The Tree of Heaven Part 27

He paused. There was one thing he had to know. He must get it out of her.

"It hasn't made you feel that you don't want it?"

"Oh--I don't know what I want--_now_. I don't know what it makes me feel!"

"Don't let it, Desmond. Don't let it. It'll be all right. You won't feel like that when you've married me. Can't you see that _that's_ the wonderful and beautiful part?"

"_What_ is?" she said in her tired drawl.

"_It_--the poor kiddy."

Because he remembered Veronica he was going to marry Desmond.

Veronica's mother was the first to hear about it. Desmond told her.

Veronica's mother was determined to stop it for the sake of everybody concerned.

She wrote to Nicholas and asked him to come and dine with her one evening when Lawrence Stephen was dining somewhere else. (Lawrence Stephen made rather a point of not going to houses where Vera was not received; but sometimes, when the occasion was political, or otherwise important, he had to. That was her punishment, as Bartholomew had meant that it should be.)

Nicky knew what he had been sent for, and to all his aunt's a.s.saults and manoeuvres he presented an inexpugnable front.

"You mustn't do it; you simply mustn't."

He intimated that his marriage was his own affair.

"It isn't. It's the affair of everybody who cares for you."

"Their caring isn't my affair," said Nicky.

And then Vera began to say things about Desmond.

"It's absurd of you," she said, "to treat her as if she was an innocent child. She isn't a child, and she isn't innocent. She knew perfectly well what she was about. There's nothing she doesn't know. She meant it to happen, and she made it happen. She said she would. She meant you to marry her, and she's making you marry her. I daresay she said she would.

She's as clever and determined as the devil. Neither you nor Headley Richards ever had a chance against her."

"She hasn't got a dog's chance against all you people yelping at her now she's down. I should have thought--"

"You mean _I_'ve no business to? That was different. I didn't take any other woman's husband, or any other woman's lover, Nicky."

"If you had," said Nicky, "I wouldn't have interfered."

"I wouldn't interfere if I thought you cared _that_ for Desmond. But you don't. You know you don't."

"Of course I care for her."

He said it stoutly, but he coloured all the same, and Vera knew that he was vulnerable.

"Oh, Nicky dear, if you'd only waited--"

"What do you mean?"

His young eyes interrogated her austerely; and she flinched. "I don't know what I mean. Unless I mean that you're just a little young to marry anybody."

"I don't care if I am. I don't _feel_ young, I can tell you. Anyhow Desmond's years younger."

"Desmond is twenty-three. You're twenty. It's Veronica who's years younger."

"Veronica?"

"She's sixteen. You don't imagine Desmond is as young as that, do you?

Wait till she's twenty-five and you're twenty-two."

"It wouldn't do poor Desmond much good if I did. I could kill Headley Richards."

"What for?"

"For leaving her."

Vera smiled. "That shows how much you care. You wouldn't have felt like killing him if he'd stuck to her. Why should you marry Headley Richards'

mistress and take on his child? It's preposterous."

"It isn't. If the other fellow's a brute it's all the more reason why I shouldn't be. I want to be some use in this rotten world where people are so d.a.m.nably cruel to each other. And there's that unhappy kiddy.

You've forgotten the kiddy."

"Do you mean to say it's Desmond's child _you_'re thinking of?"

"I can't understand any woman not thinking of it," said Nicky.

He looked at her, and she knew that he remembered Veronica.

Then she gave him back his own with interest, for his good.

"If you care so much, why don't you choose a better mother for your own children?"

It was as if she said: "If you care so much about Veronica, why don't you marry _her_?"

"It's a bit too late to think of that now," said poor Nicky.

Because he had cared so much about Veronica he was going to marry Desmond.

"I couldn't do anything with him," Vera said afterwards. "Nothing I said made the least impression on him."

That however (as both Vera and Nicky were aware), was not strictly true.

But, in spite of Nicky's terrible capacity for remembering, she stuck to it that Desmond's affair would have made no impression on him if it had not been for that other absurd affair of the Professor's wife. And it would have been better, Lawrence Stephen said, for Nicky to have made love to all the married women in Cambridge than for him to marry Phyllis Desmond.

These reflections were forced on them by the ironic coincidence of Nicky's engagement with his rehabilitation at the University.