Somehow Good - William Frend De Morgan (the little red hen read aloud .TXT) 📗

mamma knows Mr. Fenwick is spooney, and looks up at times to see that he's going on."

Laetitia seems to receive this idea with some hesitation or reserve. "Looks up at times to see if he's going on?" she repeats inquiringly.

"Yes, of course--like we should. Only I didn't say 'see if.' I said 'see that.' It makes all the difference."

Miss Wilson breaks into a laugh. "And there you are all the time looking as if butter wouldn't melt in your mouth, and as grave as a judge."

Sally has to acquiesce in being kissed by her friend at this point; but she curls up a little as one who protests against being patronised. "We-e-e-ell!" she says, lengthening out the word, "why not? I don't see anything in _that_!"

"Oh no, dear--_that's_ all right! Why shouldn't it be?"

But this isn't candid of Laetitia, whose speech and kiss had certainly appeared to impute suppressed insight, or penetration, or sly-pussness, or something of that sort to her young friend. But with an implied claim to rights of insight, on her own account, from seniority. Sally is _froissee_ at this, but not beyond jerking the topic into a new light.

"Of course, it's their being grown up that makes one stare so. If it wasn't for that...." But this gives away her case, surrenders all claim to her equality with Laetitia's twenty-four years. The advantage is caught at meanly.

"That's only because you're a baby, dear. Wait till you're ten years older, and thirty-eight won't seem so old. I suppose your mother's about that?"

"Mother? Why, she's nearly thirty-nine!"

"And Mr. Fenwick?"

"Oh, _he's_ forty-one. _Quite!_ Because we talked it all over, and made out they were over eighty between them."

"Who talked it over?"

"Why, him and her and me, of course. Last night."

"Who did you have, Sally dear?"

"Only ourselves, and Dr. Prosy and his Goody mother."

"I thought Mr. Fenwick----"

"I counted him in with us--mother and me and the Major."

"Oh, you counted him in?"

"Why shouldn't I count him in, if I like?"

"Why not? And you do like?" There is an appearance of irritating sagacity about Sally's friend. "What did Dr. Vereker say, Sally dear?"

"Doc-tor Vereker! Dr. Prosy. Prosy's not a referee--it was no concern of his! Besides--they'd gone."

"Who'd gone?"

"Dr. Prosy and his old hen of a mother. Well, Tishy dear, she _is_ like that. Comes wobbling down on you as if you were a chicken! I hope you don't think mother and I and Mr. Fenwick would talk about how old we were added together, with old Goody Prosy in it!"

"Of course not, dear!"

"Oh, Tishy dear, how aggravating you are! Now do please don't be penetrating. You know you're trying to get at something; and there's nothing to get at. It was perfectly natural. Only, of course, we should never dream of talking about how old before people and their gossipy old mothers."

"Of course not, dear!"

"There, now! You're being imperturbable! I knew you would. But you may say what you like--there really was nothing in it. Nothing whatever that time! However, of course mother does like Mr. Fenwick very much--everybody knows that."

Laetitia says time will show, and Sally says, "Show what?" For the remark connects with nothing in the conversation. Its maker does not reply, but retires into the fastnesses of a higher philosophy, unknown to the teens, but somehow attainable in the early twenties. She comes down, however, to ask after Dr. Vereker. Sally has as good as held her tongue about him. Have they quarrelled?

"My dear Tishy! The idea! A _perfect stranger_!"

"I thought you were such good friends."

"I've nothing against Dr. Vereker. But fancy quarrelling with him! Like bosom friends. Kissing and making it up. What next!" Laetitia seems to have discovered that Sally, subjected to a fixed amused look, is sure to develop, and maintains one; and Sally follows on:

"One has to be on an intimate footing to fall out. Besides, people shouldn't be hen's sons. Not if they expect that sort of thing!"

"Which sort?"

"You know perfectly well, Tishy dear! And they shouldn't be worthy, either, people shouldn't. I'm not at all sure it isn't his worthiness, just as much as his mother. I _could_ swallow his mother, if it came to that!"

Laetitia, without relaxing the magnetism of her look, is replacing a defective string. But a stimulating word will keep Sally up to the mark. It would be a pity she should die down, having got so far.

"Not at all sure _what_ isn't his worthiness!"

"Now, Tishy dear, what nonsense! As if you didn't understand! You may just as well be penetrating outright, if you're going to go on like that. All I know is that, worthiness or no, if Dr. Vereker expects I'm going to put him on a quarrelling footing, he's mistaken, and the sooner he gives up the idea the better. I suppose he'll be wanting me to cherish him next."

