Vera
Copyright© 2024 by Elizabeth Von Arnim
Chapter 9
It was not only possible, but the fact. Aunt Dot had suspected, only she hadn’t suspected anything like all that was presently imparted to her, and she found great difficulty in assimilating it. And two hours later Lucy, standing in the middle of the drawing-room, was still passionately saying to her, and saying it for perhaps the tenth time, ‘But don’t you see? It’s just because what happened to him was so awful. It’s nature asserting itself. If he couldn’t be engaged now, if he couldn’t reach up out of such a pit of blackness and get into touch with living things again and somebody who sympathises and—is fond of him, he would die, die or go mad; and oh, what’s the use to the world of somebody good and fine being left to die or go mad? Aunt Dot, what’s the use?’
And her aunt, sitting in her customary chair by the fireplace, continued to assimilate with difficulty. Also her face was puckered into folds of distress. She was seriously upset.
Lucy, looking at her, felt a kind of despair that she wasn’t being able to make her aunt, whom she loved, see what she saw, understand what she understood, and so be, as she was, filled with confidence and happiness. Not that she was happy at that moment; she, too, was seriously upset, her face flushed, her eyes bright with effort to get Wemyss as she knew him, as he so simply was, through into her aunt’s consciousness.
She had made her clean breast with a completeness that had included the confession that she did know what Mrs. Wemyss’s accident had been, and she had described it. Her aunt was painfully shocked. Anything so horrible as that hadn’t entered her mind. To fall past the very window her husband was sitting at ... it seemed to her dreadful that Lucy should be mixed up in it, and mixed up so instantly on the death of her of her natural protector, —of her two natural protectors, for hadn’t Mrs. Wemyss as long as she existed also been one? She was bewildered, and couldn’t understand the violent reactions that Lucy appeared to look upon as so natural in Wemyss. She would have concluded that she didn’t understand because she was too old, because she was out of touch with the elasticities of the younger generation, but Wemyss must be very nearly as old as herself. Certainly he was of the same generation; and yet behold him, within a fortnight of his wife’s most shocking death, able to forget her, able to fall in love——
‘But that’s why—that’s why,’ Lucy cried when Miss Entwhistle said this. ‘He had to forget, or die himself. It was beyond what anybody could bear and stay sane——’
‘I’m sure I’m very glad he should stay sane,’ said Miss Entwhistle, more and more puckered, ‘but I can’t help wishing it hadn’t been you, Lucy, who are assisting him to stay it.’
And then she repeated what at intervals she had kept on repeating with a kind of stubborn helplessness, that her quarrel with Mr. Wemyss was that he had got happy so very quickly.
‘Those grey trousers,’ she murmured.
No; Miss Entwhistle couldn’t get over it. She couldn’t understand it. And Lucy, expounding and defending Wemyss in the middle of the room with all the blaze and emotion of what was only too evidently genuine love, was to her aunt an astonishing sight. That little thing, defending that enormous man. Jim’s daughter; Jim’s cherished little daughter...
Miss Entwhistle, sitting in her chair, struggled among other struggles to be fair, and reminded herself that Mr. Wemyss had proved himself to be most kind and eager to help down in Cornwall, —though even on this there was shed a new and disturbing light, and that now that she knew everything, and the doubts that had made her perhaps be a little unjust were out of the way and she could begin to consider him impartially, she would probably very soon become sincerely attached to him. She hoped so with all her heart. She was used to being attached to people. It was normal to her to like and be liked. And there must be something more in him than his fine appearance for Lucy to be so very fond of him.
She gave herself a shake. She told herself she was taking this thing badly; that she ought not, just because it was an unusual situation, be so ready to condemn it. Was she really only a conventional spinster, shrinking back shocked at a touch of naked naturalness? Wasn’t there much in what that short-haired child was so passionately saying about the rightness, the saneness, of reaction from horror? Wasn’t it nature’s own protection against too much death? After all, what was the good of doubling horror, of being so much horrified at the horrible that you stayed rooted there and couldn’t move, and became, with your starting eyes and bristling hair, a horror yourself?
Better, of course, to pass on, as Lucy was explaining, to get on with one’s business, which wasn’t death but life. Still—there were the decencies. However desolate one would be in retirement, however much one would suffer, there was a period, Miss Entwhistle felt, during which the bereaved withdrew. Instinctively. The really bereaved would want to withdraw——
‘Ah, but don’t you see,’ Lucy once more tried despairingly to explain, ‘this wasn’t just being bereaved—this was something simply too awful. Of course Everard would have behaved in the ordinary way if it had been an ordinary death.’
‘So that the more terrible one’s sorrow the more cheerfully one goes out to tea,’ said Miss Entwhistle, the remembrance of the light trousers at one end of Wemyss and the unmistakably satisfied face at the other being for a moment too much for her.
‘Oh,’ almost moaned Lucy at that, and her head drooped in a sudden fatigue.
Miss Entwhistle got up quickly and put her arms round her. ‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘That was just stupid and cruel. I think I’m hide-bound. I think I’ve probably got into a rut. Help me out of it, Lucy. You shall teach me to take heroic views——’
And she kissed her hot face tenderly, holding it close to her own.
‘But if I could only make you see,’ said Lucy, clinging to her, tears in her voice.
‘But I do see that you love him very much,’ said Miss Entwhistle gently, again very tenderly kissing her.
That afternoon when Wemyss appeared at five o’clock, it being his bi-weekly day for calling, he found Lucy alone.
‘Why, where——? How——-?’ he asked, peeping round the drawing-room as though Miss Entwhistle must be lurking behind a chair.
‘I’ve told,’ said Lucy, who looked tired.
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