Nothing Venture (12 page)

“Have we? That remains to be seen.”

Rosamund laughed. There was as much merriment in the sound as there is in a black east wind.

“Jervis offered me three hundred a year—he chucked it at me about as politely as you'd chuck a bone to a dog. I tried to get him to make it five hundred, but he wouldn't rise. I wish to heaven I'd gone through with it and married him!”

“Do you?” said Robert Leonard.

He blew a perfect smoke ring and watched it rise and melt outwards into the dusk above them. Only a single lamp lighted the room. It stood behind Rosamund's chair. The light came palely from under a painted and gilded shade; it crossed Rosamund's shoulder and caught the gold upon her breast. He saw that gold rise and fall, and rise and fall again.

“Yes, I do,” she said. “What's the good of pretending? We've muffed it, and we're in the soup. You know it as well as I do. Three hundred a year!” She threw back her head and laughed again. “If it wasn't too late, I'd chance it now.”

Robert Leonard came deliberately over to her and put heavy hands on her shoulders.

“That's enough about that!” he said roughly.

“That's for me to say.”

“No, it isn't! You'll do what you're told.”

He slid one hand behind her head, tilted up her face, and kissed her. She did not cry out, but he felt her stiffen. Her lips were hard and cold against his. He released her and stood back.

“Now listen to me!” he said. “Jervis and this girl haven't been living together, but she's going down to King's Weare with him tomorrow—well, by now it's today. I'm going down too. You can stay here if you like.”

“Mable Tetterley has asked me down.”

He seemed to consider that.

“Quite a good plan. We had better not be seen together again for the present.”

Rosamund put her hand to her head. She pushed back the heavy gold of her hair and let her hand drop into her lap again. Then she said without looking at him,

“What are you going to do?”

“Mind my own business.”

She stood up at that.

“I think it's my business too.”

She went to the table under the lamp and, jerking open a drawer, pulled from it a sheaf of papers.

“Bills!” she said. “Today's little lot! Ever since the seventeenth they've come pouring in. I tear them up, but I kept today's to show you. Would you like to have a look at them?”

“No thanks—I've plenty of my own.”

“Exactly. And what are we going to do about it? I've got this house till the end of August. I've been paying the rent in advance on the first of the month. I'm overdrawn at the bank. And the minute the notice of Jervis' marriage is in the papers everyone I've ever dealt with sits down and sends me in a bill! And Jervis flings me three hundred a year!”

“Well, I haven't got that.”

“What are we going to do?”

“You are going to stay with Mabel Tetterley—and I am going down to Croyston,” said Robert Leonard.

XVI

Nan saw King's Weare for the first time under driving rain. They taxied from Croyston with the sky blue behind them and a heavy indigo cloud coming up out of the west. The road ran inland for a couple of miles and then, turning, zigzagged up the side of a bare hill covered with close sheep-cropped grass. As they came up the last rise, the wind met them and the rain—first heavy splashing drops, and then a solid shimmering fall.

They were running seaward again. Nan stared through the wet glass. She was frightened, but she was uplifted too. This was one of the great days of her life, whatever came of it in the end. She was with Jervis, and they were going home. She looked with all her eyes, and could see nothing but streaming rain and a blur of green grass half drowned by grey water. Then tall stone pillars, and straining trees lashed by the wind until they brushed the car as it passed. At last a grey house, and a portico under which they came to a standstill.

Jervis jumped out, and she followed him. Her new suitcases emerged; her new trunk came down dripping. There was comfort in them, and Nan needed comfort badly. She got none from Jervis. He hurried her up the steps and through a lobby into the hall with an air of gloomy abstraction. She felt very small and dreadfully alien in the new strange place which was full of the lives and the thoughts and the handiwork of Jervis' people. She could only come at them through Jervis. He must take her by the hand and bring her into his kingdom before she could be anything but a stranger in a strange land.

