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Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One

page 399

I

White hair should look like watered silk, and not like a bunch of thistledown," complained Charlotte, stooping—at sixty-odd it was quite an effort—to pick up Jenny's gardening scissors off the hall floor.

"Brevis prefers it this way," said Jenny, carelessly, continuing to arrange branches of pink may and lilac in the brass floor pots which Charlotte had never taken away because she thought her own bamboo stands so much prettier.

"Ah, yes." Charlotte plumped down on the carved hall stair; loosed the strings of her print sunbonnet, and threw back her silk dolman with an air of determination. It was precisely because someone must speak to Jenny about Brevis that Charlotte had walked out in all this heat with so many daddy-long-legs rising in the grass that she had to keep her mouth shut for fear of swallowing them. "Yes. I hear that Judge Keyes is travelling north next week on his way to Melbourne. I have written asking him to stay a night at Bredon."

"He'll be here to-night. I've just been making up his bed," said Jenny. She whistled a few bars of a music-hall song that her great-niece (another Jenny who was convalescing here after measles) had been singing, dropped the scissors again, and moved off to another pot. Charlotte turned red.

"Really, this is becoming scandalous!" she burst out.

"Why?" Jenny turned with an expression of innocent surprise." I didn't say our bed."

"I don't know what to make of you," cried Charlotte, nearly in tears with heat and vexation. "I think you might consider your relations a little."

"I thought I did. Dick's Leonard always sends his family here when they've been ill. So does Phœbe's Flo and … well, you all do, don't you?"

"They have probably been unwise …" Charlotte stopped. It page 400would never do to have all the family connections convalescing at Bredon, which was what would happen if she prevented their coming to Clent." You must know how people talk about you and Brevis, Jenny."

"Still?" murmured Jenny, her head on one side as she settled the lilac. Brevis loved lilac as she loved everything that to him meant youth. "re they talking still, Lottie? I though that search in all the orphan asylums for little Keyes to the mystery had been abandoned long ago."

"I won't listen. You are indecent," said Charlotte, upset at rinding that Jenny knew of the part she had taken in that." I certainly think you should either marry him or send him away."

"Oh, so do I!" cried Jenny, warmly. "It's so nice to have you agree with me."

Charlotte fanned herself with her gloves. This must stop, she thought, although not quite sure what she wanted to stop. The Keyes-Comyn connections which had grown so extraordinarily close again in these last eighteen or nineteen years certainly did lend distinction to the family, although if they could be persuaded to marry even now …

"Of course I realize that anyone who has such control of the morals of society as he has could hardly be expected to condone your behaviour. But …"

Jenny began to laugh. Then said solemnly: "Well, there you are. Nobody could expect him to condone my behaviour, particularly since he is the only person who knows what it was. Isn't this pink may a joy? I climbed up on the kitchen wall to pick it."

"Well, I think at least you might get me a glass of cider," said Charlotte, giving it up as she always had to in the end.

Mab was filling up the bottle-rack in the cellar when Jenny went down the worn stone steps into the shadowy coolness. New Zealand and hides and tallow were too much for an old man, he had decided, when Jenny was left alone at Clent by the death of William six years before. Perhaps the suspicion that Lottie would have turned Jenny out and put in her widowed Patty had something to do with it, for he was a very energetic man still, a huge gaunt, powerful framework of a man pottering about among the bottles with his hands stained with wine.

page 401

"Lottie wants to drink my health and Brevis's, Uncle Mab," said Jenny, her green-cotton gown making a ray of cool light in the rich browns of the cellar.

"Give her that bottle. It's corked," said Mab.

He enjoyed making cider, although there was no longer the old trace-horse turning in a circle endless as time, nor labourers in corduroys and bo-yangs pouring in apples out of tip-drays—gleaming, glowing scarlet rivers of apples. But cider made in a hand-press was very good. "You get the world in it," he used to tell Jenny. "Sharpness, sweetness, spurts of acid, and plenty of warm sun. You are God pounding people out in essence when you make cider and pour it into great barrels to ferment and then draw it off into separate bottles to mature."

