The Fingerprint (4 page)

Georgina’s eyes had not left his face. She saw it hard and altered. She steadied her voice and said,

“You haven’t waited to ask me whether I did do it.”

“Well, I am asking you now.”

She came a step nearer and rested her hand on the edge of the table.

“Will you let me tell you just what happened? You brought Mirrie here, and she had nothing. You said she had come on a visit. You didn’t say for how long. You didn’t say that you meant to make yourself responsible for her.”

“I hadn’t made any plans.”

“Uncle Jonathan, she really hadn’t got anything. I took one or two things of my own over to Mrs. Bell at Deeping. She is very clever about alterations, and she took them in and made them fit. If Mirrie minded she didn’t say so. She seemed to be terribly pleased. She said she had never had anything so nice before, and I suppose she hadn’t. They were very good things.”

His face was closed against her. He said,

“You shouldn’t have done it. It was putting her in a wrong position. You should have come to me.”

“I didn’t like to.”

She couldn’t say—it wasn’t in her to say—that there had been an instinct to protect the stray kitten of a creature that he had brought home with him. There had been a trunk full of what was literally rubbish—old musty clothes, chiefly black —old tattered books—and a frightful mangy eiderdown pushed in on the top to keep the other things steady. There wasn’t anything that could have been worn at Field End. There wasn’t anything at all. She couldn’t tell him that Mirrie hadn’t a change of underclothes, or a nightgown to sleep in, or practically anything except the cheap shoddy dress she stood up in and the cheap shoddy coat which covered it.

Jonathan echoed her last words.

“You didn’t like to? Why?”

Georgina had an appalled feeling that they were sliding rapidly down a steep place to disaster. She had known him for too many years to mistake what was happening. She had seen him involved in too many breaches, controversies, and quarrels, starting often from some infinitesimal seed and ending in bitter estrangement. And always whilst the process was going on he would be impervious to argument or reason. But this was the first time it had happened with her. She had been seventeen years under his roof, and it was the very first time. She couldn’t believe that he had gone too far away for her to reach him. She only knew that she had to try. She said,

“It’s difficult—”

“I asked you why you didn’t come to me. Well, why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t know what you wanted—what you meant to do. I really didn’t like to let you, to let anyone, know how little she had. I didn’t know you meant her to stay. Don’t you see I wanted to be nice to her? I thought it would be just a thing between us—between two girls. It’s the sort of thing that is happening in families all the time, girls passing things on because they’ve grown out of them, or because they’ve got tired of them and think they would like to have a change.”

Jonathan broke in on a hard sarcastic note.

“Yes—now we’re getting there! You were tired of the things and you wanted a change. They weren’t good enough for you, but they were all right for Mirrie. And she was so innocent and inexperienced she didn’t see that she was being humiliated. Do you know what she said to me the other day? I thought it was one of the most pathetic things I had ever heard. I had given her a cheque to fit herself out, and she came in here before dinner to show me her dress. She looked like a picture, and she held up a bit of the skirt and said, ‘Do you know, this is the first bought dress of my own I’ve ever had.’ Cast-offs, that was all she’d had all her life— other people’s cast-offs. Charity parcels! And then after I brought her here, when you might think she had got away from all that, she runs into it again. You pick out some old clothes you don’t want any more, let the village dressmaker botch them up, and get the poor child to believe you are doing her a kindness in foisting them on her!”

They had got a long way from the anonymous letter, and a long way from reason and from the likelihood that he could be got to listen to her and to understand. She couldn’t get near him, she couldn’t reach him at all. The letter lay where he had dropped it on his blotting-pad. She came round to stand beside him and leaned to pick it up. As she turned away with it in her hand, he said,

“Wait! There is something I have been going to say to you.”

He pushed his own chair back and sat there tapping on the arm until she had done as he said. Then he looked over to her and spoke briefly.

“It’s about my will.”

She was pale above the pale primrose of her jumper and cardigan. The dark grey eyes looked all the darker for it. When he said, “It’s about my will,” a little colour came up momentarily and then was gone again.

“Uncle Jonathan—”

He lifted a hand from his knee.

“I am speaking. What I want you to do is to listen. I suppose like everyone else you have taken it for granted that whatever I have will come to you?”

