The heel of Achilles (eBook)

THE HEEL OF ACHILLES

I

“I am an orphan,” reflected Lydia Raymond, with immense satisfaction.

She was a very intelligent little girl of twelve years old, and she remembered very well that when her father had died out in China, three years ago, it was her mother who had been the centre of attention and compassion. People had spoken about her poor dead father, and had praised him and pitied him, but their real attention had all been for the widow, who was there under their eyes, pathetic and sorrow-stricken. Lydia herself had been “poor little thing,” but Grandpapa and her aunts and uncle had all told her that it was her mother who must be thought of now, and she knew that they kept on saying to one another that “the child will be a comfort to poor Mary.” Her own individuality, which she felt so strongly, did not seem to count at all, and Lydia had, quite silently, resented that intensely, ever since she could remember anything at all.

Once her mother had read her some extracts of old letters from her dead father, letters which had once come so regularly every week in thin blue envelopes with the Hong Kong postmark.

“Kiss our baby Lydia for me. I hope she is a good little thing always ... some day, when these years of hard work are over, you won’t have to sacrifice yourself any more, my poor Mary....” And, later on, in the last letter of all: “The child’s life is only a continuation of ours, my Mary.”

Long afterwards, Lydia, who never forgot the words, came to see them as the expression of man’s eternal wistful attempt to live on in the generation supplanting his own, but when her mother read them aloud to her, in a voice choked with tears, something in Lydia revolted violently.

“My life is my own,” she thought stubbornly, “not just a continuation of somebody else’s.”

With that acute clarity of vision that enabled her to analyze certain aspects of her childhood’s world with such astonishing maturity, she once told herself:

“They don’t love me for myself at all. Grandpapa doesn’t love me the least bit—he doesn’t love anybody. And mother loves me because I’m her child, and the aunts love me because I’m father’s child, and they think I’m a comfort to mother.”

She could hardly remember her father, and though at first she had shed tears over his death, Lydia had quickly dried them.

“Now, dear, you must be a good little girl and not cry and make poor mother more unhappy than she is already,” had said harassed-looking Aunt Evelyn. “You know you must think of her now. You’ll have to be her comfort.”

And almost immediately afterwards Aunt Evelyn had said to Lydia’s mother:

“Do, do give way and cry, dearie. It will be so much better for you. I know you’re wonderful, but you’ll suffer for it later on. You’re bound to.”

After that it had not needed Aunt Evelyn’s further observation that “poor little Lydia didn’t know what her loss meant” to dry Lydia’s perfunctory tears with the sting of an inflexible pride.

She would not cry again until they were prepared to concede to her the major right to affliction!

She did not love her mother very much. It is more common than is generally allowed, for an intelligent child, still in bondage to her natural instinct, reinforced by the tradition of allegiance to natural authorities, to couple that allegiance with a perfectly distinct antipathy to the personality of either or both parents. Lydia’s dislike of her mother’s sentimentality, her constant vacillation of purpose, and her incessant garrulity, was only unchildlike in her calm analysis of it, and in the conscious restraint that she put upon it.

Mrs. Raymond had often said, sometimes in Lydia’s hearing, that she would welcome death.

“But for little Lydia, I think I should have put an end to it all long ago. But how can I leave her, when she only has me?”

Mrs. Raymond, however, without any intervention of her own, when Lydia was twelve years old, reached the haven to which, since her husband’s death, she had so often aspired.

“I am an orphan.”

Lydia, already a dignified and self-contained little girl, bore herself with a new, pale composure.

It was for her that Aunt Evelyn, once more summoned from her shabby, untidy house at Wimbledon, was now hastily ordering mourning, and to whom the Wimbledon cousins had written brief, blotted letters of compassion and sympathy, and it was her future that Aunt Evelyn and Uncle George and Aunt Beryl had all been discussing under their breath whenever they thought she was not listening.

This, at least, was Lydia’s complacent conviction, until she overheard a few chance words about Grandpapa, and how best they could break it to him, when he was old, and his heart was weak—and he had, besides, never really got over the shock of poor Peter’s death, three years ago.