Jenny understood that. She and Mab and Brevis had been maturing in separate bottles so long. Mab, she felt, had matured the most; for Brevis still fermented for that which had gone by him, and she for what she had never had. Mab took a swig from a pannikin under a spigot.

"Prime stuff! We'll keep that for Brevis. Give Lottie the corked bottle. How long does Brevis stay this time, dear maid?"

"A week," she said. "He needs a rest, he's been so dreadfully busy."

Mab nodded. Brevis always came to Jenny for rest—and always got it just as he got the best sheets and the best of everything else, including Jenny. But since she chose to have it so, it was not Mab who would deny her, although he would never understand what there was in the chap to have held a woman like Jenny so long.

Jenny poured the corked wine for Charlotte without a quiver. She knew that Lottie had no palate. Not like Brevis, whose fastidiousness seemed to refine with age, so that it was worth while making Clent beautiful for him. With Chrissy's help she set the dinner-table; laburnum, lilac in the tall crystal vases, early strawberries and clotted yellow cream in the worn old silver bowls. "And the judge will sit here, Chrissy, because he likes to look out on the gardens, and the hyacinths and narcissi are so very lovely just now."

She ran up to dress, a little cynical with herself because the page 402coming of Brevis still made her heart beat as though she were still a girl. Up in the attic above her head she heard a girl's laughter where Young Jenny was talking to Comyn Sorley's youngest boy, Adam.

II

Young Jenny—playing tennis, bathing with young men, smoking cigarettes, or the like—had managed to contract measles; and when she was convalescent her father Leonard (son of Richard) sent her to Jenny at Clent because it was the habit of the family to send children recovering from sickness or incipient love-troubles to Jenny.

Young Jenny had an evanescent frailty about her still, and Adam kissed the blue shadows under her eyes more than once as they sat on the attic floor against an old brown hair trunk and talked cricket and business. They were both practical young people, and both going into business. Young Jenny meant to be a journalist, although, she complained, there were no such goings-on now as those Aunt Jenny talked of.

No thin-lipped James Sorley now, to flog people into bis way of thinking with the mere weight of words. No more Captains banging violent drums. No more bush-rangers or stage-coaches. Tasmania, said Adam, had got rid of its experimental megatheriums and pterodactyls and gone in very properly for the domestic animals. One might almost say, agreed Young Jenny—since most of the old homes descended through the generations along with the rat-tailed spoons and family names—that Tasmania rather specialized in domesticity. Gentlemen (how the word had gone out of fashion!) travelled now by rail instead of in their own carriages, paying for tickets and taxes like good citizens, and never resorting to shot-guns. And they played golf and tennis instead of politics, leaving these, quite in the new English fashion, to their inferiors.

Steamers also rushed out of Australasian ports almost daily, taking the young men away to something new. Adam hoped to go soon, to build bridges in China. Australasia, they agreed, was no longer a place where the English quality threw its chicken page 403bones. It had reared up like a giant, though still rather unsteady in the legs, and England had begun to look up surprisedly from shooting grouse in August stubbles or selling balloons in the Mile End Road, and listen to Australia calling herself a commonwealth, sailing out under her own flag, sending her regiments to the Boer War.

"Tasmania," said Adam, "is too small to ever have a pull in commonwealth matters. It will have to do as it is told. I'd advise Melbourne or Sydney for your journalism, Jenny."

"I suppose so. But I'll hate to leave dear little Tassy."

She got up and leaned out of the window. Larks sang in the sky and their song came in like a river. Flowers were abloom in the garden below and their scent came in like a song. A lovely old place, Clent, dreaming its dreams of the past, with all its out-buildings going to pieces because Uncle Mark meant to pull it down when Aunt Jenny died. Too expensive to keep up, he said, and of course all Clent belonged to him now. Young Jenny wished that Aunt Jenny need never die.

