Summer Will Show (9 page)

In the space between the lightning blearing the window and shuddering out again, Sophia knew that it was to this man, to those arms, already opening in the sores of smallpox, that she had entrusted her children. Like the flash of lightning the certainty had dived into her heart and vanished, leaving only darkness. Without a falter her body went on its way, moving neatly and composedly through the sound of the thunder-clap; as though wound up like a toy it carried her up and down the long drawing-room, even remembering, so skilful the mechanical body is, to wring its hands. Some one was there, watching her. She did not know who, or care.

“Oh!”

At the trembling whine of terror she stopped, came to herself. There, pressed into a corner, holding out something in her gloved hands, was Mrs. Hervey. Her drenched clothes hung limp on her, her hair dangled in streaks along her cheeks, her eyes were black with fear and her mouth was open. Now, in a sudden swoop like a terrified bird, she rushed forward and fell on her knees before Sophia.

“Oh, Mrs. Willoughby, forgive me if I’ve done wrong! But I felt I had to come to you.”

With her gloved hands, slimy and cold, she had caught hold of Sophia’s hand.

“I don’t know what you’ll think of me, coming like this. No one knows I’m here, I came in through the window. But I had to come.”

“You must have some wine. I’ll fetch you some. Or would you rather have tea?”

“Oh, no, nothing! I implore you, don’t trouble to fetch anything.”

“Here are some salts.”

When she returned with wine and biscuits, Sophia found the young woman sitting on the smallest chair in the room, snuffing at the vinaigrette. Though she was shaking from head to foot she had composed herself into a ladylike posture, and could stammer out her speech of, “Oh, how very kind of you. No, not as much as that, if you please.”

“Drink it down,” said Sophia, and tilted the glass at her lips.

The wine was swallowed, biscuits were refused. The storm continued, a musketry of rain rattling against the windows. With so much noise around the house it seemed impossible that any conversation should ever take place. My children are dying, thought Sophia, and I must sit here, dosing this little ninny with port and waiting to hear what hysterical fool’s errand brought her. Yet she felt no anger towards the downcast figure, so childish in its grown-up fripperies, so nonsensical in its drenched elegance. You should be at home and in bed, warm beside your snoring old husband, she thought — a sudden dash of tenderness and amusement redeeming her dry misery, so that she was almost glad that instead, Mrs. Hervey was here, blown in at the window like a draggled bird.

She filled the glass again.

But the bird had revived into a boarding-school miss, and with exasperating gesture of refinement, waved it away. Then, sitting bolt upright, and opening her eyes as though that must precede opening her mouth, she began impressively,

“I have done something that I know is very indiscreet. I am quite prepared to be reproached for it.

“The wife of a medical man,” continued Mrs. Hervey, “is in a very delicate position. Officially, she should know nothing. But it is impossible to take
no
interest, especially where one’s feelings are engaged.”

If you were not so much on your best behaviour, thought Sophia, you would be telling me that I know what husbands are like, don’t I. The eyes had no charm for her now. Too disdainful for either a true word or a civil one, she set her lips closer, and inclined her head for sole assent.

But her wrath had showed out. The young woman paled and shrank.

“I have thought of you day and night, ever since that first evening when your children were taken ill and my husband sent me to you. You can’t understand, and I can’t express it. It’s more than pity, than sympathy, for I have heard other people pitying you, people who know you better than I, women with children of their own. But they don’t feel as I do. But that’s not it, that’s not what I came here to say. I would not put myself forward to tell you that.”

She stopped on her flow of words as abruptly as a wren ceases in mid-song, and turned her face aside as though to hide her tears.

“Though that had been all you came for, I should be very grateful to you for coming.”

Stiff and sincere, the words once spoken seemed completely beside the point, and Sophia had the sensation that she had snubbed without meaning to. If snub it were, the young woman ignored it, preoccupied in nerving herself to speak again.

“Mrs. Willoughby, when I came that evening, I came at my husband’s bidding, and I came with a purpose. There was something I had to say to you. But I did not, I could not, say it. You did not guess.”

