Nothing Venture (2 page)

Nan went on typing.

“Ass!” she said. “Sorry to repeat myself, but you are—and if Mr Page asks for that mortgage again and you haven't found it, I should say the odds were that you'd be an ass out of a job.”

Miss Villiers giggled tolerantly and shut the door. Desperately Nan hoped that she would not find the mortgage until Jervis Weare had come striding through the room. She wanted just that one moment—to see the inner door open, to see him come out, to see him pass, to see him go, to know him gone. It was going to hurt horribly. She wanted it even if it hurt her beyond everything she knew or could guess about pain. But you mustn't be watched when things are hurting you like that—you mustn't have people looking on and chattering—it wasn't decent.

Nan waited for her moment. Would he look very happy and relieved now that all the tiresome business connected with his marriage was done? Would he look very happy on his wedding day? By an hour or two after this time tomorrow he would be married to Rosamund Veronica Leonard Carew.

Nan tried to picture him looking happy, and failed. She had seen him frowning, she had seen him bored, she had seen him angry; and once, for a moment, she had seen him with a lost, hungry look that caught her heart and turned it in her breast. That was when he had stood at the window looking out and drumming on the sill. There was just that one moment when the drumming fingers stayed, the impatient frown smoothed out, and a lost child, hungry, bewildered and astray, looked out of the dark eyes. Nan's heart ached still when she thought about that look. It was one of the things that could not be borne, and yet had to be borne.

She took up one of the sheets that she had been typing and began to correct it. And then quite suddenly the inner door was opened and Jervis Weare came out. Mr Page was behind him, ruddy, smiling, and bland; his horn-rimmed spectacles pushed up; his head slightly thrown back as he talked to the tall young man who preceded him in what the late Mr Ambrose Weare would have described as his best bedside manner.

“Not at all—not at all. You've been most patient. A very troublesome business getting married.” Mr Page laughed his mellow laugh.

Jervis Weare did not laugh, but neither did he frown. He turned with a trace of effort and said, speaking quickly and boyishly.

“It's you who have been patient, Mr Page. I—I'm afraid I'm not a very patient person. I—I'd like to say thank you for all the trouble you've taken.” And with that he shook hands impetuously and was gone. The door slammed.

Mr Page put up his hand to his glasses.

“Dear me!” he said. “Very like his grandfather—but I think more heart. Well, well, he is marrying a very charming girl—quite beautiful in fact. A most satisfactory affair in every way. Yes—yes. Ah, Miss Forsyth! Do you know whether Miss Villiers has found that mortgage I was asking for? The Heaston estate. Gross carelessness if it has been mislaid—very gross carelessness indeed. What is the matter, Miss Forsyth? You look extremely pale. Are you ill?”

“Oh no, sir.”

“You look extremely pale. It would be most inconvenient if you were to be ill at this juncture, but I do not want you to work if you are not feeling fit.”

“I am quite well.”

The outer door had shut with a clang. It was this clang that had shaken her, and shaken the room so that everything in it was trembling just a little. The door-frames, and the window-sill, and the table at which she was sitting were all moving, shaking, trembling, as if she was seeing them through a shimmering haze. She bit hard into her lip and bent forward over the table. The room cleared; the furniture and the door-frames became solid and distinct.

Jervis Weare had gone out of her life.

III

“I haven't found it,” said Miss Villiers. “What time did you say it was? One o'clock? My! Well, that means I'll have to give up lunch and go on looking for it. Regular old Bluebeard, I call him, to keep me starving, while as likely as not he's drinking port and champagne and eating the best of everything. I know what I'd have if I was him—chicken and mushrooms, and one of those ice puddings like they gave the recipe for in last week's
Ladies' Friend
—pineapple and cream inside, and a hot chocolate sauce all over.” She sighed voluptuously. “One thing, going without lunch is good for the figure. I say, dear, you wouldn't like to stay and help me, I suppose?”

Nan shook her head. She was pulling on a small black hat. She picked up her hand-bag and made for the door.

“I've got to get home,” she said.

Miss Villiers stared.