"Oh, Lord! Just look at this," said Adam. He had pulled from a heap of yellowed music in the old hair trunk a faded song with a crinolined lady, a languishing gallant holding a crush-hat like a soup-plate over his heart. "To Miss Jenny Comyn with the respectful admiration of Adam Sorley, 1857," was written neatly in the corner. "You and me," said Adam grinning. "And here's an old Confession Book … 'Maria Beverley.' … I say, old Great-aunt Maria loved 'a dark blue eye,' and her favourite colour was 'bridal white.' Frisky old thing! … Oh, here's Aunt Jenny."

They both bent close. Here might be some clue to Aunt Jenny at last. But there wasn't. Jenny Comyn's colour was "the green in your eye." Her favourite dish "food for reflection." Even in the simple inanities of a simple age it appeared that Aunt Jenny hadn't given herself away.

"I doubt," said Young Jenny, thoughtfully. "if anyone ever got to the bottom of her, excepting perhaps Judge Keyes."

"Look here, Jen," said Adam, seriously, "He should have married her, you know. It was simply rotten of him to get her talked about all her life. Aunt Lottie says that for years no one page 404would speak to her; and see the way she waits on him still as though she weren't ten million times too good for him, the sweet thing."

"He's a darling, though. I'm in love with him, myself. There's no one with such manners as Judge Keyes now…. Oh, Adam, here's a ripping duet with nothing but I love you, over and over. We can make a splendid sentimental catawauling over that."

Jenny, going to her window below to pick a rose to put in her gown, heard them at it. Young Jenny and Young Adam, and history repeating itself in the one-idea'd adorable way it always would. Oh, infantile quaint life, she thought, insisting on nests and dens and gentlemen thrushes still with their young-man slimness overtaken by the hasty necessity of feeding families. Jenny saw them at work on the lawn now, their elegant young whiskers all slimy with worm-juice, their movements half rebellious, half dismayed. And up in the attic were the human thrushes joyously preparing for the same business.

But once, forty … fifty years ago, she had sung that duet with Brevis. She went down to open the door to him now because Golly was making the horse-radish sauce.

III

Brevis, coming in, suddenly remembered Ellen Merrick, who had earned his childish hate by kissing him once in the hall. It was many years since Ellen had eloped one night with one of her fantasies and been found dead next day on a tussocky hill. Then Joseph married the cook, who showed off Mrs. Merrick as a kind of heirloom to all her relations, and let her go on keeping the cash-box, and always called Joe "sir." But Mrs. Merrick—and to Brevis this somehow seemed quite shocking—had retained life and her faculties to the age of one hundred and three.

Then he forgot Ellen and ran his thin fingers through his iron-grey hair, with a long breath of content.

"It's good to be here again, Jenny," he said.

Young Adam, all ardencies and plans, Young Jenny with skin like white violets and one of those new close gowns which are page 405so divinely revealing, were at dinner, and for a while Brevis liked to look at them and hear them talk.

"Grandfather is to get a tide at the next Birthday Honours, but don't tell," piped up Young Jenny, indiscreet and exquisite as a moonbeam on a cloud. Brevis privately thought it very likely. Dick Comyn's beers had probably made more men drunk than any others in Australasia, and it was more than probable that he'd sent a barrel to the King.

"Well," said Mab, judicially. "I could have told you that ten years ago. For services rendered in the Boer War, you know. England's just getting out the awards."

"Impulsive lady, England," said Jenny, eating strawberries.

"That Boer War has had a most pernicious effect on the young men," said Brevis, twirling his wine-glass and watching his thin brown wrist beneath the white cuff. "They're swollen with conceit now; mistook physical travel for mental travel, of course, as half the world does, and now they won't setde down and farm the country."

"I wonder if a week here will be enough to get you well again," said Jenny, with exaggerated sympathy.

Brevis laughed. Jenny always would be provocative, and her eyes with their delicate sweep of dark brows were making a Gainsborough-Reynolds lady of her beneath the piled waves of white hair in the soft candle-light.