There was a suit of armour high on the wall to the right, and to the left a corselet, and greaves, and a morion. There were portraits. A sombre youth with Jervis' eyes and a Cavalier hat with a trailing crimson feather. There was an old man in a scarlet gown, and a lady with powdered hair and a pale spreading dress. Nan had a momentary impression of a family gathering looking down on her with dark critical eyes. They were not hostile—yet. They were searching her, appraising her, preparing to receive or to reject.

She turned, startled at Jervis' touch on her arm.

“Nan—this is Mrs Mellish. She has been housekeeper here for—How long is it, Mrs Mellish? Thirty years?”

Mrs Mellish, rosy and buxom, with severely parted grey hair and a black dress with a high stiff collar surmounted by white frilling and clasped by a large brooch of moss agate set in a pale gold rim, interposed in a firm, respectful voice.

“Thirty one years and six months in September, sir.”

Just for a moment she looked at Nan, and there was no welcome in her look. She withheld, just as the portraits withheld. Nan was a stranger.

With the cold of it at her heart, she lifted her head and smiled prettily.

Monk, the butler, considered that she smiled very prettily indeed. He was a fat man, with small sunken eyes, sparse pale hair, and a voice so soft as to lend his most casual remark the air of a confidence. “A very pleasant young lady” was his comment to Mrs Mellish in the housekeeper's room later on. “A very pleasant young lady.”

Mrs Mellish received the remark in a bridling manner. She drew back her double chin till it rested upon the neat white frilling. Not until Monk had repeated his remark for a third time did she make oracular response.

“That is as may be,” she observed.

“Pleasant spoken, and pleasant looking,” said Monk. “And favour being deceitful and beauty vain, that's as much as anyone is called upon to expect—and if she's been brought up religious, which it's too few is, it's a good deal more than most gentlemen get.”

Mrs Mellish bridled yet more severely.

“You can keep your preaching for your chapel, Mr Monk,” she said, “for I won't have it here. Whether other people have got religion or not is their own business, and as far as I'm concerned I was brought up Church of England and taught to order myself lowly and reverently to my betters, and to keep my tongue from evil speaking, lying, and slandering.” She spoke in a composed, determined voice, sitting very upright and knitting with a brisk click of bright steel needles.

Monk blinked with his large pale lids.

“And who was I slandering or speaking evil of, if I may make so bold as to inquire?”

“Nobody,” said Mrs Mellish firmly. “Not in this room, and not in my presence. Not whilst I've got my health and all my faculties—which, thank God, I've got and hope to keep.”

When Nan was alone at last in the big room which had been Ambrose Weare's, she stood in the middle of it and looked about her with a mixture of passionate interest, shy pride, and a tremulous something akin to fear. Mrs Mellish had conducted her in state. A red-cheeked girl had brought hot water and been named, with a faint flavour of disapproval, as Gladys. Now she was alone, and she stood in the middle of the floor and looked about her.

The room was large and light. A big old-fashioned four-post bed with a maroon canopy and hangings stood against the long wall, with the door on the right. To the left beyond the bed was a built-out window nearly as wide as the room, and opposite the door another window, hung like the bed with dark red curtains. There was a great deal of dark red about the room—carpet, curtains, bed-furniture, the upholstery of a Victorian couch, and the covering of two deep armchairs set very formally one on either side of the hearth. The furniture dated from the forties—square solid mahogany wardrobe, chests of drawers, and mirror. The dressing-table had a crimson petticoat with transparent muslin over it, and a looking-glass with a great many little drawers. There was a very fat crimson pin-cushion with a frill. It was, Nan thought with alarmed dismay, very completely a grandparent's room, and very certainly not hers. She felt an abashed sense of being an intruder as she skirted the dressing-table to reach the large window.

One's first instinct in a strange room is to see what lies beyond it. Nan looked out and saw a wet green lawn. The lilac bushes that edged it bent in the wind, all beyond was mist. Overhead the heavy clouds drove across the sky. She could not see the sea, but she thought that she could hear it. The room stood at the corner of the house. Perhaps the other window looked on the sea. But when she reached it, though the sound was louder, the sea was still hidden. The view from this side of the house showed a paved terrace, then falling ground—at first grass with some flower beds, then shrubs irregularly planted, and finally a steep fall towards what looked like a ravine. To the left a kind of bluff or knoll covered with trees hid the sea. Nan felt sure that it hid the sea. She could hear the sound of waves against the cliff. She felt a great desire to go out into the rain and wind. Instead she washed her hands, looked at herself in the large mirror, and went down to tea.

