The Helpmate Part 27

"I want to know what she'd do with it."

"Yes, by Jove, what _would_ you do?"

"Do? I should do my worst. I should make her sit somewhere with a good strong light on her."

"Hold hard there," said her brother-in-law (the man who called her Toodles), "Lady Cayley doesn't want that lamp lit just yet"

In the silence of the rest, the name seemed to leap straight across the room to Anne.

The two women beside her heard it, and looked at each other and at her.

Anne sickened under their eyes, struck suddenly by the meaning of their protection and their sympathy. She longed to rise, to sweep them aside and go. But she was kept motionless by some superior instinct of disdain.

Outwardly she appeared in no way concerned by this revelation of the presence of Lady Cayley. She might never have heard of her, for any knowledge that her face betrayed.

Majendie, not far from the settee in the window, was handing cuc.u.mber sandwiches to an old lady. And Lady Cayley had taken the matches from the maid and was lighting the lamp herself, and was saying, "I'm not afraid of the light yet, I a.s.sure you. There--look at me."

Everybody looked at her, and she looked at everybody, as she sat in the lamplight, and let it pour over her. She seemed to be offering herself lavishly, recklessly, triumphantly, to the light.

Lady Cayley was a large woman of thirty-seven, who had been a slender and a pretty woman at thirty. She would have been pretty still if she had been a shade less large. She had tiny upward-tilted features in her large white face; but the lines of her jaw and her little round prominent chin were already vanishing in a soft enveloping fold, flushed through its whiteness with a bloom that was a sleeping colour. Her forehead and eyelids were exceedingly white, so white that against them her black eyebrows and blue eyes were vivid and emphatic. Her head carried high a Gainsborough hat of white felt, with black plumes and a black line round its brim. Under its upward and its downward curve her light brown hair was tossed up, and curled, and waved, and puffed into an appearance of great exuberance and volume. Exuberance and volume were the note of this lady, a note subdued a little by the art of her dressmaker. A gown of smooth black cloth clung to her vast form without a wrinkle, sombre, severe, giving her a kind of slenderness in stoutness. She wore a white lace vest and any quant.i.ty of lace ruffles, any number of little black velvet lines and points set with paste b.u.t.tons. And every ruffle, every line, every point and b.u.t.ton was an accent, emphasising some beauty of her person.

And Anne looked at Lady Cayley once and no more.

It was enough. The trouble that she had put from her came again upon her, no longer in its merciful immensity, faceless and formless (for she had shrunk from picturing Lady Cayley), but boldly, abominably defined. She grasped it now, the atrocious tragedy, made visible and terrible for her in the body of Lady Cayley, the phantom of her own horror made flesh.

A terrible comprehension fell on her of that body, of its power, its secret, and its sin.

For the first moment, when she looked from it to her husband, her mind refused to a.s.sociate him with that degradation. Reverence held her, and a sudden memory of her pa.s.sion in the woods at Westleydale. Mercifully, they veiled her intelligence, and made it impossible for her to realise that he should have sunk so low.

Then she remembered. She had known that it was, that it would be so, that, sooner or later, the woman would come back. Her brain conceived a curious two-fold intuition of the fact.

It was all foreappointed and foreknown, that she should come to this hateful house, and should sit there, and that her eyes should be opened and that she should see.

And the woman's voice rose again. "Do I see cuc.u.mber sandwiches?" said Lady Cayley. "d.i.c.k, go and tell Mr. Majendie that if he doesn't want all those sandwiches himself, I'll have one."

Ransome gave the message, and Majendie turned to the lady of the settee, presenting the plate with the finest air of abstraction. Her large arm hovered in selection long enough for her to shoot out one low quick speech.

"I only wanted to see if you'd cut me, Wallie. Topsy bet me two to ten you wouldn't."

"Why on earth should I?"

"Oh, on earth I know you wouldn't. But didn't I hear just now you'd married and gone to heaven?"

"Gone to----?"

"Sh--sh--sh--I'm sure she doesn't let you use those naughty words. You needn't say you're not in heaven, for I can see you are. You didn't expect to meet me there, did you?"

"I certainly didn't expect to meet you here."

"How can you be so rude? d.i.c.k, take that tiresome plate from him, he doesn't know what to do with it. Yes. I'll have another before it goes away for ever."

Majendie had given up the plate before he realised that he was parting with the link that bound him to the outer world. He turned instantly to follow it there; but she saw his intention and frustrated it.

"b.u.t.ter? Ugh! You might hold my cup for me while I take my gloves off."

She peeled two skin-tight gloves from her plump hands, so carefully that the operation gave her all the time she wanted.

"I believe you're still afraid of me?" said she.

He was doing his best to look over her head; but she smiled a smile so flashing that it drew his eyes to her involuntarily; he felt it as positively illuminating their end of the room.

"You're not? Well, prove it."

"Is it possible to prove anything to you?"

Again he was about to break from her impatiently. Nothing, he had told himself, would induce him to stay and talk to her. But he saw Anne's face across the room; it was pale and hard, fixed in an expression of implacable repulsion. And she was not looking at Lady Cayley, but at him.

"You can prove it," said Lady Cayley, "to me and everybody else--they're all looking at you--by sitting down quietly for one moment, and trying to look a little less as if we compromised each other."

He stayed, to prove his innocence before Anne; and he stood, to prove his independence before Lady Cayley. He had longed to get away from the woman, to stand by his wife's side--to take her out of the room, out of the house, into the open air. And now the perversity that was in him kept him where he hated to be.

"That's right. Thank heaven one of us has got some presence of mind."

"Presence of _mind_?"

"Yes. You don't seem to think of _me_," she added softly.

"Why should I?" he replied with a brutality that surprised himself.

She looked at him with blue eyes softly suffused, and the curve of a red mouth sweet and tremulous. "Why?" her whisper echoed him. "Because I'm a woman."

Her eyelids dropped ever so little, but their dark lashes (following the upward trend of her features) curled to such a degree that the veil was ineffectual. He saw a large slit of the wonderful, indomitable blue.

"I'm a woman, and you're a man, you see; and the world's on your side, my friend, not on mine."

She said it sweetly. If she had been bitter she would have (as she expressed it) "choked him off"; but Lady Cayley knew better than to be bitter now, at thirty-seven. She had learnt that her power was in her sweetness.

His face softened (from the other end of the room Anne saw it soften), and Lady Cayley pursued with soundless feet her fugitive advantage.

"Poor Wallie, you needn't look so frightened. I'm quite safe now, or soon will be. Didn't I tell you I was going there too? I'm going to be married."

"I'm delighted to hear it," he said stiffly.

"To a perfect angel," said she.

"Really? If you're going up to heaven, he, I take it, is not coming down to earth."

"Nothing is settled," said Lady Cayley, with such monstrous gravity that his stiffness melted, and he laughed outright.

Anne heard him.