Patricia Wentworth - Beggar’s Choice

“Yes,” said Isobel. “He isn’t coming.” Why did people make you say things that hurt so frightfully?

“Nonsense!” said Mr. Carthew very loudly. “If she asked him to come, he’d be bound to jump at the chance.”

“Why?” said Isobel.

All at once she felt that she knew why Car wouldn’t come. How could he come to his uncle’s very door as if he were begging to be taken back? He couldn’t-of course he couldn’t. The relief was so great that it brought a mist to her eyes, and a lovely changing color to her cheek.

“Why?” said Mr. Carthew-“why? Because a lady’s good enough to ask him. That’s reason enough, isn’t it?-or it would have been when I was a young fellow. I suppose it’s no reason at all now that manners have gone out of fashion, and family feeling, and religion, and all the things that used to be expected of a man with a stake in the country. Dancing and enjoying themselves-that’s all the present generation cares for!”

Isobel’s heart gave a little leap. “He’s disappointed. He cares. He wants to see Car again and make it up. He’s angry because he’s disappointed.” Aloud she said:

“Why don’t you ask him to come? He’d come if you asked him.”

She was rather frightened as soon as she had said it. Suppose she had made him angry-he got angry rather easily. She might just have given him a push in the wrong direction.

His eyebrows were very bushy indeed. First he stared at her, and then he said explosively,

“I’m to ask him, am I-what? Go down on my knees to him and ask him to come back? Is that your idea, or it is his-what? Did he put you up to it?”

Isobel wasn’t sure whether she would be telling the truth if she said “No.” Car had certainly said “He’ll have to tell me so,” when she had declared that his uncle wanted to make it up. She blushed and said,

“Quarrels are such miserable things. Why shouldn’t you ask him to come back? It-it would be so lovely if we could all be friends again”

“H’m!” said Mr. Carthew. “Did he tell you to say that?”

“No-of course he didn’t. You know he’s proud-you said so yourself. If he’d been doing well and making money, he’d have asked you to be friends again long ago-but he’s been awfully, awfully poor. Don’t you see he simply couldn’t come back when it would look as if he were asking you to do something for him?”

Mr. Carthew planted his stick firmly behind him, put both hands on the crook, and leaned back against it.

“God bless my soul!” he said; and then, “You make him out a very fine, disinterested fellow, don’t you, my dear- eh? Most young fellows wouldn’t think so much about coming and asking an uncle to give them a helping hand. It’s his damned pride and obstinacy, I tell you, I wanted him to marry and settle down, and he wouldn’t-told me he’d no fancy for it. I’ve no patience with these young men of the present day-they’ve no sense of their obligations, no sense of responsibility. When a man’s got a property coming to him, it’s his duty to marry young. I married when I was twenty-three, and if I haven’t got a son of my own, it’s all the more reason why I should want to see Car’s children- isn’t it? Only, as I say, he set himself up against me, and the last thing he said to me-shall I tell you the last thing he said to me?”

“No, don’t,” said Isobel. “You ought to forget it. I expect you were both angry. Nobody means what they say when they’re angry-you know they don’t.”

Mr. Carthew stood bolt upright and brandished his stick in the air.

“He said, ‘I don’t care if I don’t ever see you again, and Linwood may go to-’ Well, I was brought up to consider a lady’s ears-so we’ll call it Jericho.”

Isobel looked at him with a sparkling challenge in her eyes. “And what had you just been saying to him?”

“God bless my soul, I forget.”

“Then don’t you think you’d better forget what he said too?”

“H’m!” said Mr. Carthew. He turned abruptly and began to walk away. “I shall be late for lunch,” he said, “Anna don’t like my being late for lunch.”

Mr. Bobby Markham opened the door of the hut on Linwood Edge. A complete and dense blackness confronted him.

The battery of his electric torch had given out, and at eleven o’clock on a moonless, starless night it had been dark enough coming here through the woods, but even to eyes grown accustomed to this darkness the inside of the hut presented an opaque and discouraging gloom.

Bobby Markham didn’t really like the dark very much. He found it afflicting to be asked to meet Anna at midnight in a lonely wood, and it may be said at once that for no other human being would he have come. He had hoped that she would have been here already. Comforting thoughts of finding the hut pleasantly lit up had sustained him. He opened the door, and the place was as black as the pit.

Yet when he had advanced a step, and was wishing, not for the first time, that he had a box of matches on him, he thought that he heard something move. He stood still instantly, quite still, listening. Something ever so slightly stirred in the black silence. A most unpleasant damp, pringling feeling spread rapidly from the top of his head to the tips of his fingers and toes. He grasped the defunct torch. But, in his inmost mind, the thing that he was afraid of was not a thing that could be bashed on the head or struck down by a damp, heavy fist. The very ancient menace of the terror that walks in darkness stirred, here, close at his side.

He stiffened, tried to draw breath, and felt the clammy air of the place stick in his throat. With paralyzing suddenness a round disk of brilliant light broke the dark, A beam sprang from it and just touched his face and his blinded, staring eyes. Then the torch dropped, and Anna’s voice said,

“You’re late.”

He got hold of the table and stood there shaking. How beastly-how beastly! His heart was thudding. He felt for the chair and sat down.

Anna switched off the torch.

“We can talk in the dark,” she said.

“Where’s the lantern?”-he managed to say that.

“It’s here. But we don’t want it-there’s always a chance of its attracting attention.”

He persisted.

“Light it. I can’t talk in the dark.”

He heard the spurt of a match and saw, with a most extraordinary relief, the yellow tongue of flame, the match, the outline of the lantern with the white guttered candle inside it. The flame caught the wick, and he could see the four walls of the hut, and Anna drawing back her hand and blowing out the match. She was bare-headed, with long shining diamond earrings that made rainbows of the light, and a black Chinese shawl wrapping her from shoulder to ankle. It was worked all over with small silken flowers bright as jewels. Her bare arm emerged from the long black fringe that edged it.

In the light, Bobby was himself again at once!-heavily good-natured and very much Anna Lang’s adoring slave.

“Come-that’s better!” he said.

“Is it?”

“Well, I like to look at you, you know. You look ripping in that shawl thing.”

With the movement that she made it slipped a little, showing the curve of her shoulder very white against the black.

“You mustn’t pay me compliments,” she said. “That’s not what I asked you to come here for.”

Car Fairfax would have been moved to inward mirth by the sad dignity of her tone. Bobby Markham admired it very much; it made him feel that he must be on his very best behavior. When Anna looked away for a moment, he got out a silk handkerchief and dried his forehead, which was unbecomingly damp and shiny. Like most fat men he was exceedingly vain. He put the handkerchief away quickly as Anna turned back again.