The Lion's Share by Arnold Bennett (booksvooks TXT) 📕

not even expressly revoked the old will. If there hadn't been a previous will, and if Aguilar was a thoroughly reliable man, and if the family had wished to uphold the new will, I dare say the Court _might_ have pronounced for it. But under the circumstances it hasn't the ghost of a chance."

"But won't the National Reformation Society make trouble?" demanded Miss Ingate faintly.

"Let 'em try!" said Mr. Foulger, who wished that the National Reformation Society would indeed try.

Even as he articulated the words, he was aware of Audrey coming towards him from the direction of the door; he was aware of her black frock and of her white face, with its bulging forehead and its deliciously insignificant nose. She held out her hand.

"You are a dear!" she whispered.

Her lips seemed to aim uncertainly for his face. Did they just touch, with exquisite contact, his bristly chin, or was it a divine illusion? ... She blushed in a very marked manner. He blinked, and his happy blinking seemed to say: "Only wills drawn by me are genuine.... Didn't I tell you Mr. Moze was not a man of business?"

Audrey ran to Miss Ingate.

Mr. Foulger, suddenly ashamed, and determined to be a lawyer, said sharply:

"Has Mrs. Moze made a will?"

"Mother made a will? Oh no!"

"Then she should make one at once, in your favour, of course. No time should be lost."

"But Mrs. Moze is ill in bed," protested Miss Ingate.

"All the more reason why she should make a will. It may save endless trouble. And it is her duty. I shall suggest that I be the executor and trustee, of course with the usual power to charge costs." His face was hard again. "You will thank me later on, Miss Moze," he added.

"Do you mean _now?_" shrilled Miss Ingate.

"I do," said he. "If you will give me some paper, we might go to her at once. You can be one of the witnesses. I could be a witness, but as I am to act under the will for a consideration somebody else would be preferable."

"I should suggest Aguilar," answered Miss Ingate, the corners of her lips dropping.

Miss Ingate went first, to prepare Mrs. Moze.

When Audrey was alone in the study--she had not even offered to accompany her elders to the bedroom--she made a long sound: "Ooo!" Then she gave a leap and stood still, staring out of the window at the estuary. She tried to force her mood to the colour of her dress, but the sense of propriety was insufficient for the task. The magnificence of all the world was unfolding itself to her soul. Events had hitherto so dizzyingly beaten down upon her head that she had scarcely been conscious of feeling. Now she luxuriously felt. "I am at last born," she thought. "Miracles have happened.... It's incredible.... I can do what I like with mother.... But if I don't take care I shall die of relief this very moment!"


CHAPTER V


THE DEAD HAND

Audrey was wakened up that night, just after she had gone to sleep, by a touch on the cheek. Her mother, palely indistinct in the darkness, was standing by the bedside. She wore a white wrap over her night attire, and the customary white bandage from which emanated a faint odour of eau-de-Cologne, was around her forehead.

"Audrey, darling, I must speak to you."

Instantly Audrey became the wise directress of her poor foolish mother's existence.

"Mother," she said, with firm kindness, "please do go back to bed at once. This sort of thing is simply frightful for your neuralgia. I'll come to you in one moment."

And Mrs. Moze meekly obeyed; she had gone even before Audrey had had time to light her candle. Audrey was very content in thus being able to control her mother and order everything for the best. She guessed that the old lady had got some idea into her head about the property, or about her own will, or about the solicitor, or about a tombstone, and that it was worrying her. She and Miss Ingate (who had now returned home) had had a very extensive palaver, in low voices that never ceased, after the triumphant departure of Mr. Foulger. Audrey had cautiously protested; she was afraid her mother would be fatigued, and she saw no reason why her mother should be acquainted with all the details of a complex matter; but the gossiping habit of a quarter of a century was too powerful for Audrey.

In the large parental bedroom the only light was Audrey's candle. Mrs. Moze was lying on the right half of the great bed, where she had always lain. She might have lain luxuriously in the middle, with vast spaces at either hand, but again habit was too powerful.

The girl, all in white, held the candle higher, and the shadows everywhere shrunk in unison. Mrs. Moze blinked.

"Put the candle on the night-table," said Mrs. Moze curtly.

Audrey did so. The bedroom, for her, was full of the souvenirs of parental authority. Her first recollections were those of awe in regard to the bedroom. And when she thought that on that bed she had been born, she had a very queer sensation.

"I've decided," said Mrs. Moze, lying on her back, and looking up at the ceiling, "I've decided that your father's wishes must be obeyed."

"What about, mother?"

"About those shares going to the National Reformation Society. He meant them to go, and they must go to the Society. I've thought it well over and I've quite decided. I didn't tell Miss Ingate, as it doesn't concern her. But I felt I must tell you at once."

