The Greater Trumps Read online

  He pattered away, a small, old, rather bent, but self-possessed figure, and Mr. Coningsby shut his door. “Very different from his sister,” he thought. “Curious how brothers and sisters do differ.” His mind went to Sybil. “In a way,” he went on to himself, “Sybil’s rather irresponsible. She positively encouraged that dreadful old woman. There’s a streak of wildness in her; fortunately it’s never had a chance to get out. Perhaps if that other had had different surroundings … but if this is her brother’s house, why’s she wandering about the country? And, anyhow, that settles the question of giving Henry those cards. I shall tell Nancy so if she hints at it again. Fancy giving poor dear Duncannon’s parting gift—the things he left me on his very death-bed—to a fellow with a mad gipsy for an aunt! Isis,” he thought, in deep disgust, “the Divine Isis. Good God!”

  5

  THE IMAGE THAT DID NOT MOVE

  MUCH TO her own surprise when she found it out in the morning, Nancy slept extremely well; rather to his own disgust, so did her father. No one ever thought of asking Sybil—or, at least, no one ever listened to the answer; it was one of the things which wasn’t related to her. She never said anything about it, nor, as a consequence, did anybody else; it being a certain rule in this world that what is not made of vivid personal importance will cease to be of social interest. The shoemaker’s conversation therefore rightly returns to leather. Nancy woke and stretched and, as her senses returned, considered healthily, voluptuously, and beautifully the immediate prospect of a week of Henry, interspersed with as much of other people as would make him more rare if not more precious. It occurred to her suddenly that he might already be downstairs, and that she might as well in that case be downstairs herself. But as she jumped out of bed—with the swinging movement—she swung into a sudden change of consciousness. Here they were—at his grandfather’s, and here then all his obscure hints and promises were to be explained. He wanted something; he wanted something of her, and she was not at all clear that she wasn’t rather frightened, or anyhow a little nervous, when she tried to think of it. She took a deep breath. Henry had something to show her, and the earth had grown in her hands; however often she washed them she never quite seemed to get away from the feel of it. Being a semi-educated and semi-cultured girl, she dutifully thought of Macbeth—“the perfumes of Arabia,” “this little hand.” For the first time in her life, however, she now felt as if Shakespeare had been talking about something more real than she had supposed; as if the words echoed out of her own deep being, and again echoed back into it—“cannot cleanse this little hand.” She rubbed her hands together half-unconsciously, and then more consciously, until suddenly the remembrance of Lady Macbeth as she had once seen her on the stage came to her, and she hurriedly desisted. Lady Macbeth had turned—a tall, ghostly figure caught in a lonely perdition—at the bottom corner of the stage, where the Witches … what was it they had sung?

  The weird sisters, hand in hand,

  Posters of the sea and land.

  “Posters of the sea and land”—was that what she had been yesterday in the car—in her sleep, in her dreams? Or that mad old woman? The weird sisters—the old woman and Aunt Sybil—hand in hand, posters of the sea and land? Posters—going about the world—from point to point in a supernatural speed? Another line leaped at her—“Peace! the charm’s wound up.” Wound up—ready for the unwinding, and Henry ready too. Her expectation terrified her; this day which was coming but not yet quite come was infinite with portents. Her heart filled and labored with its love; she pressed a hand against it to ease the burning pain. “Oh Henry,” she murmured aloud, “Henry!” What did one do about it? What was the making of earth besides this? This, whatever it was—this joy, this agony—was not out of key with her dreams, with the weird women. It too posted by the sea and land; the universe fell away below the glory of its passion.

  She rose, unable any longer to sit still, drawing deep breaths of love, and walked to the window. The morning as it grew was clear and cold; unseen, miles away, lay the sea. Along the seashore, between earth and water, was the woman of the roads now hobbling? Or were the royal shapes of the Emperor and the Empress riding out in the dark heavens above the ocean? Her heart labored with power still, and as that power flooded her she felt the hands that rested on the window-frame receive it; she leaned her head on the window and seemed to expect mysteries. This was the greatest mystery; this was the sea and land about which she herself was now a fortunate and happy poster.

