The Way Home (24 page)

"Milestones? Why not tombstones while you're about it?" cried Mary hotly, repudiating a theory that seemed to her wholly perverse "Of course, you're able to use words I don't understand; but I say, once a friend, always a friend. I know I'd be sorry to forget anyone I had ever liked -- even if I didn't find much to talk to them about. But you must always have your own ideas. I declare you're going on now about people just as you do about places, about not wanting to see them again once you've left."

"Yes, places and people -- one as the other. Let me face forward -- not back. But to return to the matter in hand: I don't mind telling you I'd gladly pay our visitor of this afternoon to stop away . . . and drink his tea elsewhere."

"I never heard such a thing!" Then, however, another thought struck her. "You're not letting that silly old affair in Ballarat still prejudice you against him?"

Mahony laughed out loud. "Good Lord, no! The grass has been green over that for what seems like half a century."

"Then it's because he drank his tea out of his saucer -- and things like that."

"Tch!" On the verge of letting his temper get away with him, Mahony pulled up. "Well, my dear. . . well, perhaps you're not altogether wrong. I'll put it even more plainly though. Mary, it's because he spoke and looked like what I veritably believe him to be: an ostler in some stable. Horsey checks, dirty nails, sham brilliants; and a mind and tongue to match. No, I stick to what I've said: I'd offer him a ten-pound note to stop away."

"I never knew anyone so hard on people as you."

"Come, do I need to mix with ostlers at my time of life? . . . and in my present position. It's not my fault that I've gone up in the world and he down."

"No, but all the more reason not to turn your back on somebody who hasn't had your luck."

"I deny that I'm a snob. I'd invite my butcher or my baker to the house any day, so long as he had decent manners and took an interest in what interests me."

"My dear Richard, you only say that because you know you'll never have to! And if you did, you wouldn't like them a bit better than you do Purdy. But I'm sure I sometimes don't know what's coming over you. You used to be such a stickler for remembering old friends and old kindnesses, and hadn't bad enough to say about people who didn't. I believe it was the going home that changed you. Yet when you were in England, how you railed at people there for letting themselves be influenced by a person's outside -- how he ate peas, or drank his soup, and things like that."

"England had nothing whatever to do with it. But it was a very different thing in Ballarat, Mary, where my practice brought me up against all sorts of people to whom I was forced to be civil. Now, there's no such obligation. And so I decline, once and for all, to exhibit the specimen we saw to-day to our social circle. If you're absolutely bent on befriending him -- and I know doing good is, to you, the temptation strong drink is to others -- although in my opinion, my dear, you'll end by overdoing it: you've not looked yourself for weeks past. If you must have Purdy here, kindly let it be when no one else is present, and if possible when I, too, am out of the way. What you're to say about me? Anything you like. He won't miss me so long as your friend Tilly is at hand to drink in his words. You certainly hit the bull's-eye this time, my dear, in providing her with entertainment. Purdy's egregious lying was pabulum after her own heart."

With which Richard slung a towel round his neck and retired to the bathroom, leaving Mary to the reflection that, if ever there was a person who knew how to complicate the doing of a simple kindness, it was Richard. Here he went, detesting Tilly with all his old fervour and dead set from the start against Purdy and his coming to the house. (It was true Purdy had got rather loud and bumptious; but a sensible woman like Tilly might be trusted soon to knock the nonsense out of him.) Meanwhile she, Mary, had somehow to propitiate all three; and in particular to hinder Richard from showing what he felt. For if the match came off, Purdy would become a rich and important personage to whom every door would open. And then Richard, too, would come round -- would have to. If, that was, she could meanwhile contrive to keep him from making lifelong enemies of the happy pair.

"My dear! the minute I set eyes on 'er, I knew she was a fraud. And I thinks to myself: 'Just you wait, milady, till the lights go out, and I'll cook your goose for you!' Well, sure enough, there we all sat 'and-in-hand in the dark, like a party of kids playing 'unt-the-slipper. And by-and-by one and another squeals: 'I'm touched!' What do I do, Mary? Why, I gradually work the hand I'm 'olding in me right, closer to me left, till I'd got them joined and me right 'and free. (It's as easy as Punch if you know 'ow to do it.) And when the man next me -- oh, 'e was a solemn old josser! -- when 'e said in a voice that seemed to come from 'is boots: 'The spirits 'ave deigned to touch me' -- as if 'e'd said: 'God Almighty 'as arrived and is present!' -- I made one grab, and got 'old of -- now what do you think? I'm danged if it wasn't 'er false chignon I found in my hand. I thought she was going to give me the slip then, after all: she wriggled like an eel. But I held on like grim death and, luckily for me, she'd a few 'airs left still clinging to her cranium. She squeals like a pig. 'Up with the lights,' says I; ' I've got 'er!' 'Turn up the lights if you dare,' cries she: 'it'll kill me.' Over goes a chair in the scrimmage, and then they did turn 'em up, and there was she squirming on the floor, bald like an egg, with I don't know how many false gloves and feathers and things pinned on to 'er body!"

