Brangwyn, watching the clock anxiously as the hands crept towards two, heaved a sigh of relief as he heard a key inserted in the lock; the door opened, and in came Ursula and Murchison. Ursula went up to her brother without a word and put her arms round his neck and hid her face on his shoulder. He put his arm round her and patted her back, and then held out his hand to Murchison. They exchanged a grip in a silence that was more eloquent than many words. Then Murchison turned and went off to his own quarters, leaving Brangwyn alone with his sister.
Murchison arrived down at breakfast next morning looking rather subdued and white.
‘How's Miss Brangwyn?’ he enquired, seeing that the table was only laid for two.
‘Pretty bad. I was up with her all night. At seven this morning I sent for a doctor, and he gave her an injection of morphia and took her off to a nursing-home.’
Murchison made no comment, but sat staring at the table in silence. Finally he said:
‘Perhaps it's just as well.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I'd like to get off without seeing her again, if you don't mind, sir’
‘What do you mean, Murchison? You are not going to leave us, are you?’
‘I think I'd better. I've had as much as I can stick!’
‘But, my dear fellow, I don't want to lose you. Even if you and Ursula can't hit it off, I should like you to remain on as my secretary.’
‘That's asking a bit too much, sir. This business has gone pretty deep with me, and I couldn't stand it.’
‘Are you sure you know where you stand with Ursula?’
‘I know where I get off, sir, and that is much more to the point.’
‘I'm frightfully sorry about it, my dear boy. This is a bitter disappointment to me, but I won't press you to stay if you don't feel you can. What do you want to do?’
‘I'll go round to an employment agency and put my name down, and see what turns up. I suppose Miss Brangwyn will be at the nursing-home for a few days?’
‘Certainly that. Don't rush your choice. You are due for a month's wages from me in any case.’
‘Thanks very much, sir. I don't want to land myself out of a job. I've had too much of that sort of thing.’
It was with a heavy heart he climbed the stairs of a very superior employment agency in Piccadilly to which Brangwyn had sent him with a letter of introduction. But he found it was a very different matter applying for a post in his good clothes and with his first-class reference to what it had been as a down-and-out. The clerk was almost cordial.
‘I think we can fit you up with what you want, if you are willing to go abroad?’
‘Delighted! Nothing I should like better. Where to, and when?’
‘Egypt, in about a month's time!’
‘Well, I should have like to have gone sooner, but I can hang on till then if it's worth it.’
‘Very good. You go round to the Savoy and see Mr. Agassiz. He's a Heinz; do you mind that?’
‘What in the world's a Heinz?’
‘A mongrel Levantine from Alexandria, the world's very worst. We call'em Heinzes because fifty-seven varieties have gone to the making of ‘em, see? This fellow is as rich as Croesus, and he's apparently been having trouble with his poor relations and he wants someone as a kind of boydguard-cum-secretary.’
‘Sounds all right. I ought to be able to put the fear of God into a Heinz's poor relations.’
‘Very good. Take this card and go and see him, and let us know if you get the job.’
Murchison took a bus to the Savoy and interviewed a small, skinny, sallow-cheeked little man, with eyes like black currants and greasy ringlets all over his head, who scuttled about the expensive suite like a hen in traffic all the time he was talking, too nervous to sit down.
He jibbed at the five pounds a week Murchison boldly asked for, but finally closed at four when he heard that Murchison was a good revolver shot. He would not require his new servitor till he sailed for Alexandria in a month's time, and he absolutely declined to contribute a halfpenny towards his support during the interregnum. He could take it or leave it.
Murchison took it. He still had the balance of Brangwyn's cheque in hand. The Heinz spun like a Japanese waltzing mouse as he shooed Murchison out of the suite, and he heard the door being locked behind him.
‘You've got a beauty, sir!’ whispered a waiter in passing.
Murchison returned to the flat, and told Brangwyn of his doings.
‘I am glad you are fixed up, my lad, though I shall be very sorry to lose you. But if you don't like your Heinz, and he does not sound attractive, you can always come back to me.’
They ate their lunch in silence. Murchison seemed depressed and dispirited in a way that Brangwyn had never seen him before. He had often seen Murchison sullen and brooding, or resentful and up against life, but he had never seen him with all the kick gone out of him like this.
He had thought, from Murchison's attitude, that he must have definitely received his congé from Ursula; but when he had visited her during the morning, and his arrival had roused her momentarily from her drugged daze, the words that came from her were to ask for Murchison, and to mutter that he had nearly died on the cross.
After the breakfast conversation with Murchison he had resigned himself to the disappointment of his hopes and accepted his magical experiment as a failure. But now he was not so sure. Murchison had frankly admitted he had come to care for Ursula, and at the present moment, brooding over his coffee, looked about as thoroughly broken-hearted as a man could look; and the one thing Ursula had wanted to know in her semi delirium was whether Murchison was all right, and, reassured, had become quiet and dropped off to sleep. Actions speak louder than words, thought Brangwyn, trained to watch the language of unconscious gesture.
