Miss Fothergill did not answer for a moment. Then she said, “When am I going to see you again?”
Eustace suggested the day after to-morrow.
“I’m afraid I’ve got some people coming then,” Miss Fothergill said. The answer chilled Eustace. She had often, he knew, put off her other friends on his account but she had never put him off on theirs. “Let’s look a little way ahead. What about Friday week?”
Eustace’s face fell.
“Will you be busy all that time?”
“No, but I think perhaps you ought to be. You mustn’t spend too long playing cards with an old woman.”
“It’s what I like doing best,” said Eustace lugubriously.
“Let’s say Wednesday then. Now ring the bell three times and someone will come and help you off the premises.”
This little ceremonial at his departure never failed to give Eustace exquisite pleasure. Even to press the electric bell—a luxury unknown at Cambo—was a delight.
“And say to your aunt,” said Miss Fothergill suddenly, “that we do other things besides play cards. You read poetry to me and play the piano and take me for walks and have been known to write my letters and I—well, I enjoy it all,” she concluded rather lamely.
“You do much more than that,” cried Eustace warmly, “you—you——” He saw Miss Fothergill looking at him expectantly. His heart was full of the benefits she had conferred on him, but his lips could not find words to name them. All about the room he was conscious of the influences—nourishing, refreshing, intoxicating —she had loosed in his direction. But he did not know in what currency of speech his debt could be acknowledged; and meantime the eager look on Miss Fothergill’s face faded and changed to disappointment. “You have a civilising effect on me,” at last he managed to bring out. “Daddy said so.”
The situation was saved, for Miss Fothergill looked quite pleased. “In that case perhaps you could stay a little longer.”
“Ought I to keep Alice waiting?” asked Eustace, with a nervous glance towards the door.
“Run and tell her it was a false alarm.”
Eustace lingered a moment in the hall to apologise to Alice for having given her trouble for nothing. The complaisance with which she accepted his explanations made him stay longer. When he returned to the drawing-room he found Miss Grimshaw there. She was standing with her back to him, talking to Miss Fothergill, and did not turn her head when he came in. There was a moment’s silence while he threaded his way through the little tables and came to a halt between the two women. Miss Grimshaw ignored his outstretched hand. She was looking fixedly at Miss Fothergill who said:
“I tell you it’s nothing, Helen. I’ve often been like this before.”
Her mittened hands made a fumbling movement as though to bury themselves in the lace and lilac of her long, loose sleeves. Her bosom rose and fell quickly and her head was pressed against the chair-back. Eustace stared at her, fascinated.
“I shall telephone for the doctor,” Miss Grimshaw said. “Eustace, you had better run away now.”
Eustace looked from one to the other in doubt. Neither seemed conscious he was there, so lost were they in this new situation which seemed to shut him out. At last Miss Fothergill said, speaking less indistinctly than before:
“Let the boy stay, Helen. He can be with me while you telephone.”
Miss Grimshaw gave her a look which Eustace could not interpret, but he felt included in its resentment.
“Is it fair on the child, Janet?” she said as she turned to go.
How strange! Eustace reflected. He had never heard her call her that before. Why wasn’t it fair on him? And did Miss Grimshaw really mind if it wasn’t? In the past she had never seemed to take his part; but then why should she since Miss Fothergill always took it? He looked anxiously at the figure in the chair. She had her back to the fading light, and now that he was sitting down himself he could not see her clearly. The little fidgety movements which he knew so well and which her clothes and ornaments seemed to accentuate had ceased. A chill crept into his heart, as though his long friendship with Miss Fothergill had suddenly been annulled and he was alone with the stranger who had frightened him on the cliffs.
“Shall I get the cards again, Miss Fothergill?” he asked. “Will you have time to play another hand?”
The sound of his voice emboldened him; the sound of hers, changed though it was, brought unspeakable relief.
“No, thank you, Eustace. I’m not sure that we should have time. You’ll have to be getting home, won’t you, and I——” she paused.
“You are at home,” put in Eustace gently.
“Yes, but I shall have to see this tiresome doctor—Dr. Speed-well. I shouldn’t say that, he’s really a very nice man. He attended you, didn’t he?”
Eustace said he had.
“He told me that he liked you very much,” Miss Fothergill went on. “He said you had a lot in you, and it only needed bringing out. Don’t forget that, Eustace, don’t forget that.”
