The Sleeping Fury (25 page)

There was something not quite real for Charlotte about those days that she spent at Fording. They had never been all three together—their mother, Beatrix, and herself—since her own marriage. Lady Hadlow, it seemed, always preferred to have them to stay separately. So it was that to be transported now, in the very middle of her own family crisis, back into her old home, produced on Charlotte an effect of suspended animation. She lived, watching and tending her mother and talking for a few hours each evening to Beatrix, as if in a dream, aware, sometimes vaguely, sometimes sharply, in the back of her mind of the disturbing crisis at home which was awaiting her return to solve itself—how, she could not guess.
It was almost as if time had suddenly wheeled backwards and landed them thirty years back in the past. Almost, but not quite, for there were differences. Cousin Fanny was no longer there; she had died years ago, and the old servants had disappeared. And the greatest difference of all was the difference in themselves. When Charlotte, in a dressing-gown, went into her sister's bedroom, now, soon after they had been called, she found not the lovely, half-affectionate, half-scornful girl, flushed with rebellion against their mother's rule, but an old woman with dishevelled grey hair, handsome still but haggard beyond her age. Charlotte, too, was grey and old, though she still had the figure and carriage of a woman in her prime. Charlotte in the old days had been the timid one of the family; now it was she that laid down the law, and her mother and Beatrix who obeyed without a thought of protest. It seemed, indeed, that old Lady Hadlow, with her gentler ways and her sweet childlike smile, was the youngest of the three.

The evening, when Miss Ley, who slept during the day, had relieved them at Lady Hadlow's bedside, was the only time when Charlotte and Beatrix were together. This was, besides, the first occasion that they had been quite alone together for many years, and Charlotte enjoyed their long, desultory talks over the drawing-room fire. They soothed her, and calmed the smouldering disquietude which filled her mind. The two women talked, for the most part, of old times, of which their visit to the home of their childhood brought back endless memories.

“It's strange,” said Charlotte during one of their
talks, “how quickly nowadays time seems to pass.”

“Yes, and more and more quickly,” said Beatrix, “as one gets older. And don't you notice, too, how periods of one's life which seemed, when one was living them, of enormous length, seem now, when one looks back on them, mere incidents. The whole of my married life, Charlotte, seems to me now an incident of a few months. An unfortunate incident,” she added grimly. “Yes, I have learnt, at some expense to myself, that Mamma's ideas were right. One should stick strictly to one's own class. That's the first consideration. Convention and the proprieties are, after all, valuable guides. Mamma's mistake was in her way of inculcating them.”

“My dear Beatrix, I have come to believe just the opposite. The only thing that really matters is love. If we can be sure of love, then everything is sure.”

“Don't you believe it, Charlotte. It's a charming idea, so long as you don't put it into practice. Why, nobody could have been more certain of love than I was.”

“No, Beatrix. You didn't give yourself time to be certain. What did you really know of one another? Nothing, or almost nothing.”

“But I was genuinely and deeply in love with him, Charlotte; and so he was with me. How is one to distinguish between loves? How can one diagnose whether it is the lasting kind or the kind that fizzles out and leaves nothing but distaste? Only by testing it, and then it is too late to repent. No; if I could begin again, Charlotte, I would out-Ebernoe the Ebernoes. I would be the pride and joy of Mamma.
I would plump for wealth, position, comfort, refinement, immunity from the drudgeries and horrible proximities of comparative poverty; just as you did, my dear. If you are rich, and find you can't get on with the man you have bound yourself to, you can keep out of his way more than enough to make life bearable. But in a little house of eight or nine rooms in all, like our horrid little house in Harrogate—how I used to hate it!—you
can't
escape from one another. You are cheek by jowl every moment that one of you isn't out of the house.”

“And so you and I, Beatrix, have exchanged views, it seems.”

“Evidently. But, fortunately for you, my dear, you had chosen the better part before the exchange took place.”

“But you're happy nowadays, Bee?”

