Vera. Elizabeth von Arnim
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 hadn't so much as smiled for nearly a fortnight, and now to his horror, for what could it possibly sound like to the two mourners on the lawn, he gave a sudden dreadful roar of laughter. He could hear it sounding hideous himself.
The noise he made horrified the parlourmaid as much as it did him. She flew to the window and shut it. Wemyss, in his effort to strangle the horrid thing, choked and coughed, his table-napkin up to his face, his body contorted. He was very red, and the parlourmaid watched him in terror. He had seemed at first to be laughing, though what Uncle Wemyss (thus did he figure in the conversations of the kitchen) could see to laugh at in the cook's way of getting her own back, the parlourmaid, whose flesh had crept when she first heard the story, couldn't understand; but presently she feared he wasn't laughing at all but was being, in some very robust way, ill. Dread seized her, deaths being on her mind, lest perhaps here in the chair, so convulsively struggling behind a table-napkin, were the beginnings of yet another corpse. Having flown to shut the window she now flew to open it, and ran out panic-stricken into the garden to fetch the ladies.
This cured Wemyss. He got up quickly, leaving his half-smoked cigar and his half-drunk whisky, and followed her out just in time to meet Lucy and her aunt hurrying across the lawn towards the dining-room window.
'I choked,' he said, wiping his eyes, which indeed were very wet.
'Choked?' repeated Miss Entwhistle anxiously. 'We heard a most strange noise–'
'That was me choking,' said Wemyss. 'It's all right—it's nothing at all,' he added to Lucy, who was looking at him with a face of extreme concern.
But he felt now that he had had about as much of the death and funeral atmosphere as he could stand. Reaction had set in, and his reactions were strong. He wanted to get away from woe, to be with normal, cheerful people again, to have done with conditions in which a laugh was the most improper of sounds. Here he was, being held down by the head, he felt, in a black swamp,—first that ghastly business of Vera's, and now this woebegone family.
Sudden and violent was Wemyss's reaction, let loose by the parlourmaid's story. Miss Entwhistle's swollen eyes annoyed him. Even Lucy's pathetic face made him impatient. It was against nature, all this. It shouldn't be allowed to go on, it oughtn't to be encouraged. Heaven alone knew how much he had suffered, how much more he had suffered than the Entwhistles with their perfectly normal sorrow, and if he could feel it was high time now to think of other things surely the Entwhistles could. He was tired of funerals. He had carried this one through really brilliantly from start to finish, but now it was over and done with, and he wished to get back to naturalness. Death seemed to him highly unnatural. The mere fact that it only happened once to everybody showed how exceptional it was, thought Wemyss, thoroughly disgusted with it. Why couldn't he and the Entwhistles go off somewhere to-morrow, away from this place altogether, go abroad for a bit, to somewhere cheerful, where nobody knew them and nobody would expect them to go about with long faces all day? Ostend, for instance? His mood of sympathy and gentleness had for the moment quite gone. He was indignant that there should be circumstances under which a man felt as guilty over a laugh as over a crime. A natural person like himself looked at things wholesomely. It was healthy and proper to forget horrors, to dismiss them from one's mind. If convention, that offspring of cruelty and hypocrisy, insisted that one's misfortunes should be well rubbed in, that one should be forced to smart under them, and that the more one was seen to wince the more one was regarded as behaving creditably,—if convention insisted on this, and it did insist, as Wemyss had been experiencing himself since Vera's accident, why then it ought to be defied. He had found he couldn't defy it by himself, and came away solitary and wretched in accordance with what it expected, but he felt quite different now that he had Lucy and her aunt as trusting friends who looked up to him,