Chapter 19
And then when she spoke . . . what chance was there for poor Briggs? He was undone. All Scrap said was, “How do you do,” on Mr. Wilkins presenting him, but it was enough; it undid Briggs.
From a cheerful, chatty, happy young man, overflowing with life and friendliness, he became silent, solemn, and with little beads on his temples. Also he became clumsy, dropping the teaspoon as he handed her her cup, mismanaging the macaroons, so that one rolled on the ground. His eyes could not keep off the enchanting face for a moment; and when Mr. Wilkins, elucidating him, for he failed to elucidate himself, informed Lady Caroline that in Mr. Briggs she beheld the owner of San Salvatore, who was on his way to Rome, but had got out at Mezzago, etc. etc., and that the other three ladies had invited him to spend the night in what was to all intents and purposes his own house rather than an hotel, and Mr. Briggs was only waiting for the seal of her approval to this invitation, she being the fourth hostess—when Mr. Wilkins, balancing his sentences and being admirably clear and enjoying the sound of his own cultured voice, explained the position in this manner to Lady Caroline, Briggs sat and said never a word.
A deep melancholy invaded Scrap. The symptoms of the incipient grabber were all there and only too familiar, and she knew that if Briggs stayed her rest-cure might be regarded as over.
Then Kate Lumley occurred to her. She caught at Kate as at a straw.
“It would have been delightful,” she said, faintly smiling at Briggs—she could not in decency not smile, at least a little, but even a little betrayed the dimple, and Briggs’s eyes became more fixed than ever— “I’m only wondering if there is room.”
“Yes, there is,” said Lotty. “There’s Kate Lumley’s room.”
“I thought,” said Scrap to Mrs. Fisher, and it seemed to Briggs that he had never heard music till now, “your friend was expected immediately.”
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Fisher—with an odd placidness, Scrap thought.
“Miss Lumley,” said Mr. Wilkins, “—or should I,” he inquired of Mrs. Fisher, “say Mrs.?”
“Nobody has ever married Kate,” said Mrs. Fisher complacently.
“Quite so. Miss Lumley does not arrive to-day in any case, Lady Caroline, and Mr. Briggs has—unfortunately, if I may say so—to continue his journey to-morrow, so that his staying would in no way interfere with Miss Lumley’s possible movements.”
“Then of course I join in the invitation,” said Scrap, with what was to Briggs the most divine cordiality.
He stammered something, flushing scarlet, and Scrap thought, “Oh,” and turned her head away; but that merely made Briggs acquainted with her profile, and if there existed anything more lovely than Scrap’s full face it was her profile.
Well, it was only for this one afternoon and evening. He would leave, no doubt, the first thing in the morning. It took hours to get to Rome. Awful if he hung on till the night train. She had a feeling that the principal express to Rome passed through at night. Why hadn’t that woman Kate Lumley arrived yet? She had forgotten all about her, but now she remembered she was to have been invited a fortnight ago. What had become of her? This man, once let in, would come and see her in London, would haunt the places she was likely to go to. He had the makings, her experienced eye could see, of a passionately persistent grabber.
“If,” thought Mr. Wilkins, observing Briggs’s face and sudden silence, “any understanding existed between this young fellow and Mrs. Arbuthnot, there is now going to be trouble. Trouble of a different nature from the kind I feared, in which Arbuthnot would have played a leading part, in fact the part of petitioner, but trouble that may need help and advice none the less for its not being publicly scandalous. Briggs, impelled by his passions and her beauty, will aspire to the daughter of the Droitwiches. She, naturally and properly, will repel him. Mrs. Arbuthnot, left in the cold, will be upset and show it. Arbuthnot on his arrival will find his wife in enigmatic tears. Inquiring into their cause, he will be met with an icy reserve. More trouble may then be expected, and in me they will seek and find their adviser. When Lotty said Mrs. Arbuthnot wanted her husband, she was wrong. What Mrs. Arbuthnot wants is Briggs, and it looks uncommonly as if she were not going to get him. Well, I’m their man.”
“Where are your things, Mr. Briggs?” asked Mrs. Fisher, her voice round with motherliness. “Oughtn’t they to be fetched?” For the sun was nearly in the sea now, and the sweet-smelling April dampness that followed immediately on its disappearance was beginning to steal into the garden.
Briggs started. “My things?” he repeated. “Oh yes—I must fetch them. They’re in Mezzago. I’ll send Domenico. My fly is waiting in the village. He can go back in it. I’ll go and tell him.”
He got up. To whom was he talking? To Mrs. Fisher, ostensibly, yet his eyes were fixed on Scrap, who said nothing and looked at no one.
