Two Flights Up (5 page)

“I don’t know any girls, Mother.”

“Furness could get them. He is extremely popular.”

Or it would be the trousseau and the wedding gown.

“I have that old point lace,” she would say. “It’s in a trunk in the attic. And your Aunt Margaret is really clever with her needle. Perhaps I’d better go to see her. After all, nobody knows about her. I do wish you would take some interest, Holly.”

It was during one of those talks that Holly looked up with a curiously direct glance.

“How are we going to do any of these things, Mother, without any money?”

And again Mrs. Bayne smiled her faint contented smile.

“My dear child,” she said, “I have a little. You can leave that to me.”

“You’re not borrowing it?”

“Certainly not! I have a little laid away,” said Mrs. Bayne evasively. “For heaven’s sake, Holly, don’t look at me like that! It isn’t very much. But it will start you like a lady, if we are careful.”

Holly gave her mother a long careful glance, but Mrs. Bayne was pouring herself a second cup of tea. She was of an old school, and so as she drank it, she held her little finger out and delicately curved. A slight colour came into the girl’s face as she noticed it.

They had set the wedding for two months ahead. Warrington knew that from the newspapers, for they did not tell him. In a way he had lost ground recently rather than gained it; he had never again been so close to them as just after Margaret’s attempt at suicide.

If he laid Holly’s aloofness to resentment, nobody could blame him. If there was a fear of her own weakness in quiet dignity toward him, who was to tell him that? How could he know that since that day in the kitchen he had occupied most of her thoughts? Poor Holly, wearing her engagement ring and his kiss on the same hand!

There were a good many times when he decided to pack up and clear out, and as many others when he decided to stay and see it through. He would sit in his chair or walk about the room, arguing pro and con, and sometimes he would simply sit and brood.

Once or twice, sitting thus, he heard stealthy footsteps in the attic overhead. The first time he heard them he got up and went out into the hall, only to meet Mrs. Bayne there with some old lace over her arm and a candle in her hand. She had showed it to him with pride.

“It was on my wedding gown,” she said, “and now it is for Holly. It is really lovely.”

After that the sounds in the attic were like bugle calls to battle for his bitter thoughts.

On one such evening, however, following the sounds Warrington heard a light knock on his door. Mrs. Bayne was outside, and as he opened the door she held her finger to her lips. She slipped into the room and closed the door.

“I am so sorry to trouble you,” she said cautiously, “but I wonder if you will do me a favour?”

“Anything I can,” he said politely, and eyed her. He did not see her, really; all he saw was a ruthlessly genteel person who was not to be let down at any cost. But he did see her hands. They were soft and white and unsullied by any labour.

“I so seldom go out,” she said, in a breathless sort of voice. “I dare say I should. I often think I will go for a walk, but somehow I don’t. And I have a bond here. Rather a large one, and I should have it sold. I know so little about business, but I—it is for a thousand dollars.”

She opened it out. He saw that her hands were shaking, but he laid it to the stairs.

“I have not told my daughter that I am selling it,” she went on. “She might worry. But just now, with so many fresh expenses! And you sell bonds, don’t you?”

“When I get the chance,” he said, gravely smiling down at her. “If you care to trust this to me I’ll see what I can do. Of course,” he added, to put her more at ease, “I may vanish with it! One never knows.”

She hastened to reassure him, her childish blue eyes turned up to his, her relaxed white throat quivering. She was oddly emotional; he had never thought of her as emotional. For the first time he understood why Holly felt she could not let her down; why, she was like a child; her airs and poses were those of a little girl playing at being a lady. In spite of himself his heart warmed toward her.

“If it just isn’t too much trouble,” she said. “And, of course, any commission—”

“It’s absolutely no trouble,” he told her, “and there’s no question of any commission between friends.”

He gave her again his grave smile, and she went out.

It was only when she had gone, stealing down the stairs as carefully as she had come up, that he stood for some time looking at the bond in his hand. It was almost farcical, his having it. And to-morrow he would bring it back in neat tens and twenties, and it would go to buy the clothes and the little intimate things with which Holly would go to her husband.

