Vera. Elizabeth von Arnim

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СКАЧАТЬ of Lucy's face. The priest was coming down the aisle in front of the coffin on the way out to the grave, and Lucy and her aunt were following first behind it.

      Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay....

      The priest's sad, disillusioned voice recited the beautiful words as he walked, the afternoon sun from the west window and the open west door pouring on his face and on the faces of the procession that seemed all black and white,—black clothes, white faces.

      The whitest face was Lucy's, and when Wemyss saw the look on it his mouth relaxed and his heart went soft within him, and he came impulsively out of the shadow and joined her, boldly walking on her other side at the head of the procession, and standing beside her at the grave; and at the awful moment when the first earth was dropped on to the coffin he drew her hand, before everybody, through his arm and held it there tight.

      Nobody was surprised at his standing there with her like that. It was taken quite for granted. He was evidently a relation of poor Jim's. Nor was anybody surprised when Wemyss, not letting her go again, took her home up the cliff, her arm in his just as though he were the chief mourner, the aunt following with some one else.

      He didn't speak to her or disturb her with any claims on her attention, partly because the path was very steep and he wasn't used to cliffs, but also because of his feeling that he and she, isolated together by their sorrows, understood without any words. And when they reached the house, the first to reach it from the church just as if, he couldn't help thinking, they were coming back from their wedding, he told her in his firmest voice to go straight up to her room and lie down, and she obeyed with the sweet obedience of perfect trust.

      'Who is that?' asked the man who was helping Miss Entwhistle up the cliff.

      'Oh, a very old friend of darling Jim's,' she sobbed,—she had been sobbing without stopping from the first words of the burial service, and was quite unable to leave off. 'Mr.—Mr.—We—We—Wemyss–'

      'Wemyss? I don't remember coming across him with Jim.'

      'Oh, one of his—his oldest—f—fr—friends,' sobbed poor Miss Entwhistle, got completely out of control.

      Wemyss, continuing in his rôle of chief mourner, was the only person who was asked to spend the evening up at the bereaved house.

      'I don't wonder,' said Miss Entwhistle to him at dinner, still with tears in her voice, 'at my dear brother's devotion to you. You have been the greatest help, the greatest comfort–'

      And neither Wemyss nor Lucy felt equal to explanation.

      What did it matter? Lucy, fatigued by emotions, her mind bruised by the violent demands that had been made on it the last four days, sat drooping at the table, and merely thought that if her father had known Wemyss it would certainly have been true that he was devoted to him. He hadn't known him; he had missed him by—yes, by just three hours; and this wonderful friend of hers was the very first good thing that she and her father hadn't shared. And Wemyss's attitude was simply that if people insist on jumping at conclusions, why, let them. He couldn't anyhow begin to expound himself in the middle of a meal, with a parlourmaid handing dishes round and listening.

      But there was an awkward little moment when Miss Entwhistle tearfully wondered—she was eating blanc-mange, the last of a series of cold and pallid dishes with which the imaginative cook, a woman of Celtic origin, had expressed her respectful appreciation of the occasion—whether when the will was read it wouldn't be found that Jim had appointed Mr. Wemyss poor Lucy's guardian.

      'I am—dear me, how very hard it is to remember to say I was—my dear brother's only relative. We belong—belonged—to an exiguous family, and naturally I'm no longer as young as I was. There is only—was only—a year between Jim and me, and at any moment I may be–'

      Here Miss Entwhistle was interrupted by a sob, and had to put down her spoon.

      '—taken,' she finished after a moment, during which the other two sat silent.

      'When this happens,' she went on presently, a little recovered, 'poor Lucy will be without any one, unless Jim thought of this and has appointed a guardian. You, Mr. Wemyss, I hope and expect.'

      Neither Lucy nor Wemyss spoke. There was the parlourmaid hovering, and one couldn't anyhow go into explanations now which ought to have been made four days ago.

      A dead-white cheese was handed round,—something local probably, for it wasn't any form of cheese with which Wemyss was acquainted, and the meal ended with cups of intensely black cold coffee. And all these carefully thought-out expressions of the cook's sympathy were lost on the three, who noticed nothing; certainly they noticed nothing in the way the cook had intended. Wemyss was privately a little put out by the coffee being cold. He had eaten all the other clammy things patiently, but a man likes his after-dinner coffee hot, and it was new in his experience to have it served cold. He did notice this, and was surprised that neither of his companions appeared to. But there,—women were notoriously insensitive to food; on this point the best of them were unintelligent, and the worst of them were impossible. Vera had been awful about it; he had had to do all the ordering of the meals himself at last, and also the engaging of the cooks.

      He got up from the table to open the door for the ladies feeling inwardly chilled, feeling, as he put it to himself, slabby inside; and, left alone with a dish of black plums and some sinister-looking wine in a decanter, which he avoided because when he took hold of it ice clinked, he rang the bell as unobtrusively as he could and asked the parlourmaid in a subdued voice, the French window to the garden being open and in the garden being Lucy and her aunt, whether there were such a thing in the house as a whisky and soda.

      The parlourmaid, who was a nice-looking girl and much more at home, as she herself was the first to admit, with gentlemen than with ladies, brought it him, and inquired how he had liked the dinner.

      'Not at all,' said Wemyss, whose mind on that point was clear.

      'No sir,' said the parlourmaid, nodding sympathetically. 'No sir.'

      She then explained in a discreet whisper, also with one eye on the open window, how the dinner hadn't been an ordinary dinner and it wasn't expected that it should be enjoyed, but it was the cook's tribute to her late master's burial day,—a master they had only known a week, sad to say, but to whom they had both taken a great fancy, he being so pleasant-spoken and all for giving no trouble.

      Wemyss listened, sipping the comforting drink and smoking a cigar.

      Very different, said the parlourmaid, who seemed glad to talk, would the dinner have been if the cook hadn't liked the poor gentleman. Why, in one place where she and the cook were together, and the lady was taken just as the cook would have given notice if she hadn't been because she was such a very dishonest and unpunctual lady, besides not knowing her place—no lady, of course, and never was—when she was taken, not sudden like this poor gentleman but bit by bit, on the day of her funeral the cook sent up a dinner you'd never think of,—she was like that, all fancy. Lucky it was that the family didn't read between the lines, for it began with fried soles–

      The parlourmaid paused, her eye anxiously on the window. Wemyss sat staring at her.

      'Did you say fried soles?' he asked, staring at her.

      'Yes sir. Fried soles. I didn't see anything in that either at first. It's how you spell it makes the difference, Cook said. And the next course was'—her voice dropped almost to inaudibleness—'devilled bones.'

      Wemyss СКАЧАТЬ