The Sleeping Fury (3 page)

The round, good-humoured face smiled back at her. “I'm with the Kemptons for a few days.”

The two women and Sylvia made their way slowly across the lawn. Then young John Pennington came and took Sylvia away to tennis, and during the next half-hour Lady Mardale moved from group to group and from sunshine to shadow over the soft turf, shaded here and there by the great trees. Then she had found herself sitting solitary for a moment in the drawing-room with a cup in her hand. The friend who sat near her had turned away and was talking to someone on her other side. In that pause Lady Mardale's buried self awoke again, and her eyes explored the so familiar room. But it was hard to find him there in that crowd of the living who filled the room with the hum of their talk and hid so much of it from her with the opaque mass of their bodies. How unreal they all seemed, eating and drinking and chattering there, and obscuring the burning reality which her heart sought for.

And then, as if her reality had suddenly taken
shape, that golden-haired young man had come up to her chair carrying two plates, and held them before her. For a moment it had seemed to her that a miracle had happened—that Maurice had come back to her; and her heart had lifted as if on a great wave. Next moment it sank, and the illusion died; yet even then, for some inexplicable reason, the appearance in that room and at that moment of this beautiful young man, so like the man she had loved, was deeply consoling. She felt that he had come to her there as a sign that the past was not dead, that her memories were as real as the life of the present. She had already finished her tea, but she took one of the cakes he offered her, and ate it because he had offered it—how could she have refused?—and as he passed on, offering his plates to others, she followed the bright head through the crowd.

She had wakened now from her dream and had mastered the emotion that the boy's sudden appearance had aroused in her. He was half way across the room now, and he turned his head so that she saw his face. Already he looked different. Was he really so like that other, or had she, with her thoughts so full of him, imagined a likeness? He was obviously much younger—still little more than a boy. Maurice had been thirty-one when they met. The colour of his hair and the extraordinary blue of his eyes were exactly the same; but the features … She tried to recall Maurice's face, and found with a pang that it was no longer clear to her mind. She no longer knew the exact shape of his nose and mouth. But his brow she remembered, the
beautifully modelled brow with the eyebrows tilted slightly upwards over the temples. A sigh escaped her. No, the boy was probably not like him at all except in colour and in a certain English neatness of feature. Then her neighbour spoke to her again, and then the boy came back and asked if he could get her another cup of tea. How nice he was! She could regard him more calmly now. She refused more tea. “But what about yourself; have you had some tea?” she asked. He took her empty cup and put it down on a table. “Yes, I've had some, thank you,” he said, and she kept him beside her talking about … she had already forgotten what. He had seemed a little shy at being detained there, and, after a minute or two, she had let him go and had herself risen from her chair and gone to overtake Mrs. Croft, who was at that moment making for the door. With Mrs. Croft she had gone out into the garden, and again the garden had called to her with its voiceless appeal. If only the crowd of guests would vanish, and leave house and garden deserted, so that Maurice and she could have the place to themselves!

Then Roger Pennington had taken possession of her, and they had strolled away from the other guests, talking of old times and his plans for the future now that he had got the old place back. “I hope,” she had said, in her matter-of-fact voice, “that you're not going to alter the garden”; and she had felt an immense relief when he had replied that he was determined to keep the garden exactly as it had always been. They had been strolling in the direction of the square yew-garden, and she had
said, herself noticing the tonelessness of her voice: “I'm glad they kept the yew-hedges in order”; and with a trembling heart she turned with Roger under the arch of yew into the garden, and followed the narrow yew-walled path that wound towards the centre.

“But the stone rim of the basin will have to be repaired,” he said; “and the fountain, too, is out of order.”

They emerged into the little square in the centre, closely walled with yew, with stone seats set in recesses in the walls and formal beds of aromatic herbs—lavender, southernwood, rosemary, and thyme—grouped about the stone-rimmed pool in the centre, in which the metal jet of the fountain showed above the surface of the still water. How peaceful and secret it was there! It seemed as if some part of her had actually expected to find him sitting there, and now drooped in disappointment. She sat down on one of the stone seats. Roger turned anxiously. “Your dress,” he said. “I'm afraid the seats are not very clean.”

