Vera

"Is it possible they"re going to run away?" she wondered; and so much reduced was she that she very nearly hoped so.

XIII

Lucy had meant to do exactly as Wemyss said and keep her marriage secret, creeping out of the house quietly, going off with him abroad after the registrar had bound them together, and telegraphing or writing to her aunt from some safe distant place _en route_ like Boulogne; but on saying good-night the evening before the wedding day, to her very great consternation her aunt, whom she was in the act of kissing, suddenly pushed her gently a little away, looked at her a moment, and then holding her by both arms said with conviction, "It"s to-morrow."

Lucy could only stare. She stared idiotically, open-mouthed, her face scarlet. She looked and felt both foolish and frightened. Aunt Dot was uncanny. If she had discovered, how had she discovered? And what was she going to do? But had she discovered, or was it just something she chanced to remember, some engagement Lucy had naturally forgotten, or perhaps only somebody coming to tea?

She clutched at this straw. "What is to-morrow?" she stammered, scarlet with fright and guilt.

And her aunt made herself perfectly clear by replying, "Your wedding."

Then Lucy fell on her neck and cried and told her everything, and her wonderful, unexpected, uncanny, adorable little aunt, instead of being upset and making her feel too wicked and ungrateful to live, was full of sympathy and understanding. They sobbed together, sitting on the sofa locked in each other"s arms, but it was a sweet sobbing, for they both felt at this moment how much they loved each other. Miss Entwhistle wished she had never had a single critical impatient thought of the man this darling little child so deeply loved, and Lucy wished she had never had a single secret from this darling little aunt Everard so blindly didn"t love. Dear, dear little Aunt Dot. Lucy"s heart was big with grat.i.tude and tenderness and pity,--pity because she herself was so gloriously happy and surrounded by love, and Aunt Dot"s life seemed, compared to hers, so empty, so solitary, and going to be like that till the end of her days; and Miss Entwhistle"s heart was big with yearning over this lamb of Jim"s who was giving herself with such fearlessness, all lit up by radiant love, into the hands of a strange husband.

Presently, of course, he wouldn"t be a strange husband, he would be a familiar husband; but would he be any the better for that, she wondered?

They sobbed, and kissed, and sobbed again, each keeping half her thoughts to herself.

This is how it was that Miss Entwhistle walked into the registrar"s office with Lucy next morning and was one of the witnesses of the marriage.

Wemyss had a very bad moment when he saw her come in. His heart gave a great thump, such as it had never done in his life before, for he thought there was to be a hitch and that at the very last minute he was somehow not going to get his Lucy. Then he looked at Lucy and was rea.s.sured. Her face was like the morning of a perfect day in its cloudlessness, her Love-in-a-Mist eyes were dewy with tenderness as they rested on him, and her mouth was twisted up by happiness into the sweetest, funniest little crooked smile. If only she would take off her hat, thought Wemyss, bursting with pride, so that the registrar could see how young she looked with her short hair,--why, perhaps the old boy might think she was too young to be married and start asking searching questions! What fun that would be.

He himself produced the effect on Miss Entwhistle, as he stood next to Lucy being married, of an enormous schoolboy who has just won some silver cup or other for his House after immense exertions. He had exactly that glowing face of suppressed triumph and pride; he was red with delighted achievement.

"Put the ring on your wife"s finger," ordered the registrar when, having got through the first part of the ceremony, Wemyss, busy beaming down at Lucy, forgot there was anything more to do. And Lucy stuck up her hand with all the fingers spread out and stiff, and her face beamed too with happiness at the words, "Your wife."

""Nothing is here for tears,"" quoted Miss Entwhistle to herself, watching the blissful absorption with which they were both engaged in getting the ring successfully over the knuckle of the proper finger. "He really _is_ a--a dear. Yes. Of course. But how queer life is. I wonder what he was doing this day last year, he and that poor other wife of his."

When it was over and they were outside on the steps, with the taxi Wemyss had come in waiting to take them to the station, Miss Entwhistle realised that here was the place and moment of good-bye, and that not only could she go no further with Lucy but that from now on she could do nothing more for her. Except love her. Except listen to her. Ah, she would always be there to love and listen to her; but happiest of all it would be for the little thing if she never, from her, were to need either of those services.

At the last moment she put her hand impulsively on Wemyss"s breast and looked up into his triumphant, flushed face and said, "Be kind to her."

"Oh, Aunt Dot!" laughed Lucy, turning to hug her once more.

"Oh, Aunt Dot!" laughed Wemyss, vigorously shaking her hand.

