CHAPTER V
John had been married six weeks. Four of them had been spent with an Angel in Paradise, and two of them at Mambles with Elise.
John had had a hard and lonely young life. He had plodded seriously through an orphaned childhood and into the sharpest crisis in history.
He had seen and read of the death of all his friends and come out of the shambles with one arm, and no observable future.
Then without effort or warning he had been admitted into work that moved nations; and into a friendship that saved his heart.
For three years he had held Arcady against all the enemies of life. And now, young, poor and maimed, he was master of his happiness, and owner of Mambles. It was enough to turn the head of a young man of any imagination, but it had not turned John’s. He behaved at Mambles as he had behaved at Mons. He looked about steadily for his duty and did it. Guns, disaster, and the sheer edge of danger had never deflected John at Mons; roses, young love, and luxury did not deflect him at Mambles. John felt that it was his plain duty to invite his sister-in-law to stay with his wife, and he invited her.
It was in the Dutch garden that John had seen and accepted the duty which in a fortnight had changed an angel into Elise, and Paradise into Mambles.
The moon shone big and yellow over the Dutch garden, it gave a haunting ghost light to the pale pink geraniums and the standard heliotrope rising in mauve clusters above the borders. The air was drunk with sweetness. It seemed as if time had consented to stand still and acknowledge the permanence of joy.
Elise leaning on John’s arm said suddenly, “And John, when may I have Hermione to stay?”
John had felt a momentary pang at her words, because he was so happy that he felt it an inconvenience to recognise the existence of other people.
Then he readjusted himself to the more perfect pleasure of pleasing Elise.
“Whenever you like, dearest,” he replied bravely if untruthfully. “Tell her we shall both be delighted to have her.”
Then one of them sighed.
When John told Mr. Brett what he had done, his father-in-law took his cigar out of his mouth and said in measured accents, “Well, John Sterling, I guess you feel you’ve done your duty. When a man does the plumb foolishest thing he can lay his hands on, naturally he has to find the highest motives for doing it; and a high motive is as easy to find as a barn door fowl; but it won’t lay any eggs for you. You can run round expecting your conscience to applaud you, and maybe your conscience will. I notice a man’s conscience comes when he calls it as quick as a cat after milk, but don’t come round for the approval of Oliver P. Brett!
“No, Sir! I respect a lunatic because he’s dangerous—but I don’t respect a normal man when he starts whistling for trouble; he can get all he wants without whistling.”
John looked haughty and said nothing. He had been so much admired lately by Elise that he felt whatever he did must be right.
Neither John nor Elise objected to Mr. Brett’s presence in their household. Mr. Brett’s personality was a strong one, but it was singularly unobtrusive.
He lived in the library which was a room John didn’t like, and in odd corners of the garden where the lovers never saw him.
Mr. Brett possessed that quality of ease and complete detachment which is only to be found in strong people who go their own way and do not want other people to accompany them.
John had never found the yoke of his secretaryship heavy. The work was astonishingly interesting and it would have been difficult to say which of the two men cared for it most.
It was not his return to work after the most perfect month of his existence which had so suddenly changed the paces of time, and checked John’s visions. Still John was loth to put the change down to the arrival of his charming sister-in-law, although she had arrived rather more copiously than anybody had intended. Hermione appeared within five hours of Elise’s invitation. Her exhausted household might have explained the swiftness of her move, but it did not appear precipitate to Hermione. She lay on a sofa with eau de Cologne on her forehead and gave the most admirable orders. Elise’s message came at eleven o’clock in the morning and Hermione moved with ten boxes, two Pomeranians, a medicine chest, a confidential maid, and a trained nurse, by a three o’clock train. She looked wonderfully fresh on her arrival and had not forgotten to wire for the electric brougham to meet her, because she could not stand the jolting of an ordinary car. She broke the news by telegram that she was bringing her maid and a trained nurse to save Elise trouble. The Pomeranians broke themselves.
A wild and harrowing few minutes was spent on the lawn by John, two gardeners and the chauffeur, in baffling Bodger, John’s bull terrier, in his masterly attempt to account for both the Pomeranians.
The yap of a Pom irritated Bodger in the same manner that in classical tales the bleat of the kid is said to excite the tiger.
A persuasive kick from John, conveniently placed, temporarily relieved the situation. Bodger was led away foaming at the mouth.
Hermione said most sweetly to John as soon as a human voice could be heard above the canine din, “Dear John, how unfortunate that you have a bull terrier! But I daresay you will be able to get rid of it quite soon.” It had not occurred to Hermione that John was not the kind of person to get rid of favourite bull terriers lightly.
Hermione came to Mambles with the best intentions. She liked John, and she felt, with all the tenderness of a whale for sprats, that if she could swallow John and Elise she would always be perfectly sweet to them. But whales do not like sprats who refuse to be swallowed. It took Hermione some days to realise that John, with every wish to please her superficially, would not change his habits to save her life. Hermione did not ask much of John, but she did expect him to be malleable. Elise had always been malleable. She had the habits which suited Hermione, but there was a change now. She had suddenly taken to having the habits that suited John.
Hermione was not rude to John, and she was tenderness itself to Elise, but slowly, with graceful and increasing tenacity, she began to put pressure on Elise. There was no open strife between her and her brother-in-law, but at the end of a fortnight John had said “Damn” to Elise. He had not meant to say it, but the previous evening had been an exceedingly trying one, and John had been more polite than his nature could sustain. The evening had culminated in John’s trying to save the broken remnants of his remarkably good temper by starting an impersonal topic.
“I shall have the lawn mowed to-morrow,” he observed as pleasantly as he could manage, and Hermione replied,
“What a pity to cut off the dear little daisies’ heads!”
Elise said, “Yes, must it be mown, John?” and John had explained briefly, with an unfortunate edge to his voice, that English lawns were wholly incompatible with the heads of daisies. The subject a little abruptly withered, and if Elise had been married longer she would have known that subjects which abruptly wither need very careful handling if they are to be revived in any satisfactory manner.
Elise came into John’s dressing room while he was shaving, and announced quite cheerfully that the lawn mustn’t be mown to-day on any account, because Hermione had a terrible headache and couldn’t bear the sound of a mowing machine under her window.
John said “Damn” with his face all over lather, which made it sound fiercer, and Elise exclaimed,
“Why, John, I think you’re real mean!”
Then they looked at each other aghast.
Elise wore her blue silk dressing gown and a lace cap covered with pink rosebuds. A fortnight ago John had told her that when she wore it he felt that he was entertaining the Madonna.
