CHAPTER III

Elise sat in the big dark drawing-room with the tea things before her.

She knew that it was half an hour after John’s usual time, but there was nothing expectant in her attitude. She was doing embroidery. As she bent her head over her work, the sun caught her light gold hair and made a glory of it. She was finishing the wing of a bee drawing honey from a larkspur. The design was her own and when it was finished she was going to give it to Hermione.

Sometimes Elise thought she ought to do war work, but on the whole she believed that making Papa comfortable was war work.

Papa invented wonderful things for the Allies, and he had diabetes.

The diet system of a famous Viennese doctor had saved Mr. Brett’s life and might indefinitely prolong it. But a good deal depended on his keeping still and having his mind at rest. Elise knew that one of the things which rested Mr. Brett’s mind most was seeing her at Mambles, and watching her come in and out of the long French windows to see if there were anything he wanted. Hermione had pointed out to Elise that she was wasting her life, and Elise had felt rather upset, but she had gone on wasting it.

From the age of fifteen Hermione had sat on piazzas black with young men. When she took a country excursion young men followed her as a string of ducks follow their leader across a field. When she was in town, she drew the young men away from other girls with the faultless placidity of a magnet.

Elise might not have achieved so long a line of ducks, or such responsive needles, but she could certainly draw young men. Hermione told her that she ought to go to America and draw them. She would literally have New York, or if she preferred it, Washington, at her feet. Elise had listened quietly to these dazzling pictures. It was difficult to tell Hermione without appearing unpatriotic that she did not want New York, or even Washington, at her feet. So she said a little vaguely that Europe was very interesting just now. Hermione skimmed the vagueness off the top of Elise’s mind.

“Europe isn’t Mambles,” she said with some sharpness, and she offered Elise London; but the mere thought of London petrified Elise. She had a dread of its indiscriminate, sophisticated rabble, its precedences and pitfalls, its stiff old families and their lax young offshoots.

The life of a social circle had always petrified Elise, but Hermione, even when she was almost dead, thought of people in circles.

Mercifully Papa said that when Elise wanted London she could go to Harrod’s Stores; he wasn’t going to live in a place where you could get everything, including air raids, at first hand when he didn’t need to. “If you want to be quick,” he explained, “you go to a quick country and you naturally take the quickest place in it. But if you want to be slow, you go to a slow country and you go to the slowest place in it. I’ll hunt about till I find the slowest place in England.”

At length Papa had found Mambles. A very few country people called on the Bretts slowly and as if it didn’t matter. They talked about wasps, and how the best plan was to get the milkman to bring your coal from the station on the milk cart. They were chiefly old ladies who called, and they seemed quite satisfied with being old ladies, indeed they made Elise feel as if she ought to be rather apologetic for being so young, but as if they would agree to overlook it on account of her not being at all noisy.

Elise was very quiet. She had no American accent, and only the faintest interrogative note at the end of her sentences, which sounded submissive.

In her loveliness and her quietness with her enormous expectations and her extraordinarily small claims, Elise won a place for herself in the neighbourhood which, if she had known it, was as rare as it was enviable.

Nobody who didn’t play games had ever been so liked before.—When John came in at the window Elise looked up at him over her embroidery as if it were his usual time.

Her eyes were very wide and blue, as blue as the azure delphiniums in front of the drawing-room window.

They were set some distance apart, the shape of her small face was oval, and her little mouth was tenderly curved and very sensitive. It was without humour.

“It must have been very hot in London,” Elise said gently. “Is Papa all right in the garden?”

“It’s heavenly to be here,” said John, “and anywhere that isn’t here is as bad as London. I had to go first to Mr. Brett, but I came as soon as I could. Yes, he’s all right. He says he can just sit in the sun without an overcoat, so he expects to read in the paper that the heat is tropical.”

“I hope the tea isn’t cold,” said Elise, devoting herself to the tea table.

John didn’t want any tea, but he watched her with fascinated eyes.

It seemed to him that no one ever had such small white hands or had so wonderfully manipulated tea cups and copper kettles. Elise never asked people twice what their tastes were; she persistently studied tastes, and she never forgot them. If she had had an analytical mind she would have known that there was nothing she enjoyed so much as supplying the wants of others, and that nothing so dismayed her as when those wants conflicted.

“I had to see Mr. Brett before I saw you,” John repeated. He seemed unable to take his eyes off Elise’s face, or to say anything which didn’t explain why he hadn’t been there before.

