The Sleeping Fury (7 page)

But it seemed that these theories about Beatrix falling in love were false, for that was the last mention of the beau in her letters. Either she had not met him again or she had lost interest in him. Her letters thenceforward were brief—little more than bulletins of Mamma's progress and information about the Harrogate weather; and soon Lady Hadlow was well enough to write herself to Charlotte and Cousin Fanny.

“The money I sent you for household expenses,” she wrote to Cousin Fanny, “will be exhausted by now, or nearly so. I enclose you another cheque, which please acknowledge, and I shall be glad if you will let me know the amounts of the grocer's, butcher's, and Jefferson's bills for the last three weeks, so that I can enter them in my account book. I hope you and Mrs. Ridley carefully checked the items before paying them.”

“Tell Hobson,” ran another letter, “if he has not already taken up the dahlias, as he should have done at least three weeks ago, to do so immediately.”

Evidently Lady Hadlow was recovering, and was already resuming command of the household at a range of two hundred and fifty miles. But her letters did not consist exclusively of commands. “Both you and Charlotte,” ran the same letter, “have been very good in writing me such regular and such charming letters. They were a great blessing to me during my tiresome illness, and, indeed, they are so still.”

“The doctor,” she wrote to Charlotte, “does not yet allow me out of doors. The weather is rather treacherous—damp air and cold winds—and it would be foolish to take unnecessary risks. My rheumatism, I am glad to say, has quite gone, so that when I have been out two or three times, and am fit to face the fatigue of the journey, we shall return home. But I fear, my dear Charlotte, that this may not be for a fortnight or three weeks. Beatrix has made some friends here, and is out a good deal, but I am now well able to look after myself.”

For the rest of their absence no letter came from Beatrix, but one morning, about a week after her mother's last letter, Charlotte, to her surprise and joy, received a brief intimation of their return.

“For various reasons,” wrote Lady Hadlow, “I find it necessary to return at once. Please tell Cousin Fanny that we shall reach Fording on Thursday at 5.17, and ask her to send the carriage. Need I say, my dear child, how delighted I shall be to see my good little girl again!”

Charlotte, walking impatiently up and down the station platform, watched for the red signal-lights to turn green, while her ears plumbed the evening silence for the remote roar of the train. But not a sound could she detect, and the train was already due. Then a bell rang in the signal-box at the end of the platform. Tlink, tlink! Tlink, tlink, tlink! A long silence followed, and then again—tlink, tlink, tlink!—the little bell reported the secret advance of the train. Charlotte's impatience became almost unbearable. Then, as though the long rush of the silence had been imperceptibly intensified, a remote roar like a distant weir, a roar that was so subtle that it was hardly more than a thought, travelled across the darkness. Then quite suddenly it became loud and threatening, and Charlotte knew that the train was crossing the viaduct and that in half a minute its lights would dawn in the darkness beyond the platform end. They would appear when she had counted five. One, two, three, four … now. No, nothing yet. She tried again—one, two, three … Then with a leap of the heart that was half fright and half joy she saw that they were there, trembling and twinkling like two terribly close stars. They rushed towards her, swooped forward, and suddenly the engine behind them loomed huge and brutal at the end of the
platform. Then, with a loud hissing of brakes, the train came to a standstill, carriage doors opened, there was a confusion of shapes, half golden, half black, getting out, getting in, from which two sharply familiar shapes isolated themselves, became the only objects there in the darkness. Charlotte rushed towards them. “Mamma, why how late you are!”

Lady Hadlow turned her head. “Ah, there you are, my love! I knew we should find you waiting for us. Come, let us look after the luggage.” She darted off, followed by Charlotte and Beatrix.

“You're back at last, Bee,” said Charlotte, grasping Beatrix's arm. “What an age it's been!”

The luggage was found and shouldered by the porter, and Lady Hadlow led the way out of the station. “Well, Young! Here we are again, you see! No, the dressing-case inside, Sam. Jump in, girls.” In a moment they were all boxed into the dark landau, bowling homewards.

