III

PAULINE LEICESTER’S mother’s cottage had only one spare bedroom. It stood in the New Forest, some seven miles from Brockenhurst, with no house nearer it than just that seven miles. And Mrs. Lucas, the mother of Pauline Leicester, suffered from angina pectoris. She was a little, pleasant woman, with the greatest tact that was ever known; she played a variety of Patiences, and she had one very attached servant. But, little and pleasant and patient and tactful, she suffered very much pain.

It was not, indeed, angina pectoris, but pneumonia that brought the Leicesters down in March.

“And, poor dear!” Pauline said to her husband, “no one knows what she has borne. And now ...”

She was sitting alone opposite Leicester in the railway carriage; she was still in furs, for March was by no means done with, and the black, grey-tipped hairs encircling her porcelain cheeks and chin, the black, grey-tipped furs crowning her brow, that was like soft and translucent china, she leaned back in the seat, and was so tiny that her feet did not touch the floor. Her brows curved out over her eyes; their lashes curved out and upwards, so that she had an expression of being a newly awakened and wondering child, and about her lips there hovered always one of those faint ghosts of smiles that are to other smiles as the faint odour of pot-pourri is to the scent of roses. Her husband called her Puff-Ball, because he said a breath of wind would scatter her like an odorous smoke, gone in a second; but she had acquired her faint smile whilst tending five very robust children when she had been a nursery governess. She was twenty-three.

“You see,” she went on, “it was always mother’s ambition—her secret ambition—to have a white pony and a basket-work open chaise. It must be a white pony and a basket-work chaise. You know, the New Forest’s the place where all Admirals go to die, and all their widows always set up these chaises, just as all the Admirals always have parrots. Not that I ever considered mother as a widow. I suppose that was because I hardly saw her at all in her weeds, and I hardly ever saw her with my father—and yet she was in such an agony of fear whenever the wind blew, or when the weather was fierce. When it blew in the Forest, it used to remind her that there might be wind at sea; when it was a dead calm, she was always convinced that that meant that there was a particularly vicious cyclone somewhere else. She always seemed most characteristic when she was sitting bolt upright, with one hand close to her heart—listening. And I don’t think she was the woman for father. He was so big and grizzled, and loud and romantic. He used to shout at her: ‘What’d a puff of wind do to a first-class cruiser? What’d it do, d’you think?’ It wasn’t that he wasn’t prouder of her than you are of me. Why, I’ve seen him take her up in his arms and hoist her towards the ceding, as if she had been a baby, and roar with laughter. But I don’t think that was very good for mother. And you know she got her first touch of heart trouble when the Victoria was rammed. She was in Lyndhurst, and read it on the placards—Flagship sunk: Admiral and six hundred lives lost.’ She put her hand over her heart and fell over backwards. Oh! poor dear!”

Pauline looked at her husband.

“Yes, old boy,” she said, “you don’t know what we women have to suffer.”

He was like a large, pleased spaniel assaulted by a Persian kitten. He was so slow that he seemed never to get a word out; he was so happy that he never made the effort. He had promised to stand for Mid-Kent when they had been married one year, because she declared that he needed an occupation, and would be tired of her prattle. She said she could hold him a year; after that he’d have to go out of the house. And, indeed, she ran on and on, but it was pleasant enough to hear her as she thought aloud, her mind linking up topic to topic.

“Yes,” she said, “there were father’s speculations, that were as bad for her as the winds on the sea. He’d roar out: ‘I never put into anything in any one year more than three-fifths of my year’s screw. I never did, and I never will. And the wheel’s bound to turn right side up.’ But it never did, and it never would. And he had expensive tastes, and there was me to dress. And I’ve seen him sitting with his chin between his hands. So that when he died his coffin stood in an empty house—the brokers had cleared it that day. And I was at the Brigstocks’—up in the nursery.”

Dudley Leicester swore suddenly at Fate that had so misused his Puff-Ball.

“I’ve never really told you this,” Pauline said, “though I dare say you knew it.”

“I never knew it,” he said. “By God! I’d like to, ... Well, the most I knew was, I heard the Brigstocks only gave you three days for your father’s funeral, and cut it off your holidays next summer.”

“Well, I’ve got to thank them that I never really think of mother as a widow. I’m glad of that; and there were five children in the nursery, and only me to look after them.”

Mr. Leicester muttered beneath his breath that they were cursed hogs.

“Well, I’ve got to thank them for you!” she said. “For if Mr. Grimshaw hadn’t come up into the nursery—if he hadn’t been so fond of children—he’d never have seen me, and so he’d never have helped mother to patch up her impossible affairs, and get her compassionate allowance, and keep out of rooms in Hampton Court that she dreaded so. You’d never have come to Hampton Court. You’ve never been to Hampton Court in your life.”

“I have,” Dudley Leicester asseverated. “When I was a kid I scratched a wart off my hand on the hollies in the maze; there’s the scar on the little finger. And I wish you’d call him Robert. I’ve told you so many times. It’s deuced bad form to call him Mr. Grimshaw.”

Pauline’s lower lip curved inwards.

“Anyhow, mother’s ambition to have a pony was a secret all the time.”

“She might have had fifty ponies if I’d known,” Leicester said.

“But you were engaged to Etta Stackpole all the while,” Pauline mocked him. “You know you’d have married her if she had not flirted with the boot-blacks. You’ve told me so many times! And anyhow, she didn’t want fifty ponies: she only wanted one. And, now I’m off her hands, and she’s been able to get one—there comes this....”

For Mrs. Lucas, driving out with her pony for the third time in the Forest, the pony—white, with extreme age—had fallen, and lay still, and a March storm had come sweeping up from the Solent. So that there was the pneumonia.

“And the only reason I tell you all this,” Pauline said, “is to make you very quiet and good, and careful not to knock things over, because it’s such a tiny box of a place, and you’re such a clumsy creature, and falling crockery is so bad for a weak heart. I should say it’s worse than sudden deaths or runaway marriages....”

But Dudley Leicester had no chance of breaking his mother-in-law’s china. He was fond of standing before her little mantelshelf, and, with a motion of his shoulder-blades, knocking her blue vases into the fender, and his dismal contrition then had always been almost worse for Mrs. Lucas’s nerves than the actual crash and collision. He had no chance, because the little cottage was full to overflowing. There were two nurses in attendance; there were a doctor and a specialist at the moment of the Leicesters’ arrival, and there was only one spare bedroom, and only one servant. And there was no other dwelling-place within seven miles. Dudley Leicester was left to imagine that it was the cold, calm, closely-lipped nurses in their white aprons that seemed to stand out so stiffly, to take up so much space, and with their rustlings so to fill the tiny house—that it was they who sent the quite dismal Dudley Leicester back to town. But no doubt, though she never let him suspect it, or the shadow of it, it was Pauline. With the secret consciousness that his presence, though he never went near the sick-room, was a constant torture to her mother—it was Pauline who really ejected him from the cottage, who put against the fact that he was willing to sleep on the sofa or in the loft over the white pony’s stable the other fact—that Ann, the servant, was terribly overworked already, with so many extra beds to make, meals to cook, and plates to wash up. In fact, gay and brave and pleading, Pauline put her hands on her husband’s chest and pushed him backwards out of the crowded house. And he never realized that it was she who did it.