It was obvious that he was unprepared to give Elise a suitable entertainment in this character at present.
Elise retreated into her bedroom, and John continued shaving. He did not countermand the mowing machine.
It began ten minutes later and went on for a quarter of an hour. Every minute of that time John and Elise heard the lawn-mower, as if they had been the heads of the daisies expecting immediate execution.
Hermione heard it too, but she knew that she was not going on hearing it. She had never been in the position of a threatened daisy.
In a quarter of an hour John told the gardener to stop. The gardener pointed out that it would look rather queer, as he had only just had time to make a stripe across the lawn.
John used language which he could only have heard from a Cavalry General confronted by an ill-cooked meal, and retreated into the shrubbery. The gardener said, “My word! The new master has a tongue!” and went into the kitchen to tell the cook, trusting on the strength of his recital to be given a glass of cider.
John missed Bodger. There are moments in life when only a rather large white bull terrier, personally devoted, but publicly ferocious, can minister to a mind diseased. John had to go on missing Bodger because he was chained (for the first time in his life) in the stable yard, and if he was unchained there would have been no more Pomeranians.
John had never liked small dogs, and Bichon and Bichette had a strange craze for getting under his feet and tripping him up. They had not been trained to do this by Hermione; they had never been trained at all, with the result that they got into everybody’s way and on to everybody’s nerves, except Hermione’s. It sometimes seemed as if Hermione had very strong nerves.
John proceeded down the shrubbery path, frowning.
He had everything in the world that he wanted, including all that he could never have reasonably expected to obtain; and the only thing that he could think of was that the lawn was not properly mowed.
Elise, his honeymoon and Mambles became insignificant and obscure objects in the distant recesses of his brain.
Mambles lay outstretched before him, sunny, fruitful, silent, rich with the dews of the morning; but all John saw was an uneven strip of lawn without daisies, between broad spaces of green, insolently alive with daisies.
At the end of the shrubbery John found his father-in-law on a campstool doing a pen and ink drawing of some hollyhocks against a bit of sixteenth century wall.
Mr. Brett did exquisite pen and ink drawings, and if he had had no other faculty he could have made a living out of it.
John felt an access of irritation at the sight of the steady placidity of his father-in-law. It seemed to him it would have been more sympathetic of Mr. Brett to be doing nothing and to be in an irritated state of mind.
During the last two weeks Mr. Brett had remained bafflingly aloof from the domestic situation. He had not even seemed conscious that there was one, he had taken nobody’s part and he had never corrected or restrained Hermione.
He had not avoided the society of his invalid daughter, he invariably offered her his chair when she came into a room, and helped to fetch some of the things she wanted. (No one person could have possibly fetched them all.)
John supposed that this was Mr. Brett’s way of keeping the peace, but he thought he might have had more tacit support from his father-in-law.
Mr. Brett could not have failed to hear the approach of his son-in-law, because both Bichon and Bichette accompanied John by the simple process of hurling themselves between his legs and shrieking at irregular intervals.
When they reached the end of the shrubbery they caught sight of Mr. Brett, and burst into rapturous greetings a semi-tone higher up the scale and continuous.
Mr. Brett went on drawing his delicate fine lines and did not turn his head.
John puffed at his pipe and watched his father-in-law sulkily.
There were plenty of things for John to do, but John did not feel in the mood for doing any of them, and he resented the fact that Mr. Brett did not give him the provocation of suggesting that he should begin doing them.
“I thought,” Mr. Brett observed by-and-bye, “that I heard the sound of a lawn mower about half an hour since, but I guess I was mistaken: it seems to have stopped.”
The vials of John’s wrath were unloosed.
“It has stopped,” he said furiously, and then he gave a reproduction in a slightly milder form of what he had said to the gardener. He concluded by kicking Bichon into the nearest hedge. This broke off two handsome gladioli of which John had been justly proud, and did nothing to dishearten the vocal explosions of the Poms.
When their shrieks had died away into the distance, Mr. Brett spoke again.
“Does it matter seriously?” he asked, “about that old lawn?”
It seemed to John the weakest thing he had ever heard his father-in-law say. He tried to explain that the lawn was a symbol and mowing it a fixed religious principle, but it was always difficult to explain symbols to Mr. Brett.
“Well,” said his father-in-law patiently, “I guess I wouldn’t let a little thing like a principle worry me. If you want peace, John, you better let symbols rip. I never knew a man keep peaceful with a raft of symbols around him.”
Then John broke down. He poured out the accumulated bitterness of the last fortnight.
“Now, John,” said Mr. Brett gently, when John’s category came to an end. “Let’s give all those other things the go bye. When you get irritated, it helps a heap to stick to one fact. I get more comfort out of a solid fact than I get out of a whole pack of fine arguments.
“Let’s get back to the mowing machine.
“Either you ought not to have started mowing that lawn, or else you should have gone on mowing it until it was finished.”
“Yes, I know that,” said John, whose temper was already a trifle soothed. “That stripe looks awful—just in front of the house too!”
“I wasn’t thinking of the stripe,” said Mr. Brett, starting on a fresh hollyhock. “I guess you and I could stand a stripe on a piece of grass as well as a Zebra stands it on his back, if we had to. What I was thinking of was your future.
“I daresay you think I’ve been kind of tea-coseying out of your situation, sitting under an embroidered cushion and keeping warm, don’t you, John? Well!—I was waiting for that symbol of yours to come along. It don’t do to butt in before a man hollers. As long as you thought I had a prejudice against Hermione I should only have made things worse, and Hermione would have got in under my skin. Now I’ll give you all I’ve got on the subject; and I’ll go right on giving it to you.
“There’s just two ways of treating Hermione. The best way—miles and miles the best way—is to have nothing at all to do with her. It’s too late to think of that now. The other way is never to let her rile you.
“Give in to her when it don’t cost any one else too much, and don’t give in to her when it does, but never splutter.
“Now I don’t want to be critical, but I reckon you spluttered about that lawn.
“Don’t you splutter again, John, it gives her pleasure every time, and if I were you I should continue so that Hermione couldn’t get any pleasure that way.
“It may seem to you a thin consolation—maybe it is—but at my age thin consolations count.”
“I haven’t told you everything,” said John in a contrite voice. “This morning I upset Elise.”
“That’s bad,” said Mr. Brett sympathetically. “That’s too bad, John. For Elise’ll have to get upset enough anyway.”
“I wasn’t fit to marry her,” John groaned. “I never knew I had such a beast of a temper!”