• • • • • • • •

It was a changed Beatrix that returned to Fording. Even in the landau Charlotte had felt that something was wrong, and when they reached home, and Charlotte, having gone with Beatrix to her room, sat watching her take off her veil and hat, the change was startlingly apparent. The smooth pink cheeks, the bright roguish eyes and lively mouth, were gone. It was as if Beatrix, and not Mamma, had been ill. Her cheeks were pale and sunken, her mouth drawn, her eyelids red and tired. Charlotte's heart contracted with pain. “Bee, darling!” she burst out. “What …!” Suddenly
checked either by a kind of shame in herself or some subtle withdrawal in Beatrix, she broke off, and then, hugging her, added: “Oh, how glad I am to have you back!”

“Yes,” said Beatrix, in a voice that seemed to Charlotte to be pale too, “it's nearly two months.”

In the drawing-room before dinner, all through dinner, and after dinner, Charlotte felt it and saw it—this desolating change in Beatrix, and a stiffness, a narrowing of the lips in Mamma, as in the old days of Beatrix's tantrums.

Next evening, while Charlotte was changing for dinner, there was a tap on her bedroom door, and Cousin Fanny entered. Her pale little face wore a tragic look. “Charlotte,” she whispered, “what is the matter with Beatrix?” The tears began to run down her cheeks. “She's changed. She's in some awful trouble and won't tell me. What is it, Charlotte?”

Charlotte shook her head. “I don't know, Cousin Fanny. She hasn't told me, and I can't ask her.” Charlotte too began to cry.

Cousin Fanny put a motherly arm round her. “My poor dear,” she murmured; and then, after a moment's pause: “Well, we mustn't give way like this. What sights we shall be at dinner.”

They dried their eyes and went downstairs together.

Charlotte felt even more cut off from Beatrix now than when she was away. But to-morrow, or in a day or two, Beatrix would tell her, and this painful estrangement would be ended.

But Beatrix never spoke, and with Charlotte that
first shame persisted and she dared not ask. Was it something to do with the young doctor, Beatrix's beau, she wondered; for Beatrix never once alluded to him, nor to her letters about him. Impossible to tell, for Lady Hadlow too remained inexorably silent, as if with that just perceptible clenching of the lips she were resolutely shutting the secret in.

• • • • • • • •

Weeks passed, and either Beatrix's looks improved or Charlotte grew accustomed to them and did not notice them so much. But her spirits did not improve. She never laughed now, and all her humour and sharpness of tongue had vanished.

Then came enlightenment, for one evening Beatrix fell ill. Her head ached, she shivered, and Lady Hadlow discovered that her temperature was a hundred and one. It was six o'clock in the evening, and Beatrix was at once put to bed. “If you are not better to-morrow, child,” said her mother, “I shall send for Dr. Preston. But, whether you feel better or not, you must not on any account get up to-morrow until I have seen you.”

Beatrix refused food, but later in the evening was persuaded to take a little bread-and-milk.

On the following morning Charlotte, going downstairs ten minutes before breakfast-time, was amazed to meet Beatrix, in a dressing-gown, hurrying upstairs from the hall. Since the return from Harrogate Beatrix had always been the first down to breakfast, but that she should be up now, when strictly ordered by Mamma to stay in bed, scandalised Charlotte. Once more, as in the case of
Tess of the D' Urbervilles,
Mamma's laws were being flouted.

“Bee!” she exclaimed, in an astounded whisper.

Beatrix, without stopping, held up a warning finger. “Come with me,” she whispered, and hurried to her bedroom.

Charlotte followed her, and, when they were both safe in the room, Beatrix shut the door. “Can I trust you, Charlotte?“she said earnestly.

“Yes, Bee, of course!” said Charlotte.

“But trust you absolutely, really and truly, on your word of honour, not to say a word to Mamma?”

Charlotte paused, awestruck at the solemnity of the occasion. “Yes, Bee, really!” she said. “I promise.”

“You see,” pursued Beatrix, “a letter comes for me every other morning, and Mamma is not to know.”

“Is it … is it your beau, Bee?”

Beatrix nodded, smiling and blushing. “And I want you, Charlotte, to get the letter for me before Mamma sees it, and bring it to me if I'm still in bed on Thursday and Saturday and Monday— in fact, to look through the letters every morning, just for fear. I'll show you his writing, and, of course, there's the Harrogate postmark.”

She pulled an unopened envelope out of her dressing-gown pocket and handed it to Charlotte.

Charlotte gazed at it, awestruck and embarrassed. “What nice writing!” she said stupidly.