“Uncle Jonathan, please—”

He rapped out, “I have told you that I am speaking! All I want you to do is to listen! There is nothing more offensive than the intrusion of emotion into matters of business. This is a matter of business. It concerns my will. I don’t wish you to be under any misapprehension as to its terms. I have never embarrassed you or myself by discussing them with you, but since I have recently decided to make certain alterations, I feel that you should be informed. I don’t want you to think that my decision has been made in a hurry, or because of any indignation which I may be feeling at the moment. I came to the conclusion some time ago that my present will no longer expressed my wishes. I am therefore proposing to make certain alterations. In the main the legacies to the household staff and to charities will remain as they are, but there will be important changes in some other directions. I intend to make provision for Mirrie.”

Georgina drew in her breath. She said quickly and warmly,

“But of course, Uncle Jonathan.”

There was a faint sarcastic lift of the black brows which made so decorative a contrast with his thick grey hair. He said,

“Very nice of you, I am sure, but I would ask you not to interrupt. I intend to provide for Mirrie by making her secure and independent. This will make a considerable difference in what under my present will is left to you.”

“Uncle Jonathan—”

“Disinterestedness can be overdone, my dear. Are you going to pretend you wouldn’t care if I cut you off without a penny?”

She said in a quick indignant voice,

“Of course I should care! It would mean that you were terribly angry, or that you didn’t care for me any more—of course I should care! But not about Mirrie. I should be very glad about your providing for Mirrie. Oh, darling, please wake up and stop thinking dreadful things about me! I don’t see how we can be talking to each other like this. It’s like some frightful dream—it really is! What has put such horrible ideas into your head?”

He said,

“They are facts, and facts are inconvenient things. You can’t get away from them by calling them dreams. If a thing is plain enough for you to be getting anonymous letters about it, it’s time something was done. You’ve been jealous of that poor child from the first, and I was a fool not to see it.”

Georgina said slowly,

“Who has been putting these things into your mind? Is it Mirrie?”

There was bleak anger in his eyes.

“Mirrie? No, it wasn’t Mirrie, poor child. She thinks you have meant to be kind to her. It’s been all, ‘Look how kind Georgina is! She has given me an old dress of hers—such a pretty colour,’ or, ‘Isn’t she kind! She says I can come out for a walk with her and Anthony, but of course I knew she would rather be alone with him, so I didn’t go.’

“There was something about that in your letter, wasn’t there? Something about A.H. getting too fond of her. Now, my dear, I’ll give you a bit of advice, and if you’ve any sense you’ll take it. There’s nothing any man dislikes more than a jealous, spiteful woman, so if you are interested in Anthony Hallam, I would advise you to be careful how you show your jealousy of Mirrie.”

She did not know what to do or what to say. Her every word and look seemed only to feed that strange unnatural anger. It was no use talking to him whilst he was like this— she had better go. But if she said nothing, the whole thing went by default. She made an effort and spoke.

“I never thought of being jealous.”

“Then you had better do so without delay! It is a bad fault and you should try to correct it. If you married it could wreck your life. I tell you frankly that there is nothing which puts a man off so much.”

It wasn’t any good. He had worked himself into a state of exasperation where there was nothing she could do or say. She said,

“It isn’t any good my saying anything, is it, but I haven’t really thought about Mirrie like that. I don’t know what has happened between us. I don’t know what you want me to do. I think I had better go.”

Her voice had got slower and slower. Now it just left off. She turned with the letter in her hand and went across the room to the door. She had her back to him as she went, and all at once she had the feeling that there was something behind her, something that was an enemy. There was the old, old instinct that it wasn’t wise to turn your back upon an enemy. She came to the door and found it unlatched and went out. She thought that she had shut it behind her when she came into the room. But it was unlatched now.

ANTHONY HALLAM was coming down the stairs. Because he always looked at Georgina when she was there to look at he looked across at her now, and saw at once that something had happened. For one thing there was no colour in her face, just absolutely none, and for another the way she was coming towards him across the hall she might have been blind. Her eyes were fixed, but not on him, and if she wasn’t exactly feeling her way, she had one hand a little out in front of her and it gave that effect. It was her left hand and it was empty. Her right hand hung down with a letter in it. He ran down the rest of the stairs and met her as she came to the bottom step.

“Georgina—what is it? Have you had bad news?”

He was one step above her. She looked up at him as if she had only just seen that he was there and said, “Yes.” He could see right down into her eyes, and they had a lost look.

“What is it?”

