Mouse was adamant. “I don’t like white, Frances: White is for young girls, and I like green.”
She could be gently and immovably obstinate when she wanted to. At a quarter of four she went up to change and a few minutes later Julie drifted out into the dim hall and sat down on a bench against the staircase to wait for her.
Julie was tired, and it was a relief to unfasten her smile. She eased a slender foot out of a tight slipper and lit a cigarette. Voices were a steady hum beyond the doorway. Most of the guests were elderly friends of Sarah’s or of Joe Westing’s family, and Helen Hokinson hats, mustaches and bald heads predominated.
It seemed ironic to Julie afterward—until irony vanished before the realization of hard, cold, terrible fact—that she should have chosen that precise moment for congratulation, but she did. Mouse was safely married, and there had been no hitch, no minor catastrophes. Rosetta hadn’t broken down or made a scene, and no one had been late. Frances had done wonders with the first floor. The general effect of the big old-fashioned room wasn’t half bad, she decided. The furniture was frightful, of course, and the carpets and pictures were something to dream about. You couldn’t eradicate the odor of dust and dry rot with all the vacuum cleaning in the world, but with the lamps lit, the fires burning and the flowers, it was almost festive. Moreover, it had dignity of a sort, the harsh grim dignity of tradition and stability.
Mouse had cried a little that morning when she came downstairs and saw what Frances and Julie had done. The hat rack, some of the cabinets and the worst of the vases, gigantic things you could hide a body in, were gone together with the antimacassars and scarves and the waxed flowers from all the family graves blooming falsely under glass. “If Sarah could see it,” Mouse had breathed.
“Well, she can’t,” Frances said crisply, “unless she can see through nine feet of earth and across twenty miles of space after a lapse of five months. You’re supposed to be resting. Go upstairs at once, your hair woman’s come.” She had added as Mouse moved off obediently, “Poor child! Out of providence by pneumonia at the age of seventy-one—if I’d been in Mouse’s shoes I wouldn’t have waited. I’d have put a pinch of arsenic in Sarah’s soup long, long ago. Either that or walked out, possibly both.”
It was all very well for Frances to talk, Julie thought, looking abstractedly at an immense bird in a Mrs. Burnett’s hat. Frances had money, security and a husband who idolized her. If Mouse had gone she would have had no place to walk to. Joe and she had loved each other for a long while, but until recently Joe hadn’t been in a position to support a wife, and Mouse couldn’t leave Sarah. All things considered, it was lucky she hadn’t. Under the provisions of Sarah’s will, Mouse was to inherit only if she was unmarried and living with Sarah as her companion when the old lady died. Sarah had had an almost fanatical fear of being left alone and helpless in the care of paid attendants. Her own father had been a paralytic for years before his death.
Julie frowned at an obese cupid gazing fondly at her out of a monstrous gilt frame. The clause had probably been inserted because of Bill Conroy, the man with whom Mouse had been terribly in love when she was seven or eight years younger. Sarah had quashed that affair very effectively. It had seemed cruel at the time, but it wasn’t really. Bill Conroy was a louse. It wasn’t Mouse he wanted; it was Sarah’s money. When Sarah told him he’d never touch a penny of it whether she was dead or alive he had done a fast vanishing act. Poor Mouse—but things had finally broken for her. She and Joe were man and wife, and it wasn’t too late. Mouse was only thirty-three, and she still could have all the children she wanted. If her skin had a few lines in it and her thick fair hair was beginning to fade, Joe didn’t care.
Julie looked through the doorway at him. He was in front of the buffet in the dining-room talking to a group of men from his old office. His uniform didn’t fit well and his sandy hair was disordered, but his plain, gaunt, likable face had lost its air of strain and he looked awfully happy.
The rector who had performed the ceremony had an eye for a pretty woman. He strolled toward Julie and she roused herself with an effort to chat.
“The bride is your cousin, Miss Bishop?” Dr. Fox was new at St. Martin’s.
Julie said yes and explained that she and Mouse were daughters of the late Sarah Jennings’s sisters and that Mouse’s mother and father had died when she was a child and she had lived with Sarah practically all her life.
“A wonderful old lady, wonderful.” The rector chose a sandwich with deliberation. “I had the privilege of meeting the late Miss Jennings once before her death,” he said, munching. “So tiny and so sweet, with that wonderful head of hair. I’ve heard from my parishioners of her devotion to her father, the Rear Admiral, of how she nursed him through his long years of illness, putting aside all thought of self. Marvelous character, marvelous.” He paused portentously and added, “They don’t build them like that nowadays.”
Julie thought, No, thank God. Sarah had been as hard as iron and as inflexible. She battened on grievances and never forgot a fancied slight or an imagined wrong. She had never forgiven her brothers and sisters for marrying. She might have forgiven Mouse but not her, Julie, for being born. And how she had gloried in her martyrdom to “your dear grandfather, the Admiral.”
Frances was talking to a group of elderly women near the black marble mantelpiece in the living-room. She looked lovely in spite of the fact that she had been up almost all night and had worked like a dog. But then she always did. The rector’s glance at Frances was appreciative. “Mrs. Ashe is also a niece of the late Miss Jennings?”
Julie said, “Oh, no. She was Sarah’s sister-in-law. She married Sarah’s young brother David, who was the baby of the family. After David’s death she married her present husband, Sam Ashe.” Julie didn’t add that while Sarah had hated all of them the rest were just ordinary hates, but that Frances was special. To become David’s wife had been her unforgivable sin, to remarry after his death was still more unforgivable. She was thirty years younger than Sarah—charming and attractive, and, above all, independent, on David’s money. It wasn’t to be borne. Frances had been in the house when Sarah died. She told Julie later, “No, I didn’t go into the room. I was afraid the sight of me might revive her.”
A champagne cork popped somewhere and the rector moved off. As soon as he was gone Sam Ashe lounged over to Julie, his hands in his pockets, his big body putting creases into the black cutaway that had grown too small. Sam was big all over. Thinning auburn hair receded from a high broad forehead above a Roman nose and a massive sweep of jaw. Jove among the lesser gods. He looked glum. Ten years earlier Sam had been one of America’s foremost illustrators. New men and new fashions had come up and he had lost most of his markets, but he could still paint like nobody’s business.
“Move over, lady.” He parked himself on the bench beside Julie. “I’ve been waiting till that guy went. Can’t stand clergymen,” he said gloomily. “They remind me of black beetles. I had an uncle was one. He used to come round on Sunday afternoons and tell us about his morning sermons.”
Julie laughed. “You’re mad because you were dragged into town.”
“Nonsense. How was I?”
At Frances’s insistence Sam had given Mouse away. He had done more than that; he had thrown a party for Joe Westing the night before.
“You were wonderful,” Julie assured him. “How did it go last night?”
Sam rubbed his long nose with the stem of the pipe he was cradling. “It went off all right. Trouble with Joe is he doesn’t drink enough. A couple of good benders would put him straight. Nothing like the conviction of sin for making a fellow human. I