W
ARRINGTON SOLD THE BOND
next day and brought the money back. It was a coupon bond, and it went out with an odd lot from the office. Save for a sense of responsibility as to the safe carriage of the currency in his pocket—Mrs. Bayne had asked for currency—the transaction was ended, so far as he was concerned.

He took the money back that night, buttoned inside his coat against pickpockets, and he walked part of the way. He had found that walking until he was dog tired was the only way he could sleep, just then.

Furness Brooks’s car was at the curb as usual, and so Warrington passed the open drawing-room door without a glance. He had a dread of seeing Holly and her lover together, of having their new intimacy thrust at him by some glance or gesture. But as a matter of fact, there was hardly a chance of that. It was, by and large, a strange wooing. …

“Come over and sit by me, Holly, won’t you?”

“I can talk better here.”

If Furness insisted, she would go reluctantly, and the hand he held was often cold as ice. But she was gentleness and acquiescence itself to him, as if she would make up in this way for her failure in the other.

Fortunately Furness liked to talk. He was already planning for the wedding, seeing in it that one moment when he would hold the centre of the stage and not be “filling in.” He and Holly. He was determined that the wedding should be correct in every detail.

“It’s a pity Sam Parker’s thinking of going abroad. He’s the logical person to give you away.”

There were times, of course, when his passion got the better of his common sense, when his wooing became instead a sort of fierce gesture of possession. Once, carried away by it, he went too far with her, and she struck him with her closed fist and slammed out of the room. But he knew he had been wrong, and he left her no loophole of escape. He apologized by note that night and flowers the next morning, and she had to come back to him, a trifle wary, perhaps, but still his. …

Warrington, of course, had no idea of this. He was still seeing the household through an occasional peephole: tramping up the stairs past Mrs. Bayne’s room, where, if her door was open, he could see her busy now with endless memoranda, past Holly’s little chamber, with its tidy virginal white bed and its blue curtains—he always tried very hard not to glance into that room—and so on to his own lonely quarters, where a pair of military brushes on the dresser and the books on a table were all that marked it his.

So that night he went up the stairs, and Mrs. Bayne, hearing the creak of the loose step outside, followed him up.

He gave her the money. He had an idea that it was more money than she had held in her hands for many years, but she was as calm as a May morning.

“By the way,” he said, “I hope you don’t keep things like that lying around the house. They’re negotiable, you know.”

“Just what do you mean?”

“Bonds like that are much the same as currency. They can be stolen and sold.”

Afterward he was to remember that she made an odd little startled gesture, but she said nothing for a moment. Then:

“I see,” she said quietly. “Thank you for telling me.” She moved to the door and paused there irresolutely.

“I’ll be very careful,” she said, and added irrelevantly, her eyes on the package of currency in her hand: “There are certain sacrifices one must make at times like this. I dare say you know that my daughter is to be married?”

“I saw it in the paper. Yes.”

“She is marrying very well,” she said, still in that curious irresolute manner. “Very well indeed.”

Suddenly all his resentment and anger flared up in him. He could hardly control his voice.

“That depends, of course, on how you look at it.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“If she cares for the man and not for what he will bring her.”

Their eyes met, and there was certainly no friendliness in them. Mrs. Bayne drew herself up.

“That, of course, is not a matter for discussion,” she said quietly, and went out of the room.

That she bore him no lasting grudge, however, he saw the next evening. He found her when he came home, drinking her tea as usual, with her hat awry on her head and a litter of parcels and boxes in the hall. She was clearly excited, and more expansive than he had ever seen her.

“Do come in,” she said. “Holly, a cup for Mr. Warrington. Don’t bother to ring. By the way, darling, I stopped in at your Aunt Margaret’s. She’ll be delighted to do what I suggested.”

But Holly was already out of the room.

Mrs. Bayne waved a hand toward the hall. “What a day I’ve had! But the prices of things since the war! I have done so little buying that I didn’t realize.”