Tilly sat by the fire in Mary's bedroom, her black silk skirts turned back from the blaze. She was in high feather, exhilarated by her own acumen as by the smartness with which she had conducted the exposure. Opposite her Mary, her head tied up in red flannel, crippled by the heavy cold and the face-ache that had confined her to the house, listened with a sinking heart. It was all very well for Tilly to preen herself on what she had done: Richard would see it in a very different light. He had gone straight to his study on entering; and hurrying out in her dressing-gown to learn what had brought the two of them home so early, Mary had caught a glimpse of his face. It was enough. When Richard looked like that, all was over. His hatred of a scene in public amounted to a mania.

It was most discouraging. For a fortnight past she had done everything a friend could do, to advance Tilly's suit; plotting and planning, always with an anxious ear to the study-door, in a twitter lest Richard should suddenly come out and complain about the noise. For the happy couple, to whom she had given up the drawing-room, conversed in tones that were audible throughout the house: a louder courtship Mary had never heard; it seemed to consist chiefly of comic stories, divided one from the next by bursts of laughter. Personally she thought the signs and portents would not be really favourable till the pair grew quieter: every wooing she had assisted at had been punctuated by long, long silences, in which the listener puzzled his brains to imagine what the lovers could be doing. However, Tilly seemed satisfied. After an afternoon of this kind she went into the seventh heaven, and leaning on Mary's neck shed tears of joy: it was a case of middle-aged lovesickness and no mistake! True, she also knew moments of uncertainty, when things seemed to hang fire, under the influence of which she would vehemently declare: "Upon my soul, Mary love, if he doesn't, I shall! I feel it in my bones." A state of mind which alarmed Mary and made her exclaim: "Oh no, don't, Tilly! -- don't do that. I'm sure you'd regret it. You know, later on he might cast it up at you."

And now Tilly had probably spoilt everything, by her hasty, ill-considered action.

Fortunately for her she didn't realise how deeply she had sinned; though even she could see that Richard was angry. "Of course, love, the doctor's in a bit of a taking. I couldn't get a word out of 'im all the way 'ome. -- Lor', Mary, what geese men are, to be sure!. . . even the best of 'em. Not to speak of the cleverest. To see all those learned old mopokes sitting there to-night, solemn as hens on eggs . . . it was enough to make a cat laugh. But even if 'e does bear me a bit of a grudge, it can't be helped. I'm not a one, love, to sit by and see a cheat and keep my mouth shut. A fraud's a fraud, and even if it's the Queen 'erself."

"Of course it is. I feel just the same as you. It makes my blood boil to watch Richard, with all his brains, letting himself be duped by some dishonest creature who only wants to make money out of him. But ... when he once gets an idea in his head . . . . And he's not a bit grateful for having his eyes opened."

Grateful, indeed! When, after an hour's solitude which might really have been expected to cool him down, he came into the bedroom, his very first words were: "Either that woman leaves the house, or I go myself!"

For all Mary's firm resolve to act as peacemaker, this was more than she could swallow. "Richard, don't be so absurd! We can't turn a visitor out. Decency forbids."

"It's my house, and for me to say whom I'll have in it."

"Tilly's my friend, and I'm not going to have her insulted." Mary's tone was as dogged as his own.

"No! but she is at liberty to insult mine . . . and make me a laughing-stock into the bargain. Such a scandalous scene as to-night's, it has never been my lot to witness."

"However did it happen that you held a seance? The invitation only said cards and music. I'd have kept her at home if I'd guessed, knowing her opinion of that sort of thing."

"I wish to God you had! You talk of decency? You need hardly worry, I think, in the case of a person who has so few decent feelings of her own. If you could have heard her! 'I got 'er! Up with the gas! I'm 'olding 'er -- by 'er false 'air!'" -- Mahony gave the imitation with extravagant emphasis. "I leave it to you to imagine the rest. That voice . . . the scattered aitches . . . the gauche and vulgar manner . . . the medium weeping and protesting . . . your friend parleying and exclaiming -- at the top of her lungs, too -- glorying in what she had done as if it was something to be proud of, and blind as a bat to the thunder-glances that were being thrown at her . . . no! I shall never forget it. She has rendered me impossible -- in a house where till now I have been an honoured guest."