“What do you want to do that for? If you bus it, it costs you as much as the difference between feeding at home and feeding out, and if you walk, why it's as much as you'd do to get there and back in the time.”

Nan nodded absently.

“Right as usual, Villiers,” she said.

As a rule she brought sandwiches to the office, or had a cup of tea, and an egg if funds were high, or a bun if they were low, at a tea-shop round the corner. She only went home when it seemed impossible to leave Cynthia for the whole day. Today was one of the days when it did not seem possible. She committed the extravagance of taking a bus, because this would give her forty minutes with Cynthia. She had ten minutes to put Jervis Weare out of her thoughts, and get the colour back into her cheeks. She rubbed them vigorously as she climbed Mrs Warren's stair, which smelt of lodgers' dinners, to the room at the top of the house which had been home for the last two years.

She opened the door, and if she had had a thought to spare for herself, she would have known at once that, like Miss Villiers, she would probably have to go lunchless today. She had told Cynthia that she was coming back. They would have scrambled eggs and mashed potatoes, cooked on their gas ring. Cynthia was to buy the eggs, but it was quite obvious that Cynthia had not done so, since she was still in her dressing-gown.

Nan took a breath, and shut the door behind her.

“Well, Cynthy?” she said.

Three months ago Cynthia Forsyth had possessed the frail, translucent beauty which compels a startled admiration and an almost terrified sense of its evanescence. The bloom on a wild flower, the iridescence of flung spray, the passing colours of sunrise and sunset, have this same power to astonish and to charm. Now she was just a too thin, too pallid girl with fair hair, a smooth skin, and rather appealing dark eyes reddened by hours of weeping. She sat on the floor, leaning sideways with one arm on the rickety double bed which the sisters shared at night, her faded blue dressing-gown falling away and showing a torn night-dress that had once been pink. On the honeycombed coverlet lay a pile of letters.

“Now, Cynthy!” said Nan.

Cynthia looked up.

“I'm sorry, Nan—I didn't mean to.”

“You promised you wouldn't,” said Nan gravely. She came across to the bed and began to pick up the letters. “You'd much better burn them and have done with it.”

Cynthia's hand tightened on the soaked handkerchief which she held squeezed up.

“Nan, you won't!”

“No, of course I won't—but I wish
you
would.” She sat down on the bed and pulled Cynthia's head against her knee. “What's the good of keeping them, my child? You lock them up, and you promise me you won't look at them, and when my back's turned you get them out and cry yourself to a jelly.”

Cynthia turned and clutched at her with a wild sob.

“It's so
hard
—when we love each other—when it's just money! If he didn't love me, I'd—I'd try—to get over it—I would—I really would! But when we love each other—” Her voice was choked, her hot thin hand was clenched on Nan's knee.

Nan stroked the damp fair hair.

“It would be better to try, Cynthy,” she said.

Cynthia shivered.

“I don't want to. If I can't marry Frank, I want to die—only it takes such a long time. In books people die quite quickly when their hearts are broken, and I'm sure my heart's quite as broken as anybody's in a book—and yet I'm quite strong. I've lost my colour, and I've lost my looks, and my hair won't curl any more—but I'm not dying.”

Nan's heart gave a foolish little jump. It was silly to mind Cynthy talking like that. She said,

“You'd feel better if you washed your face, ducky.”

Cynthia sniffed and dabbed her eyes.

“Yes, you would. And did you get the eggs?”

Cynthia dabbed again and shook her head.

“Then I must fly, or we shan't have anything to eat. We'll have to have them boiled. Now, up you get and put on the saucepan! I won't be a minute. Perhaps the old rabbit will oblige.”

Mrs Warren having duly obliged, Nan returned with a couple of eggs, only to find that Cynthia had neither washed her face nor put on the saucepan. She had got up from the floor and was gazing tearfully out of the window.

Nan pressed her lips together and said nothing.

Whilst she put on the eggs, Cynthia walked up and down talking in a soft exhausted voice.