The hand which had been stretched out took hold of the baluster. The other one, the one that held the letter, motioned him to let her pass. He stepped aside, and she went on up the stair without turning her head. He went up behind her, but she did not seem to know that he was there. She had her own sitting-room on the first floor. It was along a passage to the left, a bright room looking south-east with a view over the terrace to the garden with its sloping lawn and the great cedar which had been there since the house was built. He went in with her, and the first time she noticed him was when she put out a hand to shut the door and it touched his own. She moved away at once and said,

“I want to be alone.”

“I’ll go if you want me to. But can’t you tell me what is the matter? You look—”

She went over to a table and put down the letter she was holding. Then she took a yellow linen handkerchief out of her cardigan pocket and rubbed her hand with it. He had the impression that she was wiping something off. He said quickly,

“Is it that letter?”

There was a movement that said, “Yes.”

“Who is it from?”

“I don’t know. Anthony—”

“Don’t send me away. I can’t go—I want to help you. Won’t you tell me what has happened?”

She moved her head in a gesture which indicated the letter.

“Do you mean I am to read it?”

She had a moment of indecision. She had shut her doors. There was an impulse to bolt them against him, there was an impulse to throw them wide and let him in. There was no conscious thought behind the pressure of these two things. Each had its own urge, its own force. And then quite suddenly she was letting the second impulse have its way. She hadn’t known what she was going to do until she was doing it. She heard herself say,

“Yes, read it.”

Whilst he was reading it she watched him. She was tall, but he stood half a head above her. He had a tanned skin and pleasantly irregular features, eyes between blue and grey, eyebrows dark with a sort of quirk in them, a good strong line of jaw, and a firm-set mouth and chin. There floated vaguely on the surface of her mind an old and comforting impression that he didn’t look as if he would ever let anyone down.

He was frowning over the letter. When he got down to the bottom of the second page where it left off he said,

“The proper place for anonymous letters is the fire. Let’s burn it.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Much better get rid of it, unless—have you any idea where it comes from?”

“No.”

“You had much better put it in the fire.”

She had begun to remember what she ought to have remembered before, that he came into the letter himself. One of the more unpleasant sentences floated up—“because you want everything for yourself, and because she is prettier than you are and with much more taking ways, and because A.H. and others have begun to think so.” She was Mirrie, and A.H. was Anthony Hallam. He couldn’t miss it, or the place right at the end where it said, “because you think J.F. is getting fond of her as well as A.H.” She said,

“I ought not to have let you read it.”

“I’m very glad you did.”

She drew a long troubled breath.

“I oughtn’t to have let anyone read it. I didn’t think—I never thought that anyone would believe those things were true.”

“Of course they wouldn’t!”

“Uncle Jonathan did.”

When she said that, he knew where the lost look came from. It wasn’t the anonymous letter that had shaken her. It was Jonathan Field.

“He didn’t!”

“He did. I thought I ought to show it to him. I never thought he would believe it, but he did. He has got very fond of Mirrie, and he thinks I’m jealous. I don’t think I am—I really don’t think so. But he believes it. I even began to think he might have written the letter himself. Not really, you know, but he did seem to agree with everything it said.”

“But that’s nonsense!”

The anger in his voice warmed her. There had been a deadly inner cold, like touching metal with your bare hand in a deep frost. She had done that once and it had burned her hand. Anthony’s anger didn’t burn, it warmed the things which Jonathan Field’s anger had frozen. Her thoughts began to move again, to order themselves.

“Anthony, will you tell me truly, has there been anything for people to notice about the way I’ve treated Mirrie? If there has, I haven’t known it myself—I really haven’t.”

“You’ve been an angel to her. Jonathan must be off his head. Are you sure you understood him properly?”

