Heir — 9 - 11
IX
They arrived in response to her invitation, on Christmas-eve, all four of them, driving up in the station fly, Bertie on the box.
She stood on the doorway, awaiting them, and “LYDIA PROTHEROE, Theatrical Costumier and Wig-maker,” flaunted over her head in the gilt lettering on the black ground.
She was conscious of her exquisite disparity with this description.
Sleek bands, and snuff-coloured gown; Bertie and Emily should find her as they had left her; the difference should only by degrees dawn upon them.
She was glad now that she should have rejected the alteration in her appearance which, to a less subtle mind, would have been so blatantly indicated.
There was nothing blatant about Lydia Protheroe; oh no!
it was all very surreptitious, very delicate; she was an artist; everybody said so; her touch very light, but very certain.
She was a rapier to Bertie’s bludgeon.
Bertie: he had descended from the fly, he had taken both her hands in his, he had grown whiskers like his father’s, his father’s watch-chain (she recognized it) spanned his stomach, he was pressing her hands and looking into her eyes with what she was sure he inwardly phrased as “a world of tenderness and forgiveness,” while simultaneously he tried to scan out of the corner of his eye the wares displayed in her shop-window—the dragon’s head, the waxen figure of a fairy, the crowns and harps—and she saw him wince, but at the same time, she saw his determination to ignore all this, or to accept it, if he was forced to, in a spirit of jovial resignation; and now Emily was kissing her, Emily with those same thin ungenerous lips and pointed nose, so like her own features and yet so different, because of a recklessness in Lydia’s eyes which was not in Emily’s—subtle again—and now Bertie’s wife enveloped her in a soft, fat little hug; and there was Emily’s husband, whom they called Fred, and who was a pink-faced little man in a bowler hat and, for some reason, an evening tie, pushed forward to embrace his sister-in-law with a reluctance he tried to turn into enthusiasm.
Lydia brought the brood into the shop; it gave her a strange pang to see them cross her threshold, succeeded by an exaltation to have got them safely there.
She did not talk much; she let them do the talking while she surveyed them.
Bertie was voluble; he had a lot of information to give her, mixed in with small outbursts of sentimentality.
He had grown portly, and he was most anxious to conciliate her; she took the measure of Bertie in a moment.
The others, clearly, were in his charge.
His wife, as ever, watched him for her cues with little twinkling, admiring eyes.
Emily produced a sour and unconvincing smile whenever Lydia’s eyes rested on her.
As for Fred, he smiled nervously the whole time, and looked as though he felt himself very much of a stranger.
X
She had got them all into their rooms for the night.
She relished the feeling that she had got them all safely shut in, and as she stood at the top of the stairs looking first to left and then to right along the dim passage, she felt the jailer of all those four people behind the closed doors.
She would have liked a bunch of keys dangling from her belt.
Squeezing her hands tightly together, she swayed backwards and forwards as she controlled her laughter.
A single gas-jet, turned low, lit the passage.
She wandered away.
She wandered down into the shop, where the polished shields on the walls threw back the sharp flame of her candle, and the indistinct, peopled obscurity of the shop.
She thought vaguely that the shop was too full—had always been too full—she must have a clearance—but there was no longer any room upstairs—she ought to scrap half her things—but no, they were too precious.
She wandered away again, up into the attic.
She peered round, thrusting the candle into the dark corners.
A rat scurried past.
Old trunks, too full to shut; velvet and damask and leather protruded; too full.
Like life;
too full.
Like her head; too full.
She wandered back to the dim passage.
Closed doors.
The gas-jet.
She could turn off the gas at the main; that would put the house in darkness.
They would not understand what had happened.
They would run out of their rooms, and up and down the house, looking for light; finding none; blundering against objects in the dark.
She would hear their footsteps, running; their hands, perhaps, beating at last upon the shutters.
She had seen clearly enough that they already thought her strange.
She had accompanied Bertie and his wife to their rooms, and under her scrutiny they had continued their talk; they had drawn a picture of the social life in their town; they had spoken of nice little parties.
“Not so nice as the little party I’m giving now,” Lydia had cried, and left them.
Husband and wife indeed thought her very odd; the wife was puzzled and uneasy.
All through dinner Miss Protheroe had been very silent, from her place at the head of the table where she sat surveying her guests, only occasionally she had given vent to some such outburst, which she had at once restrained; and the dining-room had been odd too, a room at the back of the shop, full of queer theatrical things, and a great figure of a Javanese warrior in one corner, seven feet high, with a bearded yellow mask under his helmet, and a lantern swinging from the top of the spear he held in his hand.
