Nothing Venture (22 page)

“And you've met her again?”

“Last week.”

Jervis paused. The room filled with silence. Ferdinand Fazackerley did not break it. He kept his bright dancing eyes on Jervis' face, and saw the colour rise in it to the roots of the black hair. After one of the longest minutes he had ever known, Jervis found his voice.

He said, “Nonsense!” sharply.

“Have it your own way.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nan,” said Mr Fazackerley.

Jervis made a step towards him.

“If you're fooling—”

“I'm not.”

“
Nan!
” said Jervis. “You mean it was Nan?”

“I recognized her right away. She don't look any older to speak of, and when I saw the scar on her arm, that clinched it. I've told you about that before. She'd cut herself pretty well to the bone holding your head off the rocks every time a wave came into that darned pool. It was her arm or your head. Well, she made it her arm every time. There was bound to be a scar, and when I saw that scar on your wife's arm at the Luxe, I thought I'd butted in on a very pretty romance.”

Jervis stood for a moment with a perfectly blank face. Behind it his mind, like a shuttered room, was being violently shaken as if by an earthquake. His thoughts slid together, collided, broke. With a violent effort he turned about and walked to the window. The sun was gone; a kind of golden haze tinged the dusk. There was no wind at all; each tree and bush stood up dark and solemn without the slightest movement. The whole scene might have been painted on glass. The contrast between its stillness and the turbulent confusion of his thoughts gave him a sense of being in some remote and unfamiliar place.

He did not know how long he stood there. The gold went out of the air and left it yet more gravely still. A very faint green light came from the horizon. This too faded. An impalpable stream of darkness flowed between him and all the world.

Suddenly he crossed to the door and switched on the light. The room had been quite dark. As the light came on, the windows seemed to recede. All the shades and degrees of the outside darkness vanished. The straight crimson curtains framed blank, black windows.

Ferdinand Fazackerley had not moved. He was sitting on the arm of one of the big chairs with his hands in his pockets.

“You weren't fooling?” said Jervis.

“Great Washington—no!”

“You're sure it was Nan?”

“Everlasting certain sure.”

“She told you so?”

“No, she did not. I recognized her. And then, when we were at dinner, I told the story of the plucky kid who saved your life, and you bet I watched her. She didn't give much away—she don't, you know—but I could see she was scared, and I tumbled to it that you didn't know, and that she didn't want you to know. I'm not an inquisitive man, but I thought I'd like mighty well to get to the bottom of why you didn't know, and why she didn't want you to know. I haven't rightly got to the bottom of it yet.” Those bright yellow-brown eyes of his twinkled with questions. He crossed one leg over the other and leaned sideways against the back of the chair. “Well?” he said.

Jervis stood by the jamb of the door. He looked at a bare, blank window and spoke.

“Did she know—when she married me?”

Ferdinand twinkled more noticeably.

“Holy Niagara! What do you think?”

Jervis made a gesture. There was no expression on his face.

“Why not ask her?” suggested Ferdinand.

“I'm asking you,” said Jervis. “You seem to be well behind the scenes. Did she know when she married me—or did she find out afterwards?”

“Know? Of course she knew! Why do you suppose she married you?”

Jervis set his jaw and was silent.

“Better ask her!” said Ferdinand with a short laugh.

Jervis turned abruptly, flung open the door, and went out. Ferdinand watched him with a quizzical smile. He went impetuously through the hall and out at the front door, shutting it hard behind him.

XXIX

Jervis went striding down the drive and, once outside the gates, left the road for the downs. He could have found his way blindfold, but out here under the sky and away from shadowy trees, it was not so dark. The cloudless expanse above his head was luminous and already pricked with stars. The moon had not yet risen. The short grass was smooth under foot, and on the long swelling curve of the down he walked fast and far.

As he walked, his thoughts cleared. If it was Nan who had saved his life ten years ago at the risk of her own, and if she had known this, their whole relation was on a different basis; it was profoundly affected—so profoundly, in fact, as to alter his entire point of view.