“Don’t you yield to remorse, John,” said Mr. Brett with sudden emphasis. “I don’t know anything as weakening to the moral fibre as remorse, it wears your nerves to a frazzle and takes all the lift out of your next kick. I expect you’ve the same kind of temper as anybody else has, when they’re stung by a hornet.
“You asked for trouble when you invited Hermione to stay with you, and you’ve got trouble, but you don’t need to double up under it. You keep on smiling and be sure you are right. You stick to the facts.
“This is your place, that lawn’s your lawn. If Hermione don’t like the sound of a mowing machine, you tell Elise how sorry you are the country don’t suit Hermione. It’s the smile Elise wants, and what Hermione wants ain’t coming her way at present. If retributive justice ever comes off I’d like to be there. I’ve tarried the Lord’s leisure quite a while.”
John laughed and wheeled towards the house. He felt reinvigorated, and almost unashamed.
He would kiss Elise and have the lawn mowed before lunch.
When Mr. Brett came in at lunch time, the lawn was mowed, the stripe had disappeared. Elise looked perfectly happy and Hermione had moved her room.
“She said,” Elise explained a little apologetically to her father, “that your room was the only one in the house where she couldn’t hear the lawn being mowed, and she was sure you wouldn’t mind my putting her into it!”
John glanced quickly at his father-in-law, but Mr. Brett was calmly peeling a ripe tomato which, with a small, square piece of cheese, comprised his entire lunch.
“Sure, Elise,” he said cheerfully. “I’m pleased as Punch to change that room. I kinder dislike the frogs moaning down by the pond in that guttural way they have—the same as if they were interned aliens. You tell Hermione I’m real pleased to pass her on those frogs—”
CHAPTER VI
The Princess Girla had a very strong sense of duty; from her earliest years she had believed in doing right, and she had known that she ought to have what she wanted. There was a moral compulsion behind her simplest desires; and she never undertook anything without explaining to God what she expected from His co-operation.
She often saw with sympathy the suffering in which people were involved while carrying out her wishes.
This insight never deflected Hermione’s will, but it made her charming to serve.
She was extremely generous in ways which caused her no inconvenience, and her manner in getting her wants made known was little short of exquisite. Hermione’s confidential maid, who was a Roman Catholic, firmly believed that if the Princess could be led to embrace the true faith, she would eventually be canonised.
Hermione was of the stuff out of which the most perfect Mother Superiors are made. As a lady Abbess she would have been feared and adored by all her nuns, and no one except, perhaps, an impotent Father Confessor in a moment of rebellion, would have thought of deposing her.
The trained nurse believed that Hermione suffered from a mysterious disease not yet discovered by the doctors. Hermione had suggested to her that nurses really understood illness far more thoroughly than medical men; and she gave the nurse five guineas a week, and a series of beautiful hats.
Nurse Davies frequently told people that the Princess Girla often reminded her of Florence Nightingale and Joan of Arc. Her body was pathetically frail but her spirit was indomitable.
Torture was nothing to her.
Hermione had an iron self-control even as a child. She had behaved faultlessly. No one had ever had to correct her manners. She had had a young and jealous mother, who first adored and spoiled her, and when Hermione reached the age of fifteen, had turned against her with an antagonism as fierce as it was secret. Hermione had for a time meditated a friendly alliance with her father, but she gave up the idea when she discovered that Mr. Brett refused to take her on her own valuation, and never permitted any criticism of his wife. Theodora fought her daughter for every human soul that came into the house. They both had beauty and wit, Theodora had experience and Hermione youth. They were very evenly matched combatants, but the extra weight of authority possessed by Theodora weighed down the scale. Hermione decided at eighteen that she would leave her home. She gained her father’s consent to travel with friends of his to Europe; but she went without her mother’s approval.
Theodora resented Europe, except for clothes. She would have liked to rule in Paris but Mr. Brett had refused to give her any assistance. European countries were strange as well as illusory. They would not permit Theodora to rule without her husband. So she turned her back upon Europe and took up New York. But an instinct warned her that Hermione would conquer the old world, and leave her perpetually dissatisfied with the new.
When Hermione left America she decided never to return to it except as a visitor, and when she could take precedence of her mother.
She met Prince Girla in Paris, kept him on a tight rope for a year, and then married him. Her precedence was now assured, but she was disappointed when she discovered that in spite of Prince Girla’s connection with the ruling family of Roumania, the fact that he belonged to a younger branch (quite precluding succession) gave her much less social importance than she had expected. They both spoke French perfectly, so that language was no barrier between them. Prince Girla had heavy debts, but he was madly in love with Hermione.
He would have shot himself if he had failed to win her, although it is improbable that he would have suggested marrying her if she had not been able to bring him a magnificent dowry.
At nineteen there was only one thing that Hermione did not know about life—and that was marriage. She had spent much time and ingenuity upon the subject, but marriage is the one experience upon which no correlation of facts, however careful, has much practical bearing.
It took Hermione three days of personal experience to understand married life, but it took her longer than this to teach her husband.
Hermione said afterwards, to her greatest friends, that she was afraid she was not material enough for marriage. In the Roman Catholic Church marriage is accepted as one of the lesser sacraments, but if Hermione had been the Pope she would have altered this definition.
Prince Girla did the best he could with a spiritual tie, but he had not been brought up on those principles, and he was very much in love.
The whole affair was disastrous, and it was complicated by the birth of a boy within a year of the marriage. The Girla family took this as a sign of grace, and not as an omen of destruction. Their rejoicing was premature. Hermione went through her trial with an incredulous serenity. She could not believe that Providence really meant to play her such a trick, but when she found it had, she decided to make the occasion final.
She would never have another child, nor did she mean to be inconvenienced by the one she possessed.
Hermione did nothing to defy the marriage law; she would have thought it very wrong to defy a law as well as rather foolish when it could be so easily adapted to her convenience without defiance. She became seriously ill.
No doctor could quite understand the cause of the Princess’s illness (its chief symptom was the enforced absence of her husband for two years), but of the fact itself there could be no reasonable doubt. Hermione barely ate enough to keep herself alive, she was as frail as a leaf, and suffered intensely, with heroic fortitude—but she chose her sufferings.
At the end of two years Prince Girla had had enough of it, he still admired Hermione but he wanted a wife. He insisted upon an interview and he told her in fluent French with the extreme clarity of the Latin mind what he thought of her.
