Missing, Mrs. Humphry Ward [free e books to read online .TXT] 📗

the prisoners' camps no trace of Lieutenant Sarratt could be found. On the top of the letter, and the intolerable despair into which it had plunged her, had come influenza. There was no doubt--Nelly's recollection faced it candidly--that she would have come off badly but for Cicely. Bridget had treated the illness on the hardening plan, being at the moment slightly touched with Christian Science. Nelly should 'think it away.' To stay in bed and give in was folly. She meanwhile had found plenty to do in London, and was away for long hours. In one of these absences, Cicely--having been seized with a sudden hunger for the flesh-pots of 'town'--appeared at the flat with her maid. She discovered Nelly Sarratt in bed, and so weak as to be hardly capable of answering any question. Mrs. Simpson was doing her best; but she gave an indignant account of Bridget's behaviour, and Cicely at once took a strong line, both as a professional nurse--of sorts--and as mistress of the flat. Bridget, grimly defensive, was peremptorily put on one side, and Cicely devoted the night she was to have spent in dancing to tending her half-conscious guest. In the days that followed she fell, quite against her will, under the touching charm of Nelly's refinement, humility and sweetness. Her own trenchant and masterful temper was utterly melted, for the time, by Nelly's helpless state, by the grief which threatened to kill her, and by a gratefulness for any kindness shewn her, which seemed to Cicely almost absurd.

She fell in love--impetuously--with the little creature thus thrown upon her pity. She sent for a trained nurse and their own doctor. She wired for Hester Martin, and in forty-eight hours Bridget had been entirely ousted, and Nelly's state had begun to shew signs of improvement. Bridget took the matter stoically. 'I know nothing about nursing,' she said, with composure. 'If you wish to look after my sister, by all means look after her. Many thanks. I propose to go and stay near the British Museum, and will look in here when I can.'

So she departed, and Cicely stayed in London for three weeks until Nelly was strong enough to go to Torquay. Then, reluctantly, she gave up her charge to Bridget, she being urgently wanted at Carton, and Hester at Rydal. Bridget reappeared on the scene with the same sangfroid as she had left it. She had no intention of quarrelling with the Farrells whatever they might do; and in an eminently satisfactory interview with Sir William--quite unknown to Nelly--she allowed him to give her a cheque which covered all their expenses at Torquay.

Meanwhile Nelly had discovered Cicely's secret--which indeed was not very secret. Captain Marsworth had appeared in London for the purpose of attending his Medical Board, and called at the flat. Nelly was by that time on the sofa, with Cicely keeping guard, and Nelly could sometimes deaden her own consciousness for a little in watching the two. What were they after? Marsworth's ethical enthusiasms and resentments, the prophetic temper that was growing upon him in relation to the war, his impatience of idleness and frivolity and 'slackness,' of all modes of life that were not pitched in a key worthy of that continuous sacrifice of England's youngest and noblest that was going on perpetually across the Channel:--these traits in him made it very easy to understand why, after years of philandering with Cicely Farrell, he was now, apparently, alienated from her, and provoked by her. But then, why did he still pursue her?--why did he still lay claim to the privileges of their old intimacy, and why did Cicely allow him to do so?

At last one evening, after a visit from Marsworth which had been one jar from beginning to end, Cicely had suddenly dropped on a stool, beside Nelly on the sofa.

'What an intolerable man!' she said with crimson cheeks. 'Shall I tell Simpson not to let him in again?'

Nelly looked her surprise, for as yet there had been no confidence on this subject between them. And then had come a torrent--Cicely walking stormily up and down the room, and pouring out her soul.

The result of which outpouring was that through all the anger and denunciation, Nelly very plainly perceived that Cicely was a captured creature, endeavouring to persuade herself that she was still free. She loved Marsworth--and hated him. She could not make up her mind to give up for his sake the 'lust of the eye and the pride of life,' as he clearly would endeavour to make her give them up, the wild bursts of gaiety and flirting for which she periodically rushed up to town, the passion for dress, the reckless extravagance with which it pleased her to shock him whenever they met. And he also--so it seemed to Nelly--was torn by contradictory feelings. As soon as Cicely was within reach, he could not keep away from her; and yet when confronted with her, and some new vagary, invented probably to annoy him, though he might refrain 'even from good words,' his critical mouth and eye betrayed him, and set the offender in a fury.

However, it was the quarrels between these two strange lovers, if they were lovers, that had made a friendship, warm and real--on Cicely's side even impassioned--between Nelly and Cicely. For Cicely had at last found someone--not of her own world--to whom she could talk in safety. Yet she had treated the Sarratts cavalierly to begin with, just because they were outsiders, and because 'Willy' was making such a fuss with them; for she was almost as easily jealous in her brother's case as in Marsworth's. But now Nelly's sad remoteness from ordinary life, her very social insignificance, and the lack of any links between her and the great Farrell kinship of relations and friends, made her company, and her soft, listening ways specially welcome and soothing to Cicely's excited mood.

