Heir — 12 - 16
Bertie’s wife began to weep, loudly and helplessly.
“Oh, let me get out of this,” she cried; “why did we ever come?
Bertie, it was your fault.
Oh, why didn’t you leave her alone?
the wicked, mad woman?
Think of the noises in the night.
The house haunted, and Alice mad!
For God’s sake let’s clear out.
” “She’s in league with the Devil,” said Emily in the black moustache.
They had all forgotten, by now, about the appearance they variously presented, and all stared at each other fearfully, grotesque, ridiculous, but unheeding.
“Christmas morning!
” cried Bertie’s wife, and wept more bitterly than before.
“Here, I’ve nothing to do with this—_I_ never turned you out,” said Fred to Lydia, speaking for the first time.
“You haven’t given me your offertory yet,” said Lydia.
“Now then,” she said, “out with it!
Bertie, you used to be a churchwarden at home; you take round the plate.
” Bertie’s wife screamed when she saw a revolver in Lydia’s hand.
“Keep quiet, you women!
” said Bertie, playing the male; “if she’s mad, we must humour her.
Where’s your money?
” They fumbled, the two men in their pockets, the two women in their bags, not one of them daring to take their eyes off Lydia for an instant.
“Is that all you’ve got?
” asked Lydia, when the plate presented by Bertie was filled with silver, copper, and notes; “turn out the linings.
” They obeyed.
“You may go to your rooms now, if you like,” she added, “but don’t be late for dinner; we’ll have it at one.
And mind you come down as you are now.
You’re no more disguised like that, let me tell you, than you are with your every-day faces.
There’s no such thing as truth in you, so one disguise is no more of a disguise than any other.
Your shams are just as much shams as my shams.
And that’s one of the things you can learn while you’re here.
” They filed out of the room, past the tall figure of Lydia, who, like a grim grenadier, watched them go, still perfectly grave, but with an awful mockery in her eyes.
She savoured to the full the absurdity of their appearance.
There was no detail of incongruity which escaped her glance.
When they had all got out of the room, and she had heard them scurrying, frightened rabbits, up the stairs, she sat down again in her chair and laughed and laughed.
But it was not quite the wholesome laugh of one who plays a successful practical joke; it was, rather, a cackle of real malevolence, the malevolence that has waited and brooded and been patient, that has dammed up its impulse for many years.
She sat and laughed at the head of her table, with the debris of the brown paper parcels strewn beside every plate.
XIII
Down to dinner under the threat of the revolver.
She was intolerant now of the smallest resistance.
She got them sitting there in the same travesty, forced them to eat, forced them to entertain her with their conversation.
“No glum faces!
” she said sharply.
It was hard enough to look glum under those additions to nature; Bertie’s nose especially had a convivial air, it imposed upon him a gross jollity he was very far from feeling.
They ate turkey and plum-pudding, unwillingly, choking back, according to their natures, their fury or their tears.
Lydia had not stinted their fare; but then, she had never been niggardly.
There was a lavishness in her providing; there were raisins, almonds, brandy;
and she urged the appetites of her guests with an ironical though genuine hospitality.
“Christmas dinner, you know,” she said to them as she heaped the food upon their plates.
They protested; she nearly laughed at the piteous protest in their eyes shining out through their ridiculous trappings.
But she remembered the forty years, and the laughter died unborn.
Forty years—and she had got them to herself.
She would let them off nothing.
XIV
After dinner they huddled all four together in the same room.
They could not lock themselves in, because Lydia had removed all the keys.
They whispered together a good deal, running up and down the scale from apathy to indignation.
They had even moments of curiosity, when they ferreted among the hotch-potch of things they found stuffed away in the cupboards and drawers, and under the bed; and speculated marvelling on the queerness of Alice’s existence among these things: forty years of masquerade!
But for the most part they sat gloomy, or wandered aimlessly about the room, dwelling in their own minds upon their several apprehensions.
Bertie’s wife said, “It’s all so vague—only hints, so to speak,” and a background of shadows leapt into being.
Steps prowled past in the passage; they prowled up and down.
The four in the room looked at one another.
There was a faint cry outside, and a laugh.
“Two people, or one?
” they whispered.
There was no telling how many people the house might conceal.
The resources of the shop alone could transform Lydia into a hundred different characters.
She would change her personality with each one.
They could not contemplate this idea.
It credited her with uncanny powers.
Their imaginations, which had never in their lives been set to work before, now gaped, pits full of possibilities.
They peeped and were afraid.
Towards four o’clock it grew dark and they lit the gas, but after an hour or so it suddenly went out.
They could not find any matches, hunting round in the dark.
“Is there no light?
” said their voices.
Somebody found the door, opened it, and fled out: it was Fred.