Eustace expanded under the compliment, but he couldn’t help being surprised at the urgency in Miss Fothergill’s voice.
“He only saw me in bed. He couldn’t tell much from that, could he?”
“Oh yes, doctors can. He said,” Miss Fothergill continued, speaking a little breathlessly now, “that you can’t please everyone —nobody can—and that if you minded less about disappointing people you wouldn’t disappoint them. Do you see what I mean?”
“You mean Hilda and Aunt Sarah and Daddy and Minney and——”
“And me too, if you like. We are all designing women. You mustn’t let yourself be sucked in by us.”
“But didn’t you say something like that once before?” said Eustace, a suspicion dawning on his mind.
“Perhaps I did ... I forget ... but Dr. Speedwell said so too. And he said you were right to go on the paper-chase, it did you credit, even if you were ill afterwards. Remember that, Eustace, remember that.”
She stopped speaking and then said in what was meant to be a lighter tone, “Can you remember anything nice he said about me?”
Eustace searched his mind desperately. Had Dr. Speedwell ever mentioned Miss Fothergill, except in a reference to ‘the old lady at Laburnum Lodge’? That wouldn’t do; he wouldn’t like to be known as ‘the little boy at Cambo.’ But anything else would be a story, a falsehood, a lie. Well, let it be.
“He said that you were a dear old lady and he was very fond of you.”
Miss Fothergill made an impatient movement.
“Oh, Eustace, I’m sure he didn’t say that, you invented it. I’m not a dear old lady, and I never want to be called one.”
How swiftly retribution fell! Eustace was silent. When Miss Fothergill spoke again the tartness had gone out of her voice.
“Did he give you any suggestions as to how my character might be improved?”
That was easy.
“No.”
“He’s a long time coming,” said Miss Fothergill, suddenly fretful, “if he’s so fond of me. And Helen’s a long time at the telephone, too. Is everyone in the house dead? Your eyes are better than mine, Eustace. Is it really as dark as it seems to me? Can you see me? Am I here? Would you say I was really in the room?”
Eustace felt the tension of anxiety under her familiar bantering tone and was frightened.
“Yes, you’re still there, Miss Fothergill,” he said as reassuringly as he could. “It is rather dark, though. Should I——?”
“You might go to the window and see if you can see him coming. No, no, that’s silly.... Turn on the light, could you? No, no, I don’t want that either.... Perhaps Helen was right. I oughtn’t to have let you stay. It was selfish of me. But I was feeling better and there was something I wanted to say to you. I have said it. You do remember?”
“Yes, yes, Miss Fothergill.”
“Eustace!” she cried. The name was always difficult for her to say; the syllables got drowned and twisted by the phys
ical infirmity that distressed her utterance. “Eustace!” The sound was hardly more articulate than the surge of surf on the rocks.
“Yes, Miss Fothergill.”
“Eustace, will you hold my hand?”
Eustace approached her. For years Miss Fothergill had shaken hands with no one. It was obvious that she couldn’t, and she had long since ceased to feel seriously embarrassed when a stranger offered to. She would refuse with a quick, petulant gesture. Indeed, the phrase ‘It was like shaking hands with Miss Fothergill’ was commonly used in Anchorstone to describe a fruitless undertaking. To Eustace her hands had come to seem stylised, hardly more real than hands in a picture; he no longer thought of them as flesh and blood. To touch them now seemed an act of unbearable intimacy from which his whole being shrank—not so much in alarm, for his alarm had become too general to find new terrors in an ancient bugbear—as from an obscure feeling that he was breaking the rules, doing something that she herself, were she herself, would never allow. But he could not refuse her appeal, and seating himself on the woolwork stool which served as their card-table he felt for the mittened fingers and took them in his and wondered, for they were very cold. He turned to look into her face, stripped of the restraints she put on it, defenceless now, and as he did so he saw in the twilight the outline of two figures crossing the window. In another moment there were voices in the hall, the door opened, there was a click, and light sprang into the room.
“He was sitting there,” Dr. Speedwell said afterwards, “as if he was taking her pulse. And he wouldn’t move at first. Of course we got him away as quickly as we could. The telephone was out of order and Miss Grimshaw came to fetch me; otherwise I should have been there sooner. Poor little chap—always in trouble of one sort or another!”
11. DRAWING-ROOM AND BATH-ROOM
YOU MAY say what you like, Alfred”—Aunt Sarah’s voice suggested there was something inherently wrong in saying what one liked—“but I don’t think we ought to tell him.”
