Kingdom Lost (7 page)

“Aren't you going to say anything?” inquired Miss Ryven.

He resumed his self-control.

“Not before the child,” he said, and was pleased to observe that she flushed.

“Oh, but I wanted to hear what you were going to say!”

Barclay burst out laughing.

CHAPTER VII

“Well, I don't know how you can
knit
!” said Ida Cobb.

Mrs. Ryven went on knitting. She sat in the sofa corner, upright, but not stiffly upright. She knitted in the continental fashion, her hands low and almost motionless. The stocking between them moved rhythmically as the needles clicked; but Helena Ryven's hands hardly seemed to move at all. She had been very handsome twenty years ago, and she was very handsome now. Her thick dark hair was becomingly shingled and only lightly sprinkled with grey; her skin was as smooth as a girl's. Yet she looked her age; there was something set about her whole aspect—a suggestion of achievement, completion, which made youth and its striving uncertainties seem very far away.

Her sister, Mrs. Cobb, was of a different type—fairer, softer, with a lined plump face and greying hair precariously held in an old-fashioned coil by a great many hairpins. She had been standing by the window of her sister's drawing-room looking out into the steadily falling rain. The window commanded a magnificent view of the Downs, but to-day the view was visible only as rolling cloud and driving mist. The house stood high amongst beech woods, now a mass of drenched, straining foliage. Where the trees had been cut away to frame the view, the mist was swirling in like the spray of some wild sea.

Ida Cobb turned to the window and said, for the twentieth time, “What an afternoon! What frightful weather!”

“You won't make it any better by talking about it,” said Helena Ryven.

Mrs. Cobb made an impatient sound.

“Well, how you can
knit!
” she said again.

“I promised the stockings to little Maggie Brown, and I see no good reason for disappointing her.”

“Goodness, Helena!
Reason!
I should think you'd fifty thousand reasons for disappointing anyone.
Honestly
, I don't feel I can bear it when you just sit there and knit.”

Helena Ryven smiled with her lips. Her very handsome eyes remained grave.

“What would you like me to do, Ida?” she inquired with a faintly sarcastic inflection.

Mrs. Cobb threw up her hands.

“
Do!
Well, I should think it a great deal more natural if you had hysterics.”

“That would be so helpful—wouldn't it?”

Mrs. Cobb came forward with an exasperated rustle of a blue taffeta dress. She was the only woman of her age in England who still wore a silk petticoat. She sat down on the sofa with a flounce.

“Well, if it was
me
, I couldn't sit and knit. Helena, for goodness mercy's sake, put that stocking down, or I shall scream!”

Mrs. Ryven continued to knit. Barclay had wronged her good sense when he accused her of wearing skirts to the knee; the hem of her brown washing silk was at least three inches below it.

“Scream if you want to, my dear,” she said.

Instead of screaming, Mrs. Cobb looked at her watch.

“Half-past five,” she said. “How soon do you think they'll be here?”

“Any time after a quarter to six.”

“Then Timothy ought to be here. Hadn't I better telephone and see if he's started? Honestly, Helena, I'm not
going
to face it without Timothy. You may say what you like, but a man is a stand-by. What's the use of having a brother if he can't come and support you in family emergencies?”

“I don't feel in any need of support, thank you, Ida.”

“You don't—but I do.”

“My dear, considering that Timothy is twenty years younger than either of us—”

“He's a
man
,” said Ida Cobb. “And when everything's going to bits I like to have a man to hold on to. And you may say anything you like, but Eustace
ought
to be here.”

“Eustace had a committee meeting.”

Mrs. Cobb clapped her hands together.

“What's the good of his going to committee meetings when everything is crumbling, literally crumbling, under his feet? Helena!” She leaned forward and touched her sister's knee. “Helena! What will Eustace do?”

Mrs. Ryven shifted her position very slightly; the movement took her out of Ida's reach. She said in a colourless tone,

“Eustace is not entirely dependent on the estate.”

