Part 6

But she always agreed, and said Yes, he was a great dear; for when an only and much-loved niece is certainly going to marry, the least a wise aunt can call her future nephew is a great dear. She will make this warmer and more varied if she can, but at least she will say that much. Miss Entwhistle tried to think of variations, afraid Lucy might notice a certain sameness, and once with an effort she faltered out that he seemed to be a--a real darling; but it had a hollow sound, and she didn't repeat it. Besides, Lucy was quite satisfied with the other.

She used, sitting at her aunt's feet in the evenings--Wemyss never came in the evenings because he distrusted the probable dinner--sometimes to make her aunt say it again, by asking a little anxiously, 'But you _do_ think him a great dear, don't you, Aunt Dot?' Whereupon Miss Entwhistle, afraid her last expression of that opinion may have been absent-minded, would hastily exclaim with almost excess of emphasis, 'Oh, a _great_ dear.'

Perhaps he was a dear. She didn't know. What had she against him? She didn't know. He was too old, that was one thing; but the next minute, after hearing something he had said or laughed at, she thought he wasn't old enough. Of course what she really had against him was that he had got over his wife's shocking death so quickly. Yet she admitted there was much in Lucy's explanation of this as a sheer instinctive gesture of self-defence. Besides, she couldn't keep it up as a grudge against him for ever; with every day it mattered less. And sometimes Miss Entwhistle even doubted whether it was this that mattered to her at all,--whether it was not rather some quite small things that she really objected to: a want of fastidiousness, for instance, a forgetfulness of the minor courtesies,--the objections, in a word, she told herself smiling, of an old maid. Lucy seemed not to mind his blunders in these directions in the least. She seemed positively, thought her aunt, to take a kind of pride in them, delighting in everything he said or did with the adoring tenderness of a young mother watching the pranks of her first-born. She laughed gaily; she let him caress her openly. She too, thought Miss Entwhistle, had become what she no doubt would say was single-minded. Well, perhaps all this was a spinster's way of feeling about a type not previously met with, and she had got--again she reproached herself--into an elderly groove. Jim's friends,--well, they had been different, but not necessarily better. Mr. Wemyss would call them, she was sure, a finicking lot.

When in October London began to fill again, and Jim's friends came to look her and Lucy up and showed a tendency, many of them, to keep on doing it, a new struggle was added to her others, the struggle to prevent their meeting Wemyss. He wouldn't, she was convinced, be able to hide his proprietorship in Lucy, and Lucy wouldn't ever get that look of tenderness out of her eyes when they rested on him. Questions as to who he was would naturally be asked, and one or other of Jim's friends would be sure to remember the affair of Mrs. Wemyss's death; indeed, that day she went to the British Museum and read the report of it she had been amazed that she hadn't seen it at the time. It took up so much of the paper that she was bound to have seen it if she had seen a paper at all. She could only suppose that as she was visiting friends just then, she chanced that day to have been in the act of leaving or arriving, and that if she bought a paper on the journey she had looked, as was sometimes her way in trains, not at it but out of the window.

She felt she hadn't the strength to support being questioned, and in her turn have to embark on the explanation and defence of Wemyss. There was too much of him, she felt, to be explained. He ought to be separated into sections, and taken gradually and bit by bit,--but far best not to produce him, to keep him from meeting her friends. She therefore arranged a day in the week when she would be at home, and discouraged every one from the waste of time of trying to call on her on other days. Then presently the afternoon became an evening once a week, when whoever liked could come in after dinner and talk and drink coffee, because the evening was safer; made safe by Wemyss's conviction--he hadn't concealed it--that the dinners of maiden ladies were notoriously both scanty and bad.

Lucy would have preferred never to see a soul except Wemyss, who was all she wanted, all she asked for in life; but she did see her aunt's point, that only by pinning their friends to a day and an hour could the risk of their overflowing into precious moments be avoided. This is how Miss Entwhistle put it to her, wondering as she said it at her own growing ability in artfulness.

She had an old friend living in Chesham Street, a widow full of that ripe wisdom that sometimes comes at the end to those who have survived marriage; and to her, when the autumn brought her back to London, Miss Entwhistle went occasionally in search of comfort.

'What in the whole world puts such a gulf between two affections and comprehensions as a new love?' she asked one day, freshly struck, because of something Lucy had said, by the distance she had travelled. Lucy was quite a tiny figure now, so far away from her had she moved; she couldn't even get her voice to carry to her, much less still hold on to her with her hands.

And the friend, made brief of speech by wisdom, said: 'Nothing.'