And as he watched Murchison staring into space with miserable eyes, oblivious of his companion, a deep-laid plot began to hatch in his mind.
‘Murchison,’ he said, ‘if you haven't got to go to your Heinz for a month, I wonder whether you would do a job for me?’
‘Yes, rather, sir. What is it?’
‘I shall have to give up the cottage in Wales. It is far better that Ursula should not go back there after all that has happened. It will be full of painful memories for her. I want to find another place as a retreat. Do you think you could hunt about and find one for me? I am a wretched hand at house-hunting.’
‘Rather, sir. I'd love to do it. What part of the country are you thinking of’
‘I had thought of the East Coast, up Yorkshire way.’
‘That's my native heath. I'll soon hunt you up something.’
‘Splendid. Go ahead. I want to have somewhere to take Ursula when she comes out of the nursing-home. Can you catch the afternoon mail-train for Llandudno junction and pick up the car? You will want it for this job.’
‘Yes, easy. I'll slam a few things into a suitcase and get off. Give me some particulars of the sort of thing you want, and the price you are prepared to go to.’
It was a tremendous relief to have something to do, and especially something to do that should take him about the country in the open air. Brangwyn could not possibly have found a better medicine for his sore soul.
Murchison enjoyed the amenities of a first-class smoker to Llandudno junction (Brangwyn wouldn't let him go third), and then revelled in the driving of a six-cylindered thoroughbred cross-country to the East Coast, even though much of the route lay through the Black Country.
Finally he crossed the Humber and came into his own land. It was late afternoon as he approached the sea. He was making for a little village that had been the scene of summer holidays during his childhood. There were people about there who might remember him as a small boy in a sailor-suit, getting into every imaginable kind of mischief. Moreover, his name was one to conjure with in that district, for his forbears had owned it for many square miles. His objective was a farmhouse, about a mile from the village, right down on the beach among sandy dunes, where a stream that came from the moors ran out to the sea. It was here that they had always stayed, his father and mother and himself and an old Nanny; for his brother was a young man at the University by then, and despised holidays at a fishing village.
He planned to go and see the old couple who owned the farm. They would know every house in the neighbourhood that was to let. They must be getting on by now, for they had seemed old when he was a small boy; but then everybody who has a beard seems old to a child, and the old man was bearded like a pard, and the old lady, too, for that matter.
He passed through the village, and turned the car off the main road on to a rutted track, much overgrown. It was little more than a path, and he had to push the car through with some anxiety as to Brangwyn's varnish. Curious how things shrink from what you remember them to be as a kid. He had thought it a decent road down to the farm.
Finally he pushed through a small wood of wind-blown firs and came out into the farmyard itself. Curious, he thought, that no dog gave warning of his approach, for the door stood hospitably open. But as he drew up to it he saw the reason. The curtainless windows stared blank as the eyes of a dead man. The house was empty and deserted, and the broken door swung idly in the wind.
Murchison felt as if the bottom had dropped out of the universe. This was the last straw, everything had gone from him.
The comfortable farm and the kindly old couple were the one link he had with happier days, and now that was broken. The empty house affected him out of all proportion to its practical significance. The words ran in his head of a text from which his brother had preached a sermon of entirely different import - ‘He came to His own, and His own received Him not.’
Secure in the solitude of the deserted homestead, Murchison folded his arms on the steering-wheel and laid his head on them.
When at length he raised his head, a red-gold beam of the setting sun had penetrated a rift in the cloud-bank to the west and lit up the stained whitewash of the old walls and set the windows ablaze. The place seemed alive again for the moment, as if firelight were shining out of the windows, as he had seen it shine out of the windows of Ursula's mountain cottage as he had approached it, dead-beat, but full of strange hopes, only to hear the casual words that had revealed to him his real position.
And with the memory there flashed into his mind a sudden idea that perhaps the farm itself might suit Brangwyn for his place of secret retreat, and his depression lifted as suddenly as the beam of the setting sun had struck through the rift in the clouds. With a new eagerness he got out of the car and entered the open door. The setting sun shone straight in at the windows, filling the place with temporary cheer. The floor was deep in drilling leaves and the droppings of roosting birds, but it was dry and weather tight. The big kitchen would do for Brangwyn's living-room; the sacred parlour for his dining-room; and the big scullery out at the rear for his kitchen. An active wench on a cycle would make nothing of the mile from the village.
Murchison made his way back to the village, and received a warm welcome at the local pub when he made himself known. The landlady being a daughter of the old couple, whose pigtail he had often pulled in the days of his youth; the farm was her brother's property, brother produced forthwith, and a more than modest price demanded for the farm and the few acres immediately surrounding it that gave it complete seclusion with their wind-swept woods and barren dunes. The land was useless for farming, and no one wanted it.
Murchison went over to the post office, put through a trunk call to the flat, and announced his find to Brangwyn, to be received with acclamation.
