The Quick and the Dead (10 page)

I was impatient of this preamble, which seemed to me rather prolix. ‘But did she know or didn't she?' I insisted.

‘I'm coming to that, boy. In a way she knew. And in a way she didn't know. You see, it was like this. One day young Master Lordship comes to see me on a matter of business. Now p'raps we weren't as careful as we might have been, and y'r aunt knew well enough that there was some kind of fun and mystification in the wind, and that sister Essie was concerned in it. She didn't ask much and I didn't say much. But I did say that there was no need to mention anything of this, this visit of young Harry's, to anyone—specially poor old Robert.'

My eyes grew moist and hot. ‘Father Calamy's known everything there is to know
for pretty well ten years. You needn't have kept anything from
him,'
I said reproachfully.

‘Bob's a man in a million,' answered my uncle. ‘He's a saint, my dear boy. You mustn't think I don't realize that. But we didn't know him then as we do now. How could we? So I told y'r aunt that mum was the word, least said soonest mended, and that sort of thing. And she asked no more questions. She's very fond of sister Essie, is y'r aunt. We're both very fond of her.' My uncle chuckled, rosy with goodwill. ‘The little rascal!—her and her Aunt Evangeline.'

‘Oh yes,' I cried. ‘Who
was
Aunt Evangeline, uncle?'

‘Ah, Claud,' said my uncle, twinkling, ‘she was a very old lady, was Aunt Evangeline. A very old lady indeed she was. And she'd never been anything else, so far as I can make out. Born at the age of ninety, I reckon, in a poke bonnet and elastic-sided boots.'

‘Whatever do you mean?'

With evident enjoyment he launched into the history of Aunt Evangeline. ‘And that,' he finished, ‘was partly what young Master Lordship came to see me about. That and his will. I'm the executor, if you please. I told him to choose a younger man, but he wanted somebody who was pretty close to Essie and
could stand up for her if it came to a tussle.'

‘Do you think he was really killed that night?' I asked.

My uncle scouted the idea. ‘There's no real reason to think so. Y'r poor mother had been dreaming, that's all. But the war's not over yet, spite of what those fellows said. It'll drag on a bit, I dare say.' After a thoughtful pause he said reflectively: ‘One of these days you'll come in for a goodish bit of money, my boy. But let's hope it won't be yet awhile.'

I did not pay much attention to this bit of news, for I was busy with a new thought. ‘I wish we didn't have to live at Broad Green,' I said. ‘Did Mother tell you what happened there?'

She had not told him, and his reception of the story in my version was all that a son could wish. He used language that did my heart good: Aunt Bertha, had she heard it, would have fainted away. But when I contributed a few violent expressions of my own, he reproved me gravely.

‘No, Claud. That's not the way for boys to talk. When you get to my age it's different.'

‘Is it?' I asked, wondering how and why.

He gave me a sharp look, and burst into a roar of laughter. ‘You young scamp!' Pon my word, I believe you're making game of
me. Well, well, well. You'll be a man soon enough, I dare say. And then you'll be able to say what you please, and never mind y'r old uncle. But what are we to do about y'r mother, my boy? That's the question. I was never one for running away, but it's clear she ought not to live among a set of green-livered, psalm-singing sewer-rats like them. No, that's not swearing—that's poetry. Why can't you come and live somewhere here, near us? All three of you. That'd be a very snug arrangement, it seems to me.'

‘But there's the shop,' I objected. ‘We couldn't leave that.'

‘Why couldn't you?' said my uncle. ‘I'm not so sure about that. There's plenty more shops in the world. And besides—'

But suddenly he seemed to think that he had said enough under this head, and adroitly turned the conversation into another channel. ‘Now here we are within a stone's throw of Aunt Mary's. It's a good chance for you to run in and say good-bye to the old lady. She'd never forgive you, nor me either, if you went off without paying your respects.'