They heard him running down the passage, and his steps upon the stair.
He would get down into the shop; he must look after himself.
They sat down in the dark, pressed together to listen and to wait.
XV
It was the silence in the house, all that afternoon and evening, which frightened them.
They were left to themselves, there was no sign of Lydia; there was no sound in the house but the sounds they made themselves.
Now and then one of them would get up and go restlessly over to the window: but though they debated whether they should hail a passer-by in the street they feared too greatly the consequences of the scandal.
Whatever happened, this thing must remain a secret for ever; on that point they were agreed and decided.
This consideration kept them from the violence they might otherwise have attempted.
No one must know ...
poor Lydia ...
her shame was their shame ...
madness in the family....
So they kept silent; meekness was the only prudence.
Weary, they realized that they were old, and looked at one another with a kind of pity.
They spoke very little.
Their lives stretched out behind them, enviable in their secure monotony.
Never had they envisaged the grotesque as a possible element.
The only grotesque that had had a place in their minds, was death; and that, by virtue of much precedent, was sanctioned into conformity.
“She’s got the better of us,” said Emily once.
“No, no, no,” said Bertie with sudden energy; he could not admit it.
“No, no,” he said again, getting up and walking about.
“_No_,” he said, striking with his fist into the palm of the other hand.
They waited till the evil hours should have passed and the normal be reasserted.
XVI
There remained the evening and the night.
Lydia had said Christmas-day, and for some reason they took for granted that after Christmas-day was passed all would be over—one way or the other.
The shutters would be unbarred, the shop reopened, and life would return to the cloistered house.
Still the evening and the night.
What a Christmas-tide!
And they were old; too old for such pranks.
Bertie was sixty-five.
Old, too old.
They were tired of the strain of the silent day.
Hungry, too, although they had not noticed it.
They went downstairs meekly when Lydia summoned them to supper.
Nose, ears, moustache, blue wig; no attempt at rebellion.
They sat round the table, waiting to be given their food and drink.
They had half hoped that Lydia would present some unexpected appearance; if she was mad, she ought to look mad; that would be less terrifying.
It was horrible to be so mad and to continue to look so sane.
She might have been an old family governess; a strict one.
Whereas they were condemned to sit there, so ludicrous; knowing, moreover, that she lost none of the full savour of the paradox.
“You shall drink my health,” she said, at the opening of the meal.
They drank it, in neat spirit.
She plied them with more.
“I never touch anything,” said Emily feebly.
“No, but this is an exception.
” She poured freely into Emily’s glass, drinking nothing herself.
The Javanese warrior holding the lantern on his spear grinned down at them with his yellow mask.
The candles flickered in the great sham candelabras.
The spirit was tawny in the shining glasses.
“Drink!
it’s our last evening together.
” Emily looked at Lydia, they were sisters; had the same features; were not unlike one another.
“We shared a bedroom, Alice, didn’t we?
I got into your bed once, when I was frightened at night.
There was a box made of shells on the dressing-table, do you remember?
Mother gave it to us at the seaside.
” She laughed; her laugh was almost tender.
“I used to pull your hair, Alice,” said Bertie.
They were suddenly confident that Alice would do them no harm.
“Forty years,” said Lydia, looking down the table at them.
“A waste of time,” said Bertie, “when we were brother and sisters together.
But you’ve paid us out, Alice, you’ve paid us out.
” “Not yet,” said Lydia, “not fully.
” “I daresay I should have done the same myself,” said Bertie’s wife, surprisingly.
“After all, it was a joke, Alice; why not take Alice’s joke in good part?
” She looked round, as though she had made a discovery.
“If you prefer,” said Lydia, unmoved.
“Ha, ha!
” said Fred, and was suddenly silent.
They began to eat what Lydia had given them.
Beyond the open door of the dining-room the shop was dark and jumbled.
Lydia ate primly, and the little black revolver lay beside her plate.
The light glinted along its barrels.
They viewed it without apprehension.
This was their last evening; they were confusedly sorry; Alice, hospitable if eccentric; and what, indeed, was eccentricity?
She was giving them champagne now; it was wrong to begin with spirits, and to go on to champagne; but what matter?
Alice was well-meaning; generous.
That little revolver: like a little black, shining bull-terrier, squat, bulbous.
They heard themselves laughing and making jokes.
Alice seemed pleased, she was smiling; up to the present she had not smiled at all; but now the smile was constant on her face as she watched them.
They exerted themselves to entertain her.
Their efforts were successful; she watched them with evident approval, swaying a little, backwards and forwards, as she sat.
They ventured more; still she smiled, and her hand poured generously, though she did not empty her own glass.
They had forgotten that they were old.
Looking at one another, they laughed very heartily over the trappings Alice had provided for them.
“Christmas!
