Young Lord Hovenden sighed. If only it were he whose fingers were playing in the smooth thick tresses of Irene’s hair! It seemed an awful waste that she should be so fond of her Aunt Lilian. Somehow, the more he liked Irene the less he liked Aunt Lilian.
‘Haven’t you sometimes longed to be an artist yourself, Hovenden?’ Mrs. Aldwinkle suddenly asked. She leaned forward, her eyes glittering with the reflected light of two or three hundred million remote suns. She was going to suggest that he might try his hand at poetical rhapsodies about political injustice and the condition of the lower classes. Something half-way between Shelley and Walt Whitman.
‘Me!’ said Hovenden in astonishment. Then he laughed aloud: Ha, ha, ha! It was a jarring note.
Mrs. Aldwinkle drew back, pained. ‘I don’t know why you should think the idea so impossibly comic,’ she said.
‘Perhaps he has other work to do,’ said Mr. Falx out of the darkness. ‘More important work.’ And at the sound of that thrilling, deep, prophetical voice Lord Hovenden felt that, indeed, he had.
‘More important?’ queried Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘But can anything be more important? When one thinks of Flaubert . . .’ One thought of Flaubert—working through all a fifty-four hour week at a relative clause. But Mrs. Aldwinkle was too enthusiastic to be able to say what followed when one had thought of Flaubert.
‘Think of coal-miners for a change,’ said Mr. Falx in answer. ‘That’s what I suggest.’
‘Yes,’ Lord Hovenden agreed, gravely nodding. A lot of his money came from coal. He felt particularly responsible for miners when he had time to think of them.
‘Think,’ said Mr. Falx in his deep voice; and he relapsed into a silence more eloquently prophetical than any speech.
For a long time nobody spoke. The wind came draughtily and in ever chillier gusts. Irene clasped her arms still tightlier over her breast; she shivered, she yawned with cold. Mrs. Aldwinkle felt the shaking of the young body that leaned against her knees. She herself was cold too; but after what she had said to Cardan and the others it was impossible for her to go indoors yet awhile. She felt, in consequence, annoyed with Irene for shivering. ‘Do stop,’ she said crossly. ‘It’s only a stupid habit. Like a little dog that shivers even in front of the fire.’
‘All ve same,’ said Lord Hovenden, coming to Irene’s defence, ‘it is getting raver cold.’
‘Well, if you find it so,’ retorted Mrs. Aldwinkle, with overwhelming sarcasm, ‘you’d better go in and ask them to light a fire.’
It was nearly midnight before Mrs. Aldwinkle finally gave the word to go indoors.
CHAPTER VII
To say good-night definitely and for the last time was a thing which Mrs. Aldwinkle found most horribly difficult. With those two fatal words she pronounced sentence of death on yet another day (on yet another, and the days were so few now, so agonizingly brief); she pronounced it also, temporarily at least, on herself. For, the formula once finally uttered, there was nothing for her to do but creep away out of the light and bury herself in the black unconsciousness of sleep. Six hours, eight hours would be stolen from her and never given back. And what marvellous things might not be happening while she was lying dead between the sheets! Extraordinary happinesses might present themselves and, finding her asleep and deaf to their calling, pass on. Or some one, perhaps, would be saying the one supremely important, revealing, apocalyptic thing that she had been waiting all her life to hear. ‘There!’ she could imagine somebody winding up, ‘that’s the secret of the Universe. What a pity poor Lilian should have gone to bed. She would have loved to hear it.’ Good-night—it was like parting with a shy lover who had not yet ventured to declare himself. A minute more and he would speak, would reveal himself the unique soul-mate. Good-night, and he would remain for ever merely diffident little Mr. Jones. Must she part with this day too, before it was transfigured?
Good-night. Every evening she put off the saying of it as long as she possibly could. It was generally half-past one or two before she could bring herself to leave the drawing-room. And even then the words were not finally spoken. For on the threshold of her bed-chamber she would halt, desperately renewing the conversation with whichever of her guests had happened to light her upstairs. Who knew? Perhaps in these last five minutes, in the intimacy, in the nocturnal silence, the important thing really would be said. The five minutes often lengthened themselves out to forty, and still Mrs. Aldwinkle stood there, desperately putting off and putting off the moment when she would have to pronounce the sentence of death.