“Eustace isn't; but all these schemes of his are. You know as well as I do—”

Mrs. Cobb stopped short. Helena would not like what she was going to say. She invariably felt impelled to say the things that Helena did not like. But she could not surmount a certain flutter of apprehension.

“Well, Ida, what is it that I know as well as you do?”

“Reggie says—someone told him the other day—he says—”

“I don't think I'm particularly interested in what Reggie says, Ida.”

Reggie's mother experienced an access of valour.

“Reggie goes about a great deal and hears everything,” she declared. “And only this morning he said that if this girl did turn out to be Maurice's daughter—” She hesitated on the brink, then plunged. “He said it might be the means of keeping Eustace out of the bankruptcy court.”

Mrs. Ryven laid little Maggie Brown's stocking on her knee and folded her large white hands upon it.

“Thank you, Ida,” she said.

Mrs. Cobb tossed her head. A wisp of hair tickled the back of her neck, and she put up an impatient hand.

“Well, Helena, you know as well as I do that it won't be his fault if he doesn't land there—pulling down all those houses. And Reggie says of course most of his income must
come
from the London property.”

“Slum property, Ida.”

Mrs. Cobb dug a hairpin ferociously into her coil.

“Eustace calls anything a slum which he wouldn't like to live in himself. I hear he's putting bathrooms into his new tenements, and giving them laundries and hot water—as if people like that wanted to wash!”

Mrs. Ryven had fought this battle before. She replied with aggressive calm and just that tincture of superiority which could be depended upon to annoy Ida:

“People who can't wash soon lose the desire to do so. If you had six children and a drunken husband to care for in a room about ten foot square, and every drop of water had to be heated on the same small grate where you were trying to cook, how long do you suppose that
you
would stay clean?”

Mrs. Cobb drew herself up.

“
Really
, Helena! What a thing to say! Anyhow, if this girl
is
Maurice's daughter, Eustace won't be able to go on building bathrooms—so we needn't quarrel about
that
.”

“It takes two to make a quarrel, Ida.” The tinge of superiority was a little more marked.

It was perhaps as well that at this moment the door should open. Timothy Brand came in.

His half-sisters did not quarrel before Timothy. Mrs. Ryven took up her knitting again. Mrs. Cobb, who had not seen Timothy for some weeks, got up and kissed him. Helena merely nodded.

“Well?” he said. “What's happened? Lil said you didn't tell her anything on the telephone—only that I was to come up at once. Have you heard from Waterson?” His cheerful round face wore an air of concern.

Mrs. Cobb burst into plaintive speech:

“Oh, yes, dear boy! It's dreadful—he telephoned.”

“I think, Ida—if you will allow me to speak.”

Timothy looked at her with apprehension.

“What is it, Helena?”

“Only what I've anticipated ever since the cable from Honolulu.”

“Waterson thinks—”

“He thinks that there is no doubt at all that she is Maurice's daughter.” Helena Ryven's tone was unruffled; no one could possibly have guessed that a cold, sick anger lay at her heart.

“He met her?”

“He went on board the yacht. He told me he had been through all the papers. She has every proof—her birth certificate—letters from me—letters from Maurice to Marion.” She paused, perhaps because her voice had for an instant threatened to betray her. If this were so, she was able to impose her usual control upon it as she continued, “He was telephoning from an hotel—he could not go into details. He is bringing her here.”

“Oh, I say!”

Ida Cobb nodded.

“That's just what I said. If you have her here, it's just the same as acknowledging her—isn't it, Timothy?”

“Did Waterson advise it?”

Helena Ryven said, “Yes.” She made the word sound momentous.

Timothy ran a hand through his thick fair hair and wondered whether Helena got off her platform when she was asleep—she certainly never did during her waking hours. Then his kind heart smote him. He sat on the arm of the big chair next the sofa and leaned forward.

“I say—that means—”

“Yes,” said Helena again.

Mrs. Cobb put out an impulsive hand.

“Mr. Waterson's an old donkey! Reggie says he's frightfully out of date. Personally, I consider that family solicitors are a mistake. They know a great deal too much about you, and they're so horribly afraid of publicity.”