“It doesn't matter,” she replied. What did her dress matter? What did anything that concerned this present life matter?

“A friend of mine who is now dead,” Roger was saying, “once promised to send me a statue for the fountain. He used to stay with us in London, and once, before he left England for the last time, he stayed here. Perhaps you met him here? But I don't suppose you remember. Maurice Wainwright was his name.”

“Yes, I do remember him,” said Lady Mardale.
Her voice was quite colourless, and she sat coldly and fixedly gazing in front of her.

So there
was
still something of him here, in this spot where they had sat together and kissed. “A dear fellow,” Roger was saying. “He was enchanted with this place. It was after he stayed here that he promised to send me the little piece of statuary—a nymph or a faun or something of the kind—for the fountain. ‘You shall have it when the place becomes yours,' he said. ‘I shan't forget.' But now that the place has become mine the poor chap isn't here to remember. But I shall have it done myself some day when I come across something suitable.”

For some moments Lady Mardale had not spoken. She was lost in thought. She was reflecting on what Roger Pennington had told her. It was after he had been here that he had promised the statue. He had wanted, she understood, to leave here, in the spot so precious to both of them, some memorial of their love. And now she herself would do what he had wished to do.

“Yes, Roger,” she said; “that is a good idea, and you must let me give you the statue.”

“But, my dear Charlotte …”

“Please, Roger. It would be a real pleasure. This is my favourite place in the garden, you know.”

Roger accepted gratefully; but Charlotte Mardale had surprised him. He had never suspected her, with her strange lack of warmth, of any such romantic feeling as she had just shown. She had never before expressed any particular fondness for the yew-garden; in fact, as far as he knew, she had never
been into it before. Strange creature! Though he had known her intimately for thirty years, she had always rather puzzled him, and now she was puzzling him more than ever. They left the yew-garden and paced slowly up the long walk that ran parallel with the garden-front of the house, talking again of his return to the Manor House and the general business of the estate. In such matters her advice was often as valuable as her husband's, for she was an admirable business woman. But how surprising, that sudden romantic impulse of hers about the fountain! Not that she was not generous; but her generosity had always taken a strictly practical turn before. They reached the end of the broad walk and turned round, and, as they began to retrace their steps, she saw the golden-headed boy again, walking away from them towards the tennis-courts with John Pennington.

“Who is that nice boy with John?” she asked. “I talked to him at tea.”

“He's a friend of John's,” said Roger, “who arrived to-day for a fortnight. They were at Oxford together. His name is Eric Danver. I don't know who his people are. We see him in London from time to time. Yes, a very nice fellow.”

And then, when she was talking to Amy Pennington in the hall just before leaving, he had appeared again with Sylvia. She could see in his eyes that Sylvia fascinated him, and her heart warmed towards him. And, so that they should not lose sight of him, she had asked him to come with the Penning-tons to Haughton.

Lying back now in the car with closed eyes, she
knew that she was glad that she had gone to the garden-party. She had been deeply moved during those two hours; old happinesses and old sorrows had risen again and swept her like waves; she had been alive, alive as she had not been for years. It had been painful, but the pain had brought with it, not bitterness, but a sweetness that warmed and comforted her heart.

“You're tired,” said her husband's voice beside her.

She opened her eyes. “I
am
rather tired,” she said. “But I enjoyed the afternoon. Didn't you?”

After the day of the garden-party the weather had turned dull, as if in harmony with Charlotte Mardale's mood of resigned calm which had followed the emotions roused by her return to the Manor House. Haughton, that calm Palladian house built by the sixth Lord Mardale on the site of the dilapidated Elizabethan hall which had been the home of the Halnakers, encouraged that mood. The delicately tinted walls of its rooms, the blue of the dining-room and the morning-room, the duck-egg green of the drawing-room, and the grey of her own boudoir, the pure plasterwork of the ceilings, the classic restraint of the carved white marble mantelpieces, were the visible expression of a calm and beautiful self-discipline. How different from the richness and mystery of the Manor House!