‘It sounds absolutely right to me, provided you can vouch for the water supply. Close with it at once, and put the decorators in. I want it ready at the earliest possible moment to take Ursula to. She is jabbing at the nursing-home.’
‘How is she?’
‘Better than she was, but far from right. She can get no natural sleep, and with her nervous temperament the doctors are very shy of drugs, so we are between the devil and the deep sea.’
Murchison slept at the pub, and next morning accompanied the landlady's brother to the local solicitor, and the conveyancing of the farm to Brangwyn was put in hand. The brother himself proved to be the local handyman, decorator, maker of hen-coops, and undertaker, so down they went to the house and looked over it with a view to repairs. Practically none were needed, save to the door, that had apparently been forced by tramps or trippers.
Paint, whitewash and distemper were the chief requirements, so the job did not promise to be a big one, or a prolonged one.
Murchison was good at staff-work, and the farmhouse was taking shape rapidly. At the end of the week he was able to move in and camp out in it. The days slid by unnoticed, and almost every day there was a letter from Miss Brangwyn containing instructions and little personal friendly touches, and she always signed them ‘Ursula’, so that he came to the conclusion that Christian names were cheap in the set in which she moved. He watched the post for those letters, and yet they only kept open the wound that he wished would start to heal.
While waiting for the varnish on the floors to dry, pending the arrival of the furniture, Murchison got to work on what had been the garden, and unearthed the precious remains of certain pink and white moss-rose bushes beside the gate. And there was a sweet-briar under the window of the old kitchen, that was now the living-room; and lad's-love beside the door. Then he raided a neighbouring wood for primrose roots, already in flower, and lined the path to the gate with them. An enormous van with a trailer arrived, barging its way as best it might down the overgrown lane, and Murchison spent a strenuous day helping to lift furniture into its appointed place, as sketched on a plan by Miss Brangwyn.
Altogether, he was thoroughly enjoying himself, and what with the strong sea air and active work had been able to push his worries to the back of his mind. The Heinz seemed no more than a bad dream, fading from memory, and he had half forgotten that the sands were running low of the month's notice he was working out with Brangwyn. He seemed to have struck his roots into the old place with every spadeful of earth he turned, and ever slap of whitewash he laid on the walls.
Then there came disillusionment. The lorry from the railway station came lumbering down the lane and deposited a large packing-case in front of the door. Murchison, left alone by the departure of undertaker-decorator at the end of his job, lugged it into the living-room, which now had its curtains up, and prised it open, pulled off the covering newspapers, and discovered that it contained all Ursula Brangwyn's things from the cottage upon the flank of Snowdon. Here were books, pictures, ornaments, rugs, cushions - all the things he had seen about her in that room that had seemed so full of her personality, and in which he had heard the fatal words spoken that had shattered his dream. Here was the very rug that he had slept under that night on the settle. Out of a book fell snapshots of herself and Brangwyn, taken in front of the cottage. He picked them up and studied them. Here was a laughing Ursula, a very different person to the one he had known. Evidently the snapshot had been taken before her trouble came upon her. He held the little photo in his big hands and studied it closely. He wondered what Ursula Brangwyn could be like to those she cared for. She looked a really jolly girl here, not in the least die-away and supercilious. The eyes of the photo looked straight out at him, and he stared back at them.
‘My God!’ he said, ‘this won't do!’ and hastily thrust the photos back into the book they had come from, and proceeded to get on with the unpacking.
Presently he came to a layer of china, and found that Ursula's garments had been used as packing for it. Here was her rose-pink dressing-gown; here was the frock in which he had first seen her, faintly smelling of the scent she always used. Here were her slippers, her gloves, her silver-backed brushes. Murchison sat down on the edge of the packing-case and stared at the litter around him. It was like clearing up after a death, than which there is no more ghastly experience if one had loved the one who died. Murchison did not know that it was possible to feel such intensity of emotion.
He went out and stood at the back door for a time, looking out to sea. Then he strolled slowly round the house to the front, where the little bit of garden he had unearthed was beginning to make a brave show. Slowly it dawned upon him that in ten days' time he was due to join his Heinz and sail for Alexandria, and that would be the end of his association with the Brangwyns. He asked himself desperately if it were possible to rescind his decision and stop on with Brangwyn as secretary, as he had been pressed to do, and decided for the twentieth time that bad as the pain of the wrench might be, it would be infinitely less than the long-drawn-out agony of being in close touch with Ursula Brangwyn. Moreover, he did not feel he could trust his self-control. He had already broken out once with her, in the barn on the Conway shore, near Llandudno. It would not be fair to let Brangwyn in for unpleasantness. No, it was best to stick to his decision and go while the going was good. If he delayed, he might lose his reference.
He returned to the house, and grimly, as a kind of martyrdom, he carried Ursula Brangwyn's things up to the room she had chosen, and put them away in the drawers and cupboards for her, hung her pictures, and spread her pink eiderdown on the bed.