They went down the steps, leaving her standing alone on the top, and she watched the departing taxi with the two heads bobbing up and down at the window and the four hands waving good-byes. That taxi window could never have framed in so much triumph, so much radiance before. Well, well, thought Aunt Dot, going down in her turn when the last glimpse of them had disappeared, and walking slowly homeward; and she added, after a s.p.a.ce of further reflection, "He really _is_ a--a dear."

XIV

Marriage, Lucy found, was different from what she had supposed; Everard was different; everything was different. For one thing she was always sleepy. For another she was never alone. She hadn"t realised how completely she would never be alone, or, if alone, not sure for one minute to the other of going on being alone. Always in her life there had been intervals during which she recuperated in solitude from any strain; now there were none. Always there had been places she could go to and rest in quietly, safe from interruption; now there were none. The very sight of their room at the hotels they stayed at, with Wemyss"s suitcases and clothes piled on the chairs, and the table covered with his brushes and shaving things, for he wouldn"t have a dressing-room, being too natural and wholesome, he explained, to want anything separate from his own woman--the very sight of this room fatigued her. After a day of churches, pictures and restaurants--he was a most conscientious sightseer, besides being greatly interested in his meals--to come back to this room wasn"t rest but further fatigue. Wemyss, who was never tired and slept wonderfully--it was the soundness of his sleep that kept her awake, because she wasn"t used to hearing sound sleep so close--would fling himself into the one easy-chair and pull her on to his knee, and having kissed her a great many times he would ruffle her hair, and then when it was all on ends like a boy"s coming out of a bath, look at her with the pride of possession and say, "There"s a wife for a respectable British business man to have! Mrs. Wemyss, aren"t you ashamed of yourself?" And then there would be more kissing,--jovial, gluttonous kisses, that made her skin rough and chapped.

"Baby," she would say, feebly struggling, and smiling a little wearily.

Yes, he was a baby, a dear, high-spirited baby, but a baby now at very close quarters and one that went on all the time. You couldn"t put him in a cot and give him a bottle and say, "There now," and then sit down quietly to a little sewing; you didn"t have Sundays out; you were never, day or night, an instant off duty. Lucy couldn"t count the number of times a day she had to answer the question, "Who"s my own little wife?"

At first she answered it with laughing ecstasy, running into his outstretched arms, but very soon that fatal sleepiness set in and remained with her for the whole of her honeymoon, and she really felt too tired sometimes to get the ecstasy she quickly got to know was expected of her into her voice. She loved him, she was indeed his own little wife, but constantly to answer this and questions like it satisfactorily was a great exertion. Yet if there was a shadow of hesitation before she answered, a hair"s-breadth of delay owing to her thoughts having momentarily wandered, Wemyss was upset, and she had to spend quite a long time rea.s.suring him with the fondest whispers and caresses. Her thoughts mustn"t wander, she had discovered; her thoughts were to be his as well as all the rest of her. Was ever a girl so much loved? she asked herself, astonished and proud; but, on the other hand, she was dreadfully sleepy.

Any thinking she did had to be done at night, when she lay awake because of the immense emphasis with which Wemyss slept, and she hadn"t been married a week before she was reflecting what a bad arrangement it was, the way ecstasy seemed to have no staying power. Also it oughtn"t to begin, she considered, at its topmost height and accordingly not be able to move except downwards. If one could only start modestly in marriage with very little of it and work steadily upwards, taking one"s time, knowing there was more and more to come, it would be much better she thought. No doubt it would go on longer if one slept better and hadn"t, consequently, got headaches. Everard"s ecstasy went on. Perhaps by ecstasy she really meant high spirits, and Everard was beside himself with high spirits.

Wemyss was indeed the typical bridegroom of the Psalms, issuing forth rejoicing from his chamber. Lucy wished she could issue forth from it rejoicing too. She was vexed with herself for being so stupidly sleepy, for not being able to get used to the noise beside her at night and go to sleep as naturally as she did in Eaton Terrace, in spite of the horns of taxis. It wasn"t fair to Everard, she felt, not to find a wife in the morning matching him in spirits. Perhaps, however, this was a condition peculiar to honeymoons, and marriage, once the honeymoon was over, would be a more tranquil state. Things would settle down when they were back in England, to a different, more separated life in which there would be time to rest, time to think; time to remember, while he was away at his office, how deeply she loved him. And surely she would learn to sleep; and once she slept properly she would be able to answer his loving questions throughout the day with more real _elan_.