About Wemyss's financial position Miss Entwhistle could only judge from appearances, for it wouldn't have occurred to him that it might perhaps be her concern to know, and she preferred to wait till later, when the engagement could be talked about, to ask some old friend of Jim's to make the proper inquiries; but from the way he lived it seemed to be an easy one. He went freely in taxis, he hired cars with a reasonable frequency, he inhabited one of the substantial houses of Lancaster Gate, and also, of course, he had The Willows, the house on the river near Strorley where his wife had died. After all, what could be better than two houses, Miss Entwhistle thought, congratulating herself, as it were, on Lucy's behalf that this side of Wemyss was so satisfactory. Two houses, and no children; how much better than the other way about. And one day, feeling almost hopeful about Lucy's prospects, on the advantages of which she had insisted that her mind should dwell, she went round again to the widow in Chesham Street and said suddenly to her, who was accustomed to these completely irrelevant exclamatory inquiries from her friend, and who being wise was also incurious, 'What can be better than two houses?'

To which the widow, whose wisdom was more ripe than comforting, replied disappointingly: 'One.'

Later, when the marriage loomed very near, Miss Entwhistle, who found that she was more than ever in need of reassurance instead of being, as she had hoped to become, more reconciled, went again, in a kind of desperation this time, to the widow, seeking some word from her who was so wise that would restore her to tranquillity, that would dispel her absurd persistent doubts. 'After all,' she said almost entreatingly, 'what can be better than a devoted husband?'

And the widow, who had had three and knew what she was talking about, replied with the large calm of those who have finished and can in leisure weigh and reckon up: 'None.'

XI

The Wemyss-Entwhistle engagement proceeded on its way of development through the ordinary stages of all engagements: secrecy complete, secrecy partial, semi-publicity, and immediately after that entire publicity, with its inevitable accompanying uproar. The uproar, always more or less audible to the protagonists, of either approval or disapproval, was in this case one of unanimous disapproval. Lucy's father's friends protested to a man. The atmosphere at Eaton Terrace was convulsed; and Lucy, running as she always did to hide from everything upsetting into Wemyss's arms, was only made more certain than ever that there alone was peace.

This left Miss Entwhistle to face the protests by herself. There was nothing for it but to face them. Jim had had so many intimate, devoted friends, and each of them apparently regarded his daughter as his special care and concern. One or two of the younger ones, who had been disciples rather than friends, were in love with her themselves, and these were specially indignant and vocal in their indignation. Miss Entwhistle found herself in the position she had tried so hard to avoid, that of defending and explaining Wemyss to a highly sceptical, antagonistic audience. It was as if, forced to fight for him, she was doing so with her back to her drawing-room wall.

Lucy couldn't help her, because though she was distressed that her aunt should be being worried because of her affairs, yet she did feel that Everard was right when he said that her affairs concerned nobody in the world but herself and him. She, too, was indignant, but her indignation was because her father's friends, who had been ever since she could remember always good and kind, besides perfectly intelligent and reasonable, should with one accord, and without knowing anything about Everard except that story of the accident, be hostile to her marrying him. The ready unfairness, the willingness immediately to believe the worst instead of the best, astonished and shocked her. And then the way they all talked! Everlasting arguments and reasoning and hair-splitting; so clever, so impossible to stand up against, and yet so surely, she was certain, if only she had been clever too and able to prove things, wrong. All their multitudinous points of view,--why, there was only one point of view about a thing, Everard said, and that was the right one. Ah, but what a woman wanted wasn't this; she didn't want this endless thinking and examining and dissecting and considering. A woman--her very thoughts were now dressed in Wemyss's words--only wanted her man. '"Hers not to reason why,"' Wemyss had quoted one day, and both of them had laughed at his parody, '"hers but to love and--not die, but live."'

The most that could be said for her father's friends was that they meant well; but oh, what trouble the well-meaning could bring into an otherwise simple situation! From them she hid--it was inevitable--in Wemyss's arms. Here were no arguments; here were no misgivings and paralysing hesitations. Here was just simple love, and the feeling--delicious to her whose mother had died in the very middle of all the sweet early petting, and whose whole life since had been spent entirely in the dry and bracing company of unusually inquisitive-minded, clever men--of being a baby again in somebody's big, comfortable, uncritical lap.

The engagement hadn't leaked out so much as flooded out. It would have continued secret for quite a long time, known only to the three and to the maids--who being young women themselves, and well acquainted with the symptoms of the condition, were sure of it before Miss Entwhistle had even begun to suspect,--if Wemyss hadn't taken to dropping in, contrary to expectations, on the Thursday evenings. Lucy's descriptions of these evenings and of the people who came, and of how very kind they were to her aunt and herself, and how anxious they were to help her, they of course supposing that she was, actually, the lonely thing she would have been if she hadn't had Everard as the dear hidden background to her life--at this point they embraced,--at first amused him, then made him curious, and finally caused him to come and see for himself.

