The Greater Trumps by Charles Williams — Read

Mr. Coningsby had been lying in bed for some time, but he was not asleep. He was restless; his mind was restless. It was all very well, this going to bed, this being put to bed in case he got a bad cold, but--but--he had a continual vision of Sybil before his eyes. Sybil, he had rather dimly gathered, wasn't in bed, and wasn't in the least proposing to go: and if she was up, why was he where he was? Of course, it showed a very nice spirit, no more than he would have expected of the old man, who didn't seem to know anything about Henry's indescribable fatuous insolence in hoping, in rather more than hoping, even expecting, or something like it, that he should be given a set of cards which were part of the only memory he himself possessed of an old and dear friend, a friendship the value of which a young pigeon-stealer like Henry couldn't possibly know; gipsies never made friends, or only of their own kind, vagrants and beggars, the kind of person Nancy had never met--though certainly the grandfather seemed different: probably the mother--the daughter--had run away, only the name was identical, so it must have been the father, but then the family would be the same-- however, Aaron Lee was a very different kind of creature, and had behaved very properly. Still, though in the first shock of getting back he had allowed himself to be looked after and waited on and almost cosseted--still, the fact remained that after an hour or so of solitude he didn't like the idea. He wasn't so old that he couldn't be out in a snowstorm and laugh at it. He did a kind of mocking laugh at the blizzard swirling about the curtained windows, to which the blizzard responded by making such a frantic attack on the house that Mr. Coningsby unintentionally abandoned his laughter and looked uneasily at the curtains. If the infernal thing broke the glass and burst in, a nice sight he'd look, dancing round the room and trying to get dressed in a hurry. He had a momentary glimpse of himself feeling for a stud on a snowy dressing-table and trying to fix a tie which continually, "torn but flying", streamed away upon the wind. Really, there was a lot to be said for getting up. Besides, Sybil was up, and Sybil wasn't a girl any longer, and, though he'd been out in the storm longer than she had, yet he was a man and he had been rather underlining his own active habits, in an only half-conscious comparison of himself with the rest. Aaron, Sybil--he supposed Nancy and Henry were up too--while he was tucked up with a hot-water bottle. A hot-water bottle! That was all that the young thought their parents wanted. "And when," thought Mr. Coningsby, led on by the metaphor, "when they get into hot water, with their jumpings and their jazzings, and their nigger-minstrels and their night-clubs, who do they go to to get them out? To the old fellow tucked up with the bottle." Nothing less likely than any appeal in a crisis by Nancy or Ralph to their father could well have been imagined, but that actual division was hidden from him in his view of the sentimental. They were all up--dining probably. No one so far had brought him any dinner: however, perhaps they weren't dining yet. "I'm a fair-minded man," Mr. Coningsby thought; "I dare say dinner's a bit late. So much the better. I shall get up. If my sister can be about, so can I."

The feeling under the last sentence was, in fact, not so simple as it seemed--and he knew it. There floated in his mind, though he avoided it, a horrible wonder whether in effect he had really saved Sybil quite as much as he thought. Lothair Coningsby was in many things fantastic, but he was not merely stupid. He never insisted on seeing facts wrongly, though he did a busy best to persuade the facts to arrange themselves according to his personal preference. But sometimes a fact refused-- Nancy's arrangement with Henry, Ralph's determined departure for Christmas--and then there was nothing to do but to condole with himself over it or to look at it and send it away. The afternoon's experience had been a fact of such a kind. He had meant to be saving Sybil, he had thought he was saving her, he had been very anxious about her, but now, in his warm comfort of repose, he couldn't help seeing that she had been very active about it all; her voice had been very fresh, and she had. she certainly had.been gently singing to herself while they waited for the door to open. He himself had not been singing, but then he didn't generally sing; he believed in opening his mouth at the proper times, and outside a shut door in a howling snowstorm wasn't one of them. She'd come out to meet him--yes, of course; but which of them--O, good heavens, which of them--had really been thankful for the other's presence? Perhaps it didn't matter; perhaps they'd both been thankful? Reciprocal help. Sybil rather believed in reciprocity, so that all was right. So did he, only, in the way the world went, he always seemed having to be more reciprocal than anybody else. But this afternoon?