12. It Answered
"And besides all that, the poor little woman is ill," he said. "She didn't complain much, but she looked like a ghost to-day."
"What is the matter with her now?" his wife asked.
She was lying back in her chair as if she, herself, were a little tired, and her long white hands busied themselves with four knitting-needles from which depended the leg of a knickerbocker-stocking intended for the shapely limb of Everard Barett.
He looked quickly at her with an air of suspicion and offence. "Now?" he repeated. "What does '
now' mean, spoken in that tone? I don't want to talk about Vera if you don't want to hear. You call the little woman your friend, and ask in that tone, 'What's the matter with her
now?'"
Mrs Barett knitted on in silence during the agitated minute in which her husband kicked away the chair on whose seat his feet had been stretched, sat up, punched the cushion behind him three times with a vicious fist, and, finding it even then fail intelligently to support his head, flung it across the room.
"'Matter with her
now;'" he snorted to himself, in a tone as unlike that mimicked as possible.
"Vera seems to be generally full of complaints, that's all," the wife said.
He gave her a furious glance, and stretched a hand backwards for the newspaper that lay on the table behind him. "We will change the subject," he said, loftily.
"She has her husband, who is devoted to her," Mrs Barett reminded him, disregarding the remark.
For answer the man moved impatiently, and angrily slapped one of his slippered feet over the other.
She smiled upon her knitting. "I daresay her husband isn't the style of man you admire, but he is devoted to her all the same," she said.
"Pappy idiot!" Mr Barett ejaculated. He worked himself deeper into his chair, and held his newspaper before his face.
His wife knitted on, and presently said, as if of the outcome of her thought, "I will go in and see Vera to-morrow, of course."
The newspaper rustled defiantly as it was turned over.
"You know very well, Everard, if Vera is really ill there is no one more sorry than I. Of course, I shall not neglect her."
He was mollified by that, and lowered the paper sufficiently to gaze over the top of it into the fire. "It would be rather unfair if you did; and, considering all the little woman did for you when baby was born, a little like ingratitude into the bargain," he said. "You can't have forgotten all she did?"
No. She had not forgotten, Mrs Barett admitted.
"Here every day of her life, and sometimes all day long--neglecting her own home, and----"
"I remember perfectly, dear," said Lucilla. "What of it?"
Her husband repeated the question in a tone of exasperation, got up, threw away his newspaper, fidgeted about the room, moving the chairs out of his way, staring at the ornaments. "What of it?" he asked. "I suppose, knowing she was there, and seeing after things--saving me bother in giving orders, coming between me and that infernal nurse, and so on--was a comfort to you, wasn't it?"
Mrs Barett, intent on her knitting, made no reply.
His position was strong; he repeated his question: "Wasn't it, I say?"
"It was a comfort to you, I suppose," Lucilla said, then. "We will leave it there."
He gave her a quick glance, angrily questioning. He had temporarily anchored against the fender now, and stood with his heels on it, his hands in his pockets.
"I suppose that it was a comfort to me was something, at any rate?" he asked. He shrugged an angry shoulder. "I was the one that had to go through the misery of it, I know that. I shan't easily forget the time before, when Billy was born, and I was shut up for a solid three weeks with your mother! Heavens! going about with a face like a funeral! Looking at me as if I was a monster every time I took up my hat to go out! I should think Vera Butt was a comfort to me! It wasn't as if you had been really ill. You know you were always saying you wanted to get up and come downstairs to be with us, weren't you?"
"I certainly should have liked better to be with you," Lucilla admitted.
"Well, and Vera said, 'Here's Luce lying tucked up as jolly as a sandboy, why shouldn't we be jolly too?'"
"Exactly; and she wasn't fretful, or complaining, or hysterical once, all the time, was she?"
His thoughts travelled back over the memories of the weeks of which they spoke; the weeks in which he had first begun to find Vera attractive. He saw the face which in that time he had, not without surprise, discovered to be pretty; he thought of the fun they had made between them, and heard her chattering, gay voice, and listened to their mingled laughter. A smile moved his lips for an instant; he looked up, caught his wife's eye, and had a sudden feeling of looking foolish in her sight.
"She was a good little woman, when we wanted her, and I'm sorry if she's ill. That's all," he said. "The Butts aren't very well off, and she doesn't get the comforts a woman wants in illness."
"I'll go and see after her to-morrow," Lucilla said.