“I did,” said Sophia gently. “You came because Doctor Hervey had told you to find out if I had sent for my husband.”

“And I wouldn’t!” the girl cried out with something like exultation.

“And now, I suppose,” continued Sophia, “you have been sent on the same errand?

“No! I have refused, I have told him, nothing would make me do it.”

“Why?”

The look that answered this made her ashamed. Like a reflection of her shame a deep flush covered Mrs. Hervey’s face. Reddened as a schoolgirl in fault, she drew herself up and began to speak with something of her former stiffness.

“You have asked me why I have come, and no doubt my visit must seem ill-timed and peculiar. I told you that I was prepared for censure. This is my reason for coming.”

She held out a letter. It was addressed to Frederick in Doctor Hervey’s handwriting.

“I stole it,” she said. In her voice there was almost reverence for such a deed, and the pupils of her eyes, suddenly enlarging, seemed to rush towards Sophia like two black moons falling through a cloud.

“He gave it to me yesterday, to post. And I have had it ever since.”

But we might be two schoolgirls, thought Sophia, two romantic misses, stolen from our white beds to exchange illicit comfits, and trembling lest amid this stage-rattling thunderstorm we should hear the footsteps of Mrs. Goodchild. The letter, lying so calmly on her lap, seemed to have no real part in this to-do. Some other motive, violent and unexperienced as the emotions of youth, trembled undeclared between them.

“For why should all this be done behind your back?” exclaimed the girl passionately. “What right have they to interfere, to discuss and plot, and settle what they think best to be done? As if, whatever happened, you could not stand alone, and judge for yourself! As if you needed a man!”

The letter fell to the floor as Sophia rose and leaned her arm upon the steady cold of the marble mantelshelf and shielded her face with her hand. There was something to be done, if she could but remember what, something practical, proper and immediate. She had been staring at a white china ornament, and now, as she shut her eyes, its small glittering point of light seemed to pierce through her eyelids, and to become the immutable focus upon which her thoughts must settle and determine. Slowly she composed herself, was presently all composure; and round her steadied mind she felt her flesh hanging cold and forlorn, as though in this conflict she had for ever abandoned it.

The girl had risen too. As Sophia turned to her she said,

“I see you want me to go. Forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive. You have acted very well. It is a long time since any one has dealt by me with such honesty. I wish I could answer your generous impulse with equal truth. But I am too old, too wary of the world, to match you.”

She stooped for the letter, and put it back into the unresisting hands.

“This must go. And Doctor Hervey must never know that you brought it here.”

The girl sighed.

“Your guess was right, or your instinct. I do not want my husband to return. But whether he comes or no will make little real difference to me. Mine is a spoilt marriage. Yours is not, and I cannot let you endanger it.”

The rain had ceased, the storm was retreating. Though the air resounded with the noise of water, it was with the drips splashing from the roof-gutters, or the moisture fitfully cascading from branches when the dying wind wagged them.

“I will have the horses put in, and you shall be driven back.”

“Let me walk,” said the girl.

Common sense and civility yielded as Sophia looked at her guest. Unspeaking she picked up a shawl, and as though in some strange pre-ordered consent they left the house by the french window, and walked side by side down the avenue. Iced with the storm, the air was like the air of a new world, the darkness was like the virgin dusk of a new world emerging from chaos, slowly and blindly wheeling towards its first day. Far off the storm winked and muttered, but louder than its thunder was the sipping whistle, all around them, of the parched ground drinking the rain. Halfway down the avenue Sophia took the girl’s hand. It was ungloved now, cold and wet, and lay in her clasp like a leaf. So, grave and unspeaking, linked childishly together they went on under the trees, their footsteps scarcely audible among the sounds of the heavily dripping rain and the drinking earth.