"You have not always been so tender with the young men," he told her.

"I am now. When they're in love, which is the normal state of young men, they always want to kiss me. I let them do it. My colour doesn't come off. Does it, Adam?"

"Confound you!" Brevis straightened up with a jerk. "You're dangerous! How did you guess that I was … admiring it?"

"Oh, la, la! I've had long enough in which to guess that you never fully trust anyone, haven't I?"

"Blame my profession. Not me."

The young things were staring at Aunt Jenny daring to chaff the "greatest man in Tasmania," and Brevis felt a little annoyed. He was certainly very tired. There had been some unusually heavy cases at the late Criminal Sessions, and his summing-up page 406(everyone said, and he knew it himself) had been masterly. Quite intoxicating still, it was, to touch the pulse of life with the finger-ends; to lay bare, delicately, firmly, a man's uttermost soul for all the world to see. Quite intoxicating to sit up before all men, august, irrevocable, like God.

But what a relief it was when the young people raced off somewhere, and he lay in a long chair on the veranda with cigars and coffee and knew that he need not speak another word unless he chose.

The deep stone veranda was still warm with the sunshine pouring into it all day, and against the house walls honeysuckle and yellow and white jasmine loosened their sweets into the dusk. Their thick stems belonged to the days before the stubborn English pioneers had submitted to climate and allowed verandas to spoil the dignity of their Georgian houses. Brevis said, musing: "How these old fellows hated evolution! Yet I suppose that without that stiff-necked defiance of surroundings England would never have colonized as she has."

"They drank life as if it were old port, every mouthful to be well savoured on the palate," said Jenny. "Now it is tossed down like a fizzy drink."

"No body to it," agreed Bevis. "The gods who brew it now are grown goatish and old. Even crime is not Homeric any more."

"I think life's pretty much of a hurdle-race still," said Mab, his Wellington nose shining faintly in the starlight.

"The whole of Australasia is a hurdle-race," said Brevis, crossly. "Not the smallest, most sporadic of townships but has its own course and its retained jockeys. Not like the old days of gentlemen riders." He looked down the garden path where bosses of white pinks gleamed dimly although roses and adjuratum had sunk into the dark, and remembered a steeplechase he had won at Trienna against Mab Comyn … how many years ago? Young Jenny, Young Adam laughing down in the leaky old Clent boat on the river, hurt him a little. He and Jenny, he felt, should have done so much with their own youth. He should have ignored Frasquita, or she should have ignored her conscience. To-night he felt quite inexplicably distressed that Jenny should have page 407refused to marry him when Susan died in 'ninety-nine, although he had really been neither distressed nor disappointed then.

The young ones had splashed off in the boat. Frogs began chanting down by the river. There was a soft stir in the trees. Across the moon drifted light fleeces faintly golden. The night smelled drowsy and strangely sweet, and Mab Comyn slept, his big knees drawn up, his white shirt-front hiding now quiescent depths. Brevis said suddenly. "Jenny, will you marry me now?"

In the next chair Jenny moved so he could see the pale pointed outline of her face. Her voice was mischievous, though tender: "My very learned and distinguished friend, how damned sorry you'd be to-morrow if I said I would! As I told you before, Brevis, you don't want me in that way now. It's too late to merge our individualities now. You climbed alone, and a man so famous as you is better alone. He has his clubs, his parties; he is rude to his valet, who understands his little ways as a woman couldn't. In the light that shines on him he has no fear of the tongues that would be set wagging again if you married Jenny Comyn at last. He can still dream of kisses that no lips could give him now."

"Yours might. But you will never give them."

In the back of his mind he knew, as he had known before, that she was right. But the springtime in the blood, Young Jenny, Young Adam had upset him, and he really was very tired. The cogs of the will are apt to slip a little then. To-night he wanted a woman's arms, a woman's kisses.