He didn't tell Lucy he was coming, he just came. It had taken him five Thursday evenings of playing bridge as usual at his club, playing it with one hand, as he said to her afterwards, and thinking of her with the other--'You know what I mean,' he said, and they laughed and embraced--before it slowly oozed into and pervaded his mind that there was his little girl, rounded by people fussing over her and making love to her (because, said Wemyss, everybody would naturally want to make love to her), and there was he, the only person who had a right to do this, somewhere else.

So he walked in; and when he walked in, the group standing round Lucy with their backs to the door saw her face, which had been gently attentive, suddenly flash into colour and light; and turning with one accord to see what it was she was looking at behind them with parted lips and eyes of startled joy, beheld once more the unknown chief mourner of the funeral in Cornwall.

Down there they had taken for granted that he was a relation of Jim's, the kind of relative who in a man's life appears only three times, the last of which is his funeral; here in Eaton Terrace they were immediately sure he was not, anyhow, that, because for relatives who only appear those three times a girl's face doesn't change in a flash from gentle politeness to tremulous, shining life. They all stared at him astonished. He was so different from the sorts of people they had met at Jim's. For one thing he was so well dressed,--in the mating season, thought Miss Entwhistle, even birds dress well,--and in his impressive evening clothes, with what seemed a bigger and more spotless shirt-front than any shirt-front they could have imagined, he made them look and feel what they actually were, a dingy, shabby lot.

Wemyss was good-looking. He might be middle-aged, but he was good-looking enough frequently to eclipse the young. He might have a little too much of what tailors call a fine presence, but his height carried this off. His features were regular, his face care-free and healthy, his brown hair sleek with no grey in it, he was clean-shaven, and his mouth was the kind of mouth sometimes described by journalists as mobile, sometimes as determined, but always as well cut. One could visualise him in a fur-lined coat, thought a young man near Lucy, considering him; and one couldn't visualise a single one of the others, including himself, in the room that evening in a fur-lined coat. Also, thought this same young man, one could see railway porters and taxi-drivers and waiters hurrying to be of service to him; and one not only couldn't imagine them taking any notice that wasn't languid and reluctant of the others, including himself, but one knew from personal distressing experience that they didn't.

'My splendid lover!' Lucy's heart cried out within her when the door opened and there he stood. She had not seen him before in the evening, and the contrast between him and the rest of the people there was really striking.

Miss Entwhistle had been right: there was no hiding the look in Lucy's eyes or Wemyss's proprietary manner. He hadn't meant to take any but the barest notice of his little girl, he had meant to be quite an ordinary guest--just shake hands and say 'Hasn't it been wet to-day'--that sort of thing; but his pride and love were too much for him, he couldn't hide them. He thought he did, and was sure he was behaving beautifully and with the easiest unconcern, but the mere way he looked at her and stood over her was enough. Also there was the way she looked at him. The intelligences in that room were used to drawing more complicated inferences than this. They were outraged by its obviousness. Who was this middle-aged, prosperous outsider who had got hold of Jim's daughter? What had her aunt been about? Where had he dropped from? Had Jim known?

Miss Entwhistle introduced him. 'Mr. Wemyss,' she said to them generally, with a vague wave of her hand; and a red spot appeared and stayed on each of her cheekbones.

Wemyss held forth. He stood on the hearthrug filling his pipe--he was used to smoking in that room when he came to tea with Lucy, and forgot to ask Miss Entwhistle if it mattered--and told everybody what he thought. They were talking about Ireland when he came in, and after the disturbance of his arrival had subsided he asked them not to mind him but to go on. He then proceeded to go on himself, telling them what he thought; and what he thought was what _The Times_ had thought that morning. Wemyss spoke with the practised fluency of a leading article. He liked politics and constantly talked them at his club, and it created vacancies in the chairs near him. But Lucy, who hadn't heard him on politics before and found that she could understand every word, listened to him with parted lips. Before he came in they had been saying things beyond her quickness in following, eagerly discussing Sinn Fein, Lloyd George, the outrageous cost of living--it was the autumn of 1920--turning everything inside out, upside down, being witty, being surprising, being tremendously eager and earnest. It had been a kind of restless flashing round and catching fire from each other,--a kind of kick, and flick, and sparks, and a burst of laughter, and then on to something else just as she was laboriously getting under weigh to follow the last sentence but six. She had been missing her father, who took her by the hand on these occasions when he saw her lagging behind, and stopped a moment to explain to her, and held up the others while she got her breath.

But now came Everard, and in a minute everything was plain. He had the effect on her of a window being thrown open and fresh air and sunlight being let in. He was so sensible, she felt, compared to these others; so healthy and natural. The Government, he said, only had to do this and that, and Ireland and the cost of living would immediately, regarded as problems, be solved. He explained the line to be taken. It was a very simple line. One only needed goodwill and a little common sense. Why, thought Lucy, unconsciously nodding proud agreement, didn't people have goodwill and a little common sense?