It had become the custom of Everard Barett to go for a stroll the last thing at night, to get a "mouthful of air before turning in," as he said. When, later on this evening, he looked in upon his wife before starting for his walk, he found her standing by the hearth, gazing thoughtfully down into the fire.
"If you're thinking of dropping in at the Butts," she said, "you might take a few grapes to Vera. There are just a couple of bunches left. Shall I get them?"
He was putting himself into his topcoat, and he reddened a little with the exertion. "Oh, grapes?" he said; "I took them this afternoon. I saw them standing about, and----"
"Oh, that's all right," Lucilla said. "So long as she had them! And is that where the violets went? I wanted some in, to-day, and gardener said they had all been gathered out of the frame. Did you take the violets, too, to Vera?"
"I daresay I did," said Everard, turning his back.
"You daresay?"
"Well, I did, then. How should I know you wanted them, or that there was going to be a piece of work about a handful of violets?"
With that he went, and pulled the door to with a slightly unnecessary emphasis.
Everard Barett was the sleeping partner in a large manufacturing firm in that provincial town. He drew his comfortable income from this source, but had very little else to do with the business; and so it was that time hung heavily on his hands. Yet, every now and then, a business zeal would seize him, or a weariness of doing nothing, and he would have himself driven down to the great malodorous factory by the river, to put away a few hours. From thence he would return in a far more cheerful spirit than was his on his unoccupied days.
On the morrow of the above conversation he came back from such a dutiful visit, and going into the drawing-room in search of his wife, he found, lying on the sofa drawn up to the fire, not Lucilla, but the lady who of late had dwelt so dangerously in his thoughts--Vera Butt.
She had assumed a charming attitude, which she only changed to throw out a welcoming hand as he came forward. "Here I am," she said. "It's really me. Isn't Luce an angel?" She smiled at him, showing all her teeth, stretching back her head on the pillow to bring her full, round throat into prominence, shutting her eyes. "Oh, it is good to be here!" she said.
It was good to see her there, he murmured, but not without a little embarrassment. For, it is one thing for a man to make love to another man's wife during a half-hour's call at her house, and another to do the same when she has taken up a permanent position in his own wife's drawing-room.
"I'm to stay here till Fred comes back," Vera told him, opening her eyes upon him. (Fred was the husband.) "He won't be home for another fortnight, at least. Are you prepared to tolerate me for a fortnight?"
He thought he was, he smiled; he sat down on the divan not far from her sofa and gazed at her in a rather shamefaced way.
"In a company of three, one must be
de trop. I only hope it won't be me," she said.
She was such a nice little woman! With anyone else he might have thought it "good cheek" to imagine it possible his wife or he could be
de trop in their own house.
"What talks we'll have!" she went on. "Do you remember when Luce was ill we laughed so loud at some ridiculous thing you said when we were going up to her room that the horrid nurse came out and was rude, and asked us to be quiet?"
Everard remembered the occasion with resentment. It was he who had made the witty remark, certainly, but it had been Vera who had boisterously laughed.
"I never laugh, at home," she told him. "And if Fred does, I am ready to fly. I can't bear any sudden noise. Luce is going to have nurse take the babies always down the back stairs, for fear I should hear them as they come out and in. She has given orders they're not to come into this part of the house at all while I'm here."
"Of course not," Everard said. But he thought of his little Billy, who was two years old, and who was allowed to spend half an hour with his father twice each day. His son was very near to his heart. He wondered how he should make up to Billy for those lost half-hours.
"It is delightful!" Vera said. "I think I should like to lie here for ever, only the firelight to see by, and you sitting just there to talk to me."
"We mustn't talk if it hurts your head," Everard said, with tender caution.
"Well, you to sit there and keep silence, then," she amended.
The divan was not very comfortable. He could not echo her wish that he should sit so, for ever, silent.
"How is the poor head to-day?" he asked.
"It is like fire," she told him. "Feel."
She hitched herself upward, leant on her elbow, and stretched her neck forward, bringing her face within easy distance of his own. What could he do but kiss her forehead?
He had a very gay look when he burst in upon his wife, who was dressing for dinner.
"So you got her here?" he said. "Isn't that giving you a lot of trouble, Luce?"
"We mustn't think of the trouble," Lucilla told him. "I shall not be able to be with her always, but fortunately you and she get on so well----"
"Oh, I daresay I can find time to sit with her, now and then, if that's all you want me to do," he acquiesced, looking down his nose.
