Mr. Fortune (22 page)

“Make the chocolate for two, and see that it froths properly. And tidy yourself, wash your face if there is time, and in any case wash your hands. And tell Rosa to carry my old slippers out of the sitting-room, and the cushion which the puppies gnawed, and to wind the clock. No, she will break it, you must wind the clock yourself. But Rosa can take the clean water to the guest-chamber, and two of the best towels, the towels with embroidery. Now go, be quick, afterwards I will tell you what to do next. But before you go you must fasten me up, the black taffeta. There! That will do, I can finish the rest myself.”

Mariquita was half-way downstairs when a voice cried after her,

“Not chocolate, Quita.
Tea!
”

Rosa, scurrying before the commands of her aunt, whom some strange visitation had suddenly converted to a flail handled by a demon, fell back awed before the vision of Sunday dignity and splendour which descended the stairs. Undoubtedly the end of the world—unless it were a Bishop. Possibly that long beggar, sleeping upon the bench, had brought the news of his advent, for Bishops do travel, and cars do break down.

It was still very hot. Stepping from the house Angustias felt herself break into a sudden sweat. What she saw looked so exactly as usual, the dusty pumpkin leaves sprawling, the flickering poplars, the doves sidling along the gutter, that it was impossible to believe that anything could have happened to break the tenor of her days. Yet here she was, breathless, stepping from the house in her best clothes; and round the corner was that Englishman, one of her husband's race, a comer dauntingly composed of the known and the unknown. She began to tremble, her heart leapt up and down inside the best corsets; were it not for her age, her position, her assurance as a married and a widowed woman, and a landowner, and a mother-in-law, and a grandmother, she would have felt shy. On a sudden impulse she turned back into the house, and summoned Quita to follow her. It would be better so; if she appeared unattended he might think her brazen, or a nobody.

He was still asleep. How extraordinary that any one could sleep through such a turmoil as his coming had created. His head was propped against the wall, his face was pale and set with sleep, sleep had lent to attitude and expression an almost tragic finality.

Quita was crossing herself, and Angustias followed her example.

“One might say, a martyr,” whispered the servant.

Angustias walked up to the sleeping figure and said,

“How do you do.”

The greeting fell quite flat, he did not stir. She bent closer and stared at him. A dead man cannot cough. It must be sleep, he could not have died since that last cough, leaning against the outer wall of her house while she, inside, was making ready to bid him enter it.

It was not until she had taken hold of him by the shoulder that he opened his eyes. He saw her without any change of expression, but the obedient body rose to its feet; and before she could put out her hand to stay him he had fallen to the ground unconscious. Thereafter he did not open his eyes again until, having been carried into the house and put to bed, at the drip of cold water on his forehead he roused and stared at the brass knob of the bedstead, piteously, as though it were the small, receding image of the bright sun that had undone him.

However indolent by nature or habit, there is no woman but enjoys an occasional raid into busyness, especially if she be the prime mover in whatever is doing. From the moment when the stranger was carried into her house Angustias Bailey began to enjoy herself. Not since her daughter's wedding had she been such a fountain-head of activities—so stirring, so provident, so essential and so well-obeyed. Indeed, of the two, the present riot was the more agreeable; for an unknown man in a state of semi-consciousness, only opening his eyes to smile vaguely at the ceiling, only parting his lips to utter thanks, beg pardon, and swallow whatever she put to them, was a more gratifying object for good offices than a bride racked with emotion and nettlerash, six bridesmaids each convinced that the hats had been selected as a deliberate flout to her alone, and a bridegroom already far too much at home in the house he had such obvious intentions of inheriting almost immediately.

Her solicitude was in no jeopardy of becoming a graver concern, for the patient was just ill enough to be perfect, and no more. It was a touch of the sun, a nothing, a love-pat from that formidable god, calling only for quiet, and a half-light, and ice in linen cloths, and the concoction of a great many tisanes from her manuscript book of recipes. It was impossible not to puff oneself and bridle slightly, turning over those pages, stored with so much valuable information, and written in such a good hand. Pausing in the search for Artemisia Tea, she read an approved method for dyeing straw hats light blue; and here, on the next page, was a ham
soufflé
. How could one have such knowledge to one's hand, yet spare to use it? The book contained also recipes, less alluring, against the diseases of cattle and for worming children; but these she could apply by heart, they were as intimately grafted into her being as the Litany of the Saints. Meanwhile, she decided that when the Englishman was well he should eat a ham
soufflé
served in the arbour by Rosa wearing a light blue hat. Such little festivities are a great aid to convalescence.