At first there was a disposition to interrupt, to heckle, but it grew fainter and soon gave way to complete silence. The other guests might have been stunned, Miss Entwhistle thought, so motionless did they presently sit. And when they went away, which they seemed to do earlier than usual and in a body, Wemyss was still standing on the hearthrug explaining the points of view of the ordinary, sensible business man.

'Mind you,' he said, pointing at them with his pipe, 'I don't pretend to be a great thinker. I'm just a plain business man, and as a plain business man I know there's only one way of doing a thing, and that's the right way. Find out what that way is, and go and do it. There's too much arguing altogether and asking other people what they think. We don't want talk, we want action. I agree with Napoleon, who said concerning the French Revolution, _"Il aurait fallu mitrailler cette canaille."_ We're not simple enough.'

This was the last the others heard as they trooped in silence down the stairs. Outside they lingered for a while in little knots on the pavement talking, and then they drifted away to their various homes, where most of them spent the rest of the evening writing to Miss Entwhistle.

The following Thursday evening, her letters in reply having been vague and evasive, they came again, each hoping to get Lucy's aunt to himself, and on the ground of being Jim's most devoted friend ask her straight questions such as who and what was Wemyss. Also, more particularly, why. Who and what he was was of no sort of consequence if he would only be and do it somewhere else; but they arrived determined to get an answer to the third question: Why Wemyss? And when they got there, there he was again; there before them this time, standing on the hearthrug as if he had never moved off it since the week before and had gone on talking ever since.

This was the end of the Thursday evenings. The next one was unattended, except by Wemyss; but Miss Entwhistle had been forced to admit the engagement, and from then on right up to the marriage her life was a curse to her and a confusion. Just because Jim had appointed no guardian in his will for Lucy, every single one of his friends felt bound to fill the vacancy. They were indignant when they discovered that almost before they had begun Lucy was being carried off, but they were horrified when they discovered what Wemyss it was who was carrying her off. Most of them quite well remembered the affair of Mrs. Wemyss's death a few weeks before, and those who did not went, as Miss Entwhistle had gone, to the British Museum and read it up. They also, though they themselves were chiefly unworldly persons who lost money rather than made it, instituted the most searching private inquiries into Wemyss's business affairs, hoping that he might be caught out as such a rascal or so penniless, or, preferably, both, that no woman could possibly have anything to do with him. But Wemyss's business record, the solicitor they employed informed them, was quite creditable. Everything about it was neat and in order. He was not what the City would call a wealthy man, but if you went out say to Ealing, said the solicitor, he would be called wealthy. He was solid, and he was certainly more than able to support a wife and family. He could have been quite wealthy if he had not adopted a principle to which he had adhered for years of knocking off work early and leaving his office at an hour when other men did not,--the friends were obliged to admit that this, at least, seemed sensible. There had been, though, a very sad occurrence recently in his private life,--'Oh, thank you,' interrupted the friends, 'we have heard about that.'

But however good Wemyss's business record might be, it couldn't alter their violent objection to Jim's daughter marrying him. Apart from the stuff he talked, there was the inquest. They were aware that in this they were unreasonable, but they were all too much attached to Jim's memory to be able to be reasonable about a man they felt so certain he wouldn't have liked. Singly and in groups they came at safe times, such as after breakfast, to Eaton Terrace to reason with Lucy, too much worried to remember that you cannot reason with a person in love. Less wise than Miss Entwhistle, they tried to dissuade her from marrying this man, and the more they tried the tighter she clung to him. To the passion of love was added, by their attitudes, the passion of protectiveness, of flinging her body between him and them. And all the while, right inside her innermost soul, in spite of her amazement at them and her indignation, she was smiling to herself; for it was really very funny, the superficial judgments of these clever people when set side by side with what she alone knew,--the tenderness, the simple goodness of her heart's beloved.

Lucy laughed to herself in her happy sureness. She had miraculously found not only a lover she could adore and a guide she could follow and a teacher she could look up to and a sufferer who without her wouldn't have been healed, but a mother, a nurse, and a playmate. In spite of his being so much older and so extraordinarily wise, he was yet her contemporary,--sometimes hardly even that, so boyish was he in his talk and jokes. Lucy had never had a playmate. She had spent her life sitting, as it were, bolt upright mentally behaving, and she hadn't known till Wemyss came on the scene how delicious it was to relax. Nonsense had delighted her father, it is true, but it had to be of a certain kind; never the kind to which the adjective 'sheer' would apply. With Wemyss she could say whatever nonsense came into her head, sheer or otherwise. He laughed consumedly at her when she talked it. She loved to make him laugh. They laughed together. He understood her language. He was her playmate. Those people outside, old and young, who didn't know what playing was and were trying to get her away from him, might beat at the door behind which he and she sat listening, amused, as long as they liked.