The Tree of Heaven. Sinclair May
"No, darling. We want you to go to bed."
"I'm going, Mummy."
And at the door she turned and looked at them with her sorrowful, lucid, transparent eyes.
Then she went, leaving the door open behind her. She left it open on purpose, so that she might hear their voices, and look down into the room on her way upstairs. Besides, she always hoped that somebody would call her back again.
She lingered at the foot of the stairs till Bartie got up and shut the door on her. She lingered at the turn of the stairs and on the landing. But nobody ever called her back again.
And nobody but Nicky knew what she was afraid of.
Veronica was sitting up in the cot that used to be Nicky's when he was little. Nicky, rather cold in his pyjamas, sat on the edge of it beside her. A big, yellow, tremendous moon hung in the sky outside the window, behind a branch of the tree of Heaven, and looked at them.
Veronica crouched sideways on her pillow in a corner of the cot, her legs doubled up tight under her tiny body, her shoulders hunched together, and her thin arms hanging before her straight to her lap. Her honey coloured hair was parted and gathered into two funny plaits, that stuck out behind her ear. Her head was tilted slightly backwards to rest against the rail of the cot. She looked at Nicky and her look reminded him of something, he couldn't remember what.
"Were you ever afraid, Nicky?" she said.
Nicky searched his memory for some image encircled by an atmosphere of terror, and found there a white hound with red smears on his breast and a muzzle like two saws.
"Yes," he said, "I was once."
A lamb--a white lamb--was what Veronica looked like. And Jerry bad looked at him like that when he found him sitting on the mustard and cress the day Boris killed him.
"Afraid--what of?"
"I don't know that it was 'of' exactly."
"Would you be afraid of a ghost, now, if you saw one?"
"I expect I jolly well should, if I really saw one."
"Being afraid of ghosts doesn't count, does it?"
"No, of course it doesn't. You aren't afraid as long as I'm here, are you?"
"No."
"I shall stay, then, till you go to sleep."
Night after night he heard her calling to him, "Nicky, I'm frightened." Nobody but Veronica and Nicky were ever in bed on that floor before midnight. Night after night he got up and came to her and stayed beside her till she went to sleep.
Once he said, "If it was Michael he could tell you stories."
"I don't want Michael. I want you."
In the day-time she went about looking for him. "Where's Nicky?" she said. "I want him."
"Nicky's in the schoolroom. You can't have him."
"But--I want him."
"Can't be helped. You must do without him."
"Will he be very long?"
"Yes, ever so long. Run away like a good little girl and play with Don-Don."
She knew that they told her to play with Don-Don, because she was a little girl. If only she could grow big quick and be the same age as Nicky.
Instead of running away and playing with Don-Don, Ronny went away by herself into the apple-tree house, to wait for Nicky.
The apple-tree house stood on the grass-plot at the far end of the kitchen garden. The apple-tree had had no apples on it for years. It was so old that it leaned over at a slant; it stretched out two great boughs like twisted arms, and was propped up by a wooden post under each armpit. The breast of its trunk rested on a cross-beam. The posts and the cross-beam were the doorway of the house, and the branches were its roof and walls. Anthony had given it to Veronica to live in, and Veronica had given it to Nicky. It was Nicky's and Ronny's house. The others were only visitors who were not expected to stay. There was room enough for them both to stand up inside the doorway, to sit down in the middle, and to lie flat at the far end.
"What more," said Nicky, "do you want?"
He thought that everybody would be sure to laugh at him when he played with Bonny in the apple-tree house.
"I don't care a ram if they do," he said. But nobody ever did, not even Mr. Parsons.
Only Frances, when she passed by that way and saw Nicky and Bonny sitting cramped and close under their roof-tree, smiled unwillingly. But her smile had in it no sort of mockery at all. Nicky wondered why.
"Is it," said Dorothy one morning, "that Ronny doesn't look as if she was Uncle Bartie's daughter, or that Uncle Bartie looks as if he wasn't Ronny's father?"
However suddenly and wantonly an idea struck Dorothy, she brought it out as if it had been the result of long and mature consideration.
"Or is it," said Vera, "that I don't look as if I were Ronny's mother?"
Her eyes had opened all their length to take in Dorothy.
"No. I think it is that Uncle Bartie looks--"
Frances rushed in. "It doesn't matter, my dear, what you think."
"It will some day," said Dorothy.
It was perhaps the best thing she could have said, as showing that she was more interested in the effect she would produce some day than in the sensation she had created there and then.
"May I go round to Rosalind's after lessons?"
"You may."
"And may I stay to lunch if they ask me?"
"You may stay as long as they care to have you. Stay to tea, stay to dinner, if you like."
Dorothy knew by the behaviour of her mother's face that she had scored somewhere, somehow. She also knew that she was in disgrace and yet not in disgrace; which, if you came to think of it, was a funny thing.
About this time Frances began to notice a symptom in herself. She was apt to resent it when Vera discussed her children with her. One late afternoon she and Anthony were alone with Vera. Captain Cameron had not come round that day, and Bartie had gone into town to consult either his solicitor or a specialist. He was always consulting one or the other.
"You're wrong, you two," said Vera. "You think Michael's tender and Nicky's hard and unimpressionable. Michael's hard. You won't have to bother about Michael's feelings."
"Michael's feelings," said Frances, "are probably what I shall have to bother about more than anything."
"You needn't. For one thing, they'll be so unlike your feelings that you won't know whether they're feelings at all. You won't even know whether he's having them or not. Nicky's the one you'll have to look out for. He'll go all the howlers."
"I don't think that Nicky'll be very susceptible. He hasn't shown any great signs so far."
"Hasn't he! Nicky's susceptibility is something awful."
"My dear Vera, you say yourself you don't care about children and that you don't understand them."
"No more I do," said Vera. "But I understand men."
"Do you understand Veronica?"
"Of course I don't. I said men. Veronica's a girl. Besides, I'm Veronica's mother."
"Nicky," said Anthony, "is not much more than nine."
"You keep on thinking of him as a child--a child--nothing but a child. Wait till Nicky has children of his own. Then you'll know."
"They would be rather darlings, Nicky's children," Frances said.
"So would Veronica's."