  It was too early; Henry wouldn’t be about yet. But she couldn’t go back to bed; love and morning and profound intention called to her. Her aunt was in the next room; she decided to go there, and went.

  Her aunt, providentially, was awake, contemplating nothing with a remote accuracy. Nancy looked at her.

  “I suppose you do sleep?” she said. “Do you know, I’ve never found you asleep?”

  “How fortunate!” Sybil said. “For after all I suppose you’ve generally wanted something, if only conversation?”

  Nancy, wrapping herself in her aunt’s dressing-gown as well as her own, sat down and looked again, this time more attentively.

  “Aunt Sybil,” she said, “are you by any chance being offensive?”

  “Could I and would I?” Sybil asked.

  “Your eyes are perpetually dancing,” Nancy said. “But is it true—do I only come to you when I want something?”

  “Why,” said Sybil, “if you’re asking seriously, my dear, then by and large the answer is yes.” She was about to add that she herself was quite content, but she saw something brooding in Nancy’s face, and ceased.

  “I don’t mean to be a pig,” Nancy said. Sybil accepted that as a soliloquy and said nothing. Nancy added, “I’m not all that selfish, am I?”

  “I don’t think you’re particularly selfish,” her aunt said, “only you don’t love anyone.”

  Nancy looked up, more bewildered than angry. “Don’t love?” she said. “I love you and father and Ralph very much indeed.”

  “And Henry?” Sybil asked.

  “Well—Henry,” Nancy said, blushing a little, “is different.”

  “Alas!” Sybil murmured, but the lament was touched with laughter.

  “What do you mean—‘alas’?” Nancy asked. “Aunt Sybil, do you want me to feel about everybody as I do about Henry?”

  “A little adjustment here and there,” Sybil said, “a retinting perhaps, but otherwise—why, yes! Don’t you think so?”

  “Even, I suppose,” Nancy said, “to Henry’s great-aunt or whatever she was?” But the words died from a soft sarcasm to a softer doubt; the very framing of the question, as so often happens, was itself an answer. “Her body thought”; interrogation purged emotion, and the purified emotion replied to the interrogation. To love.…

  “But I can’t,” she exclaimed, “turn all this”—she laid her hand on her heart—“towards everybody. It can’t be done; it only lives for—him.”

  “Nor even that,” Sybil said. “It lives for and in itself. You can only give it back to itself.”

  Nancy brooded. After a while, “I still don’t see how I can love Joanna with it,” she said.

  “If you give it back to itself,” Sybil said, “wholly and utterly, it will do all that for you. You’ve no idea what a lot it can do. I think you might find it worth trying.”

  “Do you?” Nancy said soberly; then she sighed and said with a change of tone, “Of course I simply adore this kind of talk before breakfast. You ought to have been a missionary, Aunt Sybil, and held early services for cannibals on a South Sea Island.”

  “The breakfast,” Sybil said gravely, “would have a jolly time listening to the bell before the service—if I had a bell.”

  “Oh, you’d have a bell,” Nancy said, “and a collection of cowrie-shells or bananas, and open-air services on the beach in the evening. And Henry and I would lean over the side of our honeymoon liner and hear your voice coming to us over the sea in the evening and have—what
is it they have at those times?—heimweh, and be all googly. And father would say, ‘Really, Sybil!’ without being googly. Well, thank you for your kind interest in a Daughter of the Poor.” She kissed her aunt. “I do, you know,” she said, and was gone.

  The day passed till dinner without anything particularly striking having taken place. They looked over the house; they lunched; they walked. The Times arrived, sent up from the village, about mid-day, and Mr. Coningsby settled down to it. Henry and Nancy appeared and disappeared. Sybil walked and rested and talked and didn’t talk, and contemplated the universe in a serene delight. But after dinner and coffee there came a pause in the conversation, and Aaron Lee spoke.

  “My grandson thinks,” he said to his visitors, “that you’d be interested to see a curiosity which we have here.”

  “I’m sure anything——” answered Mr. Coningsby, who was feeling rather inclined to be agreeable.

  Nancy said to Henry in a low voice, “Is it whatever you meant?” and he nodded.