"Very well," said Jenny, sitting up. "We accept that, I will never give them. And now for once I have something of my own to say. If I gave you too much in those early days, if I cheapened myself a bit, I don't regret it. I wouldn't trade the memory of that love for all the tea in China. I am proud to have given you all the love I ever had for a man, Brevis. And if I lost your love, as I did, it was with my full consent. I would not try to hold you."

"You never really lost it, Jenny. Let us make the most of what is left."

"We are. It's the only way we can do it now." She laid her hand on his. "Let the young ones kiss and lie together and love. That's not for us, my dear. That's not for us any more. And I page 408really could not sink into being Brevis Keyes's wife after all the thrills I can still give successive generations who look on me as a mystery."

"Perhaps you're right," said Brevis, with a sigh. Jenny in her lightsome way seemed to have mastered that most difficult chapter which we all have to read in the world's books, supposing we live long enough. The lovely tragic flight of time past our clutching hands had not left her so disillusioned as Brevis. "I wish I could meet old age with your gay dignity, Jenny. I wonder how you'll meet death."

"Why, with cap cocked, I hope, and flower behind the ear, and swagger-stick under the arm. It will be such a lark, Brevis. I shall ride comets (I've always wanted to ride comets), and burst all the drifting light-balls into new worlds and wash my hands in the glory. I, Jenny Comyn, who has never yet even crossed Bass Strait!"

Jenny's mind, Brevis thought, recklessly tilting through space, somehow carried him limping with it. Behind Jenny's whirling words you saw (she made you) other stars, conceptions vast, heroic, serene. Good medicine, Jenny, for a man whom the doctors had lately warned: a heart … failing arteries … But not a word of that, for pity's sake, to Jenny putting Monsieur Death into his place, making of him a footstool to vault from into the skies.

"You do me good, Jenny," Brevis said, feeling almost with anguish how cruel it was for them both that all the flame, all the love and laughter which still was Jenny Comyn was to go down uninherited into the dust. Since, in spite of her, one could not believe in her fantasies. Jenny patted his arm. There was a brief silence, broken by the rapturous chanting of the frogs. Then happily, easily as always, they began to squabble about their opinions.

Jenny blamed the times only for the convicts. If Raleigh and Drake had lived in Victoria's instead of Elizabeth's reign, they would both have ended up in Port Arthur, she declared. "Other queens, other manners. Victoria loved her statesmen, but it was her adventurers for good old Bess."

"You needn't think I uphold officialdom," said Brevis; "especially of the mediocre man abruptly invested with power." page 409Brevis saw officialdom in those early days drunk on power and with no one to say "Don't" to it. "Once the mediocre man looks on himself as a symbol, he goes Druidic and starts sacrificing everything and everyone to the glorious dawn of what he thinks is his mind. That's what made the bush-rangers and, to a certain extent, the pioneers. Something in that breed which doomed them forever to hit officialdom on the nose."

"Bless them," said Jenny, who went all the way with the pioneers there.

"A fine instinct," said Brevis. "Where would all the young nations of the world have been without it? All built on rebellion of some kind, the young nations. When I have to pass sentence on one of those brown hard-eyed fellows, whose very vitality has made him a sinner, I think: Sir; it's your kind in the bulk that is going to keep the world living when all the old nations have gone to sleep over the fire…. It is, too."

"How you people talk!" said Mab, waking with a grunt. "Fellow can't get a wink of sleep."

"It's getting cold, anyway," said Jenny. "Let's all go to bed. Young Jenny went upstairs long ago."

She said good night to Brevis in the hall. Perfection of a courtly old gentleman, Brevis, with his little twisted moustache and white imperial giving his thin dark face a delicately foreign look. He had begun to grow them when the rest of the world went back to shaved faces, and that was so like Brevis, who never could bear to be just like others. He held Jenny's hand, which was an unusual ceremony, while Mab climbed the stairs.

"I'm no better than most men," he said, "but I'd like you to know that I have been faithful to you since I first loved you, Jenny."