“You can have both eggs—I don't want anything. It's all very well to say pull yourself together, but Frank's just as miserable as I am, and I'm not only thinking about myself, I'm thinking about him. And in ten days he'll be gone to Australia, and I shall never see him again. And to think that it's just money that's keeping us apart! If his uncle hadn't changed his will at the last minute, he'd have had two thousand pounds and been able to buy that partnership.”

“Your egg's done,” said Nan. “I don't know why you like them nearly raw.” Frank Walsh's nonexistent two thousand pounds was a subject to be escaped from with all possible despatch.

“If I only had two thousand pounds!” said Cynthia. She stood still in the middle of the floor and flung out her hands. “Isn't there
anything
one can do to make money quickly?”

“I don't think there's anything
you
can do, ducky,” said Nan.

Cynthia turned away with a sob. She went back to the window and stood there twisting her fingers and crying. Through the faded dressing-gown Nan could see her shoulder-blades moving as she drew quick sobbing breaths. She went on speaking in a matter of fact sort of way.

“Cynthy, you really would feel much better if you would dress and have something to eat. Sitting and thinking about things makes them a hundred times worse.”

“It's all very well for you,” said Cynthia in a hopeless voice. “You don't know what it is to want someone all the time, and to know that he's going right away and that you'll never see him again. You've never been in love, so you don't
know.
”

“No,” said Nan. “Cynthy, do come and eat your egg or it will be cold, and a cold egg is simply unutterable.”

IV

Nan was very tired when she got back to the office. She had got Cynthia to eat something, to dress, and to promise that she would go out. She felt as if she had been moving a lot of very heavy furniture. Cynthia was loving and sweet and gentle, but she was a dead weight, and there were times when it took the very last of Nan's strength to carry it.

She found Miss Villiers on her knees in the deed room sorting papers after her own peculiarly languid and dilatory fashion.

“No, dear, I haven't found it. But I've had a perfectly lovely idea for making up that length of georgette I got—you know, the pale blue with the faded patches. Well, if I have it scalloped just where the fade comes—Oh, I say, dear, you're not going! I made sure you'd give me a hand when you got back.”

“I've got the Harrington deeds to type,” said Nan.

She took off her hat, sat down to the typewriter, and passed with relief into a formal world of set, correct phrases and stilted repetitions.

Mr Page came in presently with a pleasant word.

“Feeling all right again, Miss Forsyth?”

Then click, click, click, the swish of the moving keyboard, and such words as,
hereditaments, messuages, hereinbefore
, and
party of the first part
.

Nan began to feel less tired. It wasn't work that tired you; it was fighting with yourself and trying to carry someone else all the time. If Cynthia would only get a job. But standing in a shop tired her feet, and typing made her back ache, and she didn't seem to be able to manage children. Besides, her looks had always been against her; she was too pretty and too fragile, and too gentle.

Nan forced her attention back to that comfortable formal world in which there were no emotions.

And then suddenly the outer door was flung open and Jervis Weare strode through the room, wrenched at the handle of Mr Page's sanctum, and disappeared, slamming the door behind him. It was the most sudden thing that had ever happened. Between the bang of the first door and the slam of the second there was just a momentary impression of Jervis with his face set in a black rage. Nan had hardly time to catch her breath. He plunged past. The second door banged. She had the feeling that he had taken the room in his stride without seeing it, or anything in it. And then his voice struck harshly on her ears in a violent oath.

She stood up, shaking a little, and came out from behind her table. He had slammed the door so violently that it had latched and then unlatched itself. It stood now an inch ajar, and she could hear Mr Page's startled exclamation.

“Mr Jervis! What has happened? I beg of you!”

Nan stood still in the middle of the floor. It was most clearly her duty to close the door. She stood quite still, and heard Jervis Weare go tramping through the room beyond; and as he tramped he swore in a steady bitter flow; not speaking loudly, but with a deadly effect of weighing every word.

“Mr Jervis! Mr Jervis! I beg of you! Something has happened—I beg that you will tell me what has happened. I—I—
Mr Jervis
!”

There was a silence. Mr Page's voice left off, and nothing else began. There was a dead silence.