Then, recollecting himself, he stammered, “I’m awfully sorry—I keep on forgetting—I’ll go down and fetch them myself.”
“We can easily send Domenico,” said Rose; and at her gentle voice he turned his head.
Why, there was his friend, the sweet-named lady—but how had she not in this short interval changed! Was it the failing light making her so colourless, so vague-featured, so dim, so much like a ghost? A nice good ghost, of course, and still with a pretty name, but only a ghost.
He turned from her to Scrap again, and forgot Rose Arbuthnot’s existence. How was it possible for him to bother about anybody or anything else in this first moment of being face to face with his dream come true?
Briggs had not supposed or hoped that any one as beautiful as his dream of beauty existed. He had never till now met even an approximation. Pretty women, charming women by the score he had met and properly appreciated, but never the real, the godlike thing itself. He used to think, “If ever I saw a perfectly beautiful woman I should die” ; and though, having now met what to his ideas was a perfectly beautiful woman, he did not die, he became very nearly as incapable of managing his own affairs as if he had.
The others were obliged to arrange everything for him. By questions they extracted from him that his luggage was in the station cloakroom at Mezzago, and they sent for Domenico, and, urged and prompted by everybody except Scrap, who sat in silence and looked at no one, Briggs was induced to give him the necessary instructions for going back in the fly and bringing out his things.
It was a sad sight to see the collapse of Briggs. Everybody noticed it, even Rose.
“Upon my word,” thought Mrs. Fisher, “the way one pretty face can turn a delightful man into an idiot is past all patience.”
And feeling the air getting chilly, and the sight of the enthralled Briggs painful, she went in to order his room to be got ready, regretting now that she had pressed the poor boy to stay. She had forgotten Lady Caroline’s kill-joy face for the moment, and the more completely owing to the absence of any ill effects produced by it on Mr. Wilkins. Poor boy. Such a charming boy too, left to himself. It was true she could not accuse Lady Caroline of not leaving him to himself, for she was taking no notice of him at all, but that did not help. Exactly like foolish moths did men, in other respects intelligent, flutter round the impassive lighted candle of a pretty face. She had seen them doing it. She had looked on only too often. Almost she laid a motherly hand on Briggs’s fair head as she passed him. Poor boy.
Then Scrap, having finished her cigarette, got up and went indoors too. She saw no reason why she should sit there in order to gratify Mr. Briggs’s desire to stare. She would have liked to stay out longer, to go to her corner behind the daphne bushes and look at the sunset sky and watch the lights coming out one by one in the village below and smell the sweet moistness of the evening, but if she did Mr. Briggs would certainly follow her.
The old familiar tyranny had begun again. Her holiday of peace and liberation was interrupted—perhaps over, for who knew if he would go away, after all, to-morrow? He might leave the house, driven out of it by Kate Lumley, but there was nothing to prevent his taking rooms in the village and coming up every day. This tyranny of one person over another! And she was so miserably constructed that she wouldn’t even be able to frown him down without being misunderstood.
Scrap, who loved this time of the evening in her corner, felt indignant with Mr. Briggs who was doing her out of it, and she turned her back on the garden and him and went towards the house without a look or a word. But Briggs, when he realised her intention, leapt to his feet, snatched chairs which were not in her way out of it, kicked a footstool which was not in her path on one side, hurried to the door, which stood wide open, in order to hold it open, and followed her through it, walking by her side along the hall.
What was to be done with Mr. Briggs? Well, it was his hall; she couldn’t prevent his walking along it.
“I hope,” he said, not able while walking to take his eyes off her, so that he knocked against several things he would otherwise have avoided—the corner of a bookcase, an ancient carved cupboard, the table with the flowers on it, shaking the water over— “that you are quite comfortable here? If you’re not I’ll—I’ll flay them alive.”
His voice vibrated. What was to be done with Mr. Briggs? She could of course stay in her room the whole time, say she was ill, not appear at dinner; but again, the tyranny of this . . .
“I’m very comfortable indeed,” said Scrap.
“If I had dreamed you were coming—” he began.
“It’s a wonderful old place,” said Scrap, doing her utmost to sound detached and forbidding, but with little hope of success.
The kitchen was on this floor, and passing its door, which was open a crack, they were observed by the servants, whose thoughts, communicated to each other by looks, may be roughly reproduced by such rude symbols as Aha and Oho—symbols which represented and included their appreciation of the inevitable, their foreknowledge of the inevitable, and their complete understanding and approval.
“Are you going upstairs?” asked Briggs, as she paused at the foot of them.
“Yes.”
“Which room do you sit in? The drawing-room, or the small yellow room?”
