The Fingerprint

Chapter X

WHILST THEY WERE out Jonathan Field rang up to say that he would be staying in town for the night. Mrs. Fabian came trailing down the stairs to tell the returning party about it. She was wearing a purple dressing-gown in a flowing style with a long black chiffon scarf which imparted a funerary appearance. Since she had removed the bandeau with which she attempted to control her hair during the daytime, it now straggled wildly and she had to keep putting up a hand to push it back from her forehead and out of her eyes.

“Jonathan will be staying the night in town. I thought I had better come down and tell you. I don’t know if he was speaking from Mr. Maudsley’s office, but the line was extremely bad and I could hardly hear anything he said.”

Johnny laughed.

“Darling, I hope you really did hear whether he was coming back or not, because if you’ve mucked it up and he gets home in the middle of the night to find everything locked and bolted he won’t be at all pleased.”

Mrs. Fabian’s first expression of surprise changed rapidly to one of dismay.

“Oh, my dears, do you think-oh, I can’t believe-but the line was extremely bad. I couldn’t help wondering whether they turn down the current or whatever it is at night.” Johnny said,

“Darling, you’re out of your depth. And anyhow that isn’t the point. Exactly what did Jonathan say?”

She had come to a standstill, and was now draped against the newel after the manner of one of those eighteenth-century ladies so often depicted as leaning over a pillar with an urn upon it. She put a hand to her head with an air of distraction and repeated, “The line was so bad.”

“Darling, you’re not trying. Just begin at the beginning and go right on.”

“Well, he said, ‘Is that you?,’ and when I said it was, he asked where all the rest of you were, so I said you had gone to the cinema in Lenton, and he made a kind of tutting noise as if he was vexed, and I’m not at all sure he didn’t say ‘Damn!’ ”

“We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Go on-you’re doing fine.”

By common consent the other three were leaving her to Johnny. If anyone could get a coherent story out of her, he would be the one to do it. Mirrie had a hand on Anthony’s arm. Georgina sat in the tall carved chair to the right of the door. She had gone with them because she wouldn’t let anyone guess, not even Anthony, at the shock Jonathan Field had given her. It wasn’t a case of more money or less. It was as if the ground had suddenly opened in front of her and swallowed up the foundations upon which her life was built. Nobody must know how dazed and bruised she felt. Anthony said he loved her, but she had thought that Jonathan loved her very much, and now he didn’t seem to love her at all. She wouldn’t have minded what he did for Mirrie-she wouldn’t have minded his being fond of her. But did you have to take love away from one person in order to give it to another? She hadn’t thought so, but it had happened, and there wasn’t anything that she or anyone else could do about it. Nobody must pity her or feel obliged to try and pick up the pieces. She would do that for herself, but she must have time, just a little time, and at the moment she was too tired even to think. She sat up straight, her head against the tall back of the chair, and listened vaguely to Johnny and Cousin Anna. Georgina had called her that when she was three years old. Coming into her mind like this, it was a reminder how deep were the roots that Jonathan Field was tearing up.

The sound of their voices came to her with an effect of distance.

“He said he hadn’t finished his business with Mr. Maudsley. And then I’m sure he said he wouldn’t be home tonight-at least I was sure until you asked me if I was.”

Johnny persevered.

“There must have been something to make you sure, or not sure. What did he say? Think! He used words-what were they?”

“Something about coming home tonight or not coming home tonight. I really cannot be certain which it was. There was a poem I learnt in the schoolroom, and I have forgotten most of it, but one of the verses began,

‘So many things I cannot tell

Linger in memory’s haunted shell.’

“And they do, you know. You remember some things, but you don’t remember others-like putting a sea-shell to your ear and hearing that rushing sound it makes. So I don’t think it’s any use going on about it. Jonathan will have his key, and we just won’t bolt the door. And Mrs. Stokes has got some very nice sandwiches for you all in the dining-room, so do go along and have them.”

Jonathan did not come home in the night, and by breakfast time Mrs. Fabian was recollecting quite clearly that he had said he would stay at his club. In the course of the morning he rang through and said he would be back in time for dinner.

He brought a frowning presence into the house. Mr. Maudsley, an old friend, had ventured on some plain speaking.

“Not quite fair to put a girl forward as your heiress and then suddenly cut her out. You can provide quite adequately for Mirrie Field without doing that.”

“I haven’t said that I mean to cut Georgina out of my will.”