For she had never wavered from her conviction that the stranger was an Englishman, although so far no word of English had passed his lips. When he was conscious enough to know to whom he spoke he addressed her in bad and rather slangy Spanish; when he wandered he employed a tongue like no language of the Christian world. It seemed probable that he was a sailor, or had followed the sea, for he had a fish tattooed on his arm. What was certain was that he must be a madman—for who but a madman would walk by noonday? Whence come, whither bound, it was impossible to surmise. No one had seen his arrival—naturally, since he had come while all were asleep. Two days before, it appeared, some herdsmen, many miles away, had shared their meal with him; but he had spoken little, asked no directions, and imparted nothing of himself. Thanking them, he had risen, and strolled off as calmly as though he were the angel of Tobit, absorbed, a few minutes after, by the enormous, unindented landscape. His bundle contained only a few clothes, washed and mended, one might suppose, by himself. He had a watch, which Angustias kept wound up for him, a knife, and a pair of spectacles. In his coat was a wallet with some papers in it, and this Angustias had locked up in her secretary, immediately, to avoid any future regrets.

She told herself that she was intensely curious about him; but in truth she speculated but seldom, and then not very earnestly. There was so much to do. “Since this Englishman came to the house we live in a tornado,” said Rosa to the shepherd whom she would marry before long. “Always boiling and baking and polishing. Yesterday she turned out the storeroom. Tomorrow without doubt she will carpet the hen-house. And my aunt is as bad as she. They leap about like fish in the pan.” “Old cats love to lie still and old women to be stirring,” replied Gregorio. It did not seem to him that Rosa was any the worse for her activities.

For the last twenty years, however, the house and the estate of the Salutation had not witnessed any very striking demonstrations of this second love.

It is only for a week or two that a broken chair or a door off its hinges is recognised for such. Soon, imperceptibly, it changes its character, and becomes the chair which is always left in the corner, the door which does not shut. A pin, fastening a torn valance, rusts itself into the texture of the stuff, is irremovable; the cracked dessert plate and the stewpan with a hole in it, set aside until the man who rivets and solders should chance to come that way, become part of the dresser, are taken down and dusted and put back; and when the man arrives no one remembers them as things in need of repair. Five large keys rest inside the best soup-tureen, scrupulously preserved though no one knows what it was they once opened; and the pastry-cutter is there too, little missed, for the tea-cup without a handle has taken its place. For a few days the current of household life checks at obstacles such as these, but soon it hollows itself another channel, and flows round them unperturbed.

So had it been at the House of the Salutation. But with the arrival of the Englishman, as Rosa remarked, came a new order. That the arbour should not have its empty bird-cage would, on the morning of the day of his coming, have seemed to Angustias as wild a thought as that the bird-cage should contain a bird. At the third cough she had opened new eyes, and looked round on her domain as sharply as a stranger. This was wrong, that was lacking, Soul of God, what outrageous cobwebs! All this would never do before an Englishman. For they liked to have things just so, well-ordered, well-conditioned—that extraordinary race who added to their reckless and incalculable fantasies the crowning fantastic touch of being neat; who would pick up a length of twine and twist it into a circle during an earthquake, who would run mad punctually. “Shipshape,” had been Harry's word: a most peculiar word, for what could a safe comfortable house have in common with a ship? And she recalled him, walking round his new outbuildings, eyeing them censoriously, containing his pungent joy, and saw again his rapt impassive face as he fiddled with the new electric light plant. It was beyond all hopes that this should be set going once more, something would be sure to go wrong and blow the house up; but what lay in her power to do should be done. She fell upon the task ardently, fired with pride. Rat-holes were raked out, fences repaired, gutters unstopped, fruit-trees pruned, forks counted, the pastry-cutter unearthed, rugs beaten, the dogs washed. Even Gregorio's philosophy was troubled by inquiries about sheep-dip. It was a good thing, with so much to do, that the Englishman's recovery was slow.

