When your fear cometh as a desolation.-The
Bible.
Susan Hetth rose.
She had always intensely disliked
her brother-in-law’s old friend, failing utterly
to perceive the heart of gold studded with rare gems
that was hidden under a bushel of intentional brusqueness.
But as she was under an obligation
to him she decided to make herself as pleasant as
possible, and to obey his orders, however irksome.
Great brain specialist, great philanthropist,
she had rung him up in a panic that morning after
having vainly ransacked her memory for some other
human being in whom she could with safety confide her
fear, and from whom she could expect some meed of
succour.
She knew, as everybody knew, that
years ago he had given up the hours of consultation
which had seen his Harley Street waiting-room filled
to overflowing; that little by little, bit by bit,
indeed, he had given himself up entirely to research
work, travelling in every quarter of the globe in
his quest for the knowledge necessary to the alleviation
of the mental troubles of his fellow-beings.
And that when he found it or some part of it he had
hurried home, and having brought it to as near a state
of perfection as possible, had flung it broad-cast
to the suffering; just as he flung the immense sums
of money he made among the destitute for whom he loved
to work without thought of the morrow.
A genuine case of trouble he had never
been known to dismiss, and Susan Hetth had heaved
a sigh of relief into the receiver when he fixed an
immediate appointment.
The spook of fear is not the cheeriest
companion of the early cup of tea, and Nannie’s
words, allied to Nannie’s face when she entered
without knocking, had caused the silly, invertebrate
woman to take immediate action for once in her life.
Not for anything would she confess
it, but she wished now she had listened to Nannie
when, just a year ago, she had so fervently urged a
visit to the doctor the first time she had discovered
the baby girl walking downstairs one step at a time
in her sleep.
She remembered the way the ever-changing
house-parlourmaids had furtively looked at the child
when she came in to dessert; how one after the other
they had given notice, declaring that although they
really loved the child their nerves would not stand
the ever-recurring shock of finding her sitting in
some corner in the dark; or the pattering of her little
feet on the stairs when she occasionally evaded the
nurse and walked about the house in her sleep; and
she remembered how other nurses who brought baby visitors
to tea had watched the child, surreptitiously touching
their foreheads and wagging their heads at each other.
But, as is the way of the supine,
she had put it off and put it off until her negligence
had culminated in the frightful scene of this same
very early morning, when Leonie, waking in the day
nursery to find her kitten dead, had screamed and
shrieked hour after hour until the house-parlourmaid
had rushed in and given instant notice, with the unsolicited
information that the servants thought, and the neighbours
said, the child was mad and ought to be sent to a home.
Then, indeed, had terror suddenly
tweaked Susan Hetth’s heart, the social one,
the maternal one having long since atrophied through
want of use; for the shadow of lunacy is about the
blackest of all the shadows that can fall across a
butterfly’s sunny, heedless path.
Ten years ago she had lost her husband,
in the year following most of her capital had gone
in a mad-cat speculation, and three years later her
gallant brother-in-law died, leaving her a yearly income
sufficient for expenses and education if she would
undertake to mother his little daughter. Since
then she had led the usual abortive life of the woman
who lives on the past glamour of her husband’s
success and a limited income, upon which she tries
ineffectually to dovetail herself into a society to
which she does not rightly belong. Having noticed
an increasing plenitude of silver among the ash-gold
of her hair, a deepening of the lines of discord between
her brows, and the threads of discontent which were
daily being hemstitched into her face by the sharp
needles of make-believe, covetousness, and a precarious
banking account, she had recently decided to try and
annex, or rather try and graft herself on to a certain
unsuspecting male being en secondes noces.
And that simply cannot be done if
there is the slightest shadow upon one’s appendages.
So she sat down in the chair with
as good a grace as she could muster, and arranged
her big picture hat so that the spring sun should not
draw Sir Jonathan’s attention to the methods
she employed to combat the rapidity with which what
remained of her prettiness, prematurely faded by the
Indian sun, was vanishing.
For a long and trying moment he sat
silently staring at her, wondering as he had always
wondered what had induced his old friend to place his
little girl in such inadequate, feeble hands.
To break the tension Lady Hetth clanked
a silver Indian bracelet bought at Liberty’s
against an Egyptian chain sold by Swan & Edgar’s,
and the man frowned as he drew a series of cats on
his blotting-paper.