During the latter half of the winter they had corresponded, though Cicely was the worst of letter-writers; and since Nelly and her sister had been in Rydal again there had been constant meetings. Nelly's confidences in return for Cicely's were not many nor frequent. The effects of grief were to be seen in her aspect and movements, in her most pathetic smile, in her increased dreaminess, and the inertia against which she struggled in vain. Since May began, she had for the first time put on black. Nobody had dared to speak to her about it, so sharply did the black veil thrown back from the childish brow intensify the impression that she made, as of something that a touch might break. But the appearance of the widow's dress seemed to redouble the tenderness with which every member of the little group of people among whom she lived treated her--always excepting her sister. Nelly had in vain protested to Farrell against the 'spoiling' of which she was the object. 'Spoiled' she was, and it was clear both to Hester and Cicely, after a time, that though she had the will, she had not the strength to resist.

Unless on one point. She had long since stopped all subsidies of money from Farrell through Bridget, having at last discovered the plain facts about them. Her letter of thanks to him for all he had done for her was at once so touching and so determined, that he had not dared since to cross her will. All that he now found it possible to urge was that the sisters would allow him to lend them a vacant farmhouse of his, not far from the Loughrigg Tarn cottage. Nelly had been so far unwilling; it was clear that her heart clung to the Rydal lodgings. But Hester and Cicely were both on Farrell's side. The situation of the farm was higher and more bracing than Rydal; and both Cicely and Farrell cherished the notion of making it a home for Nelly, until indeed--

At this point Farrell generally succeeded in putting a strong rein upon his thoughts, as part of the promise he had made to Hester. But Cicely, who was much cooler and more matter of fact than her brother, had long since looked further ahead. Willy was in love, irrevocably in love with Nelly Sarratt. That had been plain to her for some time. Before those days in the flat, when she herself had fallen in love with Nelly, and before the disappearance of George Sarratt, she had resented Willy's absurd devotion to a little creature who, for all her beauty, seemed to Cicely merely an insignificant member of the middle classes, with a particularly impossible sister. And as to the notion that Mrs. Sarratt might become at some distant period her brother's wife, Lady Farrell of Carton, Cicely would have received it with scorn, and fought the realisation of it tooth and nail. Yet now all the 'Farrell feeling,' the Farrell pride, in this one instance, at any rate, was gone. Why? Cicely didn't know. She supposed first because Nelly was such a dear creature, and next because the war had made such a curious difference in things. The old lines were being rubbed out. And Cicely, who had been in her day as exclusively snobbish as any other well-born damsel, felt now that it would not matter in the least if they remained rubbed out. Persons who 'did things' by land or sea; persons who invented things; persons with ideas; persons who had the art of making others follow them into the jaws of death;--these were going to be the aristocracy of the future. Though the much abused aristocracy of the present hadn't done badly either!

So she was only concerned with the emotional aspects of her brother's state. Was Nelly now convinced of her husband's death?--was that what her black meant? And if she were convinced, and it were legally possible for her to marry again and all that--what chance would there be for Willy? Cicely was much puzzled by Nelly's relation to him. She had seen many signs, pathetic signs, of a struggle on Nelly's side against Farrell's influence; especially in the time immediately following her first return to the north in March. She had done her best then, it seemed to Cicely, to do without him and to turn to other interests and occupations than those he set her, and she had failed; partly no doubt owing to her physical weakness, which had put an end to many projects,--that of doing week-end munition work for instance--but still more, surely, to Farrell's own qualities. 'He is such a charmer with women,' thought Cicely, half smiling; 'that's what it is.'

By which she meant that he had the very rare gift of tenderness; of being able to make a woman feel, that as a human being, quite apart from any question of passion, she interested and touched him. It was just sympathy, she supposed, the artistic magnetic quality in him, which made him so attractive to women, and women so attractive to him. He was no longer a young man in the strict sense; he was a man of forty, with the prestige of great accomplishment, and a wide knowledge of life. It was generally supposed that he had done with love-affairs, and women instinctively felt it safe to allow him a personal freedom towards them, which from other men would have offended them. He might pat a girl's shoulder, or lay a playful grasp on a woman's arm, and nobody minded; it was a sign of his liking, and most people wished to be liked by him. However he never allowed himself any half-caress of the kind towards Nelly Sarratt now; and once or twice, in the old days, before Sarratt's disappearance, Cicely had fancied that she had seen Nelly check rather sharply one of these demonstrations of Willy's