Bertie’s wife thought this a novel and unpleasing method of lighting a room.
She had begun to wish they had never come.
For the rest, there had been a barbaric flavour about the meal, unsuitable to one so obviously an English spinster; they had eaten off the sham gold plate, and had drunk out of the sham gold goblets; the sham gold candelabra had flared in the middle of the table with its eight or ten candles, above a great golden bowl of artificial fruit.
It was difficult to believe that that setting was the invention of Lydia, sitting there so prim in the unchanged gown of bombazine.
It was as disconcerting an indication as if Lydia had gotten up and danced.
Out in the dim passage Lydia paused before Emily’s door.
If she despised Bertie, she fairly hated Emily.
Not one of Emily’s childish sneakings and whinings was forgotten; and Emily was unchanged: she had been dragged here, reluctant, by Bertie, tempted by the pictures Bertie drew of Lydia’s wealth; unable to resist that, she had come, but she was bitter and ungracious, wringing out that thin, sour little smile whenever Lydia looked at her.
That supposed wealth, now become one of Lydia’s dearest jokes!
They wouldn’t find much—the vultures—they would find that Lydia hadn’t hoarded, hadn’t kept back more than the little necessary to her own livelihood, so long as charity had stretched out to her its piteous hands.
It was not part of Lydia’s creed to feast while others went hungry.
Not for that had she broken away from her traditions and her family.
She would have liked now to sham dead just for the sake of seeing their faces and hearing their comments.
She wasted no time on Emily; she needed no sight of Emily’s face in order to whet her vindictiveness.
She knew well enough what was going on behind all those closed doors.
Whispers of cupidity, to the ugly accompaniment of the calculation of Lydia’s prosperity, oh, she knew, she knew!
Mean souls!
mean, prudent souls!
They had thrown her out when she was poor; they fawned on her now that they thought her rich.
Well, she would teach them a lesson; she would give them twenty-four hours’ entertainment which they would not be likely to forget.
She crept away, down the dark stairs into her shop.
At home again, among her fanciful and extravagant confederates!
She held out her arms towards her shop, as though to embrace it.
They were allies, she and it, the world of illusion against the world of fact.
She set to work.
XI
Next morning her guests came down to breakfast with white faces.
They shot doubtful glances at Lydia when she blandly wished them a happy Christmas.
There were parcels put ready for them beside all their plates, and Lydia observed with sarcasm their reviving spirits as they opened them in optimistic expectancy, and their consternation as they discovered the contents: a big, pink turned-up nose for Bertie, a blue wig for Bertie’s wife, a pair of ears for Fred, and a black moustache for Emily.
Led by Bertie, they tried at first to disguise their vexation under good-humour: “Ha!
ha!
very funny, my dear,” said Bertie, putting on the nose and poking it facetiously into his wife’s face.
“But you must all put them on,” said Miss Protheroe, without a smile.
They looked at her: she was perfectly serious and even compelling.
They began to be a little afraid, though they were even more afraid of showing it.
They tried to expostulate, still good-humouredly, but, “If you don’t like my presents, you can’t eat my breakfast,” said Miss Protheroe.
They had to comply.
Lydia presided gravely, while the four sat round the table, eating kippers, tricked out in their respective presents.
Emily, whose black moustache worked up and down as she ate, was controlled only by the beseeching gaze of Bertie’s eyes over the top of the enormous nose; Bertie’s wife shed silent tears which fell into her plate.
“Shall you expect us, my dear,” Bertie said towards the end of that grim meal, feeling that it was becoming urgent to break the silence, “to go to church like this?
” “Church?
you aren’t going to church,” replied Lydia.
There was a chorus: Not go to church on Christmas-day?
“No,” said Lydia; “but,” she added suddenly, “you can give me your offertory, and I’ll see that it reaches the proper quarter.
Charity at Christmas time!
Turn out your pockets.
” “Look here, Alice,” said Bertie, standing up, “this is going beyond a joke.
Be very careful, or we shall be obliged to leave your house.
” “You can’t,” said Miss Protheroe.
“The doors are locked, the shutters are locked and barred, and you stay here for as long as I choose to keep you.
You are my guests—see?
And I’ve waited for you, for forty years.
I
shan’t let you go now.
” They heard her words; they stared at one another with a sudden horror leaping in their eyes.
XII