These sentiments, though not ascribed to Reggie, were so obviously from his address that Timothy grinned.

“Hullo, Ida! How many secrets of your shady past does old Waterson know?”

Mrs. Cobb beamed upon him.

“Naughty boy! Be quiet! No, no—we must be serious. Tim, tell Helena that she's making a mistake. Of course she won't listen to me. But you must see that if she has this girl here, she's simply giving the whole show away.”

“If Waterson advises it—” said Timothy slowly. “I say, where's Eustace? He's really the person to be consulted. Where is he, Helena?”

“We didn't expect the yacht till to-morrow. Eustace has his usual Wednesday committee meeting in town.”

“He's been going on with the work?” said Timothy quickly.

“Naturally. Why?”

“Gray—”

“He had an extremely impertinent letter from Colonel Gray, which he put in the fire.”

Timothy hesitated.

“If the girl is really Maurice's daughter, Gray is her trustee.”

“So he informed us.”

“Eustace might find himself in an awkward position.”

“Colonel Gray appeared to take a good deal of pleasure in pointing that out.”

Mrs. Cobb broke in:

“That's what Reggie said. He said Eustace would find himself in Queer Street if he went on spending money when perhaps it wasn't his to spend.”

Timothy frowned at her, but without effect.

“I do think Waterson ought not to bring her here,” she concluded irrelevantly.

Mrs. Ryven threw up her head and looked coldly at her sister.

“I think Mr. Waterson knows very well what he is doing. If he thought we had a case, he would certainly say so. He does
not
think that we have a case. He said, in so many words, that the girl is Maurice's daughter.” She laid her knitting on the arm of the sofa and rose to her feet. “And if she is Maurice's daughter, it is not a case of my having her here or not having her here. The house is hers.”

She walked quite slowly to the window and looked out. The rain swept everything; the beauty of the place was obscured. But twenty years of possession had stamped every detail of it upon Helena Ryven's mind. She saw the change of the seasons turn the bare tracery of the giant beeches to a mist of faint, frail green that deepened to summer's wealth of foliage and flamed in gold and copper at the touch of the autumn frosts. She saw the ordered garden lying out of sight behind tall walls of rosy brick—fruit trees of her planting, her rose garden. No, not hers. For twenty years she had had in her mind the day when Eustace would bring home a wife; she had schooled herself to meet it. Now fate had cast her for a part for which she had not schooled herself. She stood in the wings and waited for her call. Neither anger nor that cold shrinking should prevent her taking that call finely. If it was difficult, the triumph would be all the greater, and the applause.

Helena turned back into the room, and heard the distant sound of an approaching car.

CHAPTER VIII

The sound was a very faint one, for the drive lay on the other side of the house; if Mrs. Ryven had not been almost painfully on the alert, she would not have caught it.

It was with a great effort that she came calmly back to her seat. As she put out her hand for her knitting, the door opened.

“Eustace!” said Mrs. Cobb in tones of the liveliest surprise.

Eustace Ryven came in and shut the door. A very slight frown crossed his face at the sight of the assembled family. Then he came over to the hearth and stood with his back to the carved mantelpiece, looking down at his mother.

She said, “How did you get away?” and he answered at once in the same low, confidential tone,

“There was no committee meeting.”

“No committee meeting?”

“No. Gray came up.”

“What did he want?”

“I expect you know. He'd had a call from Waterson. Waterson says the girl is certainly Valentine Ryven.”

Mrs. Cobb and Timothy might not have been present. The conversation was between Eustace and his mother; his manner very definitely excluded the other two.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Ryven. She felt a passion of resentment, a passion of protective love, and a passion of pride. The pride was for Eustace, for the unmoved dignity of his bearing in the face of this blow.

Eustace moved a little.

“I take it that Waterson has communicated with you.”

“Yes—he's bringing her here.”

The last word slipped into a silence. Eustace took a full half minute before he said, “You thought that best?”