  The old man rose. “If I may trouble you, then, to come with me,” he said, leading the way from the room, and Mr. Coningsby sauntered after his sister without the smallest idea that the attack on his possession of the Tarot cards was about to begin. They came into Aaron’s room; they crossed it and stood about the inner locked door. Aaron inserted the key; then, before turning it, he looked round and said, “Henry thinks that your ownership of a particular pack of our gipsy cards may make you peculiarly interested in … in what you’ll see. The pack’s rather rare, I believe, and this”—he unlocked the door—“is, I may say, very much rarer.”

  Henry, from the back, watched him a little anxiously. Aaron had not been at all eager to disclose the secret dancing images to these strangers; it was only the absolute necessity of showing Mr. Coningsby an overpoweringly good reason for giving away the cards that had at last convinced him. A day’s actual acquaintance with Mr. Coningsby had done more towards conviction than all Henry’s arguments—that, and the knowledge that the Tarot cards were at last in the house, so close to the images to which, for mortal minds, they were the necessary key. Yet, under the surface of a polite and cultured host which he had presented, there stirred a longing and a hostility; he hated this means, yet it was the only means to what he desired. In the conflict his hand trembled and fumbled with the door-handle, and Henry in his own agitation loosed Nancy’s arm. She felt his trouble and misunderstood it. “Darling,” she murmured, “you don’t mind us seeing, do you? If you do, let’s go away.”

  “You must see,” he answered, low and rapidly, “you especially. And the others too—it’s why they’re here.”

  She took his “here” to mean at that door, and his agitation to be the promise of the mystery he had spoken of, and delighted to share it with him. “You’ll tell me everything,” she whispered. “I’ll do whatever you want.” Her eyes glowed at him as he looked at her. He met them, but his preoccupation was heavy upon him. “Your father,” he whispered back, “get your father to give me the cards.”

  The door was open. Aaron said, “You’ll excuse me if I go first; there’s a curtain.” He stepped forward, passed between the hangings, stepped aside and raised them, so that, one by one, the others also came into the light of the inner chamber—Mr. Coningsby first, then Sybil, then the two young ones. Aaron let the curtain fall and joined them where they stood, he and Henry closing in on either side.

  The light had been tinged with red when they entered; but it changed, so swiftly that only Aaron noticed it, to a lovely green, and then—more slowly—to an exquisite golden beauty. Aaron’s eyes went to Henry’s, but the young man was looking at the moving images; then they passed to the visitors—to Nancy, who also was raptly gazing at the spectacle; to Mr. Coningsby, who was surveying it with a benevolent generosity, as if he might have shown his host something similar in his own house, but hadn’t thought it worthwhile; to Sybil, who was half-smiling in pure pleasure at the sight.

  “These,” Aaron said, “are a very ancient secret among the folk from whom Henry and I come and they have never been shown to anyone outside our own people till now. But since we are to be so closely joined”—he smiled paternally at Nancy—“the reason against revealing them hardly exists.”

  He had to pause for a moment, either because of his inner excitement or because (as, for a moment, he half suspected) some sense stronger than usual of the unresting marvel before them attacked him and almost beat him down. He mastered himself, but his age dragged at him, and his voice trembled as he went carefully on, limiting himself to what Henry and he had agreed should be said.

  “You see those little figures? By some trick of the making they seem to hold—what we call—the secret of perpetual motion. You see—how they are dancing—they do it continually. They are—we believe—in some way magnetized—by the movements of the earth—and they—they vibrate to it.”

  He could say no more. He signed to Henry to go on, but Mr. Coningsby unintentionally interrupted.

  “Very curious,” he said, “very interesting indeed.” He looked all round the room. “I suppose the light comes from behind the curtains somehow?”

  “The light comes from the figures,” Henry said.

  “Does it indeed?” Mr. Coningsby said, as if he was perfectly ready to believe anything reasonable, and even to refrain from blaming his host for offering him something perfectly unreasonable. “From the figures? Well, well.” He settled his eyeglasses and leaned forward. “Are they moving in any order?” he asked, “or do they just”—he waggled his hand—“jump?”