She was so busy overseeing all these works undertaken in his honour—though her own honour was also involved—that she saw but little of him. He did not appear to wish for company; he slept, or lay awake with his eyes shut, sometimes fingering his jaw or feeling out the hollows under his cheek-bones, as though his own being were a little strange to him. When she inquired of him how he did he answered that he felt better, that he would soon be well; and then, dutifully, he would thank her for being so kind to him. At the sound of her visiting voice he turned towards her, opening his eyes, and when she made a joke he smiled; but she had the impression that he smiled as a dog, being addressed, wags its tail—not quite knowing why, nor troubling to know, only knowing that to wag is the correct response; and she felt, too, that for all his attentive gaze he had not the smallest conception what she looked like.

They still conversed in Spanish, though for some days he had abandoned that other strange tongue. Certainly he was now well enough for the shock of hearing his native language, and every time that she entered his room Angustias promised herself that she would break the ice; but from having delayed so long a shyness had sprung up in her, and she still forbore. It was long since she had spoken in English, not at all since Catalina's marriage, and not very frequently even before then, for the girl had turned by nature to her mother tongue. English had gone the same way as the rest of the house since its master's death. She must read the English books to refresh her memory—Byron and Surtees and the prize volumes of the Badminton Library.

It was he who first spoke in English, though not to her. By now those puppies were everywhere, having suddenly enfranchised themselves from their parent and set up as explorers. No sooner was one driven from the house and the door shut upon it than another was squealing underfoot, a third slinking from ravages in a corner. They grew leggier daily, soon they learned how to writhe themselves up the stairs. One afternoon she saw a forbidden tail accompanying Quita's skirts towards the sick-room.

“Quita, take care. There is a puppy.”

But it was too late. Encumbered with the tray, Quita had bungled with the door, and the tail slipped round it. Quita reappeared, shutting the door with great softness and precaution, but shutting the puppy in.

“Asleep,” she remarked importantly.

But he would not sleep long with that limb of Satan frisking round him. It would pull down the tray, wake him with a clatter of broken crockery, scald itself with the broth, howl. It must be got away.

She opened the door and looked in, frowning and beckoning. The creature was tugging at the bedspread, tussling with its adversary, and growling into a mouthful of linen. The bedspread yielded a little, the man woke, saw. His face woke too, he lifted his eyebrows and laughed. Then he reached down his hand to caress the animal, which started back, goggling and alarmed. He said, speaking in English.

“Hi! puppy! Hi! good dog! Come here, I say. Catch!”

It pounced on the piece of bread and he threw another.

The third piece he held out in his fingers. The puppy hesitated, cocking its ears at the soft whistle. Then it began to advance, stopping at every third step to wag its tail and flounce its haunches ingratiatingly.

“Come on, you know you want it. Be a brave dog, step out.”

Seldom unlocking their voices, save to a dog or a horse.... She shut her eyes to hear better, to put away the present, to forget, to remember. No, it was not really like that other voice. It was flatter, less living, this voice of the live man. It had never called her by her name, nor named her children, nor asked her if she had seen its hat, nor trailed off in mid-sentence, contentedly, in a yawn, in a foolish sigh, while outside the owls hunted round the house, and the stars trickled their radiance through the poplar branches. Her heart had never waited upon it, her lips had never silenced it; she had never known quite well what it would say next, nor answered it with a discreet subterfuge. It had no place in her dreams. This was a different voice, it was merely another of those voices one hears a little distantly when one is old and turning a deaf ear to the sounds that have accompanied one so long, or to the new sounds that will not accompany one long enough to be worth attending to. It could say nothing to her, this voice out of the present, talking to the great-great-grandchild of the old pointer bitch. So it would be best to go quietly away, not to listen any more, not delude oneself, melt inwardly, feel one's bowels turn over because some one, a stranger, was talking English to a dog. It was childish—worse, unseemly—to be thus at the mercy of a little resemblance, a trick of language, an accident of intonation. She would go downstairs and instantly lock up Byron and Surtees and the volumes of the Badminton Library, leaving no admission of any language but her own; and the puppies could be sent off to Gregorio and the herdsmen. It was high time they faced the realities of life. Never, never should that lost tune echoed ring in her ears again, no man should speak English in the House of the Salutation while yet she was mistress there. For it was too much for her, she was too old for emotions like this.