"She seems really sadly," Lucilla told him. "Her head is bad, and her nerves--she's all nerves! Then, she has a sort of seizure, now and then----"
"Heavens!"
"Yes. She suddenly becomes, she says, rigid. Can't move hand or foot."
"I say, that must be bad. And what do we do then, Luce?"
"Well," said Lucilla, calmly surveying herself in the glass, and turning her long neck to get a view of her elegant back, "in that case you will have to carry her up to bed, and I shall have to undress her and send for the doctor."
"I carry her!" he said to himself, doubtfully, again and again as he dressed. "She's something of a lump for any man to carry."
He was considered a handsome man by himself and his friends; by no one could he be considered a fine one. Lucilla--he admired her long, graceful figure still--was as tall as he, and he knew himself lacking in muscular strength. "I hope she won't become rigid here," he said.
She had all her meals served in the drawing-room, and she partook of every course, and had a really fine appetite. Plates with biscuits, with grapes, basins with beef-tea, glasses of milk, champagne bottles, were always standing around her sofa.
"It is making rather a piggery of the place," Everard said more than once to his wife.
It was a matter of importance to him, because he found he was expected, both by his wife and Mrs Butt, to spend all his time there. Lucilla, with her nursery, her conservatories, her interest in parochial matters, had never been exacting; he had come and gone without explanation, as it pleased him. But a half-hour unaccounted for came, with Vera, to mean a sulk, to mean tears, to mean, eventually, a nagging such as in all his life Lucilla had never given him. Certainly, if he had prized Vera Butt's society in the days when he could get very little of it, he had his fill now.
A meal being over, Lucilla would say--"I have such and such a thing to do; you go in, dear, and keep Vera amused for an hour." And the hour would stretch to two hours--till the next meal, even. And during that time Vera gave him no rest. She would call upon him incessantly to tell her things, to amuse her.
"Surely something interesting must have happened! Does nothing
ever happen in this house?" she would pout. "You used to say funny things--do you remember how we laughed when Luce was ill? Say something funny now, to keep me going?"
He, with inward resentment, would decline to be funny at command, and she would pass on to the reproachful stage, and so, by easy passage, to the stages of tears and sulks and semi-insensibility; when he would have to dab her forehead with eau-de-Cologne, and rub her hands, or to lift her head higher with his arm beneath the pillow.
"I'm a married man, but I never was called on to do this kind of thing before," he would say to himself.
And at last--"I'm hanged if I'm not getting fairly sick of it," he said.
Then came a day when, before going to his place by the invalid's sofa, he ran up to the nursery and fetched Billy down.
"All nonsense," he said to himself as he carried the child, perched on his shoulder and delightedly holding on by his hair, downstairs. "She screams and cries enough herself; suppose Billy takes his turn!"
"Look here!" he said as the pair entered, "here's Boy Billy come to see you."
Boy Billy struggled down from the paternal shoulder, ran across the room as fast as his fat legs would take him, and with a delighted cry of "mummy! mummy!" hurled himself upon the lady on the sofa. To fly back to his father, with outflung arms and a scream of terror, when, instead of the fair, blooming face of his mother with the auburn waves of hair, the sallow cheeks, the tossed black hair, the great dark eyes of Mrs Butt met his infantile gaze.
The howl that Billy gave in the first pang of that disappointment was certainly out of place in a sick-room. Everard, with one glance at the figure on the sofa, flinging itself into a sitting posture, and gazing at him in an outraged frenzy, caught his boy in his arms and fled with him upstairs.
"My's mummy! My's mummy! Billy wants my's mummy!" the child screamed.
His mummy was sitting over the fire in her own room, and her husband, bursting in, deposited Billy on her lap. The sobs died away against her breast, but Everard went down on his knees and smoothed and patted the beloved little head, and talked the foolish language of consolation his fatherhood had taught him.
"Ugly lady!" the child cried, in his broken voice. "Not Billy's mummy--ugly lady!"
"Billy's is a pretty mummy, isn't she, darling?" the man tenderly said.
"Billy's mummy loves her precious boy," Lucilla murmured.
"'Oves daddy, too," the child sobbed, feeling the father's touch.
She smiled upon the kneeling young man. "Loves dear daddy, too," she said.