"Well, I appreciate that, Brevis, though I dare say you missed a lot of fun by it…. Don't get up to breakfast. Golly will bring it in."

She went through to the salon to put all straight for the night. Faithful? Strange Brevis, who had never been faithful to any but his own fastidious temperamental self! Idealists, all men: believing that by striking attitudes and formulating oaths they can alter elementary forces. Women know better, thought Jenny, page 410pushing the furniture an inch this way and that, as a woman will with the things she loves. Women generally accept what is; and if they squabble, it is generally with one another and not with God. And if they laugh, it is generally not with one another but with God.

Madam's harp, the pictures, the old tambour frames and fauteuils seemed exhaling a faint sweet life; movement stood on the edge of expression, sound on the edge of all the silences. Surely they were all here, the dear ghosts, for so often she nearly saw them. Almost she heard Grandpa come down the stair and go into the dining-room for his after-dinner nip, or Humphrey whistling as he trod overhead, taking down riding-whips and spurs from the bedroom wall. And surely on some quiet nights it was Fanny scrambling with Pepper and the puppies along the upper corridor, or Grandma singing in her boudoir some gay little French song.

"Someday I'll be a ghost myself," she thought. "But I wonder who'll want to see me as I so often want to see Grandma."

Drawing the curtains, she looked over the balustrade and the paddocks, to the distant dark smudge where two old huts had stood until Mark cleaned that corner up and made it a fine shrubbery. Looking out, one wondered what the sheep thought, standing there in the long grass and the dew, with wet round bodies. They, too, would see the stars and the gleam of the hurrying river, and the dim mist of moths over the evening primroses, over the sweet clover. One wondered what they thought of it all, waiting to be dumb before the shearer Life, waiting to shut their round mild eyes before the slayer Death.

Jenny stayed there a long time before she, too, went up to bed.

IV

Golly, the faithful friend of a lifetime, always jolting the heavy Chrissy into action, always putting her shoulder to extra wheels, had been spirited away by fat old Alsode Fremp. Pan piped from the woods, and the ancient nymph went dancing, pirouetting to a fresh servitude. So all that year and round into the next page 411autumn Jenny was rising early, and on this morning the pump was stiff with frost and the skimmer creaked at the half-frozen cream when she drew it round the pan. Golly had not been replaced because Charlotte thought "a certain amount of light work very good for Jenny, and Judge Keyes can always come to Bredon if she finds him too much for her now."

"Damn Lottie," said Jenny, working at the pump, and stopping for breath. But there was a robin with his breast blood-red up on the wall-top, and the walnut trees smelled clear and clean, and there were the rooks teaching the young ones to fly. Disgruntled Chrissy, clop-clopping about the yard (where the stones had worn unevenly as though they knew where the child Jenny had lightly run, where the Captain had trudged with his heavy bag of duck from the marshes), called Jenny to breakfast, and Mab was waiting in the red morning sun, very jovial. And there were two letters for Jenny, and a telegram.

"About the new iron for the pigsties, I suppose," said Jenny, opening it.

She remembered afterwards that Mab had been sitting at the table like the great bronze figurehead of a ship, that the porridge was in the blue bowl she had tried to find for the cream, and she didn't like the cream in that pink jug. She was still thinking of the pink jug as she went into the hall and rang up Charlotte. Charlotte, hearing Jenny's voice as she sat at breakfast, told Mark that it was just as she thought, and he shouldn't have put the telephone in at Clent three months ago.

"Here's Jenny always wanting something…. What is it? What?"

Could Jenny (she asked it very composedly) have the car at once, please Lottie? She wanted to go to Hobart. Brevis was ill.

"Well" said Lottie to Mark (she had just presence of mind to put her hand over the mouthpiece). "What do you think of that, I'd like to know!"

Mark thought that Jenny had better have the car.

"I'll be over in ten minutes," cried Charlotte into the mouth-piece; "and then we can just catch the nine-forty-five at Milton, Mark says."

