The Soldier and the Gentlewoman Page 7

  “Oh,” she said, “but I must have your authority for moving even a pin.” She went close to the portrait and stared up at it, twisting her hands together.

  “You see, when Father had his stroke and made that will a couple of months before the end, Cecily was expecting her first baby. So was Evan’s wife, too, as it happened. She died, you know, and they couldn’t save the infant. And then, just after Father’s death, Cecily—” Gwenllian paused. “Poor Cecily’s been unlucky. All her children have been born dead or have died a few days later.”

  “Good Lord,” exclaimed Dick, “I’d no idea.”

  “No,” she said, with that downward twist of the lips which had startled him at their first meeting, “Neither had Father when he made his will.”

  Dick’s face was burning. He could think of nothing to say.

  “I believe Father was right, though, to do as he did,” she declared in a fierce tone. “It’s only by leaving every sou to heirs male, and demanding sacrifices of the others, that any property can be held together in these days of murderous taxation. We have been here since the legendary days of Welsh history. English people with French names who are proud of having ‘come over with the Conqueror’ can’t show a pedigree that compares with ours. We fought the Romans, and the Saxons after them, and held on to our own. We can’t go down now before a rabble of little Socialists, blustering in the House of Commons.” He was startled by her vehemence. “Frances and I profoundly disagree. Her reforms would lead to the old families being yet more impoverished, the great houses and parks and gardens broken up. They used to be the glory of England. Now, because everybody clamours for an equal share, they are to be turned into chicken farms and allotments, covered with barbed wire and tin shanties. And all the art treasures stored in them are to be sold to the Jews and resold to America. It makes me sick to think of!” She was pale and bitter.

  “I quite agree with you,” Dick muttered, anxious to soothe her. It seemed to him extraordinary for a woman, who was out of the running herself, to be so passionate about property. But very unselfish, he told himself, very creditable.

  “I’m afraid I grow rather warm on the subject,” she said, after a pause. “It seems to me so base to be the weak link in a long chain—the first poor soft thing to let it break.”

  “I suppose a chain is a bit of a drag on some people,” he said vaguely.

  Her chin went up. “Oh, the weak links feel the strain, I dare say…”

  Somehow that phrase made him ill at ease. He began urging her again to take her father’s portrait.

  Gwenllian’s lips parted eagerly. “I’m not sure, though,” she sighed, “that I want to take anything which belongs here, out of its setting. Don’t think me ungrateful, please Dick, but I would rather not until I’ve had time to think it over… Some day, perhaps, I’ll remind you of your generous offer.”

  Oh Lord, he thought, does that mean I’ve got to keep this hideous relic here until she makes up her mind?

  “Now,” she said, in her usual brisk tone, “you’d better go before the others return. Remember, tomorrow, not a word about our conspiracy.” She smiled at him, a mischievous smile that made her look years younger. “Poor Cecily must be allowed the distinction of telling you all she knows, or imagines she knows, about our home.”

  Dick nodded. Cousin Gwen’s an astonishing able woman, he told himself as he drove away. I like her, too. And she can be made devilish useful if I play my cards right.

  Chapter VI

  SHE DECIDES HIS FUTURE

  The children’s quarters were on the second floor of Plâs Einon, separated by stairs and a winding passage from the body of the house and by a pair of baize-covered doors from the attics where servants slept and lumber was stored. Here Gwenllian could be almost as safe from interruption as among her yew trees. In the old schoolroom she might put off her mask of composure and be free of her own mind.

  For an hour she had been pacing up and down among the relics of her girlhood, finding in them a torment and an obscure consolation. She knew that she must be parted from them and from all that they represented; she knew it, but in their presence could not finally believe and accept it; and there was something delicious—a suspension of pain—in that unbelief. There was time yet. If she had been a woman of softer character, she would have added: Something will happen to save me. To her, tantalising hope presented itself differently. There is still something I may do, she said, and though her reason told her she was powerless, she felt within her that there was something she would do.

