Success
wearied of the work; she did not say so, however, but kept on quietly
stitching as regularly as ever. After a time Miss Janet sent her to her
room to fetch an old skirt. She went at once and meant to come back at
once. She found the skirt in the cupboard where it hung, and, unhooking
it, threw it over her arm. But as she turned to fasten the door her eye
fell on her tulip-wood secretaire—her father’s first birthday present
to her, the beginning of that unspoken, undemonstrative, yet curiously
close understanding there had been between them. She and her father
together through so many years in the old house, in the dim rooms among
the dusty treasures, in quiet companionship. And he was gone, and she
was alone!
For a moment she stood quite still, the skirt slipping unheeded from
her arm; then she turned and fled. She ran up the dusty stairs to the
long warehouse-room where her father had surprised her before the
secretaire long ago. There she crouched down among the cabinets and
chairs, and, pressing her head back against some one of them, sat so,
with hands clasped hard and wide dry eyes.
* * * * *
There was a sound without, a step on the stairs. She did not hear
it, she had heard nothing for a long time; she was not aware of any
approach until someone came between her and what light there was. Then
she looked up.
“Michael!” she exclaimed, and without warning broke down into tears.
He put an arm about her. “Nan,” he said, and held her comfortingly.
For a little neither said more, there was no need; she sobbed
unrestrainedly, and he did not attempt to stop her, only let her feel
his sympathy by the touch of his hand.
But in a while she recovered herself. “I am so sorry,” she said
unsteadily; “I don’t know why I gave way like that, I haven’t done
it before. I didn’t mean to bother you; and there’s nothing to cry
about—it’s all as he would have wished it, as he would have chosen.”
“As he would, perhaps,” Michael said, “but what about you? May one not
think of you?”
Her breath caught a little. “I’m all right,” she said; “I don’t know
why I cried. It’s—it’s only the twilight, I think—the long, haunting
twilight—and being lonely.”
“You’re not lonely now I have come.”
“No,” she said, and the arm he had put about her tightened almost as if
he were protecting her from something.
For a little they sat so, they two alone, among the shadows in the
darkening, dusty room. “Nan,” he said at last, “what are we going to
do? I have nothing much, and you have nothing either, I suppose—but
there’s only you and I. Neither of us has anyone else in the world who
counts, and we seem to need each other pretty badly. Dare you risk it?
Will you, Nan?”
She drew a long breath, a hesitating breath, while one might count
twenty; and while she felt anew the warmth of his protecting arm—“Yes,”
she said softly, “I think so.”
CHAPTER XVIII
Nan lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling above her. She had been
in bed two hours and more, but still she was awake, broad awake. That
evening she had promised to marry Michael, and now she lay thinking
about it. A clock away outside had struck one long ago, it struck two
now; but she did not hear it, any more than did her father lying dead
in the room across the landing. No thoughts of that father occurred to
her now; it certainly did not occur to her as disloyalty or disrespect
to him that she had planned a future with Michael before he was buried.
It was not. There was no disloyalty or disrespect in her feelings for
him; there could be none in her actions.
Her thoughts centred round what she had that evening undertaken. Had
she done well to say she would marry Michael? Was it really the thing
to do? It was the simplest thing, certainly, and, at the first glance,
the one which appeared to offer the nearest to a continuance of life
as it had been—which is what human nature, especially when suffering
from shock, instinctively inclines towards. They could be married
easily: asking no one, telling no one; it was their concern solely.
They could go to one of those City churches which she loved, where they
were nothing and no one, chance comers borne in for a minute on the
tide of life. A little minute in the dim place, a little pause with
just themselves and God; and then out again into the streets with their
passing and repassing life, and then home to the old house.
Without thinking, she found herself picturing the going back to the
old house, the old ways, the day’s work, and the day’s burden, and the
evening’s rest; it seemed part of the inevitable scheme of things. But
in fact it was not so; she remembered that. The old house was coming
down, the old life was at an end; the work would pass to strangers.
She did not know a great deal about her father’s monetary affairs,
nothing really; but she did not expect there would be much for her. The
business, she imagined, would be sold for what it would fetch, along
with the treasures in the upper rooms. She felt a pang for both, she
had lived so long and so closely with them; but she concluded they
would have to go so that affairs might be wound up and liabilities
met, and even then she expected to be but scantily provided for.
Michael, she knew, expected there to be even less for her; she had
perceived that in the talk of the evening. In his scheme, the marriage
was somewhat as it was in hers, a matter that concerned none but
themselves; a momentary stepping aside to make the contract, and then
a going on again much as before, only they were to go on in the small
Midland town where he had lived for the last four months.
