Cold Pastoral (11 page)

“This time it was a good foot,” he said, smiling back.

“Philip, are you planning to pay yourself out of that money?”

Philip put down his knife and fork in frank surprise. “Certainly not, Mater. The little thing is poor. I'll pay the hospital, which is considerable, and the rest I'll save for education if the parents consent. They're not to touch it so the agreement runs.”

His mother regarded him with smiling approval, but she touched his most vulnerable point when she said: “You'll never paint the house if you're so prodigal with visits.”

He went on eating, unperturbed. “A doctor loves a fight,Mater, and I did some research on frostbite. I feel personally responsible for her….”

“M'mm, did you hear from the mother?”

“Yes, I did.”

Putting his hand in his pocket he produced a letter in a cheap envelope.

“It's a curious letter, Mater. I'll read it to you.”

Dear Sir,

It was a Christian act on your part to write me. I've said a prayer for your
house. To think that my child is getting better, and I made up my mind
she was dead. When they took her away I felt she was gone forever. It's
like the dreams of the dead. Between waking, you think it's not so that
they're gone, then you come to and you know that they are. Her living
seems as likely as that—

“An understanding woman,” interrupted his mother thoughtfully. “I dream of your father that way.”

I'm glad about the money. It seems a wonderful lot, but the poor can't
think past a dollar or two. I don't know all that it means, but it might lift
her out of the life I don't want for her. It comforts me to think of her looked
after by one of your name. Your father, and your father before you, bought
the fish from our men and always treated them right. I'd be a grateful
woman to hear again, and to get advice about my child. Lovely she was
and she dazzled my eyes.

Respectfully yours,
     
JOSEPHINE KEILLY
.

Philip folded up his letter, finishing his breakfast without comment.

There was a pause, during which Lady Fitz Henry gazed out unseeingly.

“Strange,” she said after a while, “the mother speaks of her in the past tense.”

“Yes,” he agreed; “it looks that way.”

Rising from the table, he bent over her, putting his arm round her shoulders. “Will you meet me at twelve-thirty, Mater? I'll be busy until then.”

“Very well, my son. I'll be at the hospital.”

When Philip saw his patient her bed was pulled by the window. The radiant day had gone into her face.

“Look,” she said. “Miss New has fancied me up.”

A hair-ribbon made a jaunty bow on her head, and her shoulders were covered in pale pink silk.

Then she saw Lady Fitz Henry.

At once the child acclaimed a quality she did not know. The lady seemed impressive, grand, with a grandeur that was not dependent upon externals. Her imaginative mind associated grandeur with velvets, trains, crowns and the ermines of a fairy-tale world. True the lady wore a silver fox. Mary Immaculate knew it at once, because the men often brought them home from Labrador. It wasn't that! She couldn't look at the doctor's mother and not know. Her clothes were as harmonious as the smoothness of a shell round a kernel. Gloves enclosed her hands without restriction, and all of the fingers were smoothed down to the tips. Instantly there came a picture of her own mother's hands in Mass on Sunday mornings. Gloves and a pair of grey stays represented Josephine's difference between Sunday andMonday. Many times, kneeling beside her, Mary Immaculate had heard the creak of the corsets and noticed the cushion of her fingers seep damply through the gloves. Beyond the wet spots, there were always points the fingers could not reach.

Contrasts were beginning to shape in her mind. As she had absorbed the quality of her doctor she absorbed the fine emanation of his mother. Lambent with inner delight she greeted her without consciousness. Her mother's world was civil but not servile.

“Oh!”she said, seeing the beautiful nose. “You're the dead spit of him. You've got his nose on your face. You're both lovely,” she finished sunnily.

Philip laughed but his face expressed relief when his mother's finger tilted his patient's chin. Some transfusion of gaiety went into her answering voice.

“I'm his mother, my dear. Don't you think he might have my nose?”

“Sure,” she agreed happily. “Do your nostrils do it too?”

It was a long time since Lady Fitz Henry had heard so many personal remarks.

“Perhaps,” she admitted graciously. “I know David's do. He's my eldest son, and he finds his own reason for it. Many years ago we had a French ancestress who got caught up in the Revolution. David says she couldn't express her disdain in her voice, so it went into her nose.”