  What bound her to this room was what she herself had done and made. Frances, on the rare occasions when she visited the schoolroom, would examine the pictures and laugh over them, remembering her favourites, rekindling old affections. But Gwenllian cared little for the ringleted children with their baskets of roses and their collie dogs, or for the Coronation of Queen Victoria, or for Nelson’s too theatrical Death. Nelson had treated women as men always treated them—sometimes callously, sometimes sentimentally, but always to his own advantage. There was little difference between him and the rest. And as for the Bath of Psyche, which amused Frances with her modern ideas about art, Gwenllian remembered only that, if ever her father came to the schoolroom, he stared at it and would take no notice of the things she wanted him to admire. That little table, for example. She crossed the room and fingered it. How small it had grown since she made it! She lifted it up, remembering how heavy it had once seemed. It had been intended to stand beside her father’s chair for him to keep his pipes on, but when she had offered it to him he had laughed—perhaps because he wasn’t listening or hadn’t understood what she said—and here it had stayed. How proud she had been of it! Her old crony, the estate carpenter, had stood by smiling while she insisted that the work must be all her own.

  Trying to drag her thoughts out of the past and to direct her mind to her present necessity, she turned away from the table. At any rate, I have his confidence, she said, recollecting her little triumph of two days ago. If she postponed her visits and lingered in the neighbourhood, he would often come to her for advice. That would be something. That would be something, she repeated, feeling her way… But would it? She’d not deceive herself. There would be nothing but bitterness and disappointment in haunting her old home, without place in it, without authority. She might rule him while he was new to it and alone, but soon, very soon, he’d marry some young girl. Then there’d be no holding him.

  These silly, pretty girls to whom power came without effort! She despised men for the ignorance and unfairness of their awards. She began to pull out here and there a drawer from the cabinet in which, years ago, she made her collection of birds’ eggs—better than Evan’s, better than Howel’s, who was too clumsy to blow an egg without breaking it. Beside the cabinet hung a map of South Africa stuck with paper flags on rusty pins, still marking the position of Boer and British troops at the moment when her interest in the war had ceased. Each of these incidents of her childhood had been a thread on a closely woven fabric which, in a few days, would be torn uncompleted from the loom. This was the pattern of her life; she could make no other; she must preserve it. There must still be a way to preserve it.

  She went to the window and opened it. Rain lashed in. The trees below were tossing their heads.

  It was an angry, crying day; and she wished that she could be out on the hills, listening to the shrilling of the seabirds as they were swept inland. But in half-an-hour she must be composed and tidy to welcome Dick and the solicitor. Half-an-hour. She had no plan.

  “Go on! Go on!” she said aloud, turning sharply from the window. There were footsteps in the passage; they seemed to check at the school- room door. “Go on!” she whispered. “Can’t you leave me alone? Can’t you leave me!” But the white china knob was turning—the loose knob that must be repaired—and Frances came in.

  “Hello,” she exclaimed, “I didn’t know you were here. Am I disturbing you?”

  “Of course not, my dea
r. But what brought you here?” Gwenllian asked, forcing a smile. “You were always in rebellion against Miss Dodds. I thought you disliked the scene of your shame.”

  Frances looked about her and made a grimace. “Oh I never really disliked Doddy,” she answered. “But I knew the poor old thing’s teaching was a farce. You were lucky to escape it—taking on the house-keeping so young.” And, going to the bookshelves, she began to laugh. “Heavens! What in- credible survivals of the eighteenth century our parents were! They paid their butler three times the salary they gave the decayed gentlewoman supposed to educate their daughters! No science, no mathematics, no economics—nothing that gave us the least inkling of the world in which we were going to live.”

  “I taught myself what I wanted to know,” Gwenllian said.

  “Yes,” Frances protested, “but people needn’t positively hinder girls from finding out the truth about anything. It isn’t so long ago since our parents did that to us. Yet here are Stanley and I pawning the last of our wedding presents to give Gill as good an education as her brothers. Heaven knows, girls’ schools are still stupid enough, but at least parents aren’t as blind as they were.”