"Mother!" cried Audrey. "Have you taken leave of your senses?" She shivered; the room was very cold, and as she shivered her image in the mirror of the wardrobe shivered, and also her shadow that climbed up the wall and bent at right-angles at the cornice till it reached the middle of the ceiling.

Mrs. Moze replied obstinately:

"I've not taken leave of my senses, and I'll thank you to remember that I'm your mother. I have always carried out your father's wishes, and at my time of life I can't alter. Your father was a very wise man. We shall be as well off as we always were. Better, because I can save, and I shall save. We have no complaint to make; I should have no excuse for disobeying your father. Everything is mine to do as I wish with it, and I shall give the shares to the Society. What the shares are worth can't affect my duty. Besides, perhaps they aren't worth anything. I always understood that things like that were always jumping up and down, and generally worthless in the end.... That's all I wanted to tell you."

Why did Audrey seize the candle and walk straight out of the bedroom, leaving darkness behind her? Was it because the acuteness of her feelings drove her out, or was it because she knew instinctively that her mother's decision would prove to be immovable? Perhaps both.

She dropped back into her own bed with a soundless sigh of exhaustion. She did not blow out the candle, but lay staring at it. Her dream was annihilated. She foresaw an interminable, weary and futile future in and about Moze, and her mother always indisposed, always fretful, and curiously obstinate in weakness. But Audrey, despite her tragic disillusion, was less desolated than made solemn. In the most disturbing way she knew herself to be the daughter of her father and her mother; and she comprehended that her destiny could not be broken off suddenly from theirs. She was touched because her mother deemed her father a very wise man, whereas she, Audrey, knew that he was nothing of the sort. She felt sorry for both of them. She pitied her father, and she was a mother to her mother. Their relations together, and the mystic posthumous spell of her father over her mother, impressed her profoundly.... And she was proud of herself for having demonstrated her courage by preventing the solicitor from running away, and extraordinarily ashamed of her sentimental and brazen behaviour to the solicitor afterwards. These various thoughts mitigated her despair as she gazed at the sinking candle. Nevertheless her dream was annihilated.


CHAPTER VI


THE YOUNG WIDOW

It was early October. Audrey stood at the garden door of Flank Hall.

The estuary, in all the colours of unsettled, mild, bright weather, lay at her feet beneath a high arch of changing blue and white. The capricious wind moved in her hair, moved in the rich grasses of the sea-wall, bent at a curtseying angle the red-sailed barges, put caps on the waves in the middle distance, and drew out into long horizontal scarves the smoke of faint steamers in the offing.

Audrey was dressed in black, but her raiment had obviously not been fashioned in the village, nor even at Colchester, nor yet at Ipswich, that great and stylish city. She looked older; she certainly had acquired something of an air of knowledge, assurance, domination, sauciness and challenge, which qualities were all partly illustrated in her large, audacious hat. The spirit which the late Mr. Moze had so successfully suppressed was at length coming to the surface for all beholders to see, and the process of evolution begun at the moment when Audrey had bounced up and prevented an authoritative solicitor from leaving the study was already advanced. Nevertheless, at frequent intervals Audrey's eyes changed, and she seemed for an instant to be a very naive, very ingenuous and wistful little thing--and this though she had reached the age of twenty. Perhaps she was feeling sorry for the girl she used to be.

And no doubt she was also thinking of her mother, who had died within eight hours of their nocturnal interview. The death of Mrs. Moze surprised everyone, except possibly Mrs. Moze. As an unsuspected result of the operation upon her, an embolism had been wandering in her veins; it reached the brain, and she expired, to the great loss of the National Reformation Society. Such was the brief and simple history. When Audrey stood by the body, she had felt that if it could have saved her mother she would have enriched the National Reformation Society with all she possessed.

Gradually the sense of freedom had grown paramount in her, and she had undertaken the enterprise of completely subduing Mr. Foulger to her own ends.

The back hall was carpetless and pictureless, and the furniture in it was draped in grey-white. Every room in the abode was in the same state, and, since all the windows were shuttered, every room lay moribund in a ghostly twilight. Only the clocks remained alive, probably thinking themselves immortal. The breakfast things were washed up and stored away. The last two servants had already gone. Behind Audrey, forming a hilly background, were trunks and boxes, a large bunch of flowers encased in paper, and a case of umbrellas and parasols; the whole strikingly new, and every single item except the flowers labelled "Paris via Charing Cross and Calais."

Audrey opened her black Russian satchel, and the purse within it. Therein were a little compartment full of English gold, another full of French gold, another full of multicoloured French bank-notes; and loose in the satchel was a blue book of credit-notes, each for five hundred francs, or twenty pounds--a thick book! And she would not have minded much if she had lost the whole