Tea was to be in the library. She came into the hall and tried three doors before she found the right one—the dining-room, full of enormous mahogany furniture; the drawing-room, long unused and breathing faint ghostly camphor, lavender, and the smell of old calendered chintzes; the third room, a small comfortable place with books, shabby old chairs, and a writing-table. She found the library next to it, a pleasant room looking to the ravine, and Jervis sitting in the window with the largest dog she had ever seen standing gravely beside him. He had a head like a lion, and he was lion-coloured. He turned deep amber eyes on Nan and came padding to meet her. She put out a hand. He slid his head under it and sniffed her skirt.

“You're not afraid of dogs,” said Jervis.

Nan threw him an indignant look.

“No. What's his name?”

“Bran. Tell him to shake hands with you.”

Nan looked down into the amber eyes.

“Bran, shake hands,” she said, and was aware of Jervis watching her quizzically.

She took her hand from Bran's head as she spoke and held it out. Immediately the huge mouth opened; her hand was taken gently but firmly and shaken from side to side. She felt the pressure of the great teeth, but it was a pressure which would not have broken an egg-shell. Then her hand was dropped and the velvet-soft muzzle moved across it with a caressing touch.

Jervis came over to them.

“You are free of Bran's affections,” he said gravely. “He only shakes hands with people he likes very much.”

Just for an instant Nan would have given everything she had in the world to know whether Rosamund was one of the people with whom Bran shook hands. The feeling was so irrational and so strong that it brought the blood to her cheeks. She walked to the window, Jervis behind her.

“Is the sea behind that bluff?”

“Yes.”

“I thought it was—I thought I could hear it.”

“You might today, but as a rule you'd hear the fall. The Weare storm comes down that cleft and takes a magnificent header just through there.” He pointed as he spoke. “The fall is one of our sights. It will be worth seeing tomorrow after this rain.”

The door opened, and Monk entered, bearing pontifically a large silver tray upon which, in order state, stood a massive and hideous tea-service. A tall pale youth followed with a cake-stand. In a hushed tone Monk issued orders. The tall youth, looking scared to death, set down the cake-stand with a clatter. In dignified reproach Monk lowered the heavy tray without the slightest sound. He then fixed the youth with an awful eye and withdrew. The door shut upon them.

“The wretched Alfred,” said Jervis, “is in for it. He's new, and in a blue funk. What's the odds he drops the whole caboodle the first time Monk lets him carry the tray?” Here, you'll pour out the tea—won't you?”

Nan approached the tea with a good deal of fellow-feeling for Alfred. The heavy teapot, which she could hardly lift; the ornate and hideous urn; the sugar-basin, big enough to serve an early Victorian family of fifteen or so; the awkward high-shouldered milk-jug; and the tray itself, so weighty that it filled her with respect for Monk's muscular control, combined as a solid symbol of wealth and social position. There slipped into her mind the glancing thought that Mrs Grundy would be very fitly served from a set like this.

She looked up to ask Jervis if he took sugar, and caught his eye with a dark gleam in it.

“Hideous—aren't they?” he said.

XVII

Nan sat up in bed in the dark. Something had wakened her, but she didn't know what it was. At first the darkness seemed to fill the room, pressing in upon her so that the posts of the bed, the red hangings, which she had pushed back as far as possible, and the big wardrobe, which was somewhere on the opposite side of the room, were all lost in an even velvet dark. Then the curtain at the far window moved in some unseen current of air, and a pale luminous streak divided the darkness. The immediate effect was to make the room seem immensely large. A moment before, everything had been pressing in upon her; she could have touched the walls with her outstretched hand. And now, with a puff of wind, everything was immensely far away. The suddenness of it made her feel dizzy. She watched the streak of light, and tried to steady herself. It came and went, and came and went again.