He went back to the stinging shock of Rosamund's defection on the eve of their marriage. He had believed then, and had since had this belief intensified, that it was a shameless and callous manoeuvre to supplant him at King's Weare and as his grandfather's heir. To counter this, he must be married by the date fixed in Ambrose Weare's will. Nan had stepped into the breach with her quiet proposal that they should marry as a matter of business. She had been very businesslike. She must have something for her trouble—a percentage. She had, in fact, put herself up for sale for two thousand pounds. He remembered that he had offered five hundred, and she had raised him very coolly to two thousand. He had not known then that the money was not for herself—old Page had let that out afterwards. It had gone to the sister, who was on her way to Australia. Page had said he believed Nan had been supporting her. A decent old thing Page—scandalized by the marriage of course, but anxious to be scrupulously fair to Nan.

Jervis was aware that he himself had not bothered his head about being fair. By marrying Nan he spoilt Rosamund's dirty game, and that was all he had cared for at the time. In the last twenty-four hours he had experienced a disposition to turn his back on the events which had led up to his marriage. They made a background so incompatible with Nan as he was beginning to know her that he had desired to detach her from it—to detach them both—not to look back at all—to blot the whole thing out. F.F.'s story made it impossible to detach himself, or to detach Nan, or to blot things out. He felt instead an overwhelming desire to rake things up, to know what had been at the back of Nan's mind when she proposed that business arrangement. He had set her down as a shrewd opportunist catching at a marriage above her hopes. But, then, why not play her best card—why not show her scar and claim her gratitude? Why not give the thing a decorative gloss of the “I saved your life, and now I can help you save your fortunes” order? The shrewd opportunist would surely have done this. But Nan, according to F.F., had been scared to death lest he should know. She had hidden her trump card instead of playing it. She had hidden her parentage too. No opportunist worth the name would have neglected to claim Nigel Forsyth as a father. What
had
been in her mind?

Something glimmered amongst his thoughts like a will o' the wisp. It was a dancing point of light that turned a flickering gleam here and there and was gone. The child who had saved his life—the gleam touched that. Did she remember? F.F. said that she had remembered. He recalled the headlong fury of his resolve to beat Rosamund at her own game. The gleam touched that too. It illumined possibilities—the depth of the abyss into which he might very easily have plunged. He would have married anyone, and picked her up anywhere. He had certainly been mad, and it was Nan who had stood between him and the abyss. The gleam touched that.

None of these things presented themselves to him in words. It could hardly be said that he recognized what the gleam showed him. His conscious thought had not greatly altered as yet. There was behind it a pressure which would compel it to alter.

He walked on, and presently the moon came up out of the haze at the horizon's edge. It cast a faintly golden trail upon the smooth, dark sea.

Jervis turned and began to walk back by the way he had come. One thing at least he could now explain to his own satisfaction, and that was Nan's extraordinary obsession with regard to Robert Leonard. He didn't, of course, believe the story of Leonard coming down the cliff and passing the pool. That was nonsense—part of the obsession. No—what had happened was quite obviously this—Nan had seen Leonard somewhere on the beach either that day or some other day. F.F. said her aunt had taken her away that afternoon, and then she had been ill. Well, it was quite obvious—she had had a shock, and she was feverish, and she had got Leonard mixed up with her fever. It was the simplest explanation in the world. She had had a bad dream about Leonard and had tacked it on to the things that had really happened.

Jervis felt much better when he had settled this. It let Nan out, and it let Leonard out. It explained everything perfectly.

He got back to King's Weare to find the house dark except for a light in the hall. Monk had standing orders never to sit up. It was a relief to find that F.F. had had enough sense not to sit up either. To be sat up for was the most irritating thing in the world. He put out the hall light and went up in the dark. As he passed Nan's door, he heard the thump of Bran's tail and a faint snuffing sound. He said “Lie down, Bran!”

As he opened his own door, the sounds ceased. He put on his light and undressed. Before he got into bed he drew the curtains back, and fell asleep whilst he was wondering why moonlight made everything look so still.