Aunt Mary Westrup lived in what might almost have been called a cottage, had not Aunt Mary Westrup lived in it. It had, in fact, been so called in earlier times. But the
presence of Aunt Mary, whose small slight figure and delicate features were like something out of fairyland, invested the place with an all-but-royal dignity. She was attended by a paid companion, Miss Reynolds, and by a housemaid who had been christened Felicity but by order of Aunt Mary, who did not consider the name suitable for a young person in service, was known as Jane. In such time as she could spare from crocheting, sleeping, and telling the bright beads of her long memory, Aunt Mary kept a sharp eye on her little garden, the care of which she reluctantly entrusted to Bates the ‘boy' (aged about forty). All these were my friends, more especially Miss Reynolds, who had known me as a small child, and who, on the strength of that fact, insisted on embracing me whenever we met. Her age was in the region of fifty, but my Aunt Mary continued to regard her as a lovable but childish young woman, and in moments of exasperation would address her as ‘My dear little girl!'; just as she continued to speak of Bates as ‘that boy' or ‘the whatisit boy'. These two had spent some thirty years in her service, the thirty years of her widowhood, and she was a lady who never changed her habits and would have been highly indignant had she been invited to do so in the smallest particular. She
had a married daughter in London, several married grandchildren scattered about the country, and a sixty-year-old bachelor son who was engaged in propping up some remote Outpost of Empire. These were ‘the children'.

She received us graciously. ‘Well, Frank, my boy! So you've brought the young man to say good-bye. My spectacles, dear!' The bony Miss Reynolds, who had already taken her customary toll of me, presented the spectacles with her inevitable ‘Yes, Mrs Westrup!'; and Aunt Mary fixed them on her nose the better to scrutinize me. ‘And has he enjoyed his holiday?' she asked.

‘Yes, auntie. Very much, thank you.'

‘And how is little Esther getting on?' asked Aunt Mary, turning suddenly to my uncle. ‘I shan't need you for a minute or two, Reynolds,' she added in an aside. ‘Now, Frank!'

‘Well …' He hesitated. The desire to equivocate, coupled with the fear of not bringing it off, evidently embarrassed him. ‘Essie's not perhaps as well as we'd like to see. That's why she asks you to excuse her coming to say good-bye, Aunt Mary.'

‘Ah,' said Aunt Mary, flashing a look at him that was half-grim, half-humorous, and wholly shrewd. ‘Fretting after that young
man of hers, I suppose, eh?'

My uncle, taken completely by surprise, could do nothing but gape.

‘Eh?' repeated Aunt Mary sharply. ‘I said: She's fretting after—'

‘Yes, Aunt Mary,' interrupted my uncle hastily, ‘I heard what you said. Quite took the wind out of my sails in fact.' He managed to produce the ghost of a laugh. ‘But I don't know what you mean.'

‘Gammon!' retorted Aunt Mary. ‘I mean young Harry Whatisit who came hobnobbing with you and Bertha some year or two back.'

‘Oh him!' said my uncle, with a most unconvincing affectation of innocence. ‘Why, that'll be more like
fourteen
years ago, Aunt Mary.'

‘Fourteen or forty, it's all one, my dear boy. I wasn't born yesterday. And I've got eyes in my head.'

Sheer curiosity overcame my uncle's consternation and betrayed him into the old lady's hands. ‘You don't mean to say
Bertha
told you something …?'

‘She told me nothing, poor girl. And she told me everything. Poor Bertha. She's simple, is Bertha. To this day she knows nothing about it, I dare swear. But she told me
all
I
wanted to know.' Aunt Mary chuckled. ‘And a very pretty story, too. Little Essie! Just think of it!'

Aunt Mary had her laugh out, and there was silence. Neither my uncle nor I could think of anything to say. And now Aunt Mary's high spirits seemed to have deserted her. She removed her spectacles and mechanically handed them to me, as though under the impression that I was Miss Reynolds. I felt that she was withdrawn from us into some vivid moment of her past.

‘Well, Aunt Mary,' said my uncle, clearing his throat with a loud rattle, ‘we mustn't tire you. We must be off.'

He leaned over her, and at that she emerged from her dream and presented her cheek to his salute. She placed a frail hand on his, detaining him.

‘That Essie of yours,' she said, ‘she was a naughty little girl. And the young man too. They were very naughty, my dear.'

‘Yes, Aunt Mary,' said my uncle soothingly. ‘Of course they were.'

I saw, with surprise, that her mouth trembled and that tears were running down her cheeks. ‘But it's all over for them now,' she sighed. ‘All over and done.'

We waited for more.

‘You knew, of course?' said Aunt Mary, as if puzzled by our silence. ‘He died of wounds, it seems. Just like my poor dear George. It was in
The Times
newspaper this afternoon.'