Hermione lay on a sofa with her eyes shut, breathing softly. There were moments in his long and emphatic speeches when Prince Girla pulled himself up short and wondered if Hermione, who was as still as a statue, was really alive at all.
But Hermione was alive; she waited until the Prince had said all that had accumulated in his goaded and troubled spirit for the space of two years, then she slowly opened her eyes, and selecting a few gentle words which had occurred to her while he was stamping about the room, she uttered them. They were perfectly wifely phrases and they gave Prince Girla no justification whatever for what took place.
He struck Hermione.
This was the end of the marriage.
Prince Girla could not get a divorce on account of his religion, nor was Hermione anxious for one.
She preferred to keep her title, and she had had enough of marriage. Prince Girla apologised for the blow, and from time to time offered abject terms of reconciliation; but Hermione refused to see him again. She said she forgave him from the bottom of her heart and mentioned meeting him at the judgment seat of Heaven where there was—as she was thankful to reflect—no marrying nor giving in marriage, but she would not meet him upon earth where the arrangements were less satisfactory.
Her relations-in-law wrote her letters which Hermione described as “terribly Roumanian,” but they failed either to move her, or, as they subsequently attempted, to cause her social destruction.
Hermione despised the Roumanian court which she privately described as “potty,” and in the larger field of Europe her character remained unblemished. She lived with perfect discretion; she was a Princess, and she had an enormous income. She made no complaints, and yet every one who mattered knew that Girla had beaten her black and blue continually.
Men raved against her ill-treatment and black-balled Girla out of their clubs; but Hermione’s best and strongest supporters were those of her own sex. She accepted passively and up to a certain point the admiration of men; at this point she definitely checked it; but she made efforts to attract women, and their admiration never became inconvenient to her.
Hermione was said to have a purifying influence over young married women, and if they sometimes became very unhappy with their husbands, she became an increasing support to them.
It was with this theory in mind that the Princess Girla came to Mambles. If she had been able to help other young married women, how much more ought she not to help Elise?
In her first twenty-four hours Hermione had pointed out to her sister, with infinite tact and gentleness, that there is a selfishness of two, as well as a selfishness of one, and that Elise might very easily fall into it.
That evening Elise forbore to go out into the garden with John, and sang Gounod’s “There Is a Green Hill Far Away” instead, in the presence of the assembled family. John had never appreciated sacred music, and he hated Gounod from that hour.
Hermione warned Elise how soon she could exhaust the affections of her husband by permitting a demonstrative regard.
“Do not rebuff him,” she explained gently, “but evade him.”
Elise tried to evade John, and neither of them liked it.
Hermione told Elise how difficult young married life is, and Elise, to whom it had come as easily as sunshine, began to see in it obstacles and perils to John’s happiness and her own, which would have been exaggerated in a jungle exclusively tenanted by wild beasts.
It never occurred to Elise that Hermione could be wrong; because Hermione loved her so much and had been so unhappy herself, and only wanted to save and shield Elise from a similar unhappiness.
Elise became pale with apprehension over the disasters and pitfalls which lay ahead of herself and John, and even for the gardener’s wife who had been married the week before, and did not look as if it had made any difference.
Elise would have liked to ask her father’s help but that might seem as if she had not perfect confidence in John, and she would have loved to talk to John about it, only that might seem as if she had not perfect confidence in Hermione, so that she decided to keep her anxieties to herself.
She struggled manfully on, evading John, and seeing that Mr. Brett was regularly and carefully attended to, even when he wanted to be left alone.
“I should never,” Hermione carefully explained to Elise, “leave dear Papa to stroll about by himself, or even sit for any length of time, without running in to see if he is still alive. At any moment we may lose him.”
Of course Hermione could not take this duty upon herself, partly because of Mr. Brett’s inexplicable dislike to her company, brought on, no doubt, by a diseased state of mind; and partly because her own health required the utmost watchfulness and repose. But Elise could make a point of running in and out and following Mr. Brett up, without any grave consequences to anybody, and if it interrupted her persistent tête-à-tête with John, so much the more precious would she make this rare companionship.
“I do not want you ever to think of me,” Hermione said tenderly, “if I never see your face from one day’s end to the other, Childie, I shall not complain! All yesterday I sat alone, hour after hour, while you went fishing with John. I thought of Papa once or twice and I was anxious at your staying out so late—but for the rest, I want you to dismiss your little old sister from your mind. I am one of those whose path in life is cut out for loneliness.”
Of course Hermione’s path was very rarely lonely at Mambles. Elise made constant opportunities to be with her sister, her little feet grew weary with running to and fro, her heart beat fast with suppressed fears, and she often lay awake for hours haunted by remorse. Had she neglected Hermione? Would Papa die suddenly while she was out of the room? Was John’s crossness when she left him quite the reward she had expected from her evasive tactfulness?
The cook, too, was difficult. She said she couldn’t see the sense of the Princess’s meals. She had no objection to Mr. Brett’s, which were no trouble, and took place at the same time as other people’s, though she wondered that he could keep alive on them, such stuff would kill a healthy rabbit if exclusively condemned to it! But the Princess liked her meals to be ordered at different times on different days, so that nobody knew when they sat down how soon they would have to be up again, and they were all new-fangled dishes which had to be cooked just right—a slice off anything cold, even off a loaf of bread, was simply sent down again as so much rat poison.
Elise wrinkled her delicate eyebrows, and wondered distractedly if she ought to get an extra cook for Hermione, and if she did, wouldn’t she (cooks’ tempers being what they were) have to ask John to build an extra kitchen, and would John build an extra kitchen while there was a war on?
She would have liked to consult John about it, but Hermione had expressly told her, “Never take your domestic difficulties to your husband, many married lives are ruined by just that lack of self-control on the part of young wives. Always meet him with a smiling face and tell him that everything is perfectly easy.”
Life became more and more complicated for Elise, and she often wondered if she would have been able to bear it at all if Hermione had not been there.
This state of tension was unexpectedly broken by Bodger.
One Sunday afternoon they were all sitting out on the lawn having tea. Mr. Brett had a glass of milk with digestive biscuits, Hermione had chocolate with whipped cream and savoury sandwiches, and John and Elise real tea with bread and butter. The Poms took what they could get from each table, and shrieked over it.
It was a lovely south-west day, high clouds sailed swiftly overhead, passing each other on different levels, in a clear blue sky. The garden was full of light movements, travelling scents and midsummer colours. John had moved the wind-screen five times for Hermione, quite good-naturedly. Elise was just wondering whether it would affect her married life irreparably if she should suggest a walk with John after tea, when Bodger, having gnawed through a substantial rope and missed the detaining hand of the stable boy by a fraction of a second, burst upon the scene.
