Chapter 27

Later on in the dining-room, when she was reluctantly eating the meal prepared for her—Lucy still slept, or she would have asked to be allowed to have a biscuit by her bedside—Miss Entwhistle said to Chesterton, who attended her, Would she let her know when Mr. Wemyss telephoned, as she wished to speak to him.

She was feeling more and more uneasy as time passed as to what Everard would think of her uninvited presence in his house. It was natural; but would he think so? What wasn’t natural was for her to feel uneasy, seeing that the house was also Lucy’s, and that the child’s face had hardly had room enough on it for the width of her smile of welcome. There, however, it was, —Miss Entwhistle felt like an interloper. It was best to face things. She not only felt like an interloper but, in Everard’s eyes, she was an interloper. This was the situation: His wife had a cold—a bad cold, but not anything serious; nobody had sent for his wife’s aunt; nobody had asked her to come; and here she was. If that, in Everard’s eyes, wasn’t being an interloper Miss Entwhistle was sure he wouldn’t know one if he saw one.

In her life she had read many books, and was familiar with those elderly relatives frequently to be met in them, and usually female, who intrude into a newly married ménage and make themselves objectionable to one of the parties by sympathising with the other one. There was no cause for sympathy here, and if there ever should be Miss Entwhistle would certainly never sympathise except from a neutral place. She wouldn’t come into a man’s house, and in the very act of being nourished by his food sympathise with his wife; she would sympathise from London. Her honesty of intention, her single-mindedness, were, she knew, complete. She didn’t feel, she knew she wasn’t, in the least like these relatives in books, and yet as she sat in Everard’s chair—obviously it was his; the upholstered seat was his very shape, inverted—she was afraid, indeed she was certain, he would think she was one of them.

There she was, she thought, come unasked, sitting in his place, eating his food. He usedn’t to like her; would he like her any the better for this? From a desire not to have meals of his she had avoided tea, but she hadn’t been able to avoid dinner, and with each dish set before her—dishes produced surprisingly, as she couldn’t but observe, at the end of an arm thrust to the minute through a door—she felt more and more acutely that she was in his eyes, if he could only see her, an interloper. No doubt it was Lucy’s house too, but it didn’t feel as if it were, and she would have given much to be able to escape back to London that night.

But whatever Everard thought of her intrusion she wasn’t going to leave Lucy. Not alone in that house; not to wake up to find herself alone in that house. Besides, who knew how such a chill would develop? There ought of course to have been a doctor. When Everard rang up, as he would be sure to the last thing to ask how Lucy was, she would go to the telephone, announce her presence, and inquire whether it wouldn’t be as well to have a doctor round in the morning.

Therefore she asked Chesterton to let her know when Mr. Wemyss telephoned; and Chesterton, surprised, for it was not Wemyss’s habit to telephone to The Willows, all his communications coming on postcards, paused just an instant before replying, ‘If you please, ma’am.’