“Why certainly,” agreed Elise, noting with disapproval but without reproof that John was neglecting his tea. “I know it’s the greatest comfort to Papa your going up to town and seeing people for him, it saves him so much fatigue, and he relies so on your judgment. He says you’re the only man who doesn’t have to tell him all you said yourself in reply to what the other people said.”

Elise broke off under John’s supplicating eyes: he was looking at her as if he wanted more than she was giving him, more than either her attention or his tea. Elise’s breath came quickly, and the heavy row of pink pearls round her small white throat rose and fell spasmodically.

“When I first saw you,” said John irrelevantly, “you were wearing those pearls, and you had your hair up for the first time.”

Elise smiled faintly. “I remember,” she said. “Papa had just given them to me because Hermione said I ought only to wear white, and I wanted to wear pink. Of course Hermione was right—in America that summer girls were only wearing white; but Papa said it didn’t matter what the other girls wore. You could have lilies and pinks in the same garden without any one’s throat being cut. So he gave me these. And you said if I were an English girl and only sixteen years old I’d still be a flapper, and I didn’t know what a flapper was, but I do now. I know lots of English things.”

“Do you like England?” asked John earnestly, as if it were a personal question. “Does it seem like home to you now, Elise?”

She hesitated a moment, then she said gently, “I should think any country seems like home when the people you love are in it. You see what I like best is being with the people I like as long as I know which to attend to first.” Elise gave the ghost of a sigh, then she smiled because she did not want John to know that she had voiced her only grief. She didn’t want any one to be inconvenienced by knowing that she had a grief at all.

There are many people who love to spare others pain and enjoy carrying their brothers’ burdens; but they do not mind an audience. Elise never wanted any one to know that she was bearing anything.

“Elise,” said John firmly, “do you know what I want? I want you to attend to me first?”

Elise drew a quick breath, her eyes lingered on John’s, a little startled, but not at all distressed. She had long ago wanted to attend to John first. Her clear colourless skin became suffused with a deep rose blush. Elise knew that John loved her, but she had not known, she did not know now, what his love meant to her. John’s love for her was three years old. Mambles was full of it, it was the background of her life; she had grown used to its protectiveness.

A little frown fixed itself between her tender brows.

“You wouldn’t,” she murmured, “if I did like you John, want me to ever give up Papa? You see he hasn’t any one now—not Mamma, or Arnold, and just being wonderful must be so dull, if it only means outsiders.”

John shook his head.

“Never,” he said emphatically. “There isn’t a man on earth I admire and like as I do your father. I consider it an honour to work for him. I don’t ever want to take you away from him; but I do want to have you as well.”

“More than this?” Elise asked gently.

“A great deal more than this,” said John with unmistakable solidity.

Elise’s eyes wavered; she wanted of course that John should have what he wanted. It would be lovely to make his eyes stop looking anxious, and smile. But, on the other hand, her mind was full of an apprehensive picture. How would Hermione bear it? She had seen Hermione bearing things she didn’t like before. John would probably bear them very much better.

“But Hermione,” Elise said under her breath, “you won’t want me ever to give up Hermione?”

“I don’t suppose for a moment I shall want you to give up your sister,” John said in a more measured tone than he had used in referring to Mr. Brett. “Why should you, darling, have to give up anything? I only want you to have more.”

Elise did not reply that in her small but deeply felt experience having more had invariably implied certain renunciations. She only said, “You don’t know Hermione, John; but if you did, you’d feel the way I do about her, and you’d help me so that she and dear Papa could understand each other better. Hermione’s heart is broken, that’s what makes her so ill, and sometimes so—difficult.

“Don’t you think if your heart’s broken, you just have to act difficult at times? Papa’s so clever, but he’s been too happy himself to realise about Hermione. Why he and Mamma had just an ideal marriage. I never heard Papa say one sharp word to Mamma, so naturally he can’t feel the way I do about Hermione. I haven’t been able to _do_ anything, but oh, John—don’t you think that perhaps you and I together could work it so that Papa could understand Hermione?”

John had a very great respect for Mr. Brett’s judgment, but he belonged to the younger generation, and he knew how misguided parents are apt to be about their children, and how wise children necessarily are about their parents. He decided to keep an open mind on the subject of Hermione.

“My dearest,” he said fervently, “I will always help you in whatever you want—all my strength is yours.”

Elise gave a soft sigh of relief. All John’s strength would do beautifully.

Very slowly she lifted her blue eyes again, and John knew that he had received his signal.

He kneeled down beside her and kissed her. There seemed to both of them to be nothing in the world so simple or so straightforward as their love.