Her eyes glittered; her hands trembled. There was almost ecstasy in her voice. He saw that she had not so much forgiven the evening before as forgotten it, and to the unaccustomed luxury of being with Holly he surrendered for a moment his own anger and bitterness.

He even had a few moments alone with her, while Mrs. Bayne went upstairs to take off her hat, a few moments which led to a rather curious result.

“I’ve always wanted to tell you,” he said in a low voice. “I don’t know what got into me the other day. I hadn’t a right in the world to say what I did.”

“No,” she said. “Of course, you didn’t really know how things were. If you had, you would have understood better.”

“I wouldn’t understand a loveless marriage, no matter how things were.”

“How do you know it is a loveless marriage?”

“What did you mean by ‘not letting her down’ if it isn’t?”

Instead of replying she went to the door and listened. Her mother was still upstairs. When she came back to the tea table, her face was set.

“I’m going to ask you something,” she said. “Something rather awful, but I must know. Has mother borrowed any money from you?”

“Certainly not. You can’t get blood out of a stone! Anyhow, I am sure she would never think of such a thing.”

“But she’s got money somewhere.”

“Hasn’t she a little capital of her own? Maybe she has disposed of something.”

“She had a small allowance. She can’t draw on it in advance.”

“She may have saved something.”

“Saved!” said Holly scornfully. “You can’t save out of nothing. Mr. Warrington, if you know anything, you must tell me. I can’t tell you how important it is.”

“But if she asked me not to?”

“What does that matter, if she’s sold something that she shouldn’t have sold? Oh, don’t you see, if she has, she’s done it for me, and I just can’t bear it.”

“I’m quite sure you are wrong. I’ll tell you, since it’s worrying you. She gave me a bond to sell. I got her a good price. And that’s all.”

“A bond!” she said. “She gave you a bond? My poor mother!”

Her face was stricken; she seemed to be holding to the tea table for support. And then Mrs. Bayne came back.

E
VEN THEN WARRINGTON HAD
no idea of the gravity of the situation. He helped them carry Mrs. Bayne’s parcels up to her bedroom, and later on he could hear her opening them and talking, still in her new excited voice. She was still gloating happily as he went out again to his dinner, where the cashier at the Red Rose told him he looked glum, and hinted that the movies would cheer them both up a bit.

“There’s a good show at the Grand,” she said. “A laugh a minute.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” he told her, smiling down at her. “I’ve got a cracked lip.”

He ate his dinner morosely and thoughtfully, and then went back to the house. So Mrs. Bayne had had no business to sell the bond! And in doing so she had added to Holly’s worries, as if she had not enough already.

Worries!
The word was too weak.
Sacrifices
was a better one; that was what she was doing, sacrificing herself, selling herself; and for what? To restore a little elderly gentlewoman to a world she had somehow lost! A silly world, full of vain imaginings and false values.

He succeeded finally in working himself to a very fair passion, so that sleep later on was out of the question. He got up, and in his dressing gown and slippers sat in the chair by the hearth, a cigarette in his hand—and was wakened not long after by the odour of burning carpet.

He looked remorsefully at the charred spot on the floor, rubbed it with his fingers but failed to erase it, and was about to try bed once more when he heard a faint sound overhead.

He stepped out into the upper hall and listened. There was a door to the attic staircase, a door which was always religiously kept closed. But now it was open, and a thin light trickled down, outlining the doorway in the surrounding darkness. A recollection of another night when he had stood there came to him, a night when Margaret had given up the battle between family pride and happiness, and had laid herself down to rest on the cold linoleum in the kitchen.

It made his heart faint within him. There had been a sort of quiet despair in Holly’s face that afternoon, as if at last she too had reached the end of the road.

He ran up the stairs and into the attic room.

There was a candle on the floor, and Holly was sitting beside it. She had drawn out an old trunk and lifted pieces of two of the ancient floor boards, which had been beneath it, and over them she was staring at him with the strangest look he had ever seen on her face.