From out the Vasty Deep | Page 5

his wife was seriously ill. The letter had implied, too, that he ought to have been told, before the marriage had taken place, that his wife's family had been one riddled with consumption. Blanche had written back at once--by that time she was a good deal nearer home than Portugal, though still abroad--asking if she could "do anything?" And he had answered that no, there was nothing to be done. "Poor Milly" had a horror of sanatoriums, so he was going to take her to some quiet place on the south coast. He had ended his note with the words: "I do not think it can last long now, and I rather hope it won't. It is very painful for her, as well as for me." And it had not lasted very long. Seven weeks later Miss Farrow had read in the first column of the Times the announcement: "Millicent, only daughter of the late George Fauncey, of Wyndfell Hall, Suffolk, and the beloved wife of Lionel Varick."
She had been surprised at the addition of the word "beloved." Somehow it was not like the man she thought she knew so well to put that word in.
That was just over a year ago. But when she had met Varick again she had seen with real relief that he was quite unchanged--those brief months of wedded life had not apparently altered him at all. There was, however, one great difference--he was quite at ease about money. That was all--but that was a great deal! Blanche Farrow and Lionel Varick had at any rate one thing in common--they both felt a horror of poverty, and all that poverty implies.
Gradually Miss Farrow had discovered a few particulars about her friend's dead wife. Millicent Fauncey had been the only child of a rather eccentric Suffolk squire, a man of great taste, known in the art world of London as a collector of fine Jacobean furniture, long before Jacobean furniture had become the rage. After her father's death his daughter, having let Wyndfell Hall, had wandered about the world with a companion till she had drifted across her future husband's path at an hotel in Florence.
"What attracted me," Lionel Varick had explained rather awkwardly on the only occasion when he had really talked of his late wife to Blanche Farrow, "was her helplessness, and, yes, a kind of simplicity."
Blanche had looked at him a little sharply. She had never known Lionel attracted by weakness or simplicity before. All women seemed attracted by him--but he was by no means attracted by all women.
"Poor Milly didn't care for Wyndfell Hall," he had gone on, "for she spent a very lonely, dull girlhood there. But it's a delightful place, and I hope to live there as soon as I can get the people out to whom it is now let. 'Twon't be an easy job, for they're devoted to it."
Of course he had got them out very soon, for, as Blanche Farrow now reminded herself, Lionel Varick had an extraordinary power of getting his own way, in little and big things alike.
It was uncommonly nice of Lionel to have asked her to be informal hostess of his first house party! Unluckily it was an oddly composed party, not so happily chosen as it might have been, and she wondered uneasily whether it would be a success. She had never met three of the people who were coming to-night--a Mr. and Miss Burnaby, an old-fashioned and, she gathered, well-to-do brother and sister, and their niece, Helen Brabazon. Miss Brabazon had been an intimate friend, Miss Farrow understood the only really intimate friend, of Lionel Varick's late wife. He had spoken of this girl, Helen Brabazon, with great regard and liking--with rather more regard and liking than he generally spoke of any woman.
"She was most awfully kind to me during that dreadful time at Redsands," he had said only yesterday. And Blanche had understood the "dreadful time" referred to the last weeks of his wife's life. "I've been to the Burnabys' house a few times, and I've dined there twice--an infamously bad cook, but very good wine--you know the sort of thing?"
Remembering that remark, Blanche now asked herself why Lionel had included these tiresome, old-fashioned people in his party. Then she told herself that it was doubtless because the niece, who lived with them, couldn't leave them to a solitary Christmas.
Another guest who was not likely to add much in the way of entertainment to the party was an enormously rich man called James Tapster. Tapster was a cynical, rather unpleasant person, yet on one occasion he had helped Varick out of a disagreeable scrape.
If the host had had his way there would also have been in the party a certain Dr. Panton. But at the last moment he had had