She returned alone to the empty lighted drawing-room, to Mrs. Hervey’s chair pulled forward, and the decanter and the glass and the biscuits. They must be put away, she thought, all traces of this extraordinary visit; and as she carried the wine and the biscuits to the pantry she found herself stiffening with a curious implacability. No! However touching, such escapades were intolerable. One could not have such young women frisking round one, babbling as to whether or no one needed a husband, declaring on one’s behalf that one didn’t. From a woman of the village she could have heard such words without offence. Down there, in that lowest class, sexual decorum could be kilted out of the way like an impeding petticoat; and Mary Bugler, whose husband was in jail, and Carry Westmacott, whose husband should be, might declare without offence that a woman was as good as a man, and better. In her own heart, too, unreproved, could lodge the conviction that a Sophia might well discard a Frederick, and in her life she had been ready, calmly enough, to put this into effect. But into words, never! Such things could be done, but not said. And was it for the doctor’s wife, an immature little feather-pate, to pipe up in her treble voice, in her tones of provincial refinement, that Mrs. Willoughby did not need Mr. Willoughby?

Setting back the chair, glancing sharply about the room — last time she had left a glove — Sophia shook her head in condemnation. This visit had left no visible trace of Mrs. Hervey. But in this room, the serene demonstration of how a lady of the upper classes spends her leisure amid flowers and books and arts, words had been spoken such as those walls had never heard before. And to hear her own thought voiced she, the lady of the room, had had to await the coming of this interloper, this social minnikin, this Thomasina Thumb who, riding on a cat and waving a bodkin, had come to be her champion.

The next morning she sent off a letter to Frederick, coldly annoyed with herself for neglecting an essential formality — for with the putting of pen to paper it had become no more than that. Absent or present, he could not affect her now. The servants would make his bed, serve his food; she, trained better than they in her particular service of hostess-ship, would entertain him, a guest for the funeral. And then he would be gone again, back to his Minna, the only trace of his visit some additional entries in the household books. For there can be no middle way, she thought, where extremes have been attempted; and Frederick, failing to be my husband, must now be to me less than an acquaintance.

“As if you needed a man.” Mrs. Hervey’s words renewed themselves in her hearing, spoken with an indignant conviction blazing against the soberer colouring of Sophia’s own view of the case: that she could get on better without one. In some ways men were essential. One must have a coachman, a gardener, a doctor, a lawyer — even a clergyman. These served their purpose and withdrew — some less briskly than others, she reflected, seeing Mr. Harwood walking up the avenue. He had visited her daily, to enquire after the children and offer, she supposed, spiritual consolation. Apparently the presence of a clergyman of the Church of England in her morning-room was consolation enough, as though, like some moral vinaigrette he had but to be filled by a Bishop, introduced, unstoppered, and gently waved about the room, to diffuse a refreshing atmosphere. To visit widows in their affliction, she thought, moving the decanter towards him, was part of his duties. Possibly she was not sufficiently a widow to call out his most reviving gales. But indeed, beyond a pleasant civility and a rather tedious flow of chit-chat, no more was to be expected of him. He gave away very respectable soup, and preached sensible sermons, and his cucumber frames were undoubtedly the most successful in the village. What more to ask, except that he should soon go away? She had often congratulated herself that the parish was served by such a rational exponent of Christianity.

To-day, of course, they discussed the storm.

“This cooler air,” said he, “must certainly be of assistance to your little invalids. We may, indeed, consider the storm (since you tell me it did not alarm them) as providential. I understand, too, that nearly all the corn was already cut, so that the harvest will not be endangered.”

Tithes, thought Sophia.

God was a cloud, lightnings were round about his seat. But Mr. Harwood was unaware of this, and good manners forbade that she should hint it to him. Instead, she found herself thanking him warmly for his promise of balsam seed, well-ripened by the hot summer. If brought on under glass and transferred to a southern aspect, she should have a fine show of plants next summer.

For everything would go on, and she with it, broken on the wheeling year. Next summer would come, and she would walk in the silent garden, her black dress trailing, her empty heart stuffed up like an old rat-hole with insignificant cares, her ambition for seemliness and prosperity driving her on to oversee the pruning of trees, the trimming of hedges, the tillage of her lands, the increase of her stock. Urged and directed by her will, everything would go on, though to no end. The balsams would bloom, and she be proud of them.