Jenny's voice came back very clear, and Charlotte could tell page 412that she was looking just like Grandma. "No need for you to come. I'll have Uncle Mab. Thanks about the car."

Jenny put up the receiver and Charlotte hurried Patty upstairs to look for a hat that was not too gay. "Of course he's dying, though I won't suggest it to him. I'll wear my brown silk and turn in the tartan trimming at the neck."

Charlotte knew that she had not been so excited in years. Now she would at last get to the bottom of the mystery, for people always spoke the truth on their deathbeds and not wild horses should keep her out of the room. Besides, it was only right for the protection of Jenny's name that she should be there, and as for her not going to Hobart, Charlotte would like to see Jenny prevent her.

Jenny did not try, but Mab did. Charlotte said: "She needs a woman with her. You don't understand, Uncle Mab. Let me see the telegram." Jeffson (who was Brevis's man) briefly informed Miss Comyn that the judge had had a seizure and wanted her. It added that the sooner she came the better.

"Oh, hurry, hurry, Atkins!" cried Charlotte to the chauffeur, her heavy black veil which had done duty at many funerals blowing across Mab's face. But Jenny sat looking like Madam, and never said a word. Jenny, thought Mab, defying the civilizations and the centuries, defying disaster abroad in the frosty air where hawks sheered in the thin blue … little Jenny who had been so set apart from life….

The nine-forty-five rattled them at last down through the apple orchards of the Bagdad Valley. Red and yellow globes of light still loaded the trees, and carts stood under them, and girls in sunbonnets picking. There were glints from tin pails; and, later on, glints from the sea at Bridgewater Ferry. Charlotte, after trying unsuccessfully to comfort a Jenny who did not appear to need comfort—perhaps she had never really loved him, after all—thought that there was sure to be a public funeral and certainly splendid obituary notices for Brevis. England might even mention him in The Times. And Jenny, of course, would insist on going to the funeral in the first mourning carriage, supported by Charlotte. Brevis (how surprising when one thought of it!) had no relations. A lonely tower he had risen and stood above page 413Tasmania. A lonely tower he would fall. Unless, indeed, there had been a secret marriage. Oh, the glorious limelight that would fall then on Jenny, sitting so quiet that Lottie could have pinched her! The limelight that would fall upon them all!

V

Jeffson took them up the carpeted stair with a very bare lady holding a lamp in a niche; knocked softly on a heavy carved door. The judge had given orders, he explained, looking askance at Charlotte, curious and deferential towards Jenny. Jeffson had always thought Miss Comyn a puffect little lady, and he hoped the judge would put things right at last. But no parson had been sent for.

A brisk young doctor came out of the room; seemed much surprised to see Charlotte; said that nothing could make any difference. "A mere question of time, madam," and went away, still looking much surprised and not seeing Jenny at all. Jenny walked straight in and over to the bed. A nurse standing there stepped back and raised the blind so that light fell on the bed. Jenny stooped.

"Hello, Brevis," she said in her warm, strong, husky voice.

Charlotte stood shocked by the door. If that wasn't just like Jenny, when one should speak in whispers, move on tiptoe! Charlotte did both, approaching the nurse. Somehow she didn't feel quite equal to approaching Brevis lying back among the pillows, very tired and foreign-looking, his little white moustache and imperial deliberately distinguished. Charlotte wondered if they would put a bust of him in St. David's. But of course Brevis never went to church.

"See what it is to be a great man and asked to so many rich dinners," said Jenny, sitting down and taking his hands. "Well, I suppose I'd do just the same."

Charlotte began tearing off her tight kid gloves, seeing Jenny's bare hands. Jenny, most amazingly, had thought of everything. She had even brought a rose for Brevis to smell. "From the damask bush by the balustrade," she told him. "Shut your eyes page 414and remember how the scent comes out on dewy evenings when the frogs are croaking."

Brevis smiled. He shut his eyes. The troubled look went off his face. Charlotte thought how courageous Jenny was. Never once asking how he felt, or saying she was sorry to see him like this, or anything.