  “They certainly move in order,” Henry answered, “all but one, the one in the center. You may recognize them; the figures are those which are painted on the Tarot cards you showed us.”

  “Oh, really?” Mr. Coningsby said, a small suspicion rising in him. “Just the same kind, are they? Well, well. But the cards aren’t moving the whole time. At least,” he added, half in real amusement, half in superior sarcasm, “I hadn’t noticed it.”

  “No,” Henry agreed. “But, if you’ll excuse me, sir, the point is rather that the cards explain—or anyhow may be supposed to explain—the movements of these figures. We think probably that that’s what all fortune-telling by cards comes from, but the origin’s been forgotten, which is why it’s the decadent and futile thing it is.”

  Nothing occurred to Mr. Coningsby in answer to this; he didn’t understand it but he didn’t want to be bothered with an explanation. He strolled forward till he stood by the table. “May one pick them up?” he asked. “It’s difficult to examine the workmanship properly while they’re all bustling round.”

  “I don’t think I should touch them, sir,” Henry said, checking his grandfather’s movement with a fierce glance. “The balance that keeps them dancing must be very delicate.”

  “Oh, just as you like,” Mr. Coningsby said. “Why doesn’t the one in the middle dance?”

  “We imagine that its weight and position must make it a kind of counterpoise,” Henry answered. “Just as the card of the Fool—which you’ll see is the same figure—is numbered nought.”

  “Has he a tiger by him for any particular reason?” Mr. Coningsby inquired. “Fools and tigers seem a funny conjunction.”

  “Nobody knows about the Fool,” Aaron burst in. “Unless the cards explain it.”

  Mr. Coningsby was about to speak again when Sybil forestalled him.

  “I can’t see this central figure,” she said. “Where is it exactly, Mr. Lee?”

  Aaron, Henry, and her brother all pointed to it, and all with very different accents said, “There.” Sybil stepped slightly forward, then to one side; she moved her head to different angles, and then said apologetically, “You’ll all think me frightfully silly, but I can’t see any figure in the middle.”

  “Really, Sybil!” her brother said. “There!”

  “But, my dear, it isn’t there,” she said. “At least, so far as I can possibly see. I’m sorry to be so stupid, Mr. Lee, beca
use it’s all quite the loveliest thing I ever saw in the whole of my life. It’s perfectly wonderful and beautiful. And I just want, if I can, to see where you say this particular figure is.”

  Henry leaned forward suddenly. Nancy put her left hand up to where his lay on her shoulder. “Darling,” she said, “please! You’re hurting me.” He took no notice; he did not apparently hear her. He was looking with intense eagerness from Sybil to the golden images and back. “Miss Coningsby,” he said, reverting unconsciously to his earlier habit of address, “can you see the Fool and his tiger at all?”

  She surveyed the table carefully. “Yes,” she said at last, “there—no, there—no—it’s moving so quickly I can hardly see it—there—ah, it’s gone again. Surely that’s it, dancing with the rest; it seems as if it were always arranging itself in some place which was empty for it.”

  Nancy took hold of Henry’s wrist and pulled it; tears of pain were in her eyes, but she smiled at him. “Darling, must you squeeze my shoulder quite so hard?” she said.

  Blankly he looked at her; automatically he let go, and though in a moment she put her own hand into the crook of his arm he did not seem to notice it. His whole attention was given to Sybil. “You can see it moving?” he uttered.

  On the other side, Aaron was trembling and putting his fingers to his mouth as if to control it and them. Sybil, gazing at the table, did not see him. “But it seems so,” she said. “Or am I just distracted?”

  Henry made a great effort. He turned to Nancy. “Can you see it?” he asked.

  “It looks to me to be in the center,” she said, “and it doesn’t seem to be moving—not exactly moving.”

  “What do you mean—not exactly moving?” Henry asked, almost harshly.

  “It isn’t moving at all,” said Mr. Coningsby. “It’s capitally made, though; the tiger’s quite lifelike. So’s the Fool,” he added handsomely.

  “I suppose I meant not moving,” Nancy said. “In a way I feel as if I expected it to. But it isn’t.”