“Perfectly, thank heaven. No one could have a better son than Bob. My only dread is that he will marry, as I hope he will. Sometimes I wake in the night and find that thought gnawing at my heart like a rat. Yes, I dread his marrying, Charlotte, even while hoping, for his sake, that he will.”

“And when he does, you will come and live with us at Haughton.”

“My dear, what would Alfred say to that?”

“He would be delighted.”

“Alfred's a darling, Charlotte; and so are you.”

Alfred, deprived of Charlotte's presence by the sudden summons to her mother's bedside, was left in almost unbroken isolation to contemplate the shattering information which she had imparted to him on the afternoon before she left home. He was not, of course, entirely alone, for Sylvia was at home. But of her he saw nothing except at meals and on one or two occasions when they happened to meet in the grounds and walked for a while together. Her attitude to him touched him deeply, for, in spite of the fact that her separation from Eric was due to him, and that she did not share his views, her behaviour to him showed not the smallest resentment. She had the rare generosity, it seemed, to give him the credit for his honest convictions, even though she was unable to share them. He felt deeply grateful to her for that, but the realisation of it made the effects of his action even more painful to him. By force of habit he regarded her still as his own child. The habit of over twenty years could not be broken off short by a mere piece of information, however devastatingly significant its implications. He loved her none the less; the sight of her still filled him with the old wondering rapture, as if at the sight of some hardly credible miracle. The only effect of his attempts to realise that she was not his own daughter was a sense of emptiness,
of irreparable loss, which lasted only while he kept his attention upon the fact. As soon as that attention was relaxed, she was his own child again, as she had been during the twenty years since her birth.

But his feelings towards Charlotte had not Charlotte's presence to impede their more rapid development. The fact that she had so relentlessly deceived him through all these years had wounded him very deeply. The motives she had alleged for doing so were no consolation to him. The thing he had loved in her above everything was her incorruptible honesty, and the discovery that she had changed, and for twenty years had deluded him into still believing in her, was the bitterest disillusionment. Again and again he forced himself to plead for her, reminding himself that she had been swept off her feet by that sudden passion, for which, he was convinced, she was not responsible, and then, regaining her self-control and faced by the consequences of her lapse, had set herself to preserve his peace of mind at all costs.

But, try as he might, his efforts were fruitless. If she had really been the creature he had believed her to be, she would have preferred the truth to everything. It would have been impossible for her to delude him so monstrously; to stand by, watching his growing delight in the child for which they had both hoped so long in vain; remorselessly to allow him year by year to build up this structure of gratitude and happiness on a foundation of falsehood and delusion.

Then he would ask himself what difference it made. If he loved the child as he did, was not his
love the vital thing? Was the fact that she was not his own of any real significance? Not perhaps to his mind, to the reasoning part of him; but to his heart it was of immense significance. To be deprived of the mysterious blessing of fatherhood was a desolating bereavement. It was as if Charlotte had deserted him again, and, this time, had snatched away Sylvia with her. Once more life became a horrible emptiness, and this new misery, following on the heels of the heart-rending complications brought by poor Eric's confession, was almost more than he could bear. He felt sometimes, during those terrible days when Charlotte was at Fording, that his mind was on the point of giving way. If it had not been for his faith, that source of strength and serenity in which he could still, with a supreme effort of self-abandonment, immerse himself, his endurance would have broken down.

• • • • • • • •

On the fifth day Lady Hadlow had another seizure. It was much more severe than the first, and left her very exhausted. She had suddenly become ten years older. Her talkativeness was ended now, and, when she spoke, her voice had shrunk away to a mere murmur. For the most part she lay back silent on her pillows, her eyes sometimes open, but more often shut. They had sent for the doctor. There was no more to be done, he said, than was already being done. It was possible that, with her excellent constitution, she might again recover her strength, as she had done after the earlier seizure, but he did not hold out much hope.