  Gwenllian hated Frances when she spoke in dis- paragement of the past. “What will be the result of her expensive education?” she asked. “Probably she’ll marry a poor man, as you did, and wish you’d taught her to be a good domestic servant.”

  “Oh but she is learning more practical things than ever I did, cooped up here,” Frances answered.

  “That may be. But you weren’t intended to marry as you did. You were educated for your own position in life. It was your choice to abandon it. Gill won’t be able to choose.”

  “She may not wish to marry,” Frances said. “You think my married life has been one of degradation, don’t you?” she added with a good- humoured smile. “Well Gill may think so too. There are other careers open to her now.”

  Gwenllian tried to conceal her contempt. Frances had always talked nonsense since, as a young girl, she had gone to stay with friends in London of whom her father disapproved and had refused to return. She had taken a post in the secretariat of a suffrage organisation, and persisted in her view that life in a comfortless hostel at twenty-five shillings a week was “glorious freedom.” After a year or two, she had become engaged to marry a young naval officer without means or prospects, and was married, “like any little shorthand typist,” in a London church of which no-one had ever heard. Since then, she had moved from lodging to lodging in the home ports, surrounded, as Gwenllian said, by fumed oak and bamboo. She had three children and was happy. She would be, Gwenllian thought, and despised her the more for her happiness. When she had visited Frances in Southsea, it had entered her mind that her sister was an echo, perhaps, of some forgotten note of ill-breeding far away in the Einon-Thomas pedigree. If Frances hadn’t been born one of us, she said to herself, she might have become a popular barmaid. I can imagine her, with that wide smile and high colour and altogether excessive amount of hair, leaning over a counter, chatting amicably to all and sundry. And Gwenllian looked now at the good-humoured woman beside her with the mingled disdain and envy that many a virgin feels for a “joyful mother of children.”

  “I suppose,” she said, “that you’ll bring Gill up to your own ideas until she thinks, as you do, that I’m half-criminal to have spent my life in keeping the property together.”

  It was useless, Frances knew, to argue with Gwenllian when she was in this angry mood of defence and self-justification. Argument would widen the breach between them—a strange breach, Frances said within her, for we are more alike than many sisters, alike in appearance, alike in our streak of fanaticism. But all Gwen’s fanaticism has dragged her inward and inward on to the property; she’s given up everything for that. And mine has forced me outward, away from this property and all property. I want my life to be an adventure, full of love. I’ve flung away everything else—even things beautiful in themselves—things I do love and prize, though Gwen thinks I don’t see the value of them— for fear they’d become more precious than human affections—growth—change of ideas. She wants her life to be set, like a frozen stream. There must be no warmth in it, for then the stream would melt, and begin to flow, and carry her away. I want my life to flow and carry me away.

  Poor Cousin Dick, she thought. I wonder what he wants. I don’t suppose he knows. Probably he thinks he can have it both ways—property, without going to prison in it. He ought to look at Gwenllian; she’s serving a life-sentence.

  “That young cousin of ours will be here directly,” she said aloud. “What did you make of him? He didn’t strike me as over intelligent.”

  “What makes you say that?” Gwenllian asked. She was sore against her sister and quick to resent whatever she might say. Why should she criticise Dick? He was not more undistinguished than her penniless husband and was at least free of Stanley’s socialistic delusions. “What do you see wrong in him?” she insisted.

  “Stupidly conventional, I thought,” Frances answered. “More so even than most Army men. He didn’t utter a word that suggested his ever having faced a problem for himself since he was bom.”

  “He’s been too busy fighting to spare as much time for meditation as some of your subversive friends,” retorted Gwenllian. “Men who preferred a safe prison to the front line seem to impress you more than a soldier.”

  Frances laughed. How perversely young she still looked, in spite of her three children! “Your attitude to the head of the house has undergone a quick change, hasn’t it?” she said. “You could scarcely bring yourself to shake hands with him the first day he called.”

