The Partnership (10 page)

At first there was an immense relief in realizing that the dream was but a dream; then she was able to laugh at its absurdities; but after that it began to weigh upon her. As she dressed she felt heavy and feverish; and her spirits were not lightened by her discovery that Annice, too, looked heavy and feverish, and had reddened eyelids—as though she had been weeping. Annice would often hover sociably round Lydia while she breakfasted; but this morning, having answered
Lydia's queries as to her health in monosyllables, she withdrew to the kitchen and left Lydia to eat her meal alone, in a gloomy and troubled silence. Now that the shock of her mother's words had receded into the past, Lydia did not doubt Wilfred's love—he had looked so wretched in that dream, poor boy!—but she felt that something, Louise alone knew what, was about to try to part them. What could that something be but Dyson?

All through the day Lydia pondered this, and by the time her work was done and she was returning homewards she had comforted herself by resolving upon a course of action. Charles could do anything with Dyson—so much had been known to Lydia since her childhood. Lydia, then, could ask Charles to go to Dyson and explain the situation. Yes, let Charles explain that his daughter's heart, her happiness, her very life, were bound up in Wilfred; let Charles say that if Dyson had any kindness for his old friend he could show it best by making Lydia happy. It was true that Wilfred had not yet given any definite indication that his happiness was bound up in Lydia's, but Lydia was determined that things should be made clear between them that very night. In deciding this she was not without a merry wish to show Wilfred that all the Mellors were not the back numbers he had represented them to be. She smiled to herself as she thought of how she would do this, and dwelt pleasurably on the charms of a certain new frock in which she
intended to take Wilfred's eye at supper. Dyson could not, should not, prevail against them. Metaphorically she shook her fist at the blazing windows of her uncle's house—none of the Dysons had any decent notions with regard to the drawing of blinds, and Eric habitually left the lights on in any room he quitted—as she passed it, and marched on to number seven with a high spirit and a glowing heart.

By contrast with Boothroyd House number seven looked very gloomy. There was no light in the hall. The door, to Lydia's disgust, was on the latch and would not yield. Imperiously she rang the bell, but the kitchen door did not open, as it usually did on such occasions, to disclose Annice moving towards her with apologetic rapidity in a thin shaft of light. She rang again, and presently, growing impatient, knocked. Then at last a door opened, a light was switched on, and footsteps came towards her along the hall. The latch clicked, the front door swung back, and Lydia found herself confronting her father.

“Where's Annice?” she demanded, disturbed.

“Come in, my dear,” said Charles.

“Is Annice ill?” pursued Lydia, obeying.

Charles closed the door behind her carefully. “Your mother is in the study,” he said over his shoulder. “You had perhaps better join her.”

His voice was grave. Lydia, alarmed, looked at him questioningly, and was not reassured by his face, which bore a look of extreme distress and discomposure.

“Your mother's in the study,” repeated Charles, and took her arm to urge her there.

His silvery tones were tremulous and broken, and Lydia began to feel really frightened. “What's the matter, father?” she demanded, halting and looking at him searchingly.

“We have bad news for you, my dear,” said poor Charles, evading her glance and urging her on.

A sickening presage of disaster filled Lydia's heart.

“Is it Wilfred?” she demanded, breathless.

Charles shook his head, and in spite of herself Lydia gave a sigh of relief.

“But I'm afraid there is a great deal of trouble in store for all of us,” continued Charles unhappily.

They had reached the study door. Lydia went in, and Charles mournfully followed. The room looked extremely dismal, for the fire was low, and one inadequate light struggled alone with the wintry dusk. Louise was sitting by the table with her hands clasped; tears stood in her eyes and her gentle face was full of grief.

“Oh, Lydia!” she exclaimed sorrowfully. “This is a bad day for us.”

“What is the matter?” demanded Lydia irritably. She was sufficiently of her generation to be annoyed by any excessive display of feeling.

“It's Annice,” explained Louise despairingly.

“I guessed it was Annice,” said Lydia in a dry tone. “Well, what's the matter with her? Is she ill?” Reading a dubious negative on their
faces, she exclaimed, startled out of her irritation into horror: “Surely she's not
dead
?”

