He spoke lightly, yet with a hint of roughness in his voice, as though her visit was an unwelcome interruption. She turned, trying to read his face, and said, with a faint smile: “Were you busy? You don’t sound as though you were glad to see me!”
“I’m not glad to see you,” he replied. “You shouldn’t be here, you know.”
“So Imber seemed to think—but I didn’t care for that.” She came slowly into the middle of the room, and paused by the table that stood there, drawing off her gloves. “I thought it best to come to you, rather than to wait for you to come to me. It might not be easy for us to be private, and I must consult you. Something quite unlooked-for has happened, and I need your advice, my dear friend. My uncle has come.”
“Your uncle?” he repeated.
“My Uncle Hendred—my uncle by marriage, I should say. Damerel, he wishes to take me to London, and at once!”
“I see,” he said, after a moment’s silence. “Well—thus ends a charming autumn idyll, eh?”
“Do you think that that is what I came to say to you?” she asked.
He glanced at her, his eyes a little narrowed. “Probably not. It is the truth, however. Unpleasant, I grant, but still the truth.”
She felt as though the blood in her veins was slowly turning to ice. He had turned abruptly away, and walked over to the window; her eyes followed him, but she did not speak. He said harshly: “Yes, it’s the end of an idyll. It has been a golden autumn, hasn’t it? In another week there won’t be a leaf left hanging to the trees, though. Your uncle timed his coming well. You don’t think so, do you, my dear? But you will think it, believe me.”
She still said nothing, because she could think of nothing it was possible to say. She found it difficult even to take in the sense of what Damerel, incredibly, had said, or to disentangle the wisps of thought that jostled and contradicted each other in her brain. It was like a bad dream, in which people one knew quite well behaved fantastically, and one was powerless to escape from some dreadful doom. She lifted one hand to rub her eyes, as though she had really been dreaming. In a voice that seemed to her to belong to nightmare, because it was so quiet, and in nightmares when one tried to scream one was never able to speak above a whisper, she said: “Why shall I think it?”
He shrugged. “I could tell you, but not convince you. You’ll find out for yourself—when you’re less green, my dear, and know a little more of the world than what you have read.”
“Will you think it?” she asked. A faint flush rose to her whitened cheeks; she added humbly: “I shouldn’t ask you that, perhaps, but I wish to understand, and I suppose I’m too green—unless things are explained to me.”
“I think it would have been better if we had never met,” he replied sombrely. “For you, or for me?”
“Oh, for both of us! The end of the idyll was implicit in the beginning: I at least knew that, though you might not. And also that the more enchanted the idyll the greater must be the pain of its ending. That won’t endure. Hearts don’t really break, you know. No, of course you don’t, but accept it as a truth, for I
do
know!”
“They can be wounded,” she said simply. “Many times—and be healed again, as I have proved!” She knit her brows. “Why do you say that? It is as if you wished to hurt me, but that can’t be so. I don’t
feel
that it can be!”
“No, I don’t wish to hurt you. I never wished to hurt you. The devil of it was, my dear delight, that you were too sweet, too adorable, and what should have been the lightest and gayest of flirtations turned to something more serious than I intended—or foresaw—or even desired! We allowed ourselves to be too much carried away, Venetia. Did you never feel you were living in a dream?”
“Not then. Now I do.
This
doesn’t seem real to me.”
“You are too romantic! We have been dwelling in Arcadia, my green girl: the rest of the world is not so golden as this retired spot! Only in fantasy does every circumstance conspire to make it inevitable that two people should fall in love! We should hardly have been more isolated had we been cast on a desert island together. Nothing happened to disturb our idyll, no person intruded on us: for one magical month we forgot—or I forgot—every worldly consideration, even that there are other things in real life than being sunk in love!”
“But it was real, for it happened, Damerel.”
“Yes, it happened. Let us agree that it was a lovely interlude! It could never be more than that, you know: we must have come to earth—we might even have grown a little weary of each other. That’s why I say that your uncle’s arrival is well-timed:
parting is such sweet sorrow—
but to fall out of love—oh, no, what a drab and bitter ending that would be to our autumn idyll! We must be able to look back smilingly, my dear delight, not shuddering!”
“Tell me one thing!” she begged. “When you talk of worldly considerations are you thinking of your past life?”
