The Misses Mallett (The Bridge Dividing) Part 25

Rose was horrified into laughter, which seemed hysterically continuous to Henrietta, and through it Rose cried tenderly, 'Oh, you poor child!

You poor child!'

Henrietta did not laugh. She said gravely, 'All the same, I'm glad I had him for a father. n.o.body but he would have chosen a thing like this. He had such taste.' She looked at her aunt. 'I do hope I have some taste, too.'

'I hope you have,' Rose said with equal gravity. She laughed no longer. 'There are many kinds, and though he knew how to choose an ornament, he made mistakes in other ways.'

Henrietta unclasped the necklace and laid it down. She looked, indeed, remarkably like her father. Her eyes flashed above her angry mouth.

'You mean my mother!'

'No, Henrietta. How could I? I did not know your mother, and from the little you have told us I believe she was too good for him.'

'How can I tell you more,' Henrietta protested, 'when I know what you would be thinking? You would be thinking she was common. Aunt Caroline does. She does! I don't know how she dare! No, I won't have the necklace.'

'You must believe what I say, Henrietta. Your mother was not the only woman in your father's life, and I was referring to the others.'

'You need not speak of them to me,' Henrietta said with dignity.

'I won't do so again. That, perhaps, is where my own taste failed.'

She decided to put out no more feelers for Henrietta's thoughts. It was what she would have resented bitterly herself, and it did no good.

She was not clever at this unpractised art, and she told herself that if her own affection could not tell her what she wished to know, the information would be useless. Moreover, she had Henrietta's word for it that she was terribly like her father.

'So put on the necklace again. It suits you better than it does me, so well that we can pretend he really chose it for you.'

'Yes,' Henrietta said, fingering it again, 'if you promise you never think anything horrid about my mother.'

'The worst I have ever thought of her,' Rose said lightly, 'is envying her for her daughter.'

She saw Henrietta's mouth open inelegantly. 'Me? Oh, but you're not old enough.'

'I feel very old sometimes.'

'I thought you were when I first saw you,' Henrietta said, looking in the gla.s.s and swaying her body to make the diamonds glitter, 'but now I know you never will be, because it's only ugly people who get old.

When your hair is white you'll be like a queen. Now you're a princess, though Mrs. Sales says you're a witch. Oh, I didn't mean to tell you that. It was a long time ago. She is never disagreeable now. I'm going to see her again to-morrow.'

'I wish you would go in the morning, Henrietta. The afternoons get dark so soon and the road is lonely.'

'She doesn't like visitors in the morning,' Henrietta said. 'I love this necklace. Could I wear it to the dance?'

'It depends on the dress. If you are really to look like a marigold you must wear no ornaments. If you had yellow tulle--' And Rose took pencil and paper and made a rough design, talking with enthusiasm meanwhile, for like all the Malletts, she loved clothes.

The next day Caroline had to stay in bed. She had been feverish all night and Sophia appeared in Rose's bedroom early in the morning, her great plait of hair swinging free, her face yellow with anxiety and sleeplessness and lack of powder, to inform her stepsister that dear Caroline was very ill: they must have the doctor directly after breakfast. Sophia was afraid Caroline was going to die. She had groaned in the night when she thought Sophia was asleep. 'I deceived her,' Sophia said. 'I hope it wasn't wrong, but I knew she would be easier if she thought I slept. Now she says there is nothing the matter with her and she wants to get up, but that's her courage.'

Caroline was not allowed to rise and after breakfast and an hour with Sophia behind the locked door she announced her readiness to see the doctor, who diagnosed nothing more serious than a chill. She was very much disgusted with his order to stay in bed. She had not had a day in bed for years; she believed people were only ill when they wanted to be and, as she did not wish to be, she was not ill. She had no resource but to be unpleasant to Sophia, to the silently devoted Susan and to Rose who had intended to go to Sales Hall with Henrietta.

She was not able to do that, but later in the afternoon she set out to meet her so that she might have company for part of the dark way home.

Afterwards, she could never make up her mind whether she was glad or sorry she had gone. She had expected to meet Henrietta within a mile or two of the bridge, and the further she went without a sight of the small figure walking towards her, the more necessary it became to proceed, but she felt a deadly sickness of this road. She loved each individual tree, each bush and field and the view from every point, but the whole thing she hated. It was the personification of mistake, disappointment and slow disillusion, but now it was all shrouded in darkness and she seemed to be walking on nothing, through nothing and towards nothing. She herself was nothing and she thought of nothing, though now and then a little wave of anxiety washed over her. Where was Henrietta?

She became genuinely alarmed when, in the hollow between the track and the rising fields, she saw a fire and discovered by its light a caravan, a cart, a huddle of dark figures, a tethered pony, and heard the barking of dogs. There were gipsies camping in the sheltered dip.

If Henrietta had walked into their midst, she might have been robbed, she would certainly have been frightened; and Rose stood still, listening intently.

The cleared s.p.a.ce, where the wood had been, stretched away to a line of trees edging the main road and above it there was a greenish colour in the sky. There was not a sound but what came from the encampment.

Down there the fire glowed like some enormous and mysterious jewel and before it figures which had become poetical and endowed with some haggard kind of beauty pa.s.sed and vanished. They might have been employed in the rites of some weird wors.h.i.+p and the movements which were in reality connected with the cooking of some snared bird or rabbit seemed to have a processional quality. The fire was replenished, the stew was stirred, there was a faint clatter of tin plates and a sharp cracking of twigs: a figure pa.s.sed before the fire with extraordinary gestures and slid into the night: another figure appeared and followed its predecessor: smoke rose and a savoury smell floated on the air.

