Helen with the High Hand by Arnold Bennett (free ebook reader .txt) 📖

you. He was singing at the concert----"

"So sorry I wasn't able to be here," Mrs. Prockter inserted, with effusive anxiety.

"We missed you awfully," Helen properly responded. "The rector was inconsolable. So was everybody," she added, feeling that as a compliment the rector's grief might be deemed insufficient. "And he had a breakdown."

"Who? Emanuel?"

"Yes. I was accompanying him, and I am afraid it was my fault. Anyhow, he didn't finish his song. And then we missed him. He had asked the butler to let him lie down somewhere, and uncle found him in his bedroom. I hope it's nothing serious."

"Oh, my dear girl," said Mrs. Prockter, regaining somewhat her natural demeanour in a laugh, "if it's only one of Emanuel's singing breakdowns, we needn't worry. Can I go up and talk sense to him? He's just like a child, you know."

"Let me take you up," cried Helen.

And the two women ascended the grand staircase. It was the first time the grand staircase had been used with becoming dignity since Mrs. Prockter had used it on her visit of inspection. That staircase and Mrs. Prockter were made for each other.

No sooner had they disappeared than James popped out of his lair, where he had been hiding, and gazed up the staircase like a hunter stalking his prey. The arrival of the page in sixpences put him out of countenance for a moment, especially when the page began to feed the hall-fire in a manner contrary to all James's lifelong notions of feeding fires. However, he passed the time by giving the page a lesson.

Helen tapped at the bedroom door, left Mrs. Prockter to enter, and descended the stairs again.

"Is her up there with him?" James asked, in a whisper.

Helen nodded.

"Ye'd better ask her stop and have something to eat wi' us," said James.

Helen had to reconcile James Ollerenshaw to the new scale of existence at Wilbraham Hall. She had to make him swallow the butler, and the page, and the other servants, and the grand piano--in themselves a heavy repast--without counting the evening dinner. Up to the present he had said nothing, because there had been no fair opportunity to say anything. But he might start at any moment. And Helen had no reason to believe that he had even begun the process of swallowing. She argued, with a sure feminine instinct and a large experience of mankind, that if he could only be dodged into tacitly accepting the new scale for even a single meal, her task would be very much simplified. And what an ally Mrs. Prockter would be!

"Tell cook there will be three to dinner," she said to the page, who fled gleefully.

After a protracted interval Mrs. Prockter reappeared.

She began by sighing. "The foolish boy is seriously damaged," said she.

"Not hurt?" Helen asked.

"Yes. But only in his dignity. He pretends it's his throat, but it isn't. It's only his dignity. I suppose all singers are children, like that. I'm really ashamed to have to ask you to let him lie there a little, dear Miss Rathbone; but he is positively sure that he can't get up. I've been through these crises with him before, but never one quite so bad."

She laughed. They all laughed.

"I'll let him lie there on one condition," Helen sweetly replied. "And that is that you stay to dinner. I am relying on you. And I won't take a refusal."

Mrs. Prockter looked sharply at James, and James blushed.

"James," she exclaimed, "you've told her. And you promised you wouldn't till to-morrow."

"Nay!" said James. "I've said nowt! It's you as has let it out, _now_, missis!"

"Told me what, Mrs. Prockter?" Helen asked, utterly unexpectant of the answer she was to get.

"My dear girl," said the elder dame, "do not call me Mrs. Prockter. I am Mrs. Ollerenshaw. I am the property that your uncle has been buying at Derby. And he is my sick relative at Nottingham. We preferred to do it like that. We could not have survived engagements and felicitations."

"Oh, you wicked sinners! You--you terrible darlings!" Helen burst out as soon as she could control her voice.

Mrs. Ollerenshaw wept discreetly.

"Bless us! Bless us!" murmured James, not to beseech a benediction, but simply to give the impression (quite false) that, in his opinion, much fuss was being made about nothing.

The new scale of existence was definitely accepted. And in private Mrs. Ollerenshaw entirely agreed with Helen as to the merits of the butler.

After dinner James hurried to his lair to search for a book. The book was not where he had left it, on his original entry into Wilbraham Hall. Within two minutes, the majority of the household staff was engaged in finding that book. Ultimately the butler discovered it; the butler had been reading it.

"Ay!" said James, opening the volume as he stood in front of the rich, expensive fire in the hall. "Dickens--Charles Dickens--that's the chap's name. I couldn't think of it when I was telling you about th' book th' other day. I mun' go on wi" that."

"Couldn't you play us something?" responded his wife.