“No, no,” said Louise. She sighed, and brought out mournfully: “It's Eric.”

“Eric!” cried Lydia. “
Eric
!” At once she knew the whole story. She sat down angrily on the ancient sofa. “Eric!” she repeated in disgust. “How horrible!”

In deprecating and incoherent sentences Louise spun out the commonplace little story. It appeared that Eric had admired Annice from the very first moment he saw her at the station; and then there was the wireless, and then they had met several times on Annice's evening out, and then Eric had occasionally dropped in of an evening, and then there had been that fatal Sunday night when there was no one in the house and Lydia went to see the fires with Wilfred.

“I didn't feel quite satisfied about it even then,” said poor Louise; “I blame myself very deeply.” Lydia groaned. If only she or Charles had had Louise's keen perception! It was so characteristic of Mrs. Mellor to observe with intense insight, and do nothing.

Since then, it appeared—Louise paused, and with an outward flutter of her hands seemed to hint at continuing depths of iniquity.

“I've had my suspicions for some time,” she affirmed. Her voice drooped piteously as she murmured circumstantial details. “This afternoon,” she concluded on a note of anguish, “Annice came to me and admitted it.”

There was a pause. Lydia could not think of anything suitable to say. She supposed that Charles was expecting her to voice a righteous grief at Annice's sin, but she could not summon any such feeling. Her grief was of a different kind, and was composed partly of disgust that Annice should have thrown herself away on such an unworthy lover, and partly of an obscure, dark, and jealous irritation because the union of Eric and Annice had been consummated in the teeth, as it were, of her own tepid love affair. She felt that the feelings of herself and Wilfred were mocked and made of none effect by this so much more ardent and more potent passion. And it was for this that she had used her eloquence beside Foyle Tower! She had used all her moral force to drag Annice away from the soldier, and the result had been to throw her into Eric's arms. Life was strange, she reflected; and was annoyed by the banality of the reflection.

Her unemotional reception of Louise's news had steadied her parents' nerves; Charles ran a smoothing hand over his agitated silvery hair and assumed his favourite position on the hearthrug.

“I have seen Eric,” he informed Lydia in his stateliest tones. “And the boy is willing to make proper reparation for his fault.”

“Herbert will never allow it,” wailed Louise, disturbed afresh.

Charles frowned. “He must and shall,” he said emphatically.

A host of literary precedents for the present situation thronged Lydia's mind, but she felt characteristically at sea in the real one.

“What does Annice say?” she demanded curiously. “I mean, what does she seem to think of herself?”

Louise threw out her hands again. “How can you tell what Annice feels?” she said despairingly. “All she says is that she's afraid you'll be vexed.”

“Vexed!” repeated Lydia. “Vexed!” She sighed—the inadequate word was indeed what could have been expected from Annice, whose emotional reserve stood in the same ratio to Lydia's as Lydia's to that of Charles and Louise. “Well,” continued Lydia crossly, “we needn't be uncomfortable even if the sky
has
fallen.” She rose, turned up another light, and attended to the fire. As she knelt before the hearth it struck her abruptly that her words had been an unconscious echo of her last night's dream, and a shudder of foreboding ran through her veins and chilled her heart.

“Eric has promised me,” Charles was saying gravely, “that he will tell his father to-night.”

Lydia considered this, poker in hand.

“He won't,” she said, unable to imagine the wretched Eric mustering courage to confess such a fault to Dyson.

“He has given me his word of honour,” protested Charles.

“He won't do it himself,” affirmed Lydia, a
certain bitterness in her tone. “He'll get Wilfred to do it for him.”

Charles looked startled.

“I hope not,” he said in a troubled voice. “I hope not, indeed. I hope not, indeed,” he repeated, shaking his head anxiously and looking at Louise.

“He will,” repeated Lydia bitterly.

“He can't,” said Louise, wiping her eyes, a mild triumph in her tone. “Wilfred's gone to Wolverhampton to see about a new lorry, and he's staying the night. He called in this noon to tell me so.”