“Well, if we don’t, you may be bound somebody soon will!” Mr. Cherrington spoke on a note of excitement which he was evidently doing his best to damp down.
“I doubt if we even ought to accept it.”
“Why ever not, Sarah? And in any case it’s not ours to accept or to refuse.”
He rose and stood with his back to the fireplace, taking his glass with him. The newly opened bottle with its attendant siphon stood on that nameless piece of furniture, neither sideboard nor dressing-table but with some of the qualities of each, which gave the drawing-room at Cambo its look of being both unready and unwilling for the uses of everyday life. These emblems of relaxation, together with the fire, surely a luxury in September, which crackled and sputtered as though angry at having been lit, were the only notes that offended against the room’s habitual primness. But they were enough to change its aspect; it now assumed, with a very bad grace indeed, the air of giving a party. And this was the more odd because Mr. Cherrington and his sister were both in black, and he when he remembered to, and she as of second nature, wore expressions of bereavement.
“Who would have thought the old lady had all that money?” mused Mr. Cherrington. “Eustace didn’t tell us much about her, did he?”
“You saw yourself the lovely things she had, the day we went there to tea. Eustace used to talk about them, more than I liked sometimes. You couldn’t expect a child of that age to know about money.”
“He will know now.”
Miss Cherrington took up the challenge.
“I don’t think it wise that he should. It might distort his whole view of life. No one knows Eustace’s good points better than I do, though I hope I don’t spoil him; but he is easily led and if he knew he had all that money it would be very bad for him.”
“It isn’t such a lot.”
“Isn’t it? I call eighteen thousand pounds a great deal.”
“It will only be his when he comes of age, which won’t be for ten years and more; and meanwhile the interest is mine, to spend at my discretion on his education.”
Miss Cherrington did not answer at once. She looked round the room, so clean and so uncomfortable, returning its unfriendly stare with another equally unfriendly; she looked at the unjustifiable fire, doggedly achieving combustion; she looked at the glass in her brother’s hand. Then she said:
“There’s another reason why we shouldn’t accept Miss Fothergill’s legacy. It might get us into extravagant ways too.”
Mr. Cherrington walked across the room and refilled his glass.
“I don’t know what you mean, Sarah, but I could do with a bit of extravagance myself, I can tell you.” He looked down at his sister, at the threads of grey contending with the brown, at the uprush of vertical lines that supported others as deeply scored across her brow, at the faded eyes fixed abstractedly on her tired-looking black shoes.
“I’m sure you could, Alfred,” she said, not at all unkindly. “But think: there would be the income of this eighteen thousand pounds—over seven hundred a year, didn’t you say?—much larger than your own, coming in, and you responsible for it to Eustace: what control would you have over him? And what would Hilda’s position be, and Barbara’s—penniless sisters of a well-to-do young man? I don’t say they would feel jealous of him, or he ... superior to them. I am sure they would all try not to. But nothing creates bad feeling so quickly as when one member of a family gets more than the others. It brings out the worst in everybody. And Miss Fothergill’s relations are sure to feel aggrieved. You said yourself that some of them looked angry and disappointed when the will was read.”
“Miss Grimshaw certainly looked pretty sour,” said Mr. Cherrington, chuckling reflectively.
“You could hardly expect her not to, could you, after all those years. And I dare say Miss Fothergill was a bit difficult sometimes.”
“I’m sure they fought like cats,” said Mr. Cherrington, comfortably sipping.
Miss Cherrington frowned. “We have no right to say that. People are only too ready to imagine disagreements between close friends. But supposing they didn’t always get on, Miss Grimshaw may still have felt, and justly, that a lifetime’s devotion deserved rewarding much more than the occasional visits of a little boy who couldn’t do anything to help Miss Fothergill and must often have been in the way.”
“Don’t forget she was paid for her devotion,” said Mr. Cherrington. “She lived at Miss Fothergill’s expense, and in the end she got as much as Eustace did. There were heaps of other legacies too. She must have been worth nearly a hundred thousand.”
“I know, I know, but all the same I don’t like the idea of it. What will everyone say? They’ll say we put Eustace up to it and told him to work on Miss Fothergill’s feelings, knowing she was old and lonely and perhaps not quite responsible after her stroke.”
Mr. Cherrington took out a cigar and lit it carefully, if inexpertly, while his sister watched him as if he were a stranger violating the amenities of a non-smoking carriage.