The peaceful lawn rocked in chaos. There was a table between Bodger and one Pom: for a fleeting moment the rampart stood erect, and then in jangled pieces bestrewed the lawn.
Mr. Brett reached out an arm, seized the Pom nearest him, and stuffed it, screaming, into a capacious pocket; John ought to have caught the other Pom—he nearly caught it, but unfortunately the sight of Bodger passing imperturbably through hot chocolate and whipped cream (it was Hermione’s table he had overturned) checked him, by a gust of laughter. The chuckle cost him the life of the Pom.
Bichon dived past him, making foolishly away from Hermione towards the open lawn. Hermione screamed and deflected Bodger from her chair. He was on the Pom’s trail in a second and an instant later Bichon was painlessly shaken into Eternity.
John caught Bodger only a moment afterwards, but there was nothing left to catch of Bichon: he had entered upon the first unbroken silence of his career.
John beat Bodger sternly and without mercy, but Bodger merely licked his lips, writhed as a matter of form, and hunted for the other Pom, out of the corner of a wicked eye.
Bichette had hysterics in Mr. Brett’s waistcoat.
Hermione missed a great opportunity. She should have fainted, probably she would have fainted, only a spontaneous faint comes off quicker than one which is premeditated. Before she had time to think of it, Elise had forestalled her.
Elise had spent a long hot day trying to make everybody happy and comfortable, and bloodshed upon the top of these efforts was more than she could stand.
“Now,” said Hermione with her grey eyes cold with hatred, “perhaps John you will be content to part with that unspeakable monster, when you see what it has done to your poor wife!”
“Hermione,” said Mr. Brett, suddenly depositing the remaining Pom upon her lap. “Quit this lawn and take this demented muff with you. You and your dogs between you have done enough mischief for one bright summer’s day.”
Hermione murmured that dear Papa was of course upset, but she did leave the lawn with Bichette under her arm, casting a glance of terror and aversion at the recumbent, contemplative form of Bodger.
John was on his knees beside his wife.
“She’s round, John,” said Mr. Brett very gently. “I guess the thing that will suit her best is for you to stay there quietly with her till dinner time.”
Elise whispered that she was perfectly all right, but some one must go at once to help and comfort Hermione.
“Sure,” agreed Mr. Brett with alacrity. “I’ll go right in and see to Hermione. I’ve assisted her some already, but it ain’t anything to what I might do if I put my mind to it.”
Mr. Brett moved off with unusual quickness across the lawn, and in a fit of absent-mindedness called out “Good dog” as he passed Bodger.
CHAPTER VII
When Mr. Brett reached the house his steps became slower. The look on his face was that of a man who foresees and dreads the weight of a task which he has already experienced.
He was not going to evade it, but he halted to measure his strength before he adjusted himself to the familiar yoke.
The large entrance hall of Mambles was a serene and sunny place.
It was filled with flowers and the still clear light of the retreating sun. A flight of shallow steps led to the upper regions of the house.
Mr. Brett stood still for a moment, resting unseeing eyes upon his collection of household treasures.
He had furnished Mambles to suit his taste and relinquished it to suit the tastes of others. There was nothing in it that had not the personal note of his selective mind, and there was nothing that he had regretted relinquishing to Elise and John.
He walked up the shallow stairs slowly and with effort.
“What I can take easy I will,” he said to himself reflectively.
Hermione had moved into Mr. Brett’s rooms in the left wing of the house. The rooms were neither as large nor as luxuriously furnished as those which had been prepared for her by Elise; but they had suited Mr. Brett.
Mr. Brett knocked at the sitting-room door, a rustle of starched petticoats and the reproving face of Nurse Davies answered him.
“The Princess is resting, and must not be disturbed,” she said with low-voiced emphasis.
Mr. Brett’s eyes narrowed a little and then became curiously fixed.
“You can go downstairs,” he said quietly, “and stay there until I send for you.”
Nurse Davies was spoilt and authoritative, her profession had raised her in the social scale with a jerk, and some of the jerk adhered to her manners. She opened her lips to bring Mr. Brett to his senses, and then shut them again with an impression that her own senses were suddenly needed elsewhere.
Mr. Brett was only an old man dying of diabetes, but as she explained afterwards downstairs to the housekeeper, his eyes were uncanny, and she had never been able to stand against anything at all queer.
Mr. Brett stood aside until she had passed him and then walked into Hermione’s sitting room.
Hermione lay on the sofa by the open window. She had had time to change into a white satin dressing gown trimmed with swansdown, and to look very ill. She was surrounded by smelling salts and heart tonics, her eyes were closed, but she had heard what had taken place between her father and Nurse Davies outside her door, and she would have recalled the latter if she had not thought that it would be wiser to appear beyond the power of speech.
Mr. Brett looked at her speculatively, pulled forward a chair, hitched it backward, and picking up a yesterday’s “Times” proceeded to rustle its leaves briskly.
Hermione’s eyelids trembled nervously.
“Please Papa,” she murmured faintly, “do not make that noise, my nerves are too unstrung to bear it.”
“Very well, Hermione,” said Mr. Brett slowly and distinctly, “if you want that I shall stop reading ‘The Times’ you can open your eyes and sit up. If you’re too exhausted to speak I shall sit right here and rustle.
“Nobody has ever been known to suffer physically from the rustling of a newspaper and I’m going to see if maybe it won’t revive you.”
The Princess set her lips in a long thin line, which was unbecoming to her, and there was a long pause during which Mr. Brett rustled systematically, and Hermione was conscious of the afflicting sound in every nerve of her body.
An unwonted flush came over her countenance, she drew her cushions a little higher with a jerk, and opened her eyes.
“If you wish to speak to me, Papa,” she said with dignity, “I should not dream of refusing to listen to you, however much pain it costs me.”
Mr. Brett laid down “The Times” with satisfaction.
“That’s the way I like to hear you talk, Hermione,” he observed cheerfully, “because that’s exactly what I’ve come up here to do. I’ve come up here to make things painful for you.”
Hermione raised incredulous and exasperating eyebrows, but she made no comment on her father’s preposterous project.
“When I was a young man,” Mr. Brett continued in his slow unemotional drawl, “I made quite a study of mules. I had to drive ’em, and if you have to drive a mule you want to study it.