It seemed to Charlotte Mardale that during these days she saw her life, past and present, reflected in the silvery atmosphere of a series of mirrors. Calmly she would approach one of the mirrors, and, looking into it, would find a single period of her life gleaming calmly and coldly before her. She was not unhappy. Her visit to the old scenes at the Manor House had in some vague way consoled her: ever since, she had felt that the past—that small fragment of the past which was so precious to her—was not wholly lost; that something of it survived
for her which permanently enriched her life. It was her secret, which she shared with no one, but it was a secret which, far from alienating her from others, warmed and humanised her heart. Even her affection for her husband was the stronger for it. Life, she realised now more than ever, was a brief business; hers was already much more than half over. How short a time it had seemed to her, as she sat with Roger Pennington in the yew-garden, since she had sat there with Maurice Wainwright! And yet that was twenty-two years—nearly a quarter of a century—earlier. In another twenty-two years she would be an old woman, not far from her life's end; perhaps dead already. She had ceased long since to demand much of life; indeed, the only time she had demanded much it had been refused her, and now it was no longer very hard to bear the heartache which that refusal had caused. Life, though it had never completely compensated her, had given her much. It had given her a good husband, for whom she had a great affection, and it had given her more than this—it had given her Sylvia; Sylvia, in whom was centred all the love of her starved heart. She tried to imagine what her life would have been if Sylvia had not been born. Her affection for her husband, she knew, would not have been enough. It was the renewal of her own life in Sylvia's that had saved her, bringing back to her own life the youth and warmth that had sprung into being at her meeting with Maurice and had died out of it after her separation from him. Yes, without Sylvia her life would have withered up years ago, and if anything were to happen to Sylvia now, she felt that she
would die. She was determined that Sylvia's life should be all that her own had failed to be. It would be terrible when the child married and was taken from her, but she had faced that in imagination a hundred times already. When Sylvia found the man she loved, she must know the fullness of love which she herself had never known. During these quiet, dull days, when the change from the glare of the July sunshine came as a soothing relief, her mind dwelt more than usual on the past, and, looking back on her life now, she felt as if it had been, not one, but several lives. There was the dimly remembered London of her childhood, when her father, a vague, benignant presence, still made a fourth in the family party of her mother, Beatrix, her elder sister, and her small self. That early life seemed to her now an existence apart, remembered as something that had happened to someone else, a life read of in a book. Then there was the country life of her girlhood, when their father was no longer with them—a life divided between the pleasant country home, the yearly migration to London for the season, visits to friends, and especially the yearly visit to the Mardales at Haughton. Old Lady Mardale had been a great friend of her mother's, and Charlotte herself had always enjoyed the visit to Haughton more than any of their other visits. Little had she dreamed in those days that she would marry Alfred Halnaker, though she had always liked and admired him. Indeed, they all loved Alfred; he was one of those lovable people who remain quite unspoilt by love and admiration. But he had seemed in those days so much older than
herself and Beatrix; before they were out of their teens he had already passed thirty. He had been a special favourite with her mother. How delighted her mother had been when he had proposed! Even if she had wanted to refuse him she would hardly have been able to bring herself to inflict such a blow on her mother. But she had not, in fact, wanted to refuse him. Though she had not been in love with him, she had liked him better—much better—than any other man she had known. To be passionately in love was at that time an experience which had never been hers. She had read of it in novels and poetry, and had sometimes heard of cases in real life, but she had no reason to suppose it would ever befall her. Her only intimation that she was capable of it was a sense which came to her at rare moments of a small gnawing hunger, an almost inarticulate regret, hidden deep in her heart. She had always been a sensible and practical person, and it was for practical reasons that she had accepted Alfred Halnaker. She had a great affection and respect for him; and it would, she had felt, be delightful to become one of a family so dear to her. Beatrix was already married and gone, and if she herself did not marry she would be left solitary when their mother died. To allow these considerations to be outweighed by that inarticulate romantic longing which sometimes stirred in her heart would be to fly in the face of what she had been brought up to regard as common sense and right thinking.