The evening light flooded the bed with unsteady gold; flooded the room. A very funny room, Charlotte thought, though probably expensive. That stiff thick strip of queerly figured embroidery on the wall. That stiff gilt Pieta (or was it gold?) hung over the mantel, that queer stiff smiling woman with beautiful hands. On a pedestal with no drapery a marble head staring. Just a head. Scarcely anything else in the room at all. In some way it made Charlotte forget the Brevis in the bed and remember the man, lean, courteous, with inscrutable eyes and a good cigar between thin brown fingers.

And there Jenny sat, smiling down a little at Brevis among the pillows, his eyes shut.

Now, thought Charlotte, was Jenny's chance to make him marry her. Feeling it her duty to suggest it, she approached the bed. But neither saw her. They were looking at each other and smiling, and she hesitated, wondering if it were possible that there had been a secret marriage after all. Then—she was surprised at her nervousness—she touched Jenny's arm. Jenny glanced round. She had thrown her hat off, and with her white hair and pale green frock she looked a most unsuitable person to be at a death-bed. Charlotte was glad that she had not taken off her own black veil. "Jenny … a clergyman," she whispered urgently. "For the sake of your name, you know. He can't refuse you now."

Jenny turned back to the bed as though she had not heard.

"Don't tame all the comets, Brevis," she said. "I'll like 'em a little wild."

Brevis whispered something, and Jenny bent over and kissed him on the lips. Then again they sat still for so long that Charlotte, missing her tea and feeling very neglected, fell asleep in the big chair in the corner.

"Come soon," said Brevis, clearly, from the bed.

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"I will," said Jenny, just as clearly.

Charlotte awoke with a start, to hear Jenny marrying herself to Brevis at last. And there was the clergyman … But it was only the nurse saying, "I think you had better take the lady away now."

Charlotte could hardly believe that it was all over and nothing confessed nor pardoned; nothing done. Jenny wouldn't even wait for the funeral. "Brevis would hate me to," she said.

In the railway carriage (Mab had reserved one) Charlotte put her arms round Jenny and said how glad she was to have been there as a support, dear Jenny.

"Oh, were you?" said Jenny, blankly. And then Mab took Charlotte by the arm and marched her down to the other end of the carriage. "You stay there, Lottie, and keep your mouth shut or I'll give you the worst spanking you ever had in your life," he said. Charlotte stayed. It was dangerous to provoke a madman, and if Jenny didn't care enough to cry she did … and would. She sat and wept for disappointment and anger; and it was all a piece with the rest if Brevis had not left Jenny his money after all.

VI

The canaries sang riotously in the window just as their faraway progenitors had sung for Madam. Sunlight was doing wonders for the canaries and the gilt cages. They were the Taj Mahal, Marco Polo's cities of gold; they were all the fine webbing of the centuries which never can quite hide the immortal song within. Jenny in a blue print frock stood on tiptoe to let Solomon and Robert the Devil fight for the seed between her lips. They fluffed out, balls of angry down, and Mab came in at the front door with some news from Bredon.

"Dick's done it," he cried. "A baronet, no less."

"Oh dear! What would Grandma say," cried Jenny, plumping down on the window seat. They looked at each other guiltily, these two miscreants from whom Madam had expected so much.

"And I've never even won a ticket in Tattersalls," said Mab.

"But the Comyn name has come to honour at last," cried Jenny. "Through beer!"

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They laughed until Jenny mopped her eyes. Then, by a like impulse—they so often thought in common, these two—they looked through the window. After last night's frost brown leaves dropped gently from the walnut trees. In and out of the branches racketed bright parrots come down from the ranges. Over Clent hills sparkled Comyn Sorley's new fences, browsed Comyn Sorley's sheep.

"Comyns and Sorleys all one at last," said Jenny. "But there are no more pioneers." Then she cried with a sudden glow: "But, oh, Uncle Mab, isn't it fun to think of all the lives and lives ahead of us still!"