But,--there in England waiting for her, inevitable, no longer to be put off or avoided, was The Willows. Whenever her thoughts reached that house they gave a little jump and tried to slink away. She was ashamed of herself, it was ridiculous, and Everard"s att.i.tude was plainly the sensible one, and if he could adopt it surely she, who hadn"t gone through that terrible afternoon last July, could; yet she failed to see herself in The Willows, she failed altogether to imagine it. How, for instance, was she going to sit on that terrace,--"We always have tea in fine weather on the terrace," Wemyss had casually remarked, apparently quite untouched by the least memory--how was she going to have tea on the very flags perhaps where.... Her thoughts slunk away; but not before one of them had sent a curdling whisper through her mind, "_The tea would taste of blood_."

Well, this was sleeplessness. She never in her life had had that sort of absurd thought. It was just that she didn"t sleep, and so her brain was relaxed and let the reins of her thinking go slack. The day her father died, it"s true, when it began to be evening and she was afraid of the night alone with him in his mysterious indifference, she had begun thinking absurdly, but Everard had come and saved her. He could save her from this too if she could tell him; only she couldn"t tell him. How could she spoil his joy in his home? It was the thing he loved next best to her.

As the honeymoon went on and Wemyss"s ecstasies a little subsided, as he began to tire of so many trains--after Paris they did the chateaux country--and hotels and waiters and taxis and restaurants, and the cooking which he had at first enjoyed now only increased his longing at every meal for a plain English steak and boiled potatoes, he talked more and more of The Willows. With almost the same eagerness as that which had so much enchanted and moved her before their marriage when he talked of their wedding day, he now talked of The Willows and the day when he would show it to her. He counted the days now to that day. The 4th of April; his birthday; on that happy day he would lead his little wife into the home he loved. How could she, when he talked like that, do anything but pretend enthusiasm and looking forward? He had apparently entirely forgotten what she had told him about her reluctance to go there at Christmas. She was astonished that, when the first bliss of being married to her had worn off and his thoughts were free for this other thing he so much loved, his home, he didn"t approach it with more care for what he must know was her feeling about it. She was still more astonished when she realised that he had entirely forgotten her feeling about it. It would be, she felt, impossible to shadow his happiness at the prospect of showing her his home by any reminder of her reluctance.

Besides, she was certainly going to have to live at The Willows, so what was the use of talking?

"I suppose," she did say hesitatingly one day when he was describing it to her for the hundredth time, for it was his habit to describe the same thing often, "you"ve changed your room----?"

They were sitting at the moment, resting after the climb up, on one of the terraces of the Chateau of Amboise, with a view across the Loire of an immense horizon, and Wemyss had been comparing it, to its disadvantage, when he recovered his breath, with the view from his bedroom window at The Willows. It wasn"t very nice weather, and they both were cold and tired, and it was still only eleven o"clock in the morning.

"Change my room? What room?" he asked.

"Your--the room you and--the room you slept in."

"My bedroom? I should think not. It"s the best room in the house. Why do you think I"ve changed it?" And he looked at her with a surprised face.

"Oh, I don"t know," said Lucy, taking refuge in stroking his hand. "I only thought----"

An inkling of what was in her mind penetrated into his, and his voice went grave.

"You mustn"t think," he said. "You mustn"t be morbid. Now Lucy, I can"t have that. It will spoil everything if you let yourself be morbid. And you promised me before our marriage you wouldn"t be. Have you forgotten?"

He turned to her and took her face in both his hands and searched her eyes with his own very solemn ones, while the woman who was conducting them over the castle went to the low parapet, and stood with her back to them studying the view and yawning.

"Oh, Everard--of course I haven"t forgotten. I"ve not forgotten anything I promised you, and never will. But--have I got to go into that bedroom too?"

He was really astonished. "Have you got to go into that bedroom too?" he repeated, staring at the face enclosed in his two big hands. It looked extraordinarily pretty like that, like a small flower in its delicate whiteness next to his discoloured, middle-aged hands, and her mouth since her marriage seemed to have become an even more vivid red than it used to be, and her eyes were young enough to be made more beautiful instead of less by the languor of want of sleep. "Well, I should think so. Aren"t you my wife?"

"Yes," said Lucy. "But----"

"Now, Lucy, I"ll have no buts," he said, with his most serious air, kissing her on the cheek, she had discovered that just that kind of kiss was a rebuke. "Those buts of yours b.u.t.t in----"

He stopped, struck by what he had said.

"I think that was rather amusing--don"t you?" he asked, suddenly smiling.

"Oh yes--very," said Lucy eagerly, smiling too, delighted that he should switch off from solemnity.

He kissed her again,--this time a real kiss, on her funny, charming mouth.

"I suppose you"ll admit," he said, laughing and squeezing up her face into a quaint crumpled shape, "that either you"re my wife or not my wife, and that if you"re my wife----"