“Why, yes—but of other considerations too! I don’t think I should make a good husband, my dear, and nothing else is possible. To be frank with you, providence, in Aubrey’s shape, intervened yesterday just in time to save us both from disaster.”
She raised her eyes to his face. “You told me yesterday that you loved me—
to the edge of madness,
you said. Was that what you meant? that it was not real, and couldn’t endure?”
“Yes, that’s what I meant,” he said brusquely. He came back to her, and grasped her wrists. “I told you also that we would talk of it when we were cooler: well, my love, the night brings counsel! And the day has brought your uncle—and there let us leave it, and say nothing more than
since there’s no help, come let us kiss, and part
!”
She lifted her face in mute invitation; he kissed her, swiftly and roughly, and almost flung her away. “There! Now go, before I take still worse advantage of your innocence!” He strode over to the door, and wrenched it open, shouting to Imber to send a message to Nidd to bring Miss Lanyon’s mare up to the house. He turned, and she saw the ugly, mocking sneer on his face, and involuntarily looked away from him. He gave a jeering little laugh, and said: “Don’t look so tragic, my dear! I assure you it won’t be very long before you will be thanking God to be well out of the devil’s own scrape. You won’t fall into another, so don’t hate me: be grateful to me for opening your beautiful eyes a little! So very beautiful they are
—and about the eyelids much sweetness
!
You’ll make a hit in London: the young eagles will say you are
something like—
a
diamond of the first water—and so you are, my lovely one!”
The sense of struggling through the thickets of a nightmare again swept over her. There was a way out, so her heart’s voice cried to her, and could she find it she would find also Damerel, her dear friend. But time was slipping away; in another minute it would be too late; and urgency acted not as a spur but as a creeping paralysis which clogged the mind, and weighted the tongue, and imposed on desperation a blanket of numb stupidity.
Suddenly Damerel spoke again, in his own voice, as it seemed to her, and abruptly: “Does Aubrey go with you?” She looked blindly at him, and said, as though trying to recall to mind a name long-forgotten: “Aubrey ...”
“To London!”
“To London,” she repeated vaguely. She passed her hand across her eyes. “Yes, of course—how foolish! I had forgotten. I don’t know. He went out. He went out shooting before my uncle came.”
“I see. Does your uncle invite him?”
“Yes. But he won’t go—I
think
he won’t go.”
“Do you wish for him?”
She frowned, trying to concentrate her mind. The thought of Aubrey steadied her. She pictured him in such a household as she guessed her uncle’s to be, flayed by her aunt’s well-meaning solicitude, bored by her attempts to entertain him, contemptuous of all that she believed to be of the first importance; and presently said in a decided tone: “No. Not in Cavendish Square. It wouldn’t do for him. Later, when I shall have made arrangements—I told you, didn’t I? I must hire a house—someone to lend me countenance—make a home for myself and Aubrey, for it is so
stupid
to say, as Edward does, that Aubrey ought to like what he detests, because other boys do. Aubrey is himself, and no one can alter him, so what is the use of saying
he ought,
when he won’t?”
“No use at all. Let him come to me! Tell him he may bring his dogs, and his horses—whatever he chooses! I’ll engage myself to see he comes to no harm, and hand him over to that grinder of his in good trim. If he were here you wouldn’t fret yourself to flinders over him, would you?”
“No.” Her smile went pitifully awry. “Oh, no, how could I? But—”
“That’s all!” he interrupted harshly. “You won’t be beholden to me, you know! I shall be glad of his company.”
“But—you are remaining here?”
“Yes, I’m remaining here. Come! Nidd should have saddled up for you by now!”
She remembered that he had sent for his agent on business which he had said was important; and wondered if he had discovered his affairs to be in a worse state than he had guessed. She said diffidently: “I think you never meant to do so, and that makes me afraid that perhaps the business you have been engaged in hasn’t prospered?”
The sneer that mocked himself returned to his face; he gave a short laugh, and replied: “Don’t trouble your head over that, for it is not of the smallest consequence!”
He was holding open the door, a suggestion of impatience in his attitude. The second line of the sonnet he had quoted came into her mind:
Nay, I have done: you get no more of me.