She walked away from him to the window. The garden lay under a grey sky that was rifting to let through a glimpse of wintry blue. The lawn went on for a long way, running down to trees which fringed a stream. The trees were leafless and the tracery of bare branches stood out against the water-flow. The weather had been mild and the lawn was green. The cedar had no winter change to make. Some of last year’s cones stood up on the sweeping branches like a flock of little brown owls. Field End had been her home since she was three years old. She had been sheltered and loved there. It was Mirrie who had been the lost waif with no one to care for her. It came into her mind that the anonymous letter turned this upside down. “You think pretty well of yourself… You’ve been brought up soft… You’ve got things coming to you that you’re not going to like. Some of those who are underneath now will be on top, and you will be underneath.” The words came out of the hidden places of her thought like rats coming out of their holes in the dark. It was all too fantastic to be real. She could have put the letter in the fire and—no, she couldn’t have forgotten about it. But she would have done her best not to let it make any difference to her, or to Mirrie, or to anyone. It wasn’t the letter, it was Jonathan’s reaction to it that was turning her world upside down. She had expected him to be angry, but his anger hadn’t turned against the anonymous letter-writer, it had turned against herself. All the concern, all the protective warmth were for Mirrie whom he had known for just six weeks. There was none to spare for the girl who had felt herself a daughter to him ever since she could remember feeling anything at all.

Anthony had come to stand beside her. He put an arm about her shoulders, but he did not speak. It was she who broke the silence, turning to face him as she did so. “I think I shall have to go away.” He said, “It will pass.”

He wasn’t touching her any more, but they were very close. She shook her head.

“He has changed. He hasn’t got the same feeling for me any more. I thought he would be angry about the letter, but I didn’t think he would be angry with me. He never has been before—not like that. But I’ve seen it happen with other people, even when he has known them and been friends with them for a long time. It starts with something, anything, it doesn’t seem to matter very much what, and then he goes on working himself up until there’s nothing left that’s worth keeping. I’ve known it happen half a dozen times, and there’s nothing anyone can do. It doesn’t pass, and he doesn’t come round. The other person is just wiped right off the slate for good and all.”

“Georgina!”

As if she had not heard him, she said,

“And now it’s happened to me.”

He took her hand and found it very cold.

“It won’t happen that way with you—it can’t! You mustn’t do anything in a hurry.”

There was a momentary flash in the dark grey eyes.

“I don’t think I’ll wait until he tells me to go.”

“He won’t do that.”

“I think he will if I give him the chance. The bother is that I’m not trained for anything. Training takes time, and one has to live.”

He waited a little before he said soberly,

“You know, you are making too much of this.”

“You didn’t hear what he said.”

“People say a lot of things they don’t mean when they are angry.”

Her eyes were suddenly bright with tears.

“I thought he would be angry about the letter. I couldn’t believe it when he was angry with me.”

He said as easily as he could,

“Oh, he just flew off the handle. He does sometimes—everyone does. You know how it is yourself. You say something because you are angry, and you go on getting angrier because you have said it. It’s a sort of buttered slide.”

She shook her head.

“No—no, it wasn’t like that. The letter touched it off, but what he said—Anthony, what he said was there in his mind already. I think it had been there for a long time—perhaps since very soon after he brought Mirrie here. You see, he told me he was going to alter his will.”

“He told you that just now?”

“Yes, just now. But he had been thinking about it before that—he must have been. He said he didn’t want me to think that his decision had been made in a hurry, or because of any indignation he might be feeling at the moment. Those are his own words. And then he went on to say he was going to make provision for Mirrie. And I said, ‘Of course,’ and he told me not to interrupt, and he asked me whether I was going to pretend I wouldn’t care if he cut me off without a penny.”

“And what did you say to that?” The colour came up brightly in her cheeks. “I blazed. I said of course I should care, because it would mean that he didn’t care for me any more. I said I was very glad about Mirrie, and I asked him what had put such horrible ideas into his head.”

“What did he say to that?”

The ringing tone went out of her voice.

“It wasn’t any good. He called Mirrie ‘that poor child,’ and said I had always been jealous of her from the first and he had been a fool not to see it. It wasn’t any use talking to him after that. I did try, but it wasn’t any good. I think everything has gone, and I don’t think there is anything that can bring it back. So I shall have to go. I can’t stay here if he doesn’t want me any longer. I oughtn’t to have said anything about it. I wasn’t going to, only you were there and it came out. I don’t want to go on talking about it any more. I want you to go”

He went as far as the door and turned round with a jerk and came back again.

“Georgina—”

She shook her head.

“I asked you to go away.”

“Yes, I’ll go. I just want to say—to say—”

“Don’t say it.”

“It’s no good your trying to stop me. It’s just that I love you very much.” He caught himself up and repeated with a change of emphasis, “I love you very much. But I expect you must know that already. I’ve loved you for a long time, and I shall go on loving you always. Will you remember that, and if there is anything I can do, will you let me do it? That’s all, my dear.”

He went out of the room and shut the door behind him.