He waked with a start, he did not know how much later, and at first he did not know why he had waked. Everything was dark and quiet as sleep; only the window framed the moonlight. Then he heard a sound—Bran moving in Nan's room. Restless brute! But that wouldn't have waked him. He raised himself on his hand, and as he did so, he heard a choking cry and in a moment was out of bed and at the door between the two rooms. If it was bolted.
.…
But it gave to his hand. He switched on the light, and saw Nan sitting up in bed under the crimson canopy, her eyes wide and blank with terror, and her lips parted on a gasping cry. Bran, with his forepaws on the bed, whined and licked frantically at her hair, her shoulder, her arm. As the light went on, he growled, flung round, dropped to the floor, and bounded to meet Jervis, thrusting at him with his head and making anxious sounds in his throat.

Jervis bade him lie down harshly. His first thought was that the dog had frightened Nan. Then, as he reached the bed, he saw that her gaze was fixed neither on him nor on Bran. It had no focus; it saw nothing. It was just a wide gaze of fear. She was sitting stiffly upright with her hands pressed down upon the bed. Her short brown hair was wildly rumpled. Her face was of an agonizing pallor, her eyes all staring pupil. She had on a childish white nightgown, rather high at the neck, and beneath it her breast rose and fell with each sobbing breath.

Jervis sat down on the edge of the bed and put a hand on her shoulder.

“Nan!” he said. “What is it?
Nan!
”

At the sound of his voice she gave a convulsive start and woke. It was only then that he realized that that blank gaze had been fixed upon something in the world of dreams. His hand and his voice waked her. She turned terrified eyes upon him, and said his name in a choking whisper.

“Nan—what is it? I say, don't be so frightened—you're all right. It was just a beastly dream.” She trembled, and he put his arm about her. “All right in a minute. Just hold on, and it'll go. Would you like a drink of water?… No, I won't go till you want me to.”

She was small and light to hold. Another of those dreadful shudders passed over her. He felt her struggle with it, stiffening herself against his arm until she was rigid. A sudden awkward tenderness for her fear came up in him. Under his impatient temperament he had a soft heart for children, animals—anything weak, defenceless, frightened. He patted her shoulder and tightened his grasp.

“Look here, there isn't anything to be afraid of. It was only a dream.”

She turned then, straining back against his arm so that she could look at him.

“Did you—dream it—too?”

“No. Look here, it's nothing—a dream's nothing—it can't hurt anyone—you've only got to wake up. Here's Bran telling you the same thing. He's most awfully upset about you.”

Bran had his forepaws on the bed again. The tip of his tail moved deprecatingly. He pushed his head forward and blew warm puffs of air at her hand, her arm.

“She's all right,” said Jervis. “You dream too—don't you, old boy? You think you're catching a rabbit, and then it does the dirty on you and disappears just as you've got your teeth into it. Now she's all right, and you can get down.”

Bran stood his ground with just a flick of the ear to show that he had heard. His eyes went to Nan.

She said, “Down, Bran!” in a shaky whisper, and he dropped to the floor.

“Feeling better?” said Jervis. “What was it? Would you like to tell me?”

Leaning against his arm, and looking up at him with those unnaturally wide eyes, she said,

“I thought—you were dead.”

Her voice was the lost ghost of itself. He hardly heard the words; yet they reached him, releasing some emotion which he did not understand. He did not try to understand it, but it reinforced that old tenderness.

“I thought—you were dead.” said Nan.

“Do I feel as if I were dead?” His arm tightened about her.

“I saw you—in a dark place. You were—dead.”

He remembered the tears running down her face when she sat by the wayside. She had wept then because she had thought him dead; but now she did not weep. He said on an impulse.

“I don't know why you should mind.”

At once she drew away from his arm, sitting up stiffly and turning her head away.

“Would you mind, Nan?” he said.

There was a silence. He wished that he had not asked her that. When he had been wishing it for what seemed quite at long time, she drew a sobbing breath.