“Well, it would be true in a way, wouldn’t it? He didn’t want to go—he slipped out on the paper-chase to avoid going—and you made him. I’m very glad you did, as it has turned out. But the boy’s own instinct when he saw Miss Fothergill was to run as hard as he could in the opposite direction. He didn’t want to make up to her.”
“Other people are not to know that. Of course I never meant Eustace to make a practice of going to see Miss Fothergill. I simply didn’t want him to grow up with the idea that people are to be avoided just because they are old and ugly. You know how susceptible he is to pretty things. It sounds silly to say it when he’s such a child, but he was half in love with Nancy Steptoe.”
“He’s certainly got more out of Miss Fothergill than he was likely to get out of her.”
A look of distaste crossed Miss Cherrington’s face.
“I don’t like your way of putting things, Alfred. It’s almost coarse. But there’s something in what you say. The first time Eustace went to
see Miss Fothergill he went from a sense of duty. Afterwards he went because he liked going. She made a fuss of him, she gave him an elaborate tea——”
“Well, his manners improved wonderfully under her tuition. He’s quite a courtier now.”
“—and she taught him to play cards for money. I didn’t like that, and I didn’t like him going so often. Naturally Hilda minded it; though she never complained you could see she missed him. As you were saying, he went because he got something out of it. Not only a shilling or two—I didn’t really object to that—but—oh, I don’t know—a sense of luxury, a feeling that you have only to smile and speak nicely and everything will be made easy for you. Of course he wasn’t aware of that; he just knew that tea and cakes were waiting for him at Laburnum Lodge whenever he chose to go: but my fear is, if we accept the money for him, that when he is older he may consciously look for a return for any little kindness that he does—and you wouldn’t want him to grow up like that.”
“You mean that virtue should be its own reward?”
“I suppose I do.”
Mr. Cherrington stretched himself.
“Well, I’m afraid you’ll find that in this case the law takes a different view.”
To the sound of voices in the room above was added the thud of feet and other noises less easy to identify. Volleys of bath-water cascaded past the window, and the smell of cooking, never quite extinct at Cambo, poured through invisible openings and mingled with the perfume of Mr. Cherrington’s cigar. Supper couldn’t be far off, supper under the gas-mantle that still needed changing, cold supper except for the vegetable which was now announcing itself as cabbage. Just time for another glass. It was his fourth, and it brought Mr. Cherrington a degree of resolution that neither he nor his sister knew that he possessed. When they rose a few minutes later he had carried the day. Eustace was to have Miss Fothergill’s legacy but, in deference to his aunt’s wishes, he was not to be told of his inheritance or how it would affect his future.
Meanwhile, upstairs in the bath-room, another conversation was in progress. It was more than a year now since Eustace had been promoted to taking his bath alone. At first he viewed the privilege with dismay, it was fraught with so many dangers. The taps were of a kind that would turn interminably either way without appreciably affecting the flow of water. Even grown-up people, threatened with a scalding or a mortal chill, lost their heads, distrusted the evidence of their senses, and applied to the all-too-responsive taps a frantic system of trial and error. And there were many other things that might go wrong. Eustace no longer feared that he would be washed down the waste-pipe when the plug was pulled out, but he had once put his foot over the hole and the memory of the sudden venomous tug it gave still alarmed him. If his whole leg were sucked in he might be torn in two. The fear that the bath-water might overflow, sink into the floor and dissolve it, and let him down into the drawing-room, the accident costing his father several hundred pounds, was too rational to scare Eustace much, though it sometimes occurred to him; but he had conceived another terror more congenial to his temperament. The whitish enamel of the bath was chipped in places, disclosing patches of a livid blue. These spots represented cities destined for inundation. Each had a name, but the name was changed according to Eustace’s fancy. Sometimes a single submersion satisfied his lust for destruction, but certain cities seemed almost waterproof and could be washed out time after time without losing their virtue. Those he cared about least came lowest in the bath, and as the upper strata of sacrifice were reached so Eustace’s ecstasy mounted. When at last, after much chilly manipulation of the taps, the water rose to Rome, his favourite victim, the spirit of the tidal wave possessed him utterly. But he rarely allowed himself this indulgence, for above Rome, not much above, an inch perhaps, there was another spot, the Death-Spot. If the water so much as licked the Death-Spot Eustace was doomed.