“Now the doggonest thing a mule can do to a human being is to baulk. You can light out from a kicking mule and you can drag a rearing mule down, but if a mule baulks, you want to revise the Catechism and put in a special clause to permit swearing. But I got wise to the mule’s temperament after a bit. I used to give ’em something they liked just out of reach of their noses—say carrots—and if that didn’t do, I put something behind them so unpleasant that it kinder induced them to prance forward unexpectedly in the direction I was wanting them to go. When I say unexpectedly, I mean unexpectedly to the mules.
“Can you think of anything you would like to have, Hermione?”
“Dear Papa,” said his daughter sweetly, “I have lived so long abroad that I hardly understand your quaint way of putting things. I am sure you mean to be funny, but American humour escapes me.”
Mr. Brett did not smile but his eyes lighted appreciatively.
“You don’t lose anything, Hermione,” he said gently. “I guess you have quite a wit of your own.
“Don’t you think it’s time you went back to Paris? There hasn’t been an air raid for some while.”
Hermione’s flush deepened.
“I don’t expect you to understand me,” she said pathetically. “You never have, but I feel that my first duty is to Elise. I left Paris to come to her, not to escape air raids.”
“If you want a house on the Champs Elysées,” said Mr. Brett meditatively, “with a garden—say the word. I happen to know that I could procure one by wire.”
“I should have thought you were clever enough not to offer me a bribe,” said Hermione coldly. She had always wanted a house in the Champs Elysées big enough for entertaining on a large scale.
“I should refuse a palace rather than neglect a duty.”
Mr. Brett pushed his chair back until the front legs of it waved dangerously in the air.
“I have known calls,” he replied impressively, “to higher duties come out of palaces. In fact they generally do. Duties dwindle with the rent. I don’t mean a bribe, but I suggest an opening. You have remarkable powers, Hermione, and there are opportunities in Europe just now which may not occur again, and which, if you hanker after celebrity, would pick and dry it for you while you waited. I might be able—if I saw the point of it—to push some of these opportunities your way.”
Hermione looked at Mr. Brett. Something flashed into her eyes, and was gone again in a moment. She was an ambitious woman and hitherto she had had to practise her struggles in secret and alone.
No one had ever seen her struggle, but though she had retained an outward and gracious passivity, Hermione had felt the strain of her efforts, and there were heights to which, without assistance, she could not, however gracefully, climb.
Mr. Brett had never backed his family’s social yearnings before. He had markedly refrained from using his extraordinary powers for any personal purposes.
He was making a great concession to his eldest daughter, and she knew it. Her heart beat faster than if she had been assisting at the process of a palpitation; then her innate violence of will reasserted itself. If she accepted any concession from her father, she must lay down her will as the price of it. Hermione shivered as if the room were cold. Her will was her religion—she called it for the moment, her cross.
Hermione was of the stuff out of which persecutors are made. It is very nearly the same stuff which creates martyrs, except that in the case of martyrs vindictiveness does not appear essential.
Hermione could bear much to keep her will intact, even the relinquishing of a life-long ambition; still she did not like relinquishing anything, and she breathed quickly; then she said with her voice a trifle strained and high,
“I daresay you do not believe me, but my desire to save and protect Elise is stronger than any personal wish of my own.”
Mr. Brett let his chair descend slowly and carefully from its precarious angle.
“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “if that is so, Hermione, carrots is dead.”
Mr. Brett could talk perfectly good grammar when he chose, but he avoided it in the presence of his eldest daughter. The perfection of her own manner, he often observed, was distinction enough for any family.
“I don’t know what else you think you can do against me,” said Hermione defensively, “but I warn you that if you attempt to drive me away from here I shall appeal to Elise, both against you—and against John!
“You have apparently succeeded in poisoning his not very acute intellect against me, but my poor darling little sister will stand by me—whatever you may choose to say or do.”
“She might stand against me,” agreed Mr. Brett reflectively. “I don’t remember that I’ve ever done a thing to hurt her since she was born—still that don’t make any difference, but I don’t advise you to calculate that Elise’ll stand against John. You’re her poor broken-hearted sister all right, all right, but John’s her young husband. If she sees John’s heart being cut into, yours won’t have much of a chance.
“She knows she can’t make you happy.
“You’ve chosen your sorrows and sit on them with the clinch of a domestic fowl, but Elise can make John happy, and I guess—take it by and large—she will.
“But I don’t mind admitting to you, Hermione, that I don’t want this tug of war to come off. Tugs of war suit some people—a frail, broken-hearted, high-brow like yourself finds nourishment in a tug of war; but normal people don’t; and while the dust and the yells are heartening you all up, an unselfish, sensitive girl like Elise gets cut as thin as a wood shaving. I’d take some trouble to keep Elise happy.
“Say, Hermione, have you ever been happy? I don’t mean top-dog happy—but real happy, like a field of buttercups in the sun?”
Hermione’s lips quivered.
“Happiness,” she said, “is not for me.”
“Sunshine is for everybody,” said Mr. Brett gently, “who’ll let the sun alone, and like it.
“Before you came Elise was happy. She was just like a little open cup filled with gold; you never saw the child so gay; and John was happy; he is the quiet kind that has to hide itself to feel at home, but he sure was at home. They didn’t need any saving—then.
“I used to take a power of comfort sitting out under the old yew tree, thinking of those two children off somewhere—with their happiness.”
“It wouldn’t have lasted,” said Hermione hurriedly. “Unthinking happiness is the shutting out of life—it leads to selfishness and satiety.”
“Don’t you believe it, Hermione,” said Mr. Brett impressively. “It’s decayed teeth give us the toothache, not sweets. Happiness and unhappiness ain’t selfish or unselfish, it depends on who’s got them.
“Marie Antoinette was just as unhappy as she could live, but she kicked her throne over and got the guillotine into the family for a necklace of diamonds. You couldn’t make Elise and John selfish, not if you set out and offered them Bond Street.
“I don’t know much about religion, what with one thing and another I guess it’s kept me dodging; but I remember being told that by their fruits ye shall know them. Fruits Hermione—that sounds like good sense don’t it, and good sense ought to make good religion. Well, how about your fruits?”
“I don’t know what you mean—” said Hermione icily. She would have tossed her head if the pillows had not been too low for it.
“I do not think you can find that I have done anything wrong.”
Mr. Brett ignored Hermione’s negative standard.
“I don’t say much about your childhood,” he began impartially. “You took credit for what was given you in the way of looks and wit, you practised them up a lot, and then fought your mother with them, to take away from her what she’d been given, along the same lines. Maybe it was your fault, maybe it was hers. All I know is you fought.