There are moments of joy more poignant, in recollection, than sorrow itself; and the moment of our reunion with Calamy, after that visit to Lutterthorpe, is one of them. I can guess now something of what it must have cost my mother to present, for his comfort, a smiling front to the prospect of wintering in Broad Green; but at the time, like Calamy himself, I was utterly deceived by her feigned pleasure in being home again. I think she had it fixed in her mind that Calamy and I must not, for any fault or whim of hers, be transplanted from our familiar soil, I having at least my school-life to occupy me, and he his dwindling trade. As wilful in self-sacrifice as ever she had been in self-indulgence (a
very vicious dichotomy, but the phrase will serve), she would not listen to his plans for escaping from the hostility that neighboured us in Adam Lane. For that silence remained virtually unbroken. Faces marvellously blank, or wooden in disdain, continued to go by us in the street: the fashion had hardened into habit. And, even had it not been so, there would have been small chance of our reinstatement as a respectable family; for Mr Fleer, with the memory of my mother's beauty to excite him, was an indefatigable worker in the cause of righteousness. So, with no outward event to relieve its deadliness, winter passed over us. Throughout that frozen time my mother made spasmodic and seemingly successful endeavours to renew her hold on life; and it was not until April came, with its false sweet promises, that she at last surrendered to her darkness of spirit. Then, prompt to its cue, disease visited her body. Her face became inflamed, swollen, distorted. She was sent to bed, and a doctor was fetched poste-haste from Farringay who told us that there was no cause for alarm. In the bitterness of my knowledge I could have laughed in his face. He physicked her, and applied poultices, and bravely brandished his surgical lance; but the adversary was not appeased. At
his third visit, which followed with significant promptitude upon his second, the man of medicine allowed himself to appear less confident. ‘Come, come!' he said to his patient. ‘We must do better than this.' He stared, and pondered, and asked a question or two by way of form. ‘Not sleeping? Ah! I'll send something along. Must have sleep. Tired nature's soft balm. It'll make a new woman of you. Good day, Mrs Calamy. I'll look in again tomorrow.' He turned to the door, and with a guilty air Calamy stole after him.

Left alone with my mother, I was aware of a painful silence mingling with my anguish of mind. We were already divided, the lovely candour of our relationship having been displaced by a benevolent hypocrisy. Not her physical suffering, not the grotesque distortion of her features, but the threat of her disease, the unspoken fear, made her in some sense a stranger to me; for, while I fought against the notion, I felt in my heart that she was doomed, and I dared not face her lest she should read the secret in my eyes. Perhaps this, rather than bodily discomfort, is the peculiar desolation of illness: the being cut off from communion with one's kind. But the physical change in my mother was not of small account: our situation was rendered,
indeed, ten times more difficult by the fact that even if I dared to look I should hardly recognize her in the strange guise she wore—one eye closed, lips twisted, and a nostril dragged woefully out of true. Her face, the expressive sign of her, was hidden under this alien aspect: she seemed already lost. But her voice, when she spoke, was still the voice I knew; and I nerved myself to listen.

‘What did you say, Mother?'

She lifted a hand, and I went nearer to her. ‘Claud, it's that man.'

My heart contracted with a premonition. ‘What do you mean? There's only me here.' Was her mind already wandering?

‘It's Mr Fleer,' said my mother. ‘He won't let me rest.'

‘What do you mean?' I repeated stupidly.

My glance, avoiding hers, fell on a pool of sunlight glowing from the mahogany surface of the wardrobe; and while one part of my thought beat wildly to and fro in a vast darkness, vainly seeking light, some idler in me went fancy-free, and my eye went with him, travelling along that visiting stream to its source in the sky. I moved to the window and looked out. The familiar street of my childhood, rich and strange in the amber glow of evening, seemed to have put on a more
than temporal glory, as though, in a timeless interval between moment and moment, the day were stained with the warm colour of eternity. Light, as from an unseen lantern, slanted across the roofs of the houses opposite; the rainwashed tiles were beaded with diamonds; the sky was luminous silk; and the line of roof and chimney-stack, like a strange caligraphy, was thrown in elongated shadow on the road. Gazing through my eyes, yet leashed in spirit to the darkness behind me, I seemed to stand at the border of two worlds; and presently, with an effect of remoteness though from near by, came a ripple of birdsong, cool and amber-clear like the evening itself—and the voice of its enchantment. This intimate encounter, this flash of wonder and recognition, endured (I suppose) for an instant only; for I could not have remained looking out of that window for more than a second or so without seeing Mr Fleer. There he stood in the road, a fantastic and (to me) a dreadful figure. Hatless, his hands clasped as in prayer, his gaunt yet pendulously fleshy face turned towards my mother's window, he stared upwards with wide eyes. His lips moved; his large nostrils dilated with every breath. At first I thought he must have seen me, but the next moment I realized that
his gaze went far beyond me, searching the heaven of his fancy for the god or devil he had throned there.