Twilight, Julia Frankau [100 books to read in a lifetime txt] 📗

cheque for five hundred pounds and told her to fit herself out properly. Mrs. Rysam promised house linen. Margaret could not but be grateful although the one spoke too much and shrilly, and the other too little and to the point.

“What is his income?” Edgar B. asked.

“That’s what I’ve got to learn and see what’s to be added to it to make you really comfortable.”

“We shall want so little, Gabriel doesn’t care a bit about money,” Margaret put in hastily.

“I daresay not.”

“And neither do I,” she was quick to add. Edgar B. with a twinkle in his eye suggested she might not care for money but she liked what money could buy. He was less original than most Americans in his expressions, but unvaryingly true to type in his outlook.

What an afternoon they had, Margaret and her stepmother! The big car took them to Westminster and the West End and back again. They were making appointments, purchasing wildly, discussing endlessly. Or so it seemed to Margaret, who, exhilarated at first, became conscious towards the end of the day of nothing but an overmastering fatigue. She had ordered several dozens of underwear, teagowns, dressinggowns, whitewash, a china bath, and electric lights! They appeared and disappeared incongruously in her bewildered brain. She had protected her panels, yet yielded to the necessity for drains. Her head was in a whirl and Gabriel himself temporarily eclipsed. Her stepmother was indefatigable, the greater the rush the greater her enjoyment. She would even have started furnishing but that Margaret was firm in refusing to visit either of the emporiums she suggested.

“Gabriel and I have our own ideas, we know exactly what we want. The glib fluency of the shopmen takes my breath away.”

Mrs. Rysam urged their expert knowledge. Whatever her private opinion of the house, its size or position, she fell in easily with Margaret’s enthusiasm.

“You must not risk making any mistake. Messrs. Rye & Gilgat or Maturin’s, that place in Albemarle Street, they all have experts who have the periods at their fingers’ ends. You’ve only got to tell them the year, and they’ll set to work and get you chintzes and brocades and everything suitable from a coal scuttle to a cabinet….”

Margaret, however, although overtired, was not to be persuaded to put herself and her little house unreservedly into any one’s hands. She was not capable of effort, only of resistance. Tea at Rumpelmayer’s was an interregnum and not a rest. More clothes became a nightmare, she begged to be taken home, was alarmed when Mrs. Rysam offered to go on alone, and begged her to desist. When the car took them back to Queen Anne’s Gate, Gabriel had already left after a most satisfactory interview with her father. Edgar B., seeing his daughter’s exhaustion and pallor, had the grace not to insist on explaining the word “satisfactory.” He insisted instead that she should rest, sleep till dinnertime. The inexhaustible stepmother heard that Gabriel had been pleased with everything Margaret’s father had suggested. He would settle house and furniture, make provision for the future. Whatever was done for Margaret or her children was to be done for her alone, he wanted nothing but the dear privilege of caring for her. Edgar appreciated his attitude and it did not make him feel less liberal.

“And the house? How about this house they’ve seen in Westminster? Is it good enough? big enough? He said it was a little house, but why so small?”

“They are just dead set on it. Small or large you won’t get them to look at another. It’s just something out of the way and quaint, such as Margaret would go crazy on. No bathroom, no drains, but a paved courtyard and a lead figure…”

“Well, well! each man to his taste, and woman too. She knows what she wants, that’s one thing. She made a mistake last time and it has cost her eight years’ suffering. She’s made none this time and everything has come right. He’s a fine fellow, this Gabriel Stanton, a white man all through. One might have wished him a few years younger, he said that himself. He’s going on for forty.”

“What’s forty! Margaret is twenty-eight, herself.”

“Well! bless her, there’s a lifetime of happiness before her and I’ll gild it.”

“The drawingroom will take a grand piano.”

“That’s good.”

“And I’ve settled to give her the house linen myself.”

“No place for a car, I suppose. In an out-of-theway place like that she’ll need a car.”

So they planned for her; having suffered in her suffering and eclipse, and eager now to make up to her for them, as indeed they had always been. Only in the bitter past it proved difficult because her sensitiveness had baffled them. It was that which had kept her bound so long. All that could be done had been done, to arrange a divorce via lawyers through Edgar B.‘s cheque-book. But James Capel, when it came to the end, proved that he cared less for money than for limelight, and had defended the suit recklessly with the help of an unscrupulous attorney. The nightmare of the case was soon over, but the shadow of it had darkened many of their days. This wedding was really the end and would put the coping stone on their content.

Neither Edgar B. nor his wife heard anything of the attempt at blackmail. Gabriel, of course, did not tell them. Margaret, strange as it may sound, had forgotten all about it! Something had given an impetus to her feeling for Gabriel: and now it was at its flood tide. She had written once, “Men do not love good women, they have a high opinion of them.” She would not have written it now, she herself had found goodness lovable. Gabriel Stanton was a better man than she had ever met. He was totally unlike an American, and had scruples even about making money.