  Gwenllian bit her lip. She must not be provoked into confessing the secret friendship between herself and Dick. “Naturally I hated the idea of handing all this over to a stranger,” she said, as casually as possible. “But since I’ve heard him talking to Cecily, I’ve ceased to dislike him.”

  “Oh,” Frances interjected, “one can’t dislike the boy. He’s so inoffensive.”

  Her sister’s tone roused Gwenllian yet further to his defence. “Well, I thought he showed great good sense in not laying down the law as so many of your young friends do,” she answered, and she added tartly, “You expect people to be original, or at least to be forever showing off, like pert children who need smacking.”

  “Like my own, I know you mean,” laughed Frances.

  Gwenllian disregarded the interruption, though it increased her anger. “I prefer a young man to have some modesty and reticence,” she said, and, in an excited tone cried out: “Here he comes.” Dick was climbing out of his car, and, the window being open, she leaned out. It was his small, slightly receding chin that had given him an air of indecision, but the collar of his coat was now turned up and she could see only the upper part of his face. Though his nose, straight and short, might have been called pretty in a girl, and his cheeks, stung by the wind, were a girlish pink, he looked more soldierly than before. He carried his head well, his shoulders were square, and set back. He had evidently been drilled. Gwenllian approved of his brisk movements as he helped his passenger to alight. His appearance of fragile youth was made the more pleasing by its contrast with the sallow complexion and stiff gestures of the lawyer, who now emerged from the car.

  Mr. Price had been for years her tongue-tied adorer. She had thought the family solicitor beneath her consideration as a husband, but remained woman enough to enjoy masculine admiration. Poor little Price, she mused, looking down on him with compassion. If I had ever given him the least encouragement, he would have proposed to me. He would still, I believe. But she turned her gaze from him with distaste. He looked like a tallow candle that had melted into a crooked droop, as he mounted the steps beside her cousin.

  Frances had joined her at the window. “You mustn’t think I’ve a down on that harmless boy,” she said.

  “He’s not a boy,” Gwenllian answered.

  “Well, youth then. He’s so undeveloped, so lik
e a nice little pink fledgling, you can’t call him a man.”

  “Nonsense, Frances! He’s twenty-eight; and he has a fine war record.”

  “I never heard of it.”

  Gwenllian’s smouldering resentment blazed into fire. Her eyes flashed at her sister. “Why must you always disparage people who do their duty? If anyone’s sent to prison, you’re the first to defend him. But you grudge a word of praise to a loyal soldier. If Dick were some long-haired poet, you wouldn’t try to find fault with him.”

  Frances tried to protest, but Gwenllian rode her down.

  “You’ve no use for loyalty—to country or to family tradition. But, thank goodness, Dick isn’t one of your moderns. He knows he has a lot to learn. And he wants to be taught.”

  “Well, if it’s his modest ambition to be moulded into the traditional Einon-Thomas shape,” Frances retorted, “he couldn’t go to a better teacher than yourself.” And turning away to light a cigarette, she added with a careless laugh, “Why don’t you marry him?”

  Gwenllian leaned out into the rain. The pungent, moist scent of the earth and the trees she loved almost made her cry aloud with emotion. She would have known from any other smell in the world that of the ferny dingle below her father’s house. There is that one way, she thought. Strange that Frances should have shown it to her. He was weak; and suddenly she felt very strong, stronger than she had ever been and more resolute. The rain was cooling her forehead and the parting of her hair. Dick could make her mistress of Plâs Einon. She clasped her hands, gathering her strength together. There was a singing in her ears, like the shrill sound of wind in telegraph wires. She knew now what she must do.

  “Well, why not?” Frances mocked.

  But Gwenllian was not touched by her mockery. I can make him do what I wish, she was thinking. She closed the window and latched it; then crossed the schoolroom towards the door.

  “You had better come down to meet him, too,” she said.