“Yes, isn't it?” said Beatrix, her pale cheeks blushing with delight. She took the envelope from Charlotte and climbed back into bed.

“You'll do this for me, won't you, Lottie darling?”

“Yes, dear, I will. Oh, Bee, are you really in love with him?” she asked in a whisper.

Beatrix nodded intensely.

“Very much, Bee?”

“Very, very much, Charlotte.”

A sudden pity for Beatrix overwhelmed Charlotte; she seemed to her at that moment a small, helpless child; and on a sudden impulse she flung her arms round her and kissed her. A door down the passage was heard to open. “Mamma's coming!” whispered Charlotte, and next moment Lady Hadlow entered the bedroom to examine the invalid.

That evening Charlotte, who, even after her mother's and Beatrix's return, had continued to write in her diary, sat at the little desk in her bedroom slowly and haltingly recording her private thoughts.

“Bee is in love. When I asked her to-day and when she answered ‘Yes,' I could see at once in her face and eyes that it was true. How lovely she looked! It must be wonderful to be in love, as if life were full of warmth and light. I have never been in love, and yet I know what it must be like, because I know what it is like to be without it, to feel a longing for warmth and light which only love can satisfy. I love Mamma, and, yes, still more, I love Bee, but that is not enough. To love is not the same as to be in love. Shall I ever fall in love, like Bee? And if I do, will he love me in return? It seems too much to hope for. I am not beautiful like Bee.”

The writing down of these hidden thoughts brought her a deep, secret comfort. Whom would
she fall in love with? What would he be like? What would his name be? She turned over various names in her mind. Arthur? No. B? She could think of no man's name beginning with B. C … Charles … Christopher. Christopher was a nice name. D, E, F, G … Gerald … Gerrard? No. Harold? No. Maurice was a nice name, but not so nice as Christopher. Yes, Christopher was her favourite name for a man. It had the same initials as Charlotte. He would be tall, with short, straight, dark hair, and dark brown eyes. She pictured him standing and looking at her: she imagined him speaking her name in a low, intimate voice. “Charlotte!” A small, subtle thrill shot through her heart. She wrote his name in capitals on the blotting-paper, and, after considering it seriously for a moment, wrote Charlotte in capitals under it. Then she began to cancel the letters in each that were common to both. C, H, R, O, T, E. Six! They had six letters in common. What an extraordinary coincidence! Then, rousing herself, she sighed, carefully crossed out the two names on the blotting-paper, blotted the page of the diary, and locked it away.

On each of the three following mornings she watched for, and once found, the letter for Beatrix, and took it to her, watching in a kind of awe the look of shy delight that lit up her face as soon as her eyes fell on the beloved envelope. On the third day Lady Hadlow pronounced Beatrix to be recovered, and she was allowed to get up after breakfast. Thenceforward she volunteered no further confidences to Charlotte. What had actually happened at Harrogate, what had caused their premature
return, what exactly was the relationship between Beatrix and the young doctor, remained a mystery for Charlotte. But by that one small confidence about the letters, and the task of faithfully conveying them to the invalid, Charlotte felt that she had to some degree won Beatrix back.

• • • • • • • •

Months passed. It was the Easter holidays, and Cousin Fanny was away, staying with a married sister. But still the old Beatrix did not return. Her laugh, on the rare occasions when she laughed, was brief, and had a bitterness at the end of it; the old uproarious gusto was gone. Her cheeks had not recovered their colour and roundness; indeed, it seemed to Charlotte that as the spring advanced they became even paler and thinner. Once, when she entered the morning-room where Beatrix and her mother were sitting, she realised that she had intruded upon a private conversation. Lady Hadlow's mouth was grim and narrow, and Beatrix— poor Beatrix—was weeping. Charlotte was overwhelmed with shame, and the sight of Beatrix in tears rent her heart. If only they would tell her what was the matter, and let her share the trouble! She might be able to help and to melt Mamma, perhaps, if Mamma was being hard. But neither of them spoke, and, taking up a book, as if that were what she had come for, Charlotte left the room and went and wept in her bedroom.

A few days later, feeling that she could no longer bear to be cut off from Beatrix, Charlotte determined to break through her diffidence and speak. The opportunity was favourable, for Lady Hadlow
was out paying a call. She knew that Beatrix was in the morning-room, and feeling, as she went, a kind of cold terror, she went to her there.