PAYING GUESTS. E. F. Benson
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I think--that I am lying a little more easily to-night than I have done since last Monday. But I must not get too much interested in it at this hour."
Mr. Kemp yawned as he spoke.
"I am beginning to get a little drowsy," he said. "I will not talk any more. Please go out very quietly, and turn off my light from the switch by the door. Don't bang it."
Florence tiptoed away to her room; though it was late, she felt wakeful and exhilarated. She had enjoyed her bridge, but it was not that alone, nor her unusually long remission from her father, nor yet the load of bullion that clinked in her bag which accounted for it. The evening had been adventurous, for Mrs. Holders had fluttered the red flag in the face of that formidable autocrat Colonel Chase: she had called in question the wisdom of his declaration, she had backed her own opinion by doubling, she had invoked the decision of Slam. And no retribution had followed, no thunderbolt had split her: the Colonel had merely paid up all round and gone to bed.
Florence wound up her watch and looked at her plump and rather pleasing image in the glass. Her hair was cropped like a man's, and parted at the side: she wore a stiff linen collar with a small black tie in a bow, and a starched shirt with a sort of Eton jacket; her skirt was about the same length as the jacket. Then crossing her legs in an easy attitude she sat down on her bed, and thought carefully over what had been happening this evening. It was an application of Mrs. Holders's defiance, rather than the defiance itself that claimed her attention. For Wentworth in general dumbly travailed under the domination of the Colonel, and if three hours ago she had been asked what she supposed would happen if anyone questioned his rulings and his bawlings and his tuition, her imagination would have failed to picture so impossible a contingency. Yet the impossible had now occurred and nothing had happened. The application was obvious, and she found herself wondering what would happen if she questioned her father's right to immolate her day and night on the altar of his aches. Daring though such a supposition was, would nothing particular happen?
Florence let the hypochondriac history of the last seven years, from the time when her father had seriously taken up the profession of invalidism instead of having no profession at all, spread itself panoramically out in front of her. Her mother was alive then, and for those first two years of this lean series, the three of them had trodden the uneasy circle of hydropathic establishments. Buxton, Bath, Harrogate, and Bolton (but never Aix again) had grown to be the cardinal points of the year, and these were followed by Torquay, Cromer, Scarborough and Bournemouth for the after-cure of bracing air or sunny climate. At first they had returned to the pleasant little flat in Kensington Square after the quarterly cure to wait for the next cardinal point to come round, but her father who was in his element in boarding houses with all their good opportunities of telling relays of strangers about his ailments, soon discovered that London did not suit him, for it was airless in the summer, treacherous in the autumn and spring and foggy in the winter, and now he and Florence remained at Torquay, Cromer, Scarborough and Bournemouth till the next cure. After two years of this preposterous existence, her mother, who had always been frail and anæmic, simply came to the end of her vitality, and exhausted by her husband's vampirism had stopped living. She had been possessed of a considerable fortune, half of which, with the flat in Kensington Square, she had left to Florence absolutely, the remainder to her husband for life. This appeared to him the most ungrateful return for all the care he had allowed her to take of him, and until his own health had completely driven all other interests from his mind he had sedulously nursed this grievance. Since then, for five years, Florence had been his enslaved companion.
She knew well that her interminable ministries to him were not performed out of the bounty of love, but from her own acquiescence in being crushed, and now it struck her that she thoroughly disliked him. Though she had not definitely stated that to herself before, the emotion must have been habitual, for its discovery did not in the least shock her nor did it shock her to conjecture that he equally disliked her. Probably all these years, he would have been happier with a trained nurse, who was paid for being bullied and bored, and she herself could have lived instead of merely getting older. She might even have married, for women did not become certified spinsters at the age of thirty, as she was when her solitary gyrations with him began, but the idea of marriage had hitherto seemed very embarrassing to her virginal soul. No man alive could justly claim to have raised the beat of her placid blood by a single pulsation; she had no spark of envy for any woman however happily married, compared with one who had her liberty. Miss Howard for instance seemed to her to live an almost ideal existence: she went where she liked, and nobody could claim her time or her energies, she tripped and sang about the passages, so sunlit to her was the normal hour: she devoted herself to her painting and her piano, the pursuits she adored, and had no bond-slave duties to anybody. Happy Miss Howard, gifted and accomplished and free! And how handsome she was: what a charm and vivacity! Though Florence had never experienced any sort of tenderness for a man, she sometimes thought of Miss Howard with a sort of shy, sentimental yearning.
There had been moments, rare and swiftly vanishing, when Florence had seen freedom gleaming on the far horizon, for in the sad hydropathic round, her father sometimes made friends with suitable and sympathetic females, especially those who had sitting-rooms and maids and motors, and once or twice it had really looked as if something was coming of it. He was remarkably handsome with his fine aquiline face, his thick grey hair and tall slim figure, and she was sure that middle-aged spinsters and widows had given him and received from him very promising attention. She knew well the symptoms on his side, for when such friendship was ripening he adopted an attitude of wistful and tender affection towards herself; he would pat her hand (when the lady was by) and ask her what she had been doing, and thank her for being so devoted to her poor old Papa. But nothing had ever come of it, the lady who seemed within an ace of becoming her poor old Mamma, had got some glimpse, Florence supposed, of his unique selfishness, and had shaken off the glamour.
She was ready for bed now, and still under the inspiration of the revolt which Mrs. Holders had made against the authority and omniscience of Colonel Chase, she asked herself what would happen if she refused to be eternally dragged about from Spa to Spa. Naturally she could not throw off so chronic a yoke with one comprehensive gesture of defiance; she would have to begin gently and say, for instance, tomorrow morning, that she was going out for a walk instead of coming down to the baths with him in the bus and, after doing various chemical errands for him, sitting in the waiting-room which faintly smelt of the awful effluvium of the waters, till he was ready to drive up again. Perhaps, if she could summon up nerve, she might ask Miss Howard if she might help her to carry her satchel and stool to the scene of her sketch. As she quenched her light, she heard through the door which communicated with her father's room, a sound so regular and sonorous that, if he had not been sure he was going to lie awake for hours, she would certainly have thought he was fast asleep.
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