And then what does that irritating Laetitia Wilson do but say suddenly, "I'm quite ready for the scherzo, dear, if you are." Just as if Sally had been talking all this for her own private satisfaction and amusement! And she knew perfectly well, Laetitia did, that she had been eliciting, and that she meant to wait a day or two, and begin again ever so far on, and make believe Sally had said heaps of things. And Sally had really said nothing--_nothing_!

However, Miss Wilson was certainly a very fine violin figure, and really striking in long sostenuto notes, with a fine throat and handsome fingers on her left hand with broad bones, and a handsome wrist on her bowing-arm where it was wanted. Only now, of course, she hadn't got her Egyptian bracelet that looked so well, and her hair wasn't done in a coronet, but only just twisted up anyhow. Besides, when it's a difficult scherzo and you take it quick, your appearance of having the concentration of Bonaparte and Julius Caesar, and the alacrity of a wild cat, doesn't bring out your good points. Give us an _andante maestoso_ movement, or a _diminuendo rallentando_ that reaches the very climax and acme of slowness itself just before the applause comes! It was rather as a meditation in contrasts, though, that Sally thought thus to herself; for detached musical jerks of diabolical rapidity, that have to be snapped at with the punctuality of the mosquito slayer, don't show your rounded lines to advantage, and make you clench your teeth and glare horribly.

* * * * *


Our story is like the scherzo in one respect: it has to be given in detached jerks--literary, not musical--and these jerks don't come at any stated intervals at all. The music was bad enough--so Sally and Laetitia thought--but the chronicle is more spasmodic still. However, if you want to know its remaining particulars, you will have to brace yourself up to tolerating an intermittent style. It is the only one our means of collecting information admits of.

This little musical interlude, and the accidental chat of our two young performers, gives us a kind of idea of what was the position of things at Krakatoa Villa six months after Fenwick made his singular reappearance in the life of Mrs. Nightingale. We shall rely on your drawing all our inferences. There is only one belief of ours we need to lay stress upon; it is that the lady's scheme to do all she could to recapture and hold this man who had been her husband was no mere slow suggestion of the course of events in that six months, but a swift and decisive resolution--one that, if not absolutely made at once, paused only in the making until she was quite satisfied that the disappearance of Fenwick's past was an accomplished fact. Once satisfied of that, he became to her simply the man she had loved twenty years ago--the man who did not, could not, forgive her what seemed so atrocious a wrong, but whom she could forgive the unforgiveness of; and this all the more if she had come to know of the ruinous effect her betrayal of him had had--must have had--upon his after-life. He was this man--this very man--to all appearance with a mysterious veil drawn, perhaps for ever, over the terrible close of their brief linked life and its hideous cause--over all that she would have asked and prayed should be forgotten. If only this oblivion could be maintained!--that was her fear. If it could, what task could be sweeter to her than to make him such amends as lay in her power for the wrong she had done him--how faultfully, who shall say? And if, in late old age, no dawn of memory having gleamed in his ruined mind, she came to be able to speak to him and tell him his own story--the tale of the wreck of his early years--would not that almost, _almost_, carry with it a kind of compensation for what she had undergone?

But her terror of seeing a return of memory now was a haunting nightmare to her. She could only soothe and alleviate her anxiety by suggesting efforts at recollection to Fenwick, and observing with concealed satisfaction how utterly useless they all were. She felt guilty at heart in being so happy at his ill-success, and had to practise an excusable hypocrisy, an affectation of disappointment at his repeated failures. On one particular occasion a shudder of apprehension passed through her; she thought he had got a clue. If he did, what was to prevent his following it up? She found it hard to say to him how sorry she was this clue led to nothing, and to forecast from it encouragement for the future. But she said to herself after that, that she was a good actress, and had played her part well. The part was a hard one.

For what came about was this. It chanced one evening, some three months after the railway adventure, when Fenwick had become an accepted and constant visitor at Krakatoa Villa, that as he took a very late leave of Sally and her mother, the latter came out with him into the always quiet road, while Sally ran back into the house to direct a letter he was to post, but which had been forgotten for the moment, just as he was departing.

They had talked a great deal, and with a closer familiarity than ever before, of the problem of Fenwick's oblivion. Both ladies had gone on the lines of suggesting clues, trying to recall to him the things that _must_ have been in his life as in others. How about his parents? Well, he remembered that, as a fact, he had a father and mother. It was _themselves_ he could not recollect. How about his schooldays? No, that was a blank. He could not even remember having been flogged. Yet the idea of school was not unfamiliar; how, otherwise, could he laugh as he did at the absurdity of forgetting all about it, especially being flogged? But his brothers, his sisters, how _could_ he forget _them_? He _did_, although in their case, as in that of his parents, he somehow knew that some definite identities had existed that he had forgotten. But any effort to recall any specific person came to nothing, or else he only succeeded in reviving images manifestly confused with