“In my own room.”
So then he couldn’t go up with her; so then all he could do was to wait till she came out again.
He longed to ask her which was her own room—it thrilled him to hear her call any room in his house her own room—that he might picture her in it. He longed to know if by any happy chance it was his room, for ever after to be filled with her wonder; but he didn’t dare. He would find that out later from some one else—Francesca, anybody.
“Then I shan’t see you again till dinner?”
“Dinner is at eight,” was Scrap’s evasive answer as she went upstairs.
He watched her go.
She passed the Madonna, the portrait of Rose Arbuthnot, and the dark-eyed figure he had thought so sweet seemed to turn pale, to shrivel into insignificance as she passed.
She turned the bend of the stairs, and the setting sun, shining through the west window a moment on her face, turned her to glory.
She disappeared, and the sun went out too, and the stairs were dark and empty.
He listened till her footsteps were silent, trying to tell from the sound of the shutting door which room she had gone into, then wandered aimlessly away through the hall again, and found himself back in the top garden.
Scrap from her window saw him there. She saw Lotty and Rose sitting on the end parapet, where she would have liked to have been, and she saw Mr. Wilkins buttonholing Briggs and evidently telling him the story of the oleander tree in the middle of the garden.
Briggs was listening with a patience she thought rather nice, seeing that it was his oleander and his own father’s story. She knew Mr. Wilkins was telling him the story by his gestures. Domenico had told it her soon after her arrival, and he had also told Mrs. Fisher, who had told Mr. Wilkins. Mrs. Fisher thought highly of this story, and often spoke of it. It was about a cherrywood walking-stick. Briggs’s father had thrust this stick into the ground at that spot, and said to Domenico’s father, who was then the gardener, “Here we will have an oleander.” And Briggs’s father left the stick in the ground as a reminder to Domenico’s father, and presently—how long afterwards nobody remembered—the stick began to sprout, and it was an oleander.
There stood poor Mr. Briggs being told all about it, and listening to the story he must have known from infancy with patience.
Probably he was thinking of something else. She was afraid he was. How unfortunate, how extremely unfortunate, the determination that seized people to get hold of and engulf other people. If only they could be induced to stand more on their own feet. Why couldn’t Mr. Briggs be more like Lotty, who never wanted anything of anybody, but was complete in herself and respected other people’s completeness? One loved being with Lotty. With her one was free, and yet befriended. Mr. Briggs looked so really nice, too. She thought she might like him if only he wouldn’t so excessively like her.
Scrap felt melancholy. Here she was shut up in her bedroom, which was stuffy from the afternoon sun that had been pouring into it, instead of out in the cool garden, and all because of Mr. Briggs.
Intolerable tyranny, she thought, flaring up. She wouldn’t endure it; she would go out all the same; she would run downstairs while Mr. Wilkins—really that man was a treasure—held Mr. Briggs down telling him about the oleander, and get out of the house by the front door, and take cover in the shadows of the zigzag path. Nobody could see her there; nobody would think of looking for her there.
She snatched up a wrap, for she did not mean to come back for a long while, perhaps not even to dinner—it would be all Mr. Briggs’s fault if she went dinnerless and hungry—and with another glance out of the window to see if she were still safe, she stole out and got away to the sheltering trees of the zigzag path, and there sat down on one of the seats placed at each bend to assist the upward journey of those who were breathless.
Ah, this was lovely, thought Scrap with a sigh of relief. How cool. How good it smelt. She could see the quiet water of the little harbour through the pine trunks, and the lights coming out in the houses on the other side, and all round her the green dusk was splashed by the rose-pink of the gladioluses in the grass and the white of the crowding daisies.
Ah, this was lovely. So still. Nothing moving—not a leaf, not a stalk. The only sound was a dog barking, far away somewhere up on the hills, or when the door of the little restaurant in the piazza below was opened and there was a burst of voices, silenced again immediately by the swinging to of the door.
She drew in a deep breath of pleasure. Ah, this was—
Her deep breath was arrested in the middle. What was that?
She leaned forward listening, her body tense.
Footsteps. On the zigzag path. Briggs. Finding her out.
Should she run?
No—the footsteps were coming up, not down. Some one from the village. Perhaps Angelo, with provisions.
She relaxed again. But the steps were not the steps of Angelo, that swift and springy youth; they were slow and considered, and they kept on pausing.
“Some one who isn’t used to hills,” thought Scrap.
The idea of going back to the house did not occur to her. She was afraid of nothing in life except love. Brigands or murderers as such held no terrors for the daughter of the Droitwiches; she only would have been afraid of them if they left off being brigands and murderers and began instead to try and make love.