“I expect it smelt bad,” said Mary Immaculate, wrinkling up her own nose. “Did they cut off her head?”

“No,” said her visitor gravely. “If they had they would have cut off our heads too. She escaped to England and founded a line of noses.”

It was a story after the child's own heart. Laughing on an unrestrained note, she made her elders laugh with her.

Miss New placed a chair for Lady Fitz Henry, and as she sat down Philip laid a long, cone-shaped parcel on the bed.

“Open it, my dear,” said Lady Fitz Henry, “and see what I've brought you.”

“Me?” she gasped, with wild incredulity.

While she tore excitedly at the paper her visitor drew her own conclusions. Beauty was there, naturalness and an ingenuous unconcern for careless chatter. It was the attitude of a child so happy in itself that the world was bound to fit in. Mary Immaculate evinced her own quality in the way her motion was stilled over flowers.

“Oh!” she said wonderingly. “Oh!”

Surrounded by tendrils of fern, cultivated carnations lay on the bed. From the open paper fragrance rose like a march of cool cloves. Hands, still bearing a reddened reaction to frostbite, touched the heads of flawless blooms.

“What are they?” she asked. “I've never seen anything like them before.”

“They're carnations, Mary. Don't you know them? Smaller varieties grow in gardens.”

“No,ma'am, I don't know them,” she said, holding up a flower and cupping it in her hand. “We don't have flower gardens—just potatoes and turnips. But I know a lot about the flowers growing in the woods.” Bringing the flowers to her face she smelt, with eyes closed like a cat content with some rich morsel.

“How could they grow in winter, ma'am? There's still snow on the hills.”

“In a hothouse, my dear; a place that's heated and made of glass. Won't you let your nurse put them in water?”

“Yes, ma'am,” she said with instant obedience. “They're the nicest thing that ever happened to me. If I could hold on to them.”

There was a shadow in the voice, and a sigh for the fading of beauty.

“There will be more flowers, Mary. When you're well. Philip will bring you out to see my garden.”

Her son walked to the door with a buoyant step.

“Mater, I have to visit another patient. I'll be back for you later.”

The child's smile followed him out and then came to rest on his mother.

“He's been like St. Joseph,” she said in a full voice, conceding her visitor a knowledge of saintly qualities.

Lady Fitz Henry's response was benign, arresting the child with its emanation of large repose. At once her teeming veins flowed calmer, as if her stream of life widened to an estuary round the quiet woman. Shrillness was muted in an effort to emulate grace. Shyness did not oppress her, and response was ingenuous and friendly. Nor was she on her best behaviour as she had been when Father Melchior came to call. Lady Fitz Henry showed no inclination to point a moral or extinguish the Little People with a frosty note in her voice. The flavour of conversation was interest, inviting a stream of artless prattle. Unconsciously the child painted a strange picture of herself, climbing the heads to watch the sea, lying in the forests waiting for the Little People, or crouching, predacious, for observation of some wood-creature. Flowers gave them a bond, and the visitor could talk of her cloth of gold crocus while the child babbled of bouncing-bets and calvary flowers. It seemed a strange contact with reserves laid down in a spontaneous desire to please.

There was an element of novelty in visiting a hospital where illness was not mentioned. The child leaned forward in her bed as if frostbite, inflammation and incipient gangrene were distant ordeals. Lady Fitz Henry was more than capable of disguising vigilant scrutiny. Neither did she show the smallest sign when her ears received an indisputable imitation of her own voice. It came experimentally, grew stronger, while a secret smile hovered round the child's mouth. She looked triumphant, as if the veneer of culture could be hers for the asking. Eyes were lambent, with an animal yellow, resembling a hound starting delicately on a chase. When asked if she felt lonely without her people, the reply was forth right and spontaneous.

“No, ma'am, not much. This is an interesting place. I'm quite close to the operating-room and the nurses tell me about the groans that go past. Sometimes they go by with just a smell, but when they have little operations they wake up and nearly always cry. The men make most noise, and sometimes they curse. No, ma'am, I don't want to go home at all. Then when the operations are over the nurses read to me, and there's the doctor, he comes twice a day, and often three times.”