” said Bertie, tapping his nose.
Emily leant back in her chair; she was sleepy and happy.
She roused herself to accept the sweets which Lydia offered her.
“Sleepy,” she murmured, smiling at Bertie’s wife; “your hair ...
” she toppled off to sleep in the midst of her sentence.
Fred wanted to prop her up.
“Let her be,” said Lydia benignly.
“All happy,” said Bertie.
They pulled crackers, and put the paper caps on their heads; the table under the candelabra was littered with the coloured paper off the crackers, and there was a discord produced by the whistles and small trumpets that came out of them.
Bertie was on his feet, trying all these toy instruments in turn; he swayed round the table, collecting them, and reading out the mottoes.
He paused to look at his wife, who had fallen forward with her arms on the table and her head on her arms.
“Asleep,” he said, with a puzzled expression.
Lydia still sat bolt upright at the head of the table, letting them all have their way as it seemed best to them, whether in sleep or hilarity; with her hands she clasped her elbows, and the bands of hair lay undisturbed upon her brows.
She examined her guests in turn; Emily, who slept, slipped sideway in her chair, the moustache still stuck on her upper lip; Bertie’s wife, who slept likewise, her face hidden, the blue wig uppermost; Fred, who between the ears stared vaguely before him; and Bertie, who, portly and irresponsible, wandered round the table searching among the litter of the crackers.
Lydia at last, having scrutinized them all, gave out a sudden creaking laugh.
Her party was to her satisfaction.
“Forty years!
” she said, nodding at Bertie, “forty years!
” When she laughed he looked at her, dimly startled through his confusion.
“Christmas,” he replied, blinking; he intended it to be an expression of good-will, an obliteration of those forty years.
At last, he thought, they had found out the right way to treat Alice: not solemnly, not as though they were afraid of her, but in a light-hearted and jocund spirit.
“Christmas,” he repeated, leaning up against her chair.
She began to laugh.
Her laughter grew; it creaked at first, then grew shrill; she pointed derisively at them all in turn.
Bertie was not alarmed; he joined in.
He relished at last the humour of the situation, which Alice had been relishing now since yesterday.
She had got twenty-four hours’ start ahead of him: an unfair advantage.
He made up for lost time by trying to laugh more heartily than she did.
She observed this with a dangerous appreciation; her fingers began to play with the butt of the revolver.
Forty years.
Forty Christmases spent in solitude.
Her sudden rage blackened out the room before her eyes.
She lifted the revolver uncertainly, then laid it down again.
“Subtle, subtle.
Not blatant,” she muttered to herself, an often-rehearsed lesson, and tapped her fingers against her teeth.
She felt slightly helpless, as though she were unable to make the most of her opportunity.
She knew she had had many schemes, but they all seemed to be slipping away from her.
It was difficult to hold on to one’s thoughts, difficult to concentrate them; they scattered as one came up to them, like a lot of sparrows.
A pity—she must make an effort—because the opportunity would not come again.
Just then she heard the front-door bell ring sharply through the house.
A little dazed, she got up to answer it.
A messenger from outside?
Perhaps an unexpected help in her emergency?
She left the dining-room, where Bertie fumbled and tried to detain her; she passed through the shop, and, moving like a sleep-walker, unlocked and undid the many fastenings of the door.
Outside in the street stood a group of men, carrying lanterns; the snow sparkled on the ground; the narrow street was like an illustration of old-fashioned Christmas.
She stood holding the door open.
She recognized many of her fellow-tradesmen; she heard their words, “Your well-known charity, Miss Protheroe ...
never turn away an appeal unanswered....
Christmas-time ...
trust we don’t intrude ...
” and heard the rattle of coin, and saw the collecting-boxes in their hands.
“You don’t intrude,” she said.
“Come in.
” Inwardly she knew they wanted an excuse to find out how Miss Protheroe spent her Christmas.
They should see.
They came in, removing their hats, from which the melting snow began to drip, and scraping the snow from their boots on the wire mat; their faces were red and jovial.
She led them through the jumbled shop, through into the dining-room, where Bertie leant up against the littered table, and the two women slept, and Fred gaped stupidly.
They were at a loss to say anything; checked in their joke of routing out old Miss Protheroe, they gazed uncomprehending at the scene before them.
Their eyes turned again towards Miss Protheroe; she stood erect and prim, her hands clasping her elbows.
“You don’t know my relations,” she said, and, indicating them, “my sister, my brother-in-law, my sister-in-law, my brother.
” She effected the introduction with irreproachable gravity.
“She’s mad,” cried Bertie suddenly, reason flooding him, and he pointed at her with a denouncing hand.
They stared, first at those four crazy figures, and then at the stiff correctness of Miss Protheroe as they always knew her.
PATIENCE