And, of course, he was right; Nan knew it as she lay watching the
alternating light and darkness as the moon passed in and out of
clouds. That was what it would be. Were Michael some other kind of man
they might perhaps have made shift to carry on her father’s business
between them, and made a small living out of it. Being the kind he was
it was impossible; he was made for other things, and he must do them
whether he would or no. He had got to work out his life another way;
she realised that, and it no more occurred to her to seek to change it
than to change the seasons of the year. But it did occur to her to ask
whether the marriage was really the best thing.
Her knowledge of love and lovers, even in fiction, was very limited,
she knew almost nothing of the subject; but she knew that she and
Michael were not lovers. He had in some fashion loved Lady Sibyl
Carson; she knew that, though it had never been spoken of between them.
It had not been, perhaps, the strongest passion, not the sort that had
figured in the few novels she had read. She more than suspected his
passion, whatever it was, had been submerged in the wreck which had
broken his career; the lost love taking a second place to the lost
work, the memory of it surviving only with other tide wrack. But such
as it was, it was love; and she instinctively knew it to be something
quite different from his feeling for herself. She was friend and sister
to him, the quiet, comprehending companion, the one who understood even
better than he did himself; but the bond between them was not love;
he did not love her as men love women when they eagerly seek them in
marriage.
And she herself? She considered the question fairly, her rather slow,
but unusually accurate, mind weighing it almost as if it concerned
another. Not quite perhaps, even thus to herself alone there were
points at which the spirit shrank from the mind’s clear-sighted probe;
yet in the main fairly and very searchingly, seeking, with a truth few
women practise with themselves, not only what Michael was to her, but
also what in her inmost soul she held of those unknowns—love and life.
Suddenly she sat up in bed. “No!” she said almost aloud. “It is not
that! He is not that to me. He is not the man—if there ever could be
one!”
She put back her hair and looked out at the cloudy sky where the moon
was going down behind chimney stacks. She realised that, whatever was
or was not cloudy in her mind, one thing at least was clear, neither
she nor Michael were really thinking of marriage at all. “It is not to
be married we want,” she thought, “but to go on with life as it was.
We could do that better without, I believe, whether we were separate
or together all the time. Marriage would not help; there would be
something wrong with it.”
But she did not say anything of her thoughts the next day, she was not
yet quite sure enough of her own conclusions. The coming of day brought
rather a revulsion of feeling and a perception afresh of the easiness,
at all events, in the initial stages, of abiding by the decision of
yesterday. Still, though she said nothing of her doubts to Michael, she
arranged with him that no mention should be made to the Foregoods of
any understanding between them.
Possibly the brother and sister had some suspicions; the long absence
in the warehouse-room might have justified such in people who rather
hopefully looked for it.
“It would be the best thing possible,” Miss Janet observed in private.
“It’s very likely to come sooner or later, and the sooner the better,
I say; I see no reason to wait about. We’re not the Annarlys to be
obliged to inconvenience ourselves and everyone else by delaying to
speak for fear the neighbours should think it odd.”
And Josiah agreed. “Yes,” he said, “yes, if she wants to, if he’ll make
her happy.”
“Make her happy!” Miss Janet said scornfully. “Of course he will.
He takes half as much looking after as a baby, and that’s what most
women want. What she’ll be happy to do till she gets a real baby, when
he’ll have to look after himself and her too, and they’ll both be as
proud as they are surprised to find he can do it. They’ll think when
they’ve found it out, and got to the common-sense place of commonplace
happiness, that they’re the only ones who’ve ever got there, and have
made the greatest discovery of the age. And so they will have too. God
bless the nonsense!” and she wiped her eyes unashamed.
But the same evening that she said it—it was the evening before the
funeral—Nan gave the first warning of doubt to Michael.
They had been talking of his work and some of the difficulties of it,
and the circumstances she would be called upon to share.
“Things are better than they were,” he said. “I don’t mean they are
magnificent, or ever will be; the place will never be more than a
little one-horse affair, a dyer’s on the smallest scale. But I have
a liking for it, and I think you will have, although I don’t suppose
I shall ever make money of it, certainly never make engineering
shops—that isn’t everything, is it? George is rather a nuisance, I must
own; he and Milligen are about as easy to move as a couple of pigs,
but as they usually pull opposite ways, I sometimes come in. You’ll
understand when you come to live near them.”
“—If I do,” she said.
“If you do? You will when we are married.”
“Yes—” she hesitated. “I’m not quite sure about that marriage, not
perfectly certain—are you?”
“Of course,” he answered; then, struck by her manner, asked, “Are not
you? You were. Have you changed your mind?”
“I don’t know it’s that exactly,” she said. “I’m not sure I knew my
mind. Are you sure? I don’t mean were you that evening, but are you
quite sure now that it would be best for us to be married?”
“Why, certainly! If it was best then, it is now—nothing has happened to
alter it.”
“No,” she agreed, “that’s so; but we may have made a mistake then? We
have had more time to think about it, and, after thinking, I am not
sure that to be married is what we really want; indeed, I am nearly
sure it is not. You think about it.”
“You had better tell me what you think,” he said.