“Later you fought me to get hold of Arnold, and make a pink sugar pet lamb of him. Well, you had me there; for quite a time you took the bones out of Arnold. I daresay you would have ruined him, but you had other fish to fry, and then the war came along, and Arnold headed right, and got his quittance.
“You fought your mother for Elise too, and you know what happens when two dogs get on to a bone? Well, that’s what happened to Elise. Then I consented for you to go to Europe. It struck me people in Europe had always liked fighting, and you were getting wasted in a civilised country like America.
“You made a mistake in marrying a European, because European men expect to have a life of their own, but by gosh—Prince Girla made a greater mistake in marrying you!
“Hermione Brett, if that young man is put into a low place in the next world, make no mistake about it—you’ll foot the bill! You’ve driven him towards vice more surely than any poor girl who gets a hardly earned living by it—and it wasn’t your profession. You had money. Then you brought a child into the world and left it. There may be a shabbier trick to play on the universe than that, but I don’t know it. I guess speculating with trust funds is a kind action compared with leaving a little child to grow up motherless.”
“I did not leave my child!” cried Hermione passionately. “He was taken from me!”
“No, Hermione,” said Mr. Brett inexorably. “Your husband said he wanted the child to grow up in his own country, but he would not separate it from you if you would live there, and let him come into the house for three months of the year, so that he could be with the child part of the time. You could have kept it. He offered to draw up a deed of separation on those lines—and you refused.”
“I couldn’t live in Roumania,” said Hermione sharply. “The climate would have killed me, and Girla’s word was not to be trusted.”
“His deed was,” said Mr. Brett imperturbably. “Very large financial interests hung on his keeping his word. I drew it up myself, and I had guaranties.”
There was a long silence. Mr. Brett sighed heavily. The dark pockets under his eyes looked deeper than ever.
“I think I’ll die before you,” he said, as if he were speaking to himself.
“I think I’ll die pretty quick. I’d rather. There’s lots of mistakes I’ve made; some of them lie on me pretty heavy at times, but I’ve come short of blasphemy. I haven’t called what I wanted ‘the will of God.’ But what’s going to pull you through when you come to the other side, Hermione, I don’t know. You’ve lied to yourself so thick and bad, there isn’t anything in you that ain’t what you don’t expect; and you’ve deceived a crowd of people! Your wits helped you, and your looks; and all the people who depended on you, or ought to have depended on you, you’ve let down.
“Well, I’m your father. Seeing what you are don’t let me out of that. But I’ve told you the truth, and it don’t let you out either.
“If you want to try to get the better of me now—start trying. I don’t say you won’t be able to do a cruel bit of harm before I down you, but I guess I’m going to down you, if that Viennese doctor was worth what I gave him to stiffen me up.”
Mr. Brett rose wearily, as he spoke, and wandered to the south window; from it he could see Elise and John upon the lawn. John was reading out loud to her. John read out loud with great monotony, but no elocution could have sounded more impressive to Elise.
“I don’t know, Hermione,” said Mr. Brett unexpectedly, “that the person I’m not sorriest for after all, isn’t yourself.”
Hermione made no answer to this statement. She lay as still as a statue with her face turned to the wall.
Mr. Brett saw that the sun was in her eyes and he pulled the blind down gently to shield her face before he left the room.
CHAPTER VIII
Mr. Brett was suddenly aroused from his sleep by the sight of John in a green dressing gown standing at the foot of his bed.
John had switched the light on and there was no more colour in his face than on a blank sheet of paper.
“Hermione’s ill,” he said urgently. “I hate to disturb you, but she’s most awfully ill; we’ve got a doctor, he’s with her now. Can’t you hear her screaming?”
Mr. Brett listened. Mambles was a solid, deep-built house and his rooms were on the opposite wing to his daughter’s, but he could distinctly hear a high travelling sound like the shriek of wind in a broken chimney.
“Well, she ain’t dying from lung complaint,” said Mr. Brett after a pause.
He made no effort to get up, he merely eyed John with sardonic thoughtfulness over the bedclothes.
“What do you want me to do about it?” he asked.
“The doctor thought I ought to tell you,” said John a little reproachfully. “Nothing seems able to soothe her. Every now and then she screams for you. It’s awful to see her, her eyes are nearly starting out of her head. She never stops screaming.”
“I’ll have to see the doctor before I get up,” said Mr. Brett consideringly. “What’s been done to soothe her anyway?”
John hesitated.
“The doctor gave her a powerful sedative,” he explained, “and of course we kept saying everything we thought could help. I promised to get rid of Bodger.”
Mr. Brett was suddenly contorted by a spasm of silent laughter.
“John,” he murmured as soon as he could speak, “you’re a good boy, but you don’t show staying power. That bull terrier’s a trump card: you don’t want to throw him, in the first round. He’s more of a symbol than a streaky lawn. Don’t you do anything hasty with Bodger. You have him farmed out and we’ll have him back some day bringing his sheaves with him. But I don’t want to get up unless I have to, it’ll disturb my digestion. You send that doctor man in to talk to me and get Elise back into her own room. Hermione has her nurse and she can scream just as well with her as she can with a crowd of people standing round gaping at her, but maybe she won’t want to.”
“I don’t think you understand, Sir, how ill she is,” said John gravely. “She is quite delirious; she doesn’t know whether we are there or not.”
Mr. Brett shook his head.
“I fancy she’s just as conscious as she needs to be to make her points,” he said drily. “Unconsciousness sets in with Hermione when other people want to make theirs. She won’t forget to ask what you’ve done about Bodger first thing to-morrow morning.”
John withdrew, unconvinced and shocked. As he opened the door a rush of sound passed into the room.
Mr. Brett lay perfectly still listening to it.
Theodora had suffered from screaming attacks when she was angry (and when she thought she was hurt she was always angry), but she had never been seriously frightened. There was something curious to Mr. Brett in the sound of his daughter’s voice. It was a note of fear, and as he was registering this new note, the doctor came hurriedly into the room.
Dr. Raymond had motored over from the nearest small town. He was a clever and keen young man who had overworked himself in France and been sent into the country to recuperate. Mr. Brett looked at him attentively.
“What do you think my daughter’s got an attack of?” he asked.
“To tell you the truth,” said Dr. Raymond, “I don’t know—there’s an hysterical element in it of course, but there was nothing to indicate this kind of seizure when I saw her before. Her temperature is 106 and her pulse is like a jig-saw puzzle—the attack may turn to meningitis or some other acute brain trouble, and I suppose it has been produced by shock. They tell me she saw her dog killed this afternoon. The seriousness of her condition is that she isn’t in a fit state to stand any additional illness. It may be the dog of course, but she keeps calling out for you.”