“What you are proposing goes very close to it. And she is the nearer relation, isn’t she?”

Jonathan gave a frowning nod.

“My sister Ina’s daughter, and I repeat, I am not cutting her out of my will.”

“And Mirrie Field-where does she come in?”

“A cousin’s daughter. I was on close terms with both her parents. There was-a most unfortunate quarrel which was never made up. They died during the war by enemy action, and the child was left friendless and penniless. I didn’t even know of her existence. I heard of it for the first time a few months ago, and I set out to trace her. I found her-” he paused, bit his lip, and said harshly, “in a Home. Fortunately, she hadn’t been there very long.”

Mr. Maudsley looked down at his blotting-pad. He found points in the story which disturbed him a good deal. He wondered whether he could venture upon a question. In the end he said,

“Where had she been since the death of her parents?”

He thought Jonathan was going to fly out at him, but he controlled himself. He got a curt,

“Some of her mother’s relations took her in. They were in very straitened circumstances. She was not an inmate at the Home where I found her-she had a post there.” After a pause he went on again. “She had had a most wretched time. I am naturally anxious to do all I can for her now. If it hadn’t been for my quarrel with her parents she would never have been exposed to such privations.”

He drove himself down to Field End with an obstinate conviction that there was a conspiracy to prevent him from doing what he chose to do with his own. They were all against him, everyone except Mirrie, but they should see-he would show them!

As he opened the door with his latchkey and came into the hall, Mirrie ran down the stairs to meet him in a little white dress and a blue sash. The dress had a childish round neck and puffed sleeves. She looked young and eager as she caught him by the arm and put up her face to be kissed.

“Oh, you’re back! How lovely!”

The frown melted from his brow.

“Pleased to see me?”

She squeezed his arm.

“Oh, yes! It’s lovely! Did you get your horrid will signed and everything finished so that you won’t have to go up again?”

He laughed.

“It isn’t at all a horrid will for you, my child-you know that.”

She gazed up at him adoringly.

“I know how frightfully, frightfully kind you are! But I do hate talking about wills-don’t you? I do hope it’s all signed and finished with so that you won’t have to think about it any more.”

He put an arm round her and kissed her again. It was rather a solemn sort of kiss, not at all like the first one. Nobody had ever kissed her on the forehead before. It gave her a curious half-frightened feeling, but it only lasted a moment, and then he was saying,

“Oh, yes, it’s all signed, with two of Mr. Maudsley’s clerks to witness it, so there is nothing to worry about any more.”

The words were said more to himself than to her. They kept repeating themselves in his mind-“Nothing to worry about-” But the worry persisted, and the frown returned to his brow.

Dinner that evening would have dragged if Mirrie had not prattled artlessly about the film they had seen in Lenton.

“It was lovely, Uncle Jonathan, and it was almost the first real film I’d ever seen-the first proper story film, you know. Uncle Albert and Aunt Grace didn’t approve of them. They didn’t approve of such a lot of things.”

The four other people at the table absorbed this, the first mention of any previous family circle. Johnny immediately enquired,

“Darling, who are Uncle Albert and Aunt Grace?” Whereupon Mirrie raised pleading eyes to Jonathan’s face.

“Oh, I’m sorry-they just slipped out.”

It was perhaps fortunate that Stokes was not in the room. Jonathan leaned across the table to pat Mirrie’s shoulder and murmur, “Never mind, my child,” and then straightened up to look sternly at the rest of them. “They were relations of Mirrie’s mother. She wasn’t happy with them. I am anxious that she should forget about her life under their roof. She has been asked to think and speak of them as little as possible. There are, I hope, a great many much happier years before her in which there will be no need to dwell upon the past.”

Johnny pitched his voice to Georgina ’s ear.

“This is where we drink confusion to Uncle Albert and Aunt Grace. Do you think it would run to champagne?”

Mrs. Fabian sent a kind vague smile across the table.

“Dear Jonathan, how well you put it! As a poet whose name I have forgotten says,

‘Tomorrow comes with flowers of May,

Gone are the snows of yesterday.’

“So what is the use of thinking about them?” Georgina had not meant to speak. She heard herself saying to Anthony very low, “Sometimes it’s the other way round.”

He said, “It isn’t-it won’t be.”

She had a startled expression.

“I didn’t mean to say it.”

He let his hand touch hers for a moment.

“It doesn’t matter what you say to me-you know that.”

Mirrie went on telling Jonathan about the film.