The exaggeration of this statement nettled Mary. She clicked her tongue. "Oh, don't be so silly! Surely you can write and explain? Mrs. Phayre will understand . . . that you had nothing to do with it."

"Who am I that I should have to explain and apologise? -- and for the behaviour of a person she did us the courtesy to invite."

"But considering the woman was a fraud? Tilly vows she had all sorts of contrivances pinned to her body."

"There you go! Ready, as usual, to believe any one rather than me! She was no more a fraud than I am. She came to us well attested by circles of the highest standing. Yet in spite of this, an ignorant outsider, who is present at a sitting for the first time in her life, has the insolence to set herself up as a judge. -- Mary! I've put up with the job lot you call your friends for more than a twelvemonth. But this is the last straw. Out she goes, and that's the end of it!"

But this flicked Mary on the raw. "You seem to forget some of the job lot were my own relations."

"Oh, now get touchy, do! You know very well what I mean. But enough's enough. I can stand no more."

"You talk as if you were the sole person to be considered. As usual, think of nobody but yourself."

"Ha! I like that," cried Mahony, exasperated. "I think I'm possessed of the patience of Job, if you ask me. For there's never been a soul among them with whom I had two ideas in common."

"No, you prefer these wretched mediums and the silly people who are taken in by them. I wish spiritualism had never been invented!"

"Don't talk about what you don't understand!"

"I do. I know nearly every time we go out now, I have to sit by and watch you letting yourself be humbugged. And then I'm not to open my mouth, or say what I see, or have any opinion of my own."

"No! I should leave that to the superior wits of your friend."

"I think it's abominable the way you sneer at Tilly! But if you do it just to get her out of the house, you're on the wrong tack. She's not going just now, and that's all about it. Any one but you would understand what's happening. But you're so taken up with yourself that you never see a thing -- not if it's under your very nose!"

"Pray what do you mean by that? What is happening?" Pierced by a sudden suspicion Mahony swung round and faced her. "Good Lord, Mary!". . . his voice trailed off in a kind of incredulous disgust. "Good Lord! You don't want to tell me you're trying to bolster up a match between this woman and . . . and Purdy?"

Mary tightened her lips and did not reply.

Mahony's irritation burst its bounds. "Well, upon my soul! . .. well, of all the monstrous pieces of folly!" After which he broke off, to throw in caustically: "Of course if it comes to that, I 'll allow they're well matched. . . in manners and appearance. But the fellow's an incorrigible waster. He'll make ducks and drakes of old Ocock's hard-earned pile. Besides, has he shown the least desire for matrimony? Are you not lending yourself to a vulgar intrigue on the woman's part? If so, let me tell you that it's beneath your dignity -- your dignity as my wife -- and I for one decline to permit anything so offensive to go on under my roof. Not to speak of having to see you bear the blame, should things go wrong."

"No, really, Richard! this is too much," cried Mary, and bounced up from her seat. "For goodness sake, let me manage my own affairs! To hear you talk, any one would think I was still a child, to be told what I may and mayn't do -- instead of a middle-aged woman. I'm quite able to judge for myself; yes! and take the consequences, too. But you blow me up just as if I wasn't a person for myself at all, but only your wife. Besides, I think you might show a little confidence in me. I shan't disgrace you, even if I am fool enough to bring two people together again who were once so fond of each other. Which you seem to have quite forgotten. Though your own common sense might tell you. Tilly's alone in the world, and has more money than she knows what to do with. And he has none. I think you can safely leave it to her to look after her own interests. She's a good deal sharper than any of us, you included. And Purdy, too. You sneer at him for an ostler and a ne'er-do-well. He's nothing of the sort. For six months now he's worked hard as a traveller in jewellery." ("Ha! . . . that explains the sham diamonds, the rings, the breastpins.") "There you go! . . . sneering again. And here am I, struggling and striving to keep the peace between you, till I don't know whether I'm standing on my head or my heels. And as far as you're concerned, it's not the least bit of good. I think you grow more selfish and perverse day by day. You ought to have lived on a desert island, all by yourself. Oh, I'm tired . . . sick and tired . . . of it and of everything!" -- and having said her say, passionately and at top speed, Mary suddenly broke down and burst out crying.