When there was nobody else to talk to, she had to be content with the company of Irene, who always, when she herself had undressed, came back in her dressing-gown to help Mrs. Aldwinkle—since it would have been unfair to keep a maid up to such late hours—make ready for the night. Not that little Irene was particularly likely to utter the significant word or think the one apocalyptic thought. Though of course one never knew: out of the mouths of babes and sucklings . . . And in any case, talking with Irene, who was a dear child and so devoted, was better than definitely condemning oneself to bed.
To-night, it was one o’clock before Mrs. Aldwinkle made a move towards the door. Miss Thriplow and Mr. Falx, protesting that they too were sleepy, accompanied her. And like an attendant shadow, Irene silently rose when her aunt rose and silently walked after her. Half-way across the room Mrs. Aldwinkle halted and turned round. Formidable she was, a tragedy queen in coral-red velvet. Her little white muslin mirage halted too. Less patient, Mr. Falx and Miss Thriplow moved on towards the door.
‘You must all come to bed soon, you know,’ she said, addressing herself to the three men who remained at the further end of the room in a tone at once imperious and cajoling. ‘I simply won’t allow you, Cardan, to keep those poor young men out of their beds to all hours of the night. Poor Calamy has been travelling all day. And Hovenden needs all the sleep, at his age, that he can get.’ Mrs. Aldwinkle took it hardly that any of her guests should be awake and talking while she was lying dead in the tomb of sleep. ‘Poor Calamy!’ she pathetically exclaimed, as though it were a case of cruelty to animals. She felt herself filled, all at once, with an enormous and maternal solicitude for this young man.
‘Yes, poor Calamy!’ Mr. Cardan repeated, twinkling. ‘Out of pure sympathy I was suggesting that we should drink a pint or two of red wine before going to bed. There’s nothing like it for making one sleep.’
Mrs. Aldwinkle turned her bright blue eyes on Calamy, smiled her sweetest and most piercing smile. ‘Do come,’ she said. ‘Do.’ She extended her hand in a clumsy and inexpressive gesture. ‘And you, Hovenden,’ she added, almost despairingly.
Hovenden looked uncomfortably from Mr. Cardan to Calamy, hoping that one or other of them would answer for him.
‘We shan’t be long,’ said Calamy. ‘The time to drink a glass of wine, that’s all. I’m not a bit tired, you know. And Cardan’s suggestion of Chianti is very tempting.’
‘Ah well,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, ‘if you prefer a glass of wine . . .’ She turned away with a sad indignation and rustled off towards the door, sweeping the tiled floor with the train of her velvet dress. Mr. Falx and Miss Thriplow, who had been lingering impatiently near the door, drew back in order that she might make her exit in full majesty. With a face that looked very gravely out of the little window in her bell of copper hair, Irene followed. The door closed behind them.
Calamy turned to Mr. Cardan. ‘If I prefer a glass of wine?’ he repeated on a note of interrogation. ‘But prefer it to what? She made it sound as if I had had to make a momentous and eternal choice between her and a pint of Chianti—and had chosen the Chianti. It passes my understanding.’
‘Ah, but then you don’t know Lilian as well as I do,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘And now, let’s go and hunt out that flask and some glasses in the dining-room.’
Half-way up the stairs—they were a grand and solemn flight loping gradually upwards under a slanting tunnel of barrel vaulting—Mrs. Aldwinkle paused. ‘I always think of them,’ she said ecstatically, ‘going up, coming down. Such a spectacle!’
‘Who?’ asked Mr. Falx.
‘Those grand old people.’
‘Oh, the tyrants.’
Mrs. Aldwinkle smiled pityingly. ‘And the poets, the scholars, the philosophers, the painters, the musicians, the beautiful women. You forget those, Mr. Falx.’ She raised her hand, as though summoning their spirits from the abyss. Psychical