It was so much the natural truth that there was no room for filial shock. Lady Fitz Henry seemed to understand. When her son returned she was standing by the bed, looking down at a glowing face. But she shook hands in a grave adult way.

“Would you like me to come again, Mary?”

“Would you, ma'am?” she said with flattering awe. “I knew 'twas a day for the wonderful to come. Now I can look forward to your voice and not back.”

Philip laughed, touching his patient as if he couldn't help it.

“Are you sure, Mary, you were born in a skiff?”

“I mean every word,'' she said sunnily; “though Mom says you catch more flies with molasses than vinegar.”

Her head was back and she was laughing, laughing with a face of white incandescence, sun-illumined. She looked like a wild woodthing about to spring off a leash. Her mouth was open on even teeth and Philip's sharp eyes saw a tiny cavity. Instinct stirred in him to rush her to a dentist to preserve the white perfection of her mouth.

Lady Fitz Henry had a sudden desire to give the child a haircut and a voice to match her face and body. She had a sense of having witnessed a supreme exhibition of classlessness. On a bedside table there was a copy of
Through the Looking Glass
, and for a moment she saw inside where Humpty Dumpty was explaining the meaning of “slithy”—lithe and active. She left the hospital feeling it was a “brillig” day.

Back in her Cove Josephine was reading her second letter from Philip Fitz Henry, while her mind recorded thanks for the consideration of a mother. Surrounded by her work, her eyes travelled to a statue of St. Anthony. There was the source who would find the way for her child. As she prayed her mouth gave a half-agonised quirk. She was remembering that her daughter had turned the Saint to the wall because he failed to find her lead pencil. Josephine decided to make a Novena! Nine days' intercession would open their doors and their hearts. It was the will of God!

“ALL SAILS AND NO BALLAST.”

D
id the house welcome her? She would know by the sound.

The sea-voices that used to enter her window in the Cove had changed to the wind in Fitz Henry trees.

She lay in bed wide-eyed and vigilant. Between open curtains moonlight filtered through branches bearing secret leaves. Dark and patulous the trees bent pliant in the wind. It seemed to worry them in the same way that the sea had worried the beach. There must be still nights when the branches rested, like the nights in the Cove when the sea slept against the cliffs.

She listened inside. There were cracks and creaks like the bend of old joints, and long sighs round the window-sills. The floors and walls settled. A tap dripped in a marble basin in her room. The sound soothed her. Let the tap drip on! It was the symbol of her new life.

The house received her! It held but one hostility and she knew it already. This dislike was deep and dark, mute as an ancient rock. Hannah was old, loose in the skin and disapproving as Mrs. Houlihan. The old woman worshipped the family and resented her intrusion.

Her new mater was great, grand, with manners like a queen. She was the same every day and wore no special dress on Sunday. She did not draw attention to her mistakes until they were alone. After her first meal in the dining-room, Philip had been dismissed.

“My dear, I think it would be wise to have Lilas back. We'll pretend it's the meal over again. If I show you once do you think you'll remember again? There's a small proverb I like very much: ‘It's disgraceful to stumble against the same stone twice.' Do you understand what I mean?”

Mary Immaculate did! Such word-painting was the breath of life to her. They sat bolt upright while Lilas passed empty dishes. Aptitude had earned praise and a promise of reward.

“Mary dear, I shall question you at the end of a week to see how much you have retained. If I find it satisfactory Philip will take you to the cinema.”

She had something to earn!

Sleek and warm between linen sheets she slept to the tune of Fitz Henry trees.

When her adoption was mooted Lady Fitz Henry was ready. An intangible bond had grown up between herself and the child. A spiritual loneliness and the melancholy of winter made Mary Immaculate seem like ardent spring. The depletion of the house helped, and possibly the weight of Josephine's prayers. Mother and son were drab, heavy with many memories. Philip's wish was obvious, but had she not displayed the qualities suitable for his mother's direction he would have returned her to the Cove. When Lady Fitz Henry visited the child of her own volition and went again and again, the venture became easy and gradual.