“Yes,” she said. “Thank you. Show it to Mr. Mont, Stack. Don’t grieve.”
“Oh, miss!”
Dinny laid her fingers on his sleeve, gave it a little pull, and walked swiftly on.
Don’t grieve! Sleet was falling now. She raised her face to feel the tingling touch of those small flakes. No more dead to her than he had already been. But—DEAD! Away over there—utterly far! Lying in the earth by the river that had drowned him, in forest silence, where no one would ever see his grave. Every memory she had of him came to life with an intensity that seemed to take all strength from her limbs, so that she nearly collapsed in the snowy street. She stood for a minute with her gloved hand on the railing of a house. An evening postman stopped and looked round at her. Perhaps some tiny flame of hope—that some day he would come back—had flickered deep down within her; perhaps only the snowy cold was creeping into her bones; but she felt deadly cold and numb.
She reached Mount Street at last and let herself in. And there a sudden horror of betraying that anything had happened to awaken pity for her, interest in her, any sort of feeling, beset her, and she fled to her room. What was it to anyone but her? And pride so moved within her that even her heart felt cold as stone.
A hot bath revived her a little. She dressed for dinner early and went down.
The evening was one of silences more tolerable than the spasmodic spurts of conversation. Dinny felt ill. When she went up to bed her Aunt came to her room.
“Dinny, you look like a ghost.”
“I got chilled, Auntie.”
“Lawyers!—they do. I’ve brought you a posset.”
“Ah! I’ve always longed to know what a posset is.”
“Well, drink it.”
Dinny drank, and gasped.
“Frightfully strong.”
“Yes. Your Uncle made it. Michael rang up.” And taking the glass, Lady Mont bent forward and kissed her cheek. “That’s all,” she said. “Now go to bed, or you’ll be ill.”
Dinny smiled. “I’m not going to be ill, Aunt Em.”
In pursuance of that resolve she went down to breakfast next morning.
The oracle, it seemed, had spoken in a typewritten letter signed Kingson, Cuthcott and Forsyte. It recommended putting in a defence, and had so advised Lady Corven and Mr. Croom. When it had taken the necessary proceedings it would advise further.
And that coldness in the pit of the stomach which follows the receipt of lawyers’ letters was felt even by Dinny, the pit of whose stomach was already deadly cold.
She went back to Condaford with her father by the morning train, repeating to her Aunt the formula: “I’m not going to be ill.”
CHAPTER 24
But she WAS ill, and for a month in her conventual room at Condaford often wished she were dead and done with. She might, indeed, quite easily have died if such belief as she had in a future life had grown instead of declining as her strength ebbed. To rejoin Wilfrid, where this world’s pain and judgments were not, had a fatal attraction. To fade out into the sleep of nothingness was not hard, but had no active enticement; and, as the tide of health turned back within her, seemed less and less natural. The solicitude of people had a subtle, pervasive healing influence. The village required a daily bulletin, her mother had been writing or ‘phoning almost daily to a dozen people. Clare had been down every week-end, bringing flowers from Dornford. Aunt Em had been sending twice a week the products of Boswell and Johnson; Fleur bombarding her with the products of Piccadilly. Adrian had come down three times without warning. Hilary began sending funny little notes the moment she had turned the corner.
On March the thirtieth, spring visited her room with southwest airs, a small bowl of the first spring flowers, some pussy willows and a sprig of gorse. She was picking up rapidly now, and three days later was out of doors. For everything in nature she felt a zest such as she had not known for a long time. Crocuses, daffodil clumps, swelling buds, sun on the fantails’ wings, shapes and colour of the clouds, scent of the wind, all affected her with an almost painful emotion. Yet she had no desire to do anything or see anybody. In this queer apathy she accepted an invitation from Adrian to go abroad with him on his short holiday.
The memorable things about their fortnight’s stay at Argelès in the Pyrenees, were the walks they took, the flowers they picked, the Pyrenean sheep-dogs, the almond blossom they saw, the conversations they held. They were out all day, taking lunch with them, and the opportunities for talk were unlimited. Adrian became eloquent on mountains. He had never got over his climbing days. Dinny suspected him of trying to rouse her from the lethargy in which she was sunk.
“When I went up ‘the little Sinner’ in the Dolomites with Hilary before the war,” he said one day, “I got as near to God as I ever shall. Nineteen years ago—dash it! What’s the nearest to God you ever got, Dinny?”
She did not answer.
“Look here, my dear, what are you now—twenty-seven?”
“Nearly twenty-eight.”
“On the threshold still. I suppose talking it out wouldn’t help?”
“You ought to know, Uncle, that talking one’s heart out is not in the family.”
“True! The more we’re hurt the silenter we get. But one mustn’t inbreed to sorrow, Dinny.”
Dinny said suddenly: “I understand perfectly how women go into convents, or give themselves up to good works. I always used to think it showed a lack of humour.”
“It can show a lack of courage, or too much courage, of the sort fanatical.”
“Or broken springs.”
Adrian looked at her.
“Yours are not broken, Dinny—badly bent, not broken.”
“Let’s hope so, Uncle; but they ought to be straightening by now.”
“You’re beginning to look fine.”
“Yes, I’m eating enough even for Aunt Em. It’s taking interest in oneself that’s the trouble.”
“I agree. I wonder if—”
“Not iron, darling. It sews me up inside.”
Adrian smiled. “I was thinking more of children.”
“They’re not synthetic, yet. I’m all right, and very lucky, as things go. Did I tell you old Betty died?”
“Good old soul! She used to give me bulls’-eyes.”
“SHE was the real thing. We read too many books, Uncle.”
“Indubitably. Walk more, read less! Let’s have our lunch.”
On the way back to England they stayed two nights in Paris at a little hotel over a restaurant near the Gare St. Lazare. They had wood fires, and their beds were comfortable.
“Only the French know what a bed should be,” said Adrian.
The cooking down below was intended for racing men and such as go where they can appreciate food. The waiters, who wore aprons, looked, as Adrian expressed it, “like monks doing a spot of work,” pouring the wine and mixing the salads with reverence. He and Dinny were the only foreigners in either hotel or restaurant, not far from being the only foreigners in Paris.
“Marvellous town, Dinny. Except for cars in place of fiacres and the Eiffel Tower, I don’t see any real change by daylight since I was first here in ‘88, when your grandfather was Minister at Copenhagen. There’s the same tang of coffee and wood smoke in the air; people have the same breadth of back, the same red buttons in their coats; there are the same tables outside the same cafés, the same affiches, the same funny little stalls for selling books, the same violently miraculous driving, the same pervading French grey, even in the sky; and the same rather ill-tempered look of not giving a damn for anything outside Paris. Paris leads fashion, and yet it’s the most conservative place in the world. They say the advanced literary crowd here regard the world as having begun in 1914 at earliest, have scrapped everything that came before the war, despise anything that lasts, are mostly Jews, Poles and Irishmen, and yet have chosen this changeless town to function in. The same with the painters and musicians, and every other extremist. Here they gather and chatter and experiment themselves to death. And good old Paris laughs and carries on, as concerned with reality and flavours and the past as it ever was. Paris produces anarchy exactly as stout produces froth.”