Naturally he might try to despoil her. That is what brother does to brother’s widow and children. … But, on occasion, he treated her with a pompous courtesy—a parade. On the first time he had seen her—not so long ago that; only during that period of the war that had been without measurable time—he had treated her to heavy but expressive gestures of respect and words of courtesy in an old-fashioned language that he must have learned at the Théatre Français while they still played Ruy Blas. French was a different thing now, that she must acknowledge. When she went to Paris—which she did every late summer whilst her man went to Harrogate—the language her nephews spoke was a different affair—without grace, courtesy, intelligibility. Certainly without respect! Oh, là, là! When they came to divide up her inheritance that would be a sharper kind of despoilment than ever Christopher Tietjens’! Whilst she lay on her bed of death those young fellows and their wives would be all through her presses and armoires like a pack of wolves. … La famille! Well, that was very proper. It showed the appropriate spirit of acquisition. What was a good mother for if not to despoil her husband’s relatives in the interests of their joint children!
So Christopher had been as courteous as a well-trained meal-sack of the dix-huitième. Eighteenth century. Older still, période Molière! When he had come into her room that had been dimly lit with a veilleuse—a night-light; they are so much more economical than shaded electric lights!—he had precisely suggested to her a lumbering character from Molière as presented at the Comédie Française; elaborate of phrase and character but protuberant in odd places. She might in that case have supposed that he entertained designs on her person; but with his eyes sticking out in elaborate considerateness, he had only come to break to her the news that his brother was about to make an honest woman of her. That had been Mark’s phrase. It is of course only God that can do that. … But the enterprise had had the full concurrence of Monsieur the Heir-Apparent.
He had indeed been active whilst she had slumbered in a hooded-chair after four days and three nights on her feet. She would have surrendered the body of Mark to no human being but his brother. Now the brother had come to tell her not to be alarmed—panting with nervousness and shortness of breath. … Bad lungs both the brothers had! Panting he had come to tell her not to be alarmed at finding in her man’s room a priest, a lawyer and a lawyer’s clerk. … These black-robed people attend on death, bringing will-forms and the holy oils. The doctor and a man with oxygen cylinders had been there when she had gone to repose herself. It was a pretty congregation of the vultures that attend on us during life.
She had started at once to cry out. That undoubtedly was what had made him nervous—the anticipation that she would cry out sharply in the black, silent London that brooded between air-raids. In that silence, before sleep had visited her peignoir-enveloped, and therefore clumsyish form, she had been aware of Christopher’s activities on the telephone in the passage. It had struck her that he might have been warning the Pompes Funèbres! … So she had begun to scream: the sound that irresistibly you make when death is about to descend. But he had agitated himself to soothe her—for all the world like Monsieur Sylvain on the boards of Molière’s establishment! He spoke that sort of French, in a hoarse whisper, in the shadows of the night-light … assuring her that the priest was for marriage, with licence of the Archevêque de Cantorbéri such as in London you got in those days from Lambeth Palace for thirty pounds sterling. That enabled you to make any woman honest at any hour of the day or night. The lawyer was there to have a will resigned. Marriage in this singular country invalidates any previous will. So Tietjens (Christophère) assured her.
But then, if there was that haste, there was danger of death. She had often speculated as to whether he would or would not marry her as an act of deathbed contrition. Rather contemptuously as great lords with le spleen make their peace with God. She screamed. In silent, black London. The night-light wavered in its saucer.
He crepitated out that his brother was doubling, in this new will, his posthumous provision for her. With provision for the purchase of a house in France if she would not inhabit the Dower House at Groby. A Louis Treize dower-house. It was his idea of consolation. He affected to be businesslike. … These English. But then, perhaps they do not go through your presses and wardrobes whilst your corpse is still warm!
She screamed out that they might take away their marriage papers and will-forms, but to give her her man again. If they had let her give him her tisanes instead of …
With her breast heaving, she had cried into that man’s
