Vera by Elizabeth von Arnim

Author:Elizabeth von Arnim [Arnim, Elizabeth von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: caricature, marital dysharmony
Publisher: Bellware
Published: 2017-07-26T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

He got over it, however. There was a particularly well-made soufflé, and this helped. Also Lucy kept on looking at him very tenderly, and it was the first time she had sat at his table in his beloved home, realising the dreams of months that she should sit just there with him, his little bobbed-haired Love, and gradually therefore he recovered and smiled at her again.

But what power she had to hurt him, thought Wemyss; it was so great because his love for her was so great. She should be very careful how she wielded it. Her Everard was made very sensitive by his love.

He gazed at her solemnly, thinking this, while the plates were being changed.

‘What is it, Everard?’ Lucy asked anxiously.

‘I’m only thinking that I love you,’ he said, laying his hand on hers.

She flushed with pleasure, and her face grew instantly happy. ‘My Everard,’ she murmured, gazing back at him, forgetful in her pleasure of the parlourmaid. How dear he was. How silly she was to be so much distressed when he was offended. At the core he was so sound and simple. At the core he was utterly her own dear lover. The rest was mere incident, merest indifferent detail.

‘We’ll have coffee in the library,’ he said to the parlourmaid, getting up when he had finished his lunch and walking to the door. ‘Come along, little Love,’ he called over his shoulder.

The library…

‘Can’t we – don’t we – have coffee in the hall?’ asked Lucy, getting up slowly.

‘No,’ said Wemyss, who had paused before an enlarged photograph that hung on the wall between the two windows, enlarged to life size.

He examined it a moment, and then drew his finger obliquely across the glass from top to bottom. It then became evident that the picture needed dusting.

‘Look,’ he said to the parlourmaid, pointing.

The parlourmaid looked.

‘I notice you don’t say anything,’ he said to her after a silence in which she continued to look, and Lucy, taken aback again, stood uncertain by the chair she had got up from. ‘I don’t wonder. There’s nothing you can possibly say to excuse such carelessness.’

‘Lizzie –’ began the parlourmaid.

‘Don’t put it on to Lizzie.’

The parlourmaid ceased putting it on to Lizzie and was dumb.

‘Come along, little Love,’ said Wemyss, turning to Lucy and holding out his hand. ‘It makes one pretty sick, doesn’t it, to see that not even one’s own father gets dusted.’

‘Is that your father?’ asked Lucy, hurrying to his side and offering no opinion about dusting.

It could have been no one else’s. It was Wemyss grown very enormous, Wemyss grown very old, Wemyss displeased. The photograph had been so arranged that wherever you moved to in the room Wemyss’s father watched you doing it. He had been watching Lucy from between those two windows all through her first lunch, and must, flashed through Lucy’s brain, have watched Vera like that all through her last one.

‘How long has he been there?’ she asked, looking up into Wemyss’s father’s displeased eyes which looked straight back into hers.

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