In the triumph of concertinas over grand pianos, poor Emanuel, lying wounded upstairs, was forgotten. At five minutes to nine Helen stole, unperceived, away from the domestic tableau. She had by no means recovered from her amazement; but she had screened it off by main force in her mind, and she was now occupied with something far more important than the blameless amours of the richest old man in Hillport.

By Wilbraham Water a young man was walking to and fro in the deep autumn night. He wore a cap and a muffler, but no overcoat, and his hands were pushed far down into the pockets of his trousers. He regarded the ground fixedly, and stamped his feet at every step. Then a pale grey figure, with head enveloped in a shawl, and skirts carefully withdrawn from the ground, approached him.

He did not salute the figure, he did not even take his hands out of his pockets. He put his face close to hers, and each could see that the other's features were white and anxious.

"So you've come," said he, glumly.

"What do you want?" Helen coldly asked.

"I want to speak to you. That's what I want. If you care for Emanuel Prockter, why did you play that trick on him this afternoon?"

"What trick?"

"You know perfectly well what I mean. So I'll thank you not to beat about the bush. The plain fact is that you don't care a pin for Prockter."

"I never said I did."

"You've made every one believe you did, anyhow. You've even made me think so, though all the time I knew it was impossible. An ass like that!"

"What do you want?" Helen repeated.

They were both using a tone intended to indicate that they were enemies from everlasting to everlasting, and that mere words could not express the intensity of their mutual hatred and scorn. The casual distant observer might have conceived the encounter to be a love idyll.

There was a short silence.

"I broke off my engagement last night," Andrew Dean muttered, ferociously.

"Really!" Helen commented.

"You don't seem to care."

"I don't see what it has to do with me. But if you talked to Lilian Swetnam in the same nice agreeable manner that you talk to me, I can't say I'm surprised to hear that she broke with you."

"Who told you _she_ broke?" Andrew demanded.

"I guessed," said Helen. "You'd never have had the courage to break it off yourself."

Andrew made a vicious movement.

"If you mean to serve me as you served Emanuel," she remarked, with bitter calm, "please do it as gently as you can. And don't throw me far. I can only swim a little."

Andrew walked away.

"Good-night," she called.

"Look here!" he snarled coming back to her "What's the matter with you? I know I oughtn't to have asked Lilian to marry me. Everybody knows that. It's universally agreed. But are you going to make that an excuse for spoiling the whole show? What's up with you is pride."

"And what is up with you?" she inquired.

"Pride," said he. "How could I know you were in love with me all the time? How could----"

"You couldn't," said Helen. "I wasn't. No more than you were with me."

"If you weren't in love with me, why did you try to make me jealous?"

"Me try to make you jealous!" she exclaimed, disdainfully. "You flatter yourself, Mr. Dean!"

"I can stand a good deal, but I can't stand lies, and I won't!" he exploded. "I say you did try to make me jealous."

He then noticed that she was crying.

The duologue might have extended itself indefinitely if her tears had not excited him to uncontrollable fury, to that instinctive cruelty that every male is capable of under certain conditions. Without asking her permission, without uttering a word of warning, he rushed at her and seized her in his arms. He crushed her with the whole of his very considerable strength. And he added insult to injury by kissing her about forty seven times. Women are such strange, incalculable creatures. Helen did not protest. She did not invoke the protection of Heaven. She existed, passively and silently, the unremonstrating victim of his disgraceful violence.

Then he held her at arm's length. "Will you marry me?"

"Yes," she said.

"Did you try to make me jealous?"

"Yes."

Later, as they walked by the lake, he ejaculated: "I'm an awful brute!"

"I like you as you are," she replied.

But the answer was lacking in precision, for at that moment he was being as tender as only an awful brute can be.

"Of course," she said, "we mustn't say anything about it yet."

"No," he agreed. "To let it out at once might make unpleasantness between you and the Swetnams."

"Oh!" she said, "I wasn't thinking of that. But there's another love-affair in the house, and no house will hold two at once. It would be nauseating."

That is how they talk in the Five Towns. As if one could have too much love, even in a cottage--to say nothing of a Wilbraham Hall! Mrs. Ollerenshaw placidly decided that she and James would live at the Hall, though James would have preferred something a size smaller. As I have already noticed, the staircase suited her; James suited her, too. No one could guess why, except possibly James. They got on together, as the Five Towns said, "like a house afire."

Helen and Andrew Dean were satisfied with a semi-detached villa in Park-road, with a fine view of the gold angel. Women vary, capricious beings! Helen is perfectly satisfied with one servant. But she dresses rather better than ever.


THE END