It had been only a foolish flirtation--just the snatching at something to fill his empty days. Everard Barett's heart had been his wife's all along. He knew it for a certainty, looking at the woman and her child together, kneeling before them, with a sudden conviction of his own unworthiness, and folly, and absurdity.
"We all love each other, little man," he said. "If we three stick together, we're all right, Boy Billy--we're all right, Luce."
He got upon his feet presently. "I'm going to the Works this afternoon, dear," he said. "And after dinner I thought I'd go in and take a hand at bridge with the Worleys. I'm afraid you'll have rather a time of it, poor old girl."
"I'm afraid you will, when you come home again," Lucilla said.
He dropped his voice to a whisper. "I say, haven't we had almost enough?" he asked. "A fortnight's a deuce of a time! She's all very well, but it's jollier when we're alone, Luce. I want us to be alone again."
When he came home to dinner, his wife met him in the hall. "Everard," she said, "it's come."
"In the name of heaven, what?"
"The Rigor.
You know. She can't move. Can't stir hand nor foot. All the afternoon she was in a terrible way, crying, and--well, actually fighting me. Then the Rigor came on."
"I'll run for the doctor," he said. He had an aghast face.
"All done. He's here. He's waiting for you to carry Vera to bed."
"Let him carry her himself!" Everard said, fiercely. "Look here, I'm best out of this. I'll go and dine somewhere."
"My dear, you can't run away like that," she said, and, of course, prevailed.
It was as Lucilla had said. Vera was rigid. She looked up at Everard with a smile of satisfaction at that fact. "What do you think of me now?" it seemed to ask. "Am I the sort of woman to turn your back on, and neglect?--a woman who at once becomes as stiff as a broomstick?"
"She must be got upstairs and undressed," the doctor said to Barett.
"Lean on me and try to walk," Barett implored the patient.
She gave a defiant smile. "If my life depended on it I could not move a toe," she said.
"If I took her head, and you her feet?" Everard suggested to the doctor--a plan at once negatived by Vera.
"I won't be carried in that fashion," she said. "I am not a long woman, like Luce," she added. "Fred carries me with perfect ease."
"I think you can manage it, Mr Barett," the doctor said.
There was no help for it. Everard stooped to the task. He ought to have been a happy man, perhaps, with that burden in his arms. It was not as such he described himself to his wife afterwards.
Halfway up the stairs he tripped, and she screamed.
"Grip me! Grip me! Don't let me drop over the balusters!" she called.
He laboured on, the cords bursting in his forehead, his legs bending, his throat swelling, his arms two seats of agony. Lucilla, who had gone before, cleared the mats out of his way. "It isn't much farther," she whispered.
"He is not grasping me right," Mrs Butt cried in a terrified voice. "It's not how Fred grasps me. I am as easy as a child when he carries me. Oh! I shall drop--he is going to let me drop!"
He thought he was, but made a superhuman effort, and tottered on. Having reached level ground he stopped, then started on again with a staggering run. In piloting her through the bedroom door he banged her head against the frame, and Vera gave a howl of rage and pain.
The next minute she found herself hurled upon the bed.
She remained as she fell, upon her face, uttering suffocating moans of angry shame and misery.
Everard waited not a second to watch her there. He reeled from the room, and reaching the landing again, sank down there, ignominiously, sitting on the carpet, his back to the wall, a wreck of his spruce, dapper self, having bodily and spiritually reached the bounds of endurance.
They telegraphed for her husband. "Let him come and take her home, and carry her himself!" Everard said, savagely. "It's his place to carry her, not mine. We've done our part--let her go."
He came as soon as the train could bring him. Lucilla was able to tell him truthfully that his wife had lain and called upon his name all night.
"He is kneeling by her bedside and kissing her, and crying over her," Lucilla told her husband, running down to him, her own eyes wet with tears. "Isn't it a mercy he loves her so?"
"There's nothing whatever the matter with her, you know," Everard said. "The doctor's just been telling me. Nothing whatever."
"I knew that all along," Lucilla told him.
He took her hand and looked in her face, and his own grew red. "Confession is good for the soul, and you and I should have no secrets, Luce," he said. "That little woman upstairs--you'll think me an awful ass. She and I--she----"
Lucilla nodded, without looking at him. "I knew that all along, too," she said.
"You knew? Yet you asked her here?"
He held her before him, and looked in her face, and kissed her.
"I don't believe any other woman would have done that. That was a risky thing to do, Luce," he said.
"But it answered," Lucilla said to herself as she turned away.