The Shivering Sands (25 page)

A feeling of claustrophobia came to me; she would keep grasping my arm, putting her grotesque little girl face close to mine…and I was in agreement with those who said she was not all there.

I glanced at my watch and said: “The time…I’m forgetting…”

She had a little enameled watch pinned to her frilly pink blouse and she looked at it and then shook her finger at me.

“You haven’t to take Sylvia until half past. So you have twenty minutes.”

I was startled that she knew so much about my schedule.

“And,” she went on, “you were all last afternoon preparing their lessons.”

I felt very uneasy.

“Now that there is no curate at the vicarage—” I began.

“They are all working on the tasks Mrs. Lincroft has set them. What a clever woman she is.” She began to laugh. “I know how clever. And getting her child brought up here too. That would be one of her conditions. She thinks the world of Alice.”

“It’s natural that she should think a great deal of her own daughter.”

“Oh, very very natural; and there we have Miss Alice brought up in Lovat Stacy, for all the world as though she were a daughter of the house.”

“She is a good child and works very hard.”

Sybil nodded gravely. “But it is Edith I’m interested in now.”

“Well, I never expect to see her looking like that.”

“Shocked, shocked, shocked!” She pointed at me and chanted mischievously, the little girl again. Then her face stiffened. “They will call the child Beaumont,” she went on. “They think they can replace my Beau merely by calling a child by his name. They never will. Nothing will ever bring Beaumont back. My darling boy…he is lost to us.”

“Sir William is delighted at the prospect of having a grandchild.”

“A grandchild.” She began to titter. “And to call him Beaumont!”

“Everyone is a little premature. The child is not born yet and it seems to be presumed that it will be a boy.”

“They can never replace Beaumont,” she said fiercely. “What’s done is done.”

“It’s a pity it cannot be forgotten,” I said.

“Napier thinks that. And you take his view, of course,” she was accusing, mocking.

“I have been here such a short time, and as I am not connected with the family, it is not for me to take views.”

“But you take them all the same. Oh yes, I shall most certainly paint you, Mrs. Verlaine. But not yet…I’ll wait a while. Has anyone ever told you about Harry?”

“No.”

“You should know. You like to know everything about us, don’t you? So of course you should know about Harry.”

“He was the man you were going to marry.”

She nodded and her face puckered. “I thought he loved me…and he did. Everything would have been all right, but they stopped it. They took Harry away from me.”

“Who?”

She waved her arms vaguely. “William stopped it. My brother. He was my guardian because our parents were dead. He said, ‘No. Wait. No wedding until you are twenty-one. You are too young.’ I was nineteen. Nineteen was not too young to be in love. You should have seen Harry, Mrs. Verlaine. He was so handsome, so clever, so witty. He used to make me laugh with his quips. It was wonderful. He was very aristocratic, but he had no money and that was really why William said I was too young. William thinks too much about money. He thinks it is the most important thing in the world. He punished Napier through money, you know. Go away…you are banished. You shan’t have my worldly goods. And then he wanted a grandson so Napier is summoned to return and meekly Napier comes. The bait is…money!”

“It might be something else.”

“Now what else could it be, Mrs. Verlaine?”

“The desire to please a father, the desire to make amends, to forget old enmities.”

“You
are
sentimental. No one would believe it to look at you…except me of course. You look so coolly on the world…so it seems. But I could see that underneath it all you’re as sentimental as—as—Edith.”

“There’s no harm in sentiment.”

“As long as you don’t smother the truth with it. It’s like pouring treacle over a suet pudding. You can’t see anything but the treacle.”

“You were telling me about Harry.”

“Oh…Harry! He had debts. Blue blood doesn’t pay debts, does it? But money does. I had the money. Perhaps William didn’t want it to go out of the family. Did you think that was the reason? But you couldn’t know that, could you? William said wait, and he wouldn’t give his consent until I was twenty-one. Two years to wait. So we were betrothed. We had a dinner party to celebrate it. Isabella was there. She wasn’t married to William then. There was an orchestra on the dais where the piano is now. We danced, Harry and I, and he said: ‘Two years will soon pass, my darling.’ It did pass and at the end of it I’d lost Harry because he’d met a girl with more money than I had, who could pay his debts without delay and it seemed the need was pressing. She wasn’t as pretty as I was, but she had so much more money.”

“Perhaps then it was all for the best.”

“What do you mean…all for the best?”

“Since it was the money he wanted, he might not have been a good husband.”

“That’s what they tried to tell me.” She stamped her foot “It’s not true. I would have married him. He would have loved me most then. Harry just wanted life to be easy. He would have been happy with me if they’d let him marry me in the beginning. I’d have had my babies…” Her face puckered; she was like a child crying for a coveted toy. “But no,” she cried fiercely, “they stopped me. William stopped me. How dared he! Do you know what he said? ‘He’s a fortune hunter. You’re better without him.’ And he looked prim and virtuous, as though Harry was bad and he was so good. He—why, I could tell you…”

I was looking at her so sadly that she smiled and her vehemence was stemmed. “You have a kind heart, Mrs. Verlaine,” she said, “and you know what it means to lose a lover, don’t you? You suffered too, didn’t you? That’s why I talk to you. I had a ring…a beautiful opal ring. But opals are unlucky, they say. Harry couldn’t bring himself to tell me, and I was nearly twenty-one and I fixed the wedding day and the presents started to come in. And then…one day…I had the letter. He couldn’t face me, he could only write it. He’d been married for months. I ought to have defied my brother and run away with him when he first asked me. William broke my heart, Mrs. Verlaine. I hated him. I hated Harry too for a while. I took the opal ring and I threw it out to sea…and then I took my paints and painted Harry’s face on the walls. Harry’s face…horrible…horrible…horrible…but it comforted me.”