“No, it ain’t the dog,” said Mr. Brett reflectively. “What she’s got an attack of, is the truth. It’s rare, but I don’t believe that as a disease it’s fatal.
“I told her what I thought of her this afternoon, and what she wants now is for me to take it all back. Well! I don’t see it that way. I didn’t tell her for fun. I told her because I thought she right down needed it.
“The burnt child dreads the fire, but you don’t want to stop the child dreading it, you want to stop it being burned. Now what do you anticipate will happen if she’s left to scream?”
“Neither her heart nor her brain will stand much more of it,” said Dr. Raymond gravely. “I can’t answer for the consequences if she keeps calling for you and you don’t go—anything may happen. On the other hand she may not recognise you even if you’re there. Her brain is caught on one point and sticks there, the excitement keeps mounting and nothing I’ve been able to do has touched it.”
“She’ll recognise me all right,” said Mr. Brett with conviction, “and she’ll get off her point—when she’s made it. If she was the only person concerned I’d leave things the way they are. But I’ve got my other daughter to consider, and that does me in. If I come along to the Princess Girla, I want you to undertake to get Mrs. Sterling back to bed and keep her there.”
Dr. Raymond agreed with alacrity, and hurried back to his patient.
Mr. Brett got up slowly and put on his bedroom slippers with reluctance. He was by no means convinced that he was doing the right thing, but he felt that neither Elise nor John would have understood his running counter to the doctor.
The servants, white and trembling, were all assembled in the big hall listening to the acute and terrible sound that filled the house. Mr. Brett looked at them contemplatively over the banisters.
“You can all make tracks for bed,” he said in his steady soothing drawl. “You can take my word for it—when there’s that amount of noise in an illness there’s no immediate danger. All except the cook, and she can send up some hot drinks to Mr. and Mrs. Sterling’s apartments.”
Then he opened Hermione’s door and walked to the foot of her bed. Even Mr. Brett was momentarily impressed by Hermione’s appearance. Her face was hardly human, it was wild and strained beyond recognition, her fixed eyes had an awful stare in them of blank terror. She had reached the acutest point of consciousness, beyond which the mind passes out of the power of personality.
“I’m not! I’m not! I’m not!” screamed Hermione.
In the absolute stillness of the room her tones gathered an incredible beating force: they neither changed their accent nor their sound, but swung on like the regular rise and fall of a piston rod in an engine.
Elise knelt in a crumpled heap on the floor by her sister’s bed, trying to hold one of Hermione’s burning, restless hands. The other clutched and plucked persistently at the counterpane.
Nurse Davies made ice packs by the bedside. John and Dr. Raymond clung together by the window as if their mutual impotence was a protection to them.
Mr. Brett faced his daughter consideringly. He fixed his quiet, dominating eyes upon hers, without anxiety. For one astonishing moment the room emptied itself of sound. Mr. Brett said steadily and gently,
“Hermione, I guess you have me beat.”
Nobody knew what he meant or guessed that in that instant’s pause he had passed a life sentence upon himself.
His words hardly reached Hermione’s maddened and excited brain, but something in his presence succeeded in breaking in upon the morbid concentration of her mind. The pupils of her eyes contracted suddenly: she had recognised him.
A few moments later the screaming began again, but it had lost its regularity, there were moments when it fell into vague mutterings.
Dr. Raymond stepped forward and felt her pulse again.
“I think the sedative is taking hold now,” he said with satisfaction.
Mr. Brett drew an arm chair forward beside the bed.
“I’ll stay here till morning,” he said to the doctor. “You carry out your part of the programme now. I guess the Princess don’t need an audience for a nap.”
Dr. Raymond cleared the room except for Nurse Davies, and after giving her a few orders withdrew. It was a puzzling case, but there was no doubt the brain crisis was over.
Mr. Brett drew out of his dressing-gown pocket a small and much worn book. It was called “The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine,” by Frank Stockton. Mr. Brett preferred it to any other novel.
Hermione still screamed at irregular intervals, but during one of her quieter moments Mr. Brett said to the Nurse,
“Now Nurse Davies it isn’t going to do a mite of good the two of us Agag-ing round. You just go into the next room and get a little rest. If there’s any change in the Princess’s condition I’ll wake you.”
Nurse Davies hesitated, but to her surprise Hermione slowly opened her eyes and looked at her with apparent consciousness.
“Yes,” she said, “leave me with my father.” Then she closed her eyes again.
When Mr. Brett and Hermione were alone, Mr. Brett drew up the blind and opened the window near him, then he returned to his arm chair, pulled a thick rug over his knees, arranged the reading lamp, so that it shed a light over Hermione’s face, and settled to his reading.
For an hour or more Hermione slept the deep sleep of intense exhaustion, then she woke with a start and fixed her strained eyes on her father’s face.
“Is that you Papa?” she asked quickly. “Am I going to die?”
Mr. Brett shook his head.
“No, Hermione,” he said, “you’ll live on yet a while. I’m not a betting man, but I’d take odds on it. Do you want that I should read out loud to you ‘The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine’? I don’t know a book more calculated to soothe the sick or enliven the down-hearted. I don’t say it’s like life—but it’s the way life might be like if we took irregular things more regularly.”
Hermione shook her head.
“No, I don’t want to be read to,” she whispered. “I want to talk to you. I think I can now. I can see what I want to say.”
Mr. Brett leaned forward and lit a spirit lamp beside the bed.
“Well,” he said, “let’s have some soup first. You can talk all you like on soup, but if you start on an empty stomach there’s no saying where you’ll land up on.”
Hermione drank the soup with perfect docility, and leaning back on her pillow began to speak in a low, fevered voice, with momentary pauses, but without intermission. Her eyes fixed themselves on Mr. Brett’s face with the intensity of the Ancient Mariner.
Mr. Brett put down “The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine,” and leaned forward so that he could catch her low, hurrying voice without effort. The night light cast weird shadows on his grey face and deep-set, patient eyes. He listened without attempting to interrupt Hermione. She began with the story of her childhood. In the long hours of her delirium her mind had built up and stored an attractive pageant of her character, set in the gloomy pitfalls of her life.
She told her father of the inner desolation of her childhood, her mother’s neglect, her nurse’s carelessness, his own inability to understand her or foster her affection for him.