He had not spoken those words; there was no need: a golden autumn had ended in storm and drizzling rain, an iridescent bubble had burst, and nothing was left to her but conduct, to help her to behave mannerly. She picked up her gloves and her whip, and walked out of the saloon, and across the flagged hall to the open entrance-door. Imber was standing by it, and through it she could see Nidd, holding her mare’s bridle. She was going to say goodbye to Damerel, her friend and her love, watched by these two, and it did not seem to her as though she would be able to speak at all, because her throat was aching quite dreadfully. She stepped out into the open, and turned to him, drawing a painful breath.
He was not looking at her, but at a black cloud looming to the west. “The devil!” he exclaimed. “You’ll never reach Undershaw before that comes down on you! What chance of its clearing, Nidd?”
Nidd shook his head. “Setting in wet, m’lord. Spitting already.”
Damerel looked down at Venetia, not sneering now, but concerned, ruefully smiling. He said, lowering his voice to reach only her ears: “You must go immediately, my dear. I can’t send you home in my carriage: it wouldn’t do! If that woman knew—!”
“It is of no consequence.” She put out her hand; she was very pale, but the flicker of her sweet smile warmed her eyes. “Goodbye—my dear friend!”
He did not answer, but only kissed her hand, and, holding it still, led her immediately to her mare. He tossed her up into the saddle, as he had done so many times when she had come to visit Aubrey, but today there was no lingering to make a plan for the morrow; he only said: “Take the short way, and don’t dawdle! I only hope you may not be drenched! Off with you, my child!”
He stepped back as he spoke, and the mare, needing no urging to go home to her own stable, started forward. Damerel lifted a hand in farewell, but Venetia was not looking at him, and he let it fall, and turned sharply on his heel. His eyes fell on Imber; he said in a curt, hard voice: “Miss Lanyon is going to London. It’s probable Mr. Aubrey will come here tomorrow, to stay for some few weeks. Tell Mrs. Imber to make his room ready!”
He strode away to the library, and the door shut with a snap behind him. Imber looked to see what Nidd made of this, not that he was likely to say, because he was as close as Marston, and dull as a beetle. Nidd was walking off to the stables, so there was nobody to gossip with but Mrs. Imber, and she was in a bad skin, because her dough hadn’t risen, and only said: “Don’t come fidgeting me!” and: “Get out of my way, do!” Imber wished himself at Undershaw, to see what they made of it there, when Miss Venetia came in looking like she’d seen a ghost. Proper set-about they’d be, and no wonder!
But only three people at Undershaw saw Venetia upon her return, and neither the undergroom nor the young housemaid who waited on her noticed more than her dripping habit, and the ruin of her hat, with its curled feather hanging sodden and straight beside her rain-washed face. She went up the backstairs to her room, and opened the door to find the maid there, with Nurse, and the room a welter of silver paper, and trunks, with gowns and cloaks laid out on the bed ready to be packed, the linen in which her furs had been stored all summer lying in a heap on the floor, and the sour apples which had kept the moth at bay scenting the air.
Nurse broke instantly into angry scolding, while Venetia stood on the threshold, her eyes, with that blind look in them, wandering round the disordered room. Then, quite suddenly, Nurse rounded on Jenny, driving her out of the room with orders to fetch up a can of hot water, instead of standing there like a gowk, when anyone could see Miss Venetia was soaked to the skin, and likely to catch her death. She drew Venetia to the fire, still scolding, but differently, just as years ago she had fondly scolded a little girl, appalled by some catastrophe, until she stopped crying. The little girl had known that nothing dreadful could happen to her when Nurse was there; Venetia knew now that Nurse was powerless to help her, but still was a little comforted. Nurse stripped off her wet habit, and huddled her into a dressing-gown, and made her sit by the fire, while she herself bustled about, first trotting off to mix a cordial, which she made Venetia drink, then rubbing her chilled feet, tidying the room, laying out an evening-gown, and all the time talking, talking, but never waiting for answers, and only looking at Venetia out of the corners of her sharp old eyes. Let Miss Venetia sit quiet for a while: plenty of time before she need dress again! And no sitting up late, mind, with so much as there was to do, and Mr. Hendred wishful to make an early start! And no need to worry about Undershaw, either, not that she would do that for long, with all the exciting things she would be doing in London, and her aunt so kind, and new faces to see, and goodness only knew how many treats in store! It would seem strange, at first, and it stood to reason she would feel homesick, missing all the people she knew, but let her trust Nurse, and not fall into the dismals, because she would soon be better, never fear!