'Took it hard, have she?' she whispered. 'Maybe missing her ma?'
I said nothing at first. Then I remembered our plot, and what was to happen. Better, I thought drearily, to make it happen soon. I stood on the little landing with her and closed the door. I said quietly,
'Hard ain't the word for it. There's trouble, up here. Mr Rivers dotes on her and won't bear gossip— he has brought her to this quiet place, hoping the country air will calm her.'
'Calm her?' she said then. 'You mean— ? Bless me! She ain't likely to break out— turn the pigs loose— set the place afire?'
'No, no,' I said. 'She is only— only too much in her head.'
'Poor lady,' said Mrs Cream. But I could see her thinking. She hadn't bargained on having a mad girl in the house. And whenever she brought a tray up then, she looked sideways at Maud and set it down very quick, as if afraid she might get bitten.
'She doesn't like me,' said Maud, after she saw her do that two or three times; and I swallowed and said, 'Not like you? What an idea! Why should she not like you?'
'I can't say,' she answered quietly, looking down at her hands.
Later Gentleman heard her say it, too; and then he got me on my own. 'That's good,'
he said. 'Keep Mrs Cream in fear of her, and her in fear of Mrs Cream, while seeming not to— very good. That will help us, when it comes time to call in the doctor.'
He gave it a week before he sent for him. I thought it the worst week of my life. He had told Maud they should stay a day; but on the second morning he looked at her and said,
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'How pale you are, Maud! I think you aren't quite well. I think we ought to stay a little longer, until your strength comes back to you.'
'Stay longer?' she said. Her voice was dull. 'But can't we go, to your house in London?'
'I really think you are not well enough.'
'Not well? But, I am quite well— you must only ask Sue. Sue, won't you tell Mr Rivers how well I am?'
She sat and shook. I said nothing. 'Just a day or two more,' said Gentleman. 'Until you are rested. Until you are calm. Perhaps, if you were to keep more to the bed— ?'
She began to weep. He went to her side, and that made her shudder and weep harder.
He said, 'Oh, Maud, it tears at my heart to see you like this! If I thought it would be a comfort to you, of course I should take you to London at once— I should carry you, in my own arms— do you think I would not? But do you look at yourself now, and still tell me you are well?'
'I don't know,' she said then. 'It is so strange here. I'm afraid, Richard— '
'And won't it be stranger, in London? And shouldn't you be frightened there, where it's so loud and crowded and dark? Oh, no, this is the place to keep you. Here you have Mrs Cream, to make you comfortable— '
'Mrs Cream hates me.'
'Hates you? Oh, Maud. Now you are growing foolish; and I should be sorry to think you that; and Sue should also be sorry— shouldn't you, Sue?' I would not answer. 'Of course she would,' he said, with his hard blue eyes on mine. Maud looked at me, too, then looked away. Gentleman took her head in his hands and kissed her brow.
'There now,' he said. 'Let us have no more argument. We'll stay another day— only a day, until that paleness is driven from your cheek, and your eyes are bright again!'
He said the same thing then, the next day. On the fourth day he was stern with her— said she seemed to mean to disappoint him, to make him wait, when he longed only to carry her back to Chelsea as his bride; then on the fifth day, he took her in his arms and almost wept, and said he loved her.
After that, she did not ask how long they were to stay there. Her cheek never grew rosy. Her eye stayed dull. Gentleman told Mrs Cream to make her every kind of nourishing dish, and what she
brought were more eggs, more kidneys, livers, greasy bacons and puddings of blood.
The meat made the room smell sour. Maud could eat none of it. I ate it instead— since somebody must. I ate it, and she only sat beside the window gazing out, turning the ring upon her finger, stretching her hands, or drawing a strand of hair across her mouth.
Her hair was dull as her eyes. She would not let me wash it— she would hardly let me brush it, she said she couldn't bear the scraping of the comb upon her head. She kept in the gown she had travelled from Briar in, that had mud about the hem. Her best gown
a silk one— she gave to me. She said,
'Why should I wear it, here? I had much rather see you in it. You had much better wear it, than let it lie in the press.'
Our fingers touched beneath the silk, and we flinched and stepped apart. She had 105
never tried to kiss me, after that first night.
I took the dress. It helped to pass the awful hours, sitting letting out the waist; and she seemed to like to watch me sew it. When I had finished it, and put it on and stood before her, her expression was strange. 'How well you look!' she said, her blood rising.
'The colour sets off your eyes and hair. I knew it would. Now you are quite the beauty— aren't you? And I am plain— don't you think?'
I had got her a little looking- glass from Mrs Cream. She caught it up in her trembling hand and came and held it before our faces. I remembered the time she had dressed me up, in her old room, and called us sisters; and how gay she had seemed then, and how plump and careless. She had liked to stand before her glass and make herself look fair, for Gentleman. Now— I saw it! I saw it, in the desperate slyness of her gaze!— now she was glad to see herself grown plain. She thought it meant he would not want her.
I could have told her once that he would want her anyway.
Now, I don't know what he did with her. I never spoke to him more than I had to. I did everything that was needed, but I did it all in a thick, miserable kind of trance, shrinking from thought and feeling— I was as low, almost, as she was. And Gentleman, to do him justice, seemed troubled on his own account. He only came to kiss or bully her, a little while each day; the rest of the time he sat in Mrs Cream's parlour, lighting cigarettes— the smoke came rising through the floor, to mix with the smell of the meat, the chamberpot, the sheets on the bed. Once or twice he went riding.
He went for news of Mr Lilly— but heard only that the word was, there was some queer stir at Briar, no-one knew quite what. In the evenings he would stand at a fence at the back of the house, looking over the black- faced pigs; or he would walk a little, in the lane or about the churchyard. He would walk, however, as if he knew we watched him— not in the old, show-off way he had used to stretch and smoke his cigarettes, but with a twitch to his step, as if he could not bear the feel of our gazes on his back.
Then at night I would undress her, and he would come, and I would leave them, and lie alone, with my head between my pillow and my rustling mattress.
I should have said he needed to do it to her only the once. I should have thought he might have been frightened he should get her with child. But there were other things I thought he might like her to do, now he had learned how smooth her hands were, how soft her bosom was, how warm and glib her mouth.
And every morning, when I went in to her, she seemed paler and thinner and in more of a daze than she had seemed the night before; and he caught my eye less, and plucked at his whiskers, his swagger all gone.
He at least knew what a dreadful business he was about, the bloody villain.
At last he sent for the doctor to come.
I heard him writing the letter in Mrs Cream's parlour. The doctor was one he knew. I believe he had been crooked once, perhaps in the ladies' medicine line, and had taken to the madhouse business as being more safe. But the crookedness, for us, was only a security. He wasn't in on Gentleman's plot. Gentleman wouldn't have cared to cut the cash with him.
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Besides, the story was too sound. And there was Mrs Cream to back it. Maud was young, she was fey, and had been kept from the
world. She had seemed to love Gentleman, and he loved her; but they hadn't been married an hour before she started to turn queer.
I think any doctor would have done what that one did, hearing Gentleman's story, and seeing Maud, and me, as we were then.