Suddenly a child wailed and Rose had the ghastly impression that it was the child who was in the pot.

Cautiously she stepped into the clearing; the dogs barked again and she ran swiftly, as silently as possible, leaping over the small hummocks of heath, dodging the brushwood and finding a certain pleasure in her own speed and in her fear that the dogs would soon be snapping at her heels. If she did not find Henrietta on the road, she would go on to Sales Hall. Very high up, clouds floated as though patrolling the sky; they found in her fleeting figure something which must be watched.

She was breathless and strangely happy when she reached the road. She was pleased at her capacity for running and her dull trouble seemed to have lifted, to have risen from her mind and gone off to join the clouds. She laughed a little and dropped down on a stone, and above the hurried beating of her heart she heard fainter, more despairing, the cry of the gipsy child. 'It isn't cooked yet,' she thought. There was a deeper silence, and she imagined a horrible dipping into the pot, a loud and ravenous eating.

For a few minutes she forgot her quest, conscious of a happy loss of personality in this solitary place, feeling herself merged into the night, looking up at the patrolling clouds which, having lost her, had moved on. She sat in the darkness until she heard, very far off, the beat of a horse's hoofs, the rumble of wheels. She remembered then that she had to find Henrietta. The road towards Sales Hall was nowhere blurred by a figure, there was no sound of footsteps, and the noise of the approaching horse and cart was distantly symbolic of human activity and home-faring; it made her think of lights and food.

She looked back, and not many yards away two figures stepped from the sheltering trees by the roadside. On the whiteness of the road they were clear and unmistakable. Their arms were outstretched and their hands were joined and, as she looked, the two forms became one, separated and parted. The feet of Henrietta went tapping down the road and for a moment Francis stood and watched her. Then he turned. He struck a match, and Rose saw his face and hands illuminated like a paper lantern. The match made a short, brilliant journey in the air and fell extinguished. He had lighted his pipe and was advancing towards her. She, too, advanced and stopped a few feet from him and at once she said calmly, 'Was that Henrietta? I came to find her.'

He stammered something; she was afraid he was going to lie, yet at the same time she knew that to hear him lie would give her pleasure; it would be like the final shattering and trampling of her love: but he did not lie.

'Yes, Henrietta,' he said sullenly. 'There are gipsies in the hollow.

I shall turn them out to-morrow.'

'Let them stay there,' she said, she knew not why.

'They're all thieves,' he muttered.

Neither spoke. It was like a dream to be standing there with him and hearing Henrietta's footsteps tapping into silence. Then Rose asked in genuine bewilderment, 'Why did you let her go home alone? Why did you leave her here?'

'She wouldn't have me. She's safe now'; and raising his voice, he almost cried, 'You shouldn't let her come here!' It was a cry for help, he was appealing to her again, he was the victim of his habit.

She smiled and wondered if her pale face was as clear to him as his was to her.

'No, I should not,' she said slowly. 'I should not. One does nothing all one's life but make mistakes.' Her chief feeling at that moment was one of self-disgust. She moved away without another word, going slowly so that she should not overtake Henrietta.

-- 4

Henrietta was going very fast, impelled by the fury of her thoughts, and she forgot to be afraid of the lonely country, for she felt herself still wrapped in the dangerous safety of that man's embrace, and the darkness through which she went was still the palpitating darkness which had fallen over her at his touch. The thing had been bound to happen. She had been watching its approach and pretending it was not there, and now it had arrived and she was giddy with excitement, inspired with a sense of triumph, tremulous with apprehension.

Her thoughts were not of her lover as an individual, but of the situation as a whole. Here she was, Henrietta Mallett, from Mrs.

Banks's boarding-house, the chief figure in a drama and an unrepentant sinner. She could not help it: she loved him; he needed her. Since that day when she had offered him friends.h.i.+p and help, he had been depending on her more and more, a big man like a neglected baby. She had strenuously fixed her mind on the babyish side of him, but all the time her senses had been attracted by the man, and now, by the mere physical experience of the force of his arms, she could never see him as a child again. She clung to the idea of helping him, to the thought of his misfortunes, for that was imperative, but she was now conscious of her fewer years, her infinitely smaller bodily strength, the limitations of her s.e.x.

And suddenly, as she moved swiftly, hardly feeling the ground under her feet, she began to cry, with emotion, with fear and joy. What was going to happen to her? She loved him. She could still feel the violence of his clasp, the roughness of his coat on her cheeks, the iron of his hands, so distinctly that it seemed to have happened only a moment ago, yet she was nearly home. She could see the lights of the bridge as though swung on a cord across the gulf, and she dried her eyes. She was exhausted and hungry and when she had pa.s.sed over the river she made her way to a shop where chocolates could be bought. She knew their comforting and sustaining properties. It was unromantic, but hunger a.s.serts itself in spite of love.

It was getting late and the shop was empty but for one a.s.sistant and a tall young man. This was Charles Batty, taking a great deal of trouble over his purchase, for spread before him on the counter was an a.s.sortment of large chocolate boxes adorned with bows of ribbon and pictures of lovers leaning over stiles and red-lipped maidens caressing dogs.

'I don't like these pictures,' Henrietta heard him mutter bashfully.

'Here's one with roses. Roses are always suitable.' 'No,' he said, 'I want a big white box with crimson ribbon.' Henrietta stepped up to his side. 'I'll help you choose,' she said.

He started, stared, forgot to take off his hat. He gazed at her with the absorption of some connoisseur looking at the perfect thing he has dreamed of: he looked without greed and with a sort of ecstasy which left his face expressionless and embarra.s.sed Henrietta in the presence of the arch girl behind the counter.