The next moment the footsteps turned the corner of her bit of path, and stood still.
“Getting his wind,” thought Scrap, not looking round.
Then as he—from the sounds of the steps she took them to belong to a man—did not move, she turned her head, and beheld with astonishment a person she had seen a good deal of lately in London, the well-known writer of amusing memoirs, Mr. Ferdinand Arundel.
She stared. Nothing in the way of being followed surprised her any more, but that he should have discovered where she was surprised her. Her mother had promised faithfully to tell no one.
“You?” she said, feeling betrayed. “Here?”
He came up to her and took off his hat. His forehead beneath the hat was wet with the beads of unaccustomed climbing. He looked ashamed and entreating, like a guilty but devoted dog.
“You must forgive me,” he said. “Lady Droitwich told me where you were, and as I happened to be passing through on my way to Rome I thought I would get out at Mezzago and just look in and see how you were.”
“But—didn’t my mother tell you I was doing a rest-cure?”
“Yes. She did. And that’s why I haven’t intruded on you earlier in the day. I thought you would probably sleep all day, and wake up about now so as to be fed.”
“But—”
“I know. I’ve got nothing to say in excuse. I couldn’t help myself.”
“This,” thought Scrap, “comes of mother insisting on having authors to lunch, and me being so much more amiable in appearance than I really am.”
She had been amiable to Ferdinand Arundel; she liked him—or rather she did not dislike him. He seemed a jovial, simple man, and had the eyes of a nice dog. Also, though it was evident that he admired her, he had not in London grabbed. There he had merely been a good-natured, harmless person of entertaining conversation, who helped to make luncheons agreeable. Now it appeared that he too was a grabber. Fancy following her out there—daring to. Nobody else had. Perhaps her mother had given him the address because she considered him so absolutely harmless, and thought he might be useful and see her home.
Well, whatever he was he couldn’t possibly give her the trouble an active young man like Mr. Briggs might give her. Mr. Briggs, infatuated, would be reckless, she felt, would stick at nothing, would lose his head publicly. She could imagine Mr. Briggs doing things with rope-ladders, and singing all night under her window—being really difficult and uncomfortable. Mr. Arundel hadn’t the figure for any kind of recklessness. He had lived too long and too well. She was sure he couldn’t sing, and wouldn’t want to. He must be at least forty. How many good dinners could not a man have eaten by the time he was forty? And if during that time instead of taking exercise he had sat writing books, he would quite naturally acquire the figure Mr. Arundel had in fact acquired—the figure rather for conversation than adventure.
Scrap, who had become melancholy at the sight of Briggs, became philosophical at the sight of Arundel. Here he was. She couldn’t send him away till after dinner. He must be nourished.
This being so, she had better make the best of it, and do that with a good grace which anyhow wasn’t to be avoided. Besides, he would be a temporary shelter from Mr. Briggs. She was at least acquainted with Ferdinand Arundel, and could hear news from him of her mother and her friends, and such talk would put up a defensive barrier at dinner between herself and the approaches of the other one. And it was only for one dinner, and he couldn’t eat her.
She therefore prepared herself for friendliness. “I’m to be fed,” she said, ignoring his last remark, “at eight, and you must come up and be fed too. Sit down and get cool and tell me how everybody is.”
“May I really dine with you? In these travelling things?” he said, wiping his forehead before sitting down beside her.
She was too lovely to be true, he thought. Just to look at her for an hour, just to hear her voice, was enough reward for his journey and his fears.
“Of course. I suppose you’ve left your fly in the village, and will be going on from Mezzago by the night train.”
“Or stay in Mezzago in an hotel and go on to-morrow. But tell me,” he said, gazing at the adorable profile, “about yourself. London has been extraordinarily dull and empty. Lady Droitwich said you were with people here she didn’t know. I hope they’ve been kind to you? You look—well, as if your cure had done everything a cure should.”
“They’ve been very kind,” said Scrap. “I got them out of an advertisement.”
“An advertisement?”
“It’s a good way, I find, to get friends. I’m fonder of one of these than I’ve been of anybody in years.”
“Really? Who is it?”
“You shall guess which of them it is when you see them. Tell me about mother. When did you see her last? We arranged not to write to each other unless there was something special. I wanted to have a month that was perfectly blank.”
“And now I’ve come and interrupted. I can’t tell you how ashamed I am—both of having done it and of not having been able to help it.”
“Oh, but,” said Scrap quickly, for he could not have come on a better day, when up there waiting and watching for her was, she knew, the enamoured Briggs, “I’m really very glad indeed to see you. Tell me about mother.”