“I’m sorry,” was all I could say.

“You’re truly so.” She smiled at me sadly. “But don’t you say things are forgotten. They are never forgotten. I shall never forget Harry. And I shall never forget Beaumont. My darling Beau…I felt happier when he was born. He took to me right away. He always wanted Auntie Sib. I let him use my paints and he liked that. He was always with me, he was sunny natured and so beautiful. Beau! We naturally called him that because his name was Beaumont. But it meant something too. It meant that he was beautiful.”

“So you had your consolation.”

“Until that day…the day he was murdered.”

“It was an accident. It could have happened to any two boys.”

She shook her head angrily. “But this was Beau…my lovely, beautiful Beau.” She turned to me suddenly: “There’s something in this house…something
bad
. I know.”

“A
house
can’t be bad,” I said.

“It can if the people who live there make it so. There are bad wicked people in this house. Be careful.”

I said I would and because I felt she was going to begin an attack on Napier and that if she did I should be forced to defend him, I said I must go.

She consulted her watch and nodded.

“Come again,” she said. “Come and talk to me. I like talking to you. And don’t forget…one day I have to paint a picture of you.”

Alice walked beside me in the gardens where I had come for a little exercise. It had been raining all the morning and now the sun had come out; the flowers smelled all the more delicious and the bees were already busy in the lavender bushes.

Alice was talking to me about the Chopin prelude which she was having some difficulty in mastering, and I was trying to explain to her that the effect of simplicity was often the hardest to obtain.

“How I should love to sit at the piano and play as you do, Mrs. Verlaine. It always looks so easy for you.”

“It’s due to years and years of practice,” I told her. “You haven’t been practicing for years and years, and you have improved tremendously.”

“Does Sir William ever ask about our lessons?” she asked.

“Yes, he has done so.”

“Does he mention me?”

“He mentions you all.”

She was pink with pleasure. She said suddenly, her face grave: “Edith was ill again this morning.”

“I believe it sometimes happens that expectant mothers are ill in the morning; as the time passes she will feel better.”

“What a good thing it is. Everyone is very happy about the baby. They say this is going to make everything right.”

“What is going to make everything right?” It was Allegra who had fallen into step beside me.

“We were talking about the baby,” Alice explained.

“Everybody is talking about the baby. Anyone would think no one had ever had a baby before. After all, they are married, aren’t they? Why shouldn’t they have a baby…People do. That’s what they marry for…or part of it.”

Allegra was looking at me slyly as though to provoke me into some reproof.

“Have you done your practice?” I asked coolly.

“Not yet, Mrs. Verlaine. I will though…later. Only it has been such a horrid morning and now the sun is out, and it’s going to rain again soon. Look at those clouds.” She was smiling at me mischievously, but almost immediately her face darkened. “I’m sick of hearing about this baby. My grandfather is a changed man. That’s what one of the footmen told me this morning. He said: ‘Miss Allegra, this baby will make all the difference to your grandfather. It’ll be like having Mr. Beau back again!’”

“Yes, that’s it,” said Alice. “It will be like having Mr. Beau back again. I wonder whether there’ll be no more lights in the chapel then.”

“There’s a perfectly logical explanation to the light in the chapel,” I said; and as they looked at me expectantly I added: “I’m sure.”

Allegra stood still, expressing her exasperation by facial contortions. “All this fuss. It nauseates me. Why should there be all this fuss about a baby? Perhaps it will be a girl and then serve them right. They seem to forget that I’m here. They never make this fuss about me. I’m Napier’s daughter and Sir William is my grandfather. Yet he scarcely looks at me and when he does his face shows…distaste.”

“Oh no, Allegra,” I said.

“Oh
yes
, Mrs. Verlaine. So what’s the use of pretending. I used to think it was because Napier was my father and grandfather hated my father. But it’s not that because this new baby will be Napier’s, and they are all making such a fuss before it is born.”

She ran ahead of us and started pulling a rose to pieces.

“Allegra,” warned Alice, “that’s one of your grandfather’s favorites.”

“I know,” spat out Allegra. “That’s why I’m doing it.”

“That’s not the best way to relieve your feelings,” I said.

Allegra grinned at me. “It’s
one
way, Mrs. Verlaine. The best available at the moment.”

Allegra had plucked another of the precious blooms and was bent on destruction.

I knew it was no use protesting and that once she had no audience she would stop, so I stepped off the path and started to walk across the lawn.

Some time before this Mrs. Lincroft had suggested that I accompany the girls when they went out riding, and I had ordered a riding habit from London as I hated borrowing clothes and Edith’s certainly did not fit me well. I admitted to myself that this was an extravagance but having acquired it I rode more frequently than I had previously.

My habit was in a becoming shade of dark blue—not quite navy; it was beautifully cut and as soon as I saw it I did not regret the money I had spent on it. The girls all assured me that I looked very elegant in it and they were constantly admiring it.