey, dull square where Estelle lived with her aunt. It was London at its dreariest; smoke-stained old houses, blinking out at a smoke-grimed, railed-in square. A few messengers delivering meat at area doors, a few tradesmen's carts standing about, now and then a taxi gliding through, spurning the thin slime of the quiet street. Decorous, old-fas.h.i.+oned carriages were drawn up at some of the doors, with large horses poking miserably at their bearing reins, and getting their mouths chucked as they did it by obese and self-satisfied coachmen. The self-centred life of a colony of quiet people was making its monotonous way from free lighting to lights out. People who lived next door and never knew each other, who revolved in their own little circles and called it living. Perhaps lived as happily as others, since to each their own life and drawing of breath.

"Was Miss Reynolds in? Yes?"

Estelle was dusting the china in the big, brown-hued drawing-room, an appalling museum of early Victorian atrocities, with efforts of the newer arts which followed the c.u.mbrous solidity; pieces of black and gold, plush monkeys clinging to worked curtains, fret-work brackets and tables covered with velvet sandwiched in here and there.

Estelle dusted an offensive bronze clock with positive loathing. It was a gouty effigy of Time, clinging to his scythe because he must have fallen without it, and mournfully accepting the hour-gla.s.s set in his chest, which held a loudly-ticking clock of flighty opinions and habits; evidently, judging by his soured expression, a cross to the holder. Two large vases containing dyed pampas gra.s.s guarded each end of the mantelpiece; two others held everlastings.

Estelle had once said that the room inspired her with a deep longing to throw stones there, so as to break some of the monotony.

Mrs Martin, her aunt, padded softly in each morning, moving pieces of furniture back to their exact places if they had been stirred by visitors, patting the muslin antimaca.s.sars, pausing every time at the doorway to remark, "Is it not a charming room?" and then padding out again--she wore velvet slippers--to sit in the room at the back and st.i.tch for the poor. Mrs Martin had reduced dullness, skilfully touched up with worthiness, to a fine art.

She gave Estelle complete liberty, because, behind her conventional stupidity, she herself had a mind which imagined no harm, a child's mind, crystal clear of evil thoughts. She had married, been widowed, lived blamelessly. The swirl of London was part of the newspaper world, "which everyone knows, my dear, the compositors make up as they go on,"

she told Estelle, "except of course the divorce cases, and no doubt half of those are not true."

The most blameless daily which could be procured was taken together with the Athenaeum and the Sunday Chronicle.

"Oh, I shall throw them some day," said Estelle aloud to the vases.

"Who is that, Magennis?" said Mrs Martin to the butler. "Captain Carteret! I trust he has come to arrange an outing for Miss Reynolds."

"He does that often, 'e does," said Magennis, as he went back to his pantry. Magennis had not a mind of crystal purity. When he was younger he had been pantry-boy in a large country house.

"Bertie! What is it?" Estelle dropped one of the smaller vases. It crashed on to the silver brightness of the polished fender, making a litter of bright-flowered gla.s.s and crackling everlastings.

"It's broken," said Estelle.

"And so am I." Bertie crossed the room and took her hands. "And you cannot ever mend the vase, Estelle, but I wonder if you can mend me."

Estelle turned very white.

"I'm tired," he said drearily. "I feel as if the fates had drubbed me mentally, until my sore mind aches. We'll get another vase, Estelle"--for she was picking up the pieces with shaking fingers. "And I tell you, I have come to you to be mended," he went on, almost pitifully.

"But I--what can I do?" she whispered.

The room faded; she saw the open sea s.h.i.+mmering blue and green and opal; she felt again the love she had hoped she had fought down and put away.

"You can stop pretending," he said. "You can give me a little comfort, Estelle, a little love. I have lost faith in everything except you.

And--I love you, Estelle," he added gravely.

The rush of mingled joy and sorrow made the girl gasp.

"But Esme?" she whispered.

"Esme was a will-o'-the-wisp--a false light on a marsh. You are the solid world. Estelle, I don't know where I am. Esme has made a fool of me--and I can never care for her again. Will you help me--or see me go to the dogs alone?"

The cunning of man, turning the mother-love in woman, which he knows is stronger than pa.s.sion, to his own ends. Man triumphant, merry, full of strength and hope, she may resist; but man broken, pitiful, needing her, is irresistible.

Bertie had sat down on the brown sofa; he was looking at her with dazed eyes.

"I'll help you, Bertie. I'll be all I can ... as your friend ...