Her father and he, discoursing one evening upon commercial morality, she found that they spoke different languages, and could arrive at no understanding. But she discovered in herself a linguistic gift and so saw through her father’s subtlety into Gabriel’s simplicity. She knew then that the man who enthralled her was the type of which she had read with interest, and written with enthusiasm, but never before encountered. An English gentleman! With this in her consciousness she could permit herself to revel in all his other attractions, his lean vigour and easy movements, shapely hands and deep-set eyes under the thin straight brows. His mouth was an inflexible line when his face was in repose. When he smiled at her the asceticism vanished. He smiled at her very often in these strange full days. The days hurried past, there was little time for private conversation, an orgy of buying held them.

Margaret, yielding to pressure and inclination, stayed on and on until the week passed and the next one was broken in upon. Now it was Tuesday and there was only one more week. One more week! Sometimes it seemed incredible. Always it seemed as if the sun was shining and the light growing more intense, blinding. She moved toward it unsteadily. This semi-American atmosphere into which she and her lover had become absorbed was an atmosphere of hustle, kaleidoscopic, shifting.

“If they had only given me time to think I should have known that the clothes and the houselinen, the carpets and curtains, the piano and the choice of a car, could all wait until we came back, could wait even after that. But they tear along and carry us after them in a whirlwind of tempestuous good-nature,” Margaret said ruefully in the five minutes they secured together before dinner that Tuesday evening.

“You are doing too much, exhausting your energy, using up your strength. And we have not found time for even one prowl after old furniture in our own way, that we spoke of at Carbies.”

“They are spoiling the house with the talk of preserving it. To-day Father told me it was absolutely necessary the floors should be levelled…”

“I know. And he wants the kitchen concreted. Some wretched person with the lips of a daylabourer and the soul of an iconoclast told him the place was swarming with rats…”

“We wanted to hear mysterious noises behind the wainscot.”

They were half -laughing, but there was an undercurrent of seriousness in their complaining. They and their house were caught in the torpedo-netting of the parental Rysams’ strong common sense. Confronted and caught they had to admit there was little glamour in rats and none at all in black beetles. Still… concrete! To yield to it was weakness, to deny it, folly.

“I have lost sight of logic and forgotten how to argue. There is nothing for it but to run away again. Gabriel, I have quite made up my mind. Tomorrow, I am going back to Carbies. There are things to settle up there, arrange. Stevens is coming back with me, and we are going before anybody is up. Every day I have said that I must go, and each time Father and Mother have answered breathlessly that it was impossible, interposed the most cogent arguments. Now I am going without telling them.”

“I am sure there is nothing else to be done. And stay until next week. Let me come down Saturday. We need quiet. I feel as if I had been in a machine room the last few days.”

“‘All day the wheels keep turning,’” she quoted.

“Yes, that expresses it perfectly. Run away and let me run after you. Saturday afternoon and Sunday we will be on the beach, listen to the sea, and forget the use of speech.”

“The use and abuse of speech. I’ll wear my oldest clothes. No! I won’t. You shall have a treat. I really have some most exquisite things. I’ll take them all down; change every hour or two, give you a private view…”

“You are lovely in everything you wear. You need never trouble to change. Think what a fatigue it will be. I want you to rest.”

“How serious you are! I was not in earnest, not quite in earnest. But I can’t wait to show you a teagown, all lacy and transparent, made of chiffon and mist…”

“Grey mist?”

“Yes.”

“I love you in grey.”

She laughed:

“You have had no opportunity of loving me in any other colour. Not indoors at least. But you will. I could not have a one-coloured trousseau. I’ve a wonderful beige walking-dress; one in blue serge, lined with chiffon…”

“Tell me of your wedding-dress. Only a week today…” Before she had told him her stepmother bustled in, her arms full of parcels that Margaret must unpack, investigate, try on immediately after dinner, or before. Dinner could wait. Margaret had already been tried on and tried on until her head swam. She yielded again and Gabriel and her father waited for dinner.

Nothing was as they had planned it. So, although they were too happy to complain, and too grateful to resent what was being done for them, the scheme that Margaret should return to Carbies without again announcing her intention was hurriedly confirmed between them and carried out.

This time Margaret did not complain that the place was remote, the garden desolate, the furniture ill-sorted and ill-suited. She was glad to find herself anchored as it were in a quiet back-water, out of the hurly-burly, able to hear herself breathe. Wednesday she spent in resting, dreaming. She went to bed early.

Thursday found her at her writing-desk, sorting, resorting, reading those early letters of hers, and of his; recapturing a mood. She recognised that in those early days she had not been quite genuine, that her letters did not ring as true as his. She saw there was a literary quality in them that detracted from their value.