Charlotte sat with her towards evening, when the
light was failing. In the semi-darkness the pillows and bedclothes showed with the dead whiteness of snow under a grey sky, and the reflection of them in a mirror away in the darker end of the room, chill and colourless as the lights and darknesses in the water of a cistern in a roof, showed colder and ghostlier still. The old lady lay with closed eyes, her head and body motionless; only her hands were tirelessly active, fingering and groping vaguely over the turned-back sheet. Charlotte, fearing that she would get cold, had tried to make her keep her arms under the bedclothes, but she had always drawn them out again and resumed the endless, aimless, ineffectual exploration which reminded Charlotte of the first fumbling, experimental gestures of Sylvia as a tiny baby. Then the old lady spoke, so low that Charlotte could not hear what she was saying. She went over to the bed and bent over her.

“What is it, dear?”

Then she began to distinguish words. “He likes him, anyhow,” she heard.

“Who likes him, Mamma?”

“The Duke told me so himself.” Then, clear and sharp, in a voice quite unlike her own: “Well, you can think as you please, Papa.”

Charlotte went back to her chair. The rambling talk in the dim, twilit room, sometimes inarticulate, like a parrot mimicking human conversation, sometimes audible and speaking to people long dead, both touched and disquieted Charlotte.

“… don't mind really.” Once again clear words emerged from the mumbling. “Go on, Fanny.
Really … I really want to hear. … Yes … about the baby.”

Charlotte's mind followed her mother's to that evening, over thirty years ago, of Cousin Fanny's return from her visit to Beatrix. It was as if that life, unseen and unheard by her, were acting itself over again, and she herself were catching in broken phrases the thoughts that her mother had never spoken. How far away that life seemed! For a moment she could not think where it had happened. Then, with a shock of surprise, she remembered that it had happened in the very house she was now in. Yes, it was in the drawing-room, the room under this room in which she sat, that Cousin Fanny had talked of Beatrix's baby till snubbed by Mamma. Was Beatrix, who was probably sitting there at this moment, aware of this ghostly reanimation of the past which was occurring in the room above her? Charlotte half believed that the drawing-room must at that moment be peopled by ghosts—ghosts of herself, her mother, and Cousin Fanny. Her mother's words came back to her: “Really, Fanny, from the way you talk the child might be the Prince of Wales”; and then there came, painfully clear to her memory, the change in poor Cousin Fanny's face, the sudden quenching of the warmth and light in it.

There was a subdued sound in the dark room, and Charlotte with a start returned to the present. The door was opening softly, and a widening streak of light from the passage fell across the darkness. It was Miss Ley, come to relieve her.

• • • • • • • •

It was about a quarter to ten the same evening, when Charlotte and Beatrix were sitting talking in the drawing-room after dinner, that three taps sounded on the ceiling. It was the summons agreed upon by them in case of need. Beatrix broke off in the middle of a phrase, and both women rose from their chairs and hurried to the door. Beatrix was stout and not good at climbing stairs, and, before she was half way up, Charlotte was already at the door of their mother's room. She opened it softly and went in.

A lamp on a small table focused the light on the bed. Miss Ley was bending over the pillows. She raised herself as Charlotte entered, and her shadow, like a huge black nun, reared itself up on the wall behind her.

“It's all over, I think,” she said to Charlotte in a low voice. In one hand she held the limp white arm; one finger was upon the pulse.

Charlotte tiptoed to the bed. Old Lady Hadlow lay with her head on one side, the mouth slightly open. It reminded Charlotte of the open mouth of a goldfish. There was a glint of the whites of the eyes between the almost closed lids. From the door came a sound of breathing, and Beatrice came into the room and shut the door behind her.

“Is it the end?” she said.

Charlotte nodded.

On the day following Lady Hadlow's death, Beatrix's son Bob joined them at Fording and relieved them of most of the business immediately connected with the funeral. Charlotte and Beatrix were kept fully occupied, during the three days that preceded the funeral, in going through their mother's various accumulated belongings.

The old lady's money was left equally between her two daughters, but Fording and its contents, with the exception of a few pictures, a Worcester dinner service, and a share of her jewellery, were left, as Lady Hadlow had agreed with Charlotte when she had made a new will many years ago, to Beatrix.