A look of relief, which seemed to Lydia quite out of proportion to its cause, crossed Charles's face.

“I'm glad of that,” he said.

“Where is Annice?” demanded Lydia. Not that she wanted to know, but she felt that she must say something.

“In the kitchen,” replied Louise, fitting on her glasses. “It's too cold for her to be anywhere else, you know, isn't it?”

Just then the pseudo-Japanese gong which stood in the hall and summoned the Mellors to all their meals was gently tinkled. All three started guiltily.

“She's evidently got tea ready,” whispered Charles with a conspiratorial air.

“Evidently,” said Lydia dryly. She wondered irritably whether Charles imagined that Annice's surrender to Eric made her incapable of preparing
tea; and then wondered at her own cynical and unsympathetic attitude towards the disaster. Why, she reproached herself, did she feel anger rather than sorrow at Annice's situation? Why did there seem to her something irresistibly comic and yet sinister in the conversation which had just concluded, as though the whole affair were a horrible joke on the part of the Fates? For a moment Lydia almost seemed to hear an echo of their sardonic laughter on the air; then she shook herself free of the obsession and followed her mother into the next room, where Annice had indubitably laid the tea.

The unhappy Mellors partook of it in silence. Charles's brow was furrowed; Louise wept, and tried to conceal her tears; Lydia, exasperated almost to the point of screaming by the glances of commiseration which her parents from time to time rested on her, fixed her eyes on the portrait of the Tolefree ancestor, and ate far more than she really desired out of sheer vexation. When they had all finished they sat on for a long half-hour, embarrassed by the question of how to dispose of the remains of the meal. The ringing of the bell would produce Annice, and none of them wished to see Annice just then. At last Lydia rose abruptly, collected the tea-things, and laid them on the table in the hall. While she was so engaged she heard the handle of the front door turn. Imagining that it was the culprit Eric seeking an entrance, she marched forward, put up the latch, and swung back the door with an
air of judicial severity which would certainly have intimidated poor Eric very considerably if he had been there. It was her uncle, however, who stepped briskly past her into the hall.

“Oh, it's you, Lydia,” he said dryly.

Lydia, very much perplexed as to whether her uncle had heard the story of the tragedy or not—her first thought was that he had come to see Charles on the subject, but he looked so calm that she could scarcely credit it—admitted that it was she herself.

“Is your father in?” then inquired Dyson, hanging up his hat.

Lydia, more uncertain than ever as to the extent of her uncle's knowledge, said that he was, and Dyson began to take off his coat. To do this with greater ease he threw down on the table a letter which he had held in his hand; and Lydia, taking a sidelong glance at it, saw that the writing was in the childish and unformed hand of Eric. She gave a deep sigh; obviously the note contained Eric's confession, and an unpleasant scene was at hand. Mr. Dyson, however, hung up his thick new coat in a business-like manner, settled his collar about his neck, picked up the letter, and strode into the dining-room. Lydia, frightened but fascinated, followed him.

“Ah, Herbert,” said Charles in his most harmonious and sympathetic tones, half rising. “I'm glad you've come across. Take this chair.”

Mr. Dyson, with a sniff, seated himself in the proffered chair and folded his arms.

There was a moment's pause, and Lydia had time to notice, as she had often noticed before, how her uncle's presence made the Mellors look shabby and out of date. Mr. Dyson's dark suit of finest quality, his excellent linen and expensive tie, his monogrammed cuff links, the spruce and severe grooming of his sandy hair, somehow called attention to the creases in her father's clerical black and the untidiness of Louise's fair abundant coils. The hard healthy red of Mr. Dyson's face, too, his fierce grey eyes, bristling short moustache, and aggressive chin, made Charles's pink cheeks, flowing silver hair, and benign expression look childish and unpractical. Lydia was reassured, however, by her uncle's composed and business-like air; perhaps the discussion of Annice's misdemeanour would not be so disagreeable after all.

“What's all this about Eric and that girl of yours?” demanded Dyson at this point abruptly.

“He's told you, then,” observed Charles with gravity. “I'm glad of that.”