So it was Grandpapa they were thinking of now!

Lydia really felt very angry. Grandpapa, however, did not exact an undue amount of attention, on the whole.

“Grandpapa is old,” said Aunt Beryl, with a hint of apology in her voice. “Very old people don’t realize things quite in the same way—they’re more familiar with grief, perhaps.”

“The real blow was poor Peter’s death,” said Aunt Evelyn, also determined that Grandpapa should be accredited with his due meed of afflictions.

Aunt Beryl, who lived with Grandpapa, took Lydia to stay with them.

They had a house at the seaside, only two hours by train from London, and Aunt Evelyn came with them, ostensibly to see how Grandpapa was, but in reality, Lydia felt certain, in order to help them to decide upon her own future.

The two aunts talked to one another in anxious undertones all through the journey; their two, almost identical, black hats nodding so close together that Aunt Beryl’s hard straw brim kept on knocking against Aunt Evelyn’s stiff, upstanding bow of rigid crape. Although the younger one was still unmarried, Lydia’s two aunts had never lost a certain indefinable similarity of taste that always made them look as though they were dressed alike.

Aunt Evelyn was Mrs. Senthoven.

“You can remember it because of Beethoven,” she always said, with a nervous laugh. She had three children, and was several years older than her sister.

Miss Raymond might have been handsome in a small, beaky way but for her extreme thinness and the permanent anxiety in her light-brown eyes. “Beryl is the youngest bird in the old home nest, and is always with dear Grandpapa,” Aunt Evelyn and Uncle George were apt to say.

The youngest bird in the old home nest, growing yearly more pinched and vulture-like, invariably acquiesced eagerly in the pious formula, and thus enabled Aunt Evelyn to give her undivided attention to the straitened, clamorous household at Wimbledon, and Uncle George to leave his room in Grandpapa’s house untenanted during his fortnightly holiday from the office.

Now, however, he was at home, having gone straight back after the funeral. He met them at the station.

Uncle George was small and fair, with a habit of asking thoughtful questions of the kind apt to provoke hasty and inaccurate replies, which he then had the satisfaction of correcting.

He said, “Well, well, Lydia,” and gave her a little, awkward pat on the shoulder, that she quite understood to be expressive of his pity and sympathy.

“What about the ’bus?” said Aunt Beryl.

“No, no,” Aunt Evelyn protested quickly. “The walk would do us good. No need to take the ’bus.”

This was one of the fundamental differences between the aunts and Lydia’s mother. Mrs. Raymond had always taken a cab from the station, whether she had brought any luggage or no, when she came down to see Grandpapa. She had never seemed to be aware, as Lydia had privately always been aware, that the household in Regency Terrace thought very much the worse of her for the extravagance.

“The ’bus could take your bag, Evelyn. I know the man,” said Uncle George. “It will be quite all right.” He put out his hand for the small, dirty, brown suit-case that was weighing his sister down on one side.

“Well—I don’t know,” she hesitated. “I suppose it will be sixpence or more saved, if we carry it ourselves.” She laughed nervously.

“Better let the ’bus take it. I can say a word to the conductor,” persisted Uncle George, now burdened with the bag.

“Oh, it isn’t far. I think I’d rather keep an eye on it.”

“Just as you like.”

Uncle George raised his eyebrows, and they trudged away down the dusty station road.

Lydia was tired and hot in her new, fussy black clothes, and the contrast between her present discomfort and those condemned, self-indulgent ways of her mother, in the advantages of which she had always shared, brought a genuine realization of loss to her mind with a dull pang.

“What made your train late?” Uncle George inquired, patiently shifting the suit-case into his other hand.

“Was it late?”

“Surely. Wasn’t it, Beryl?”

“I think it was. About five or ten minutes.”

Her brother immediately looked astonished.

“Five or ten! The railway company would tell you that there is a very great difference. As a matter of fact, your train came in exactly seven-and-a-half minutes behind time.”

“Perhaps we started late,” wearily suggested Mrs. Senthoven. She was beginning to limp a little in her tight, black boots.

“Not very...