Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [130]
Brideshead had never been a favourite with her; she greeted the news of his engagement with: 'He's certainly taken long enough to make up his mind,' and, when the search through Debrett afforded no information about Mrs Muspratt's connections: 'She's caught him, I daresay.'
We found her, as always in the evening, at the fireside with her teapot, and the wool rug she was making.
'I knew you'd be up,' she said. 'Mr Wilcox sent to tell me you were coming.'
'I brought you some lace.'
'Well, dear, that is nice. Just like her poor Ladyship used to wear at mass. Though why they made it black I never did understand, seeing lace is white naturally. That is very welcome, I'm sure.'
'May I turn off the wireless, nanny?'
'Why, of course; I didn't notice it was on, in the pleasure of' seeing you. What have you done to your hair?'
'I know it's terrible. I must get all that put right now I'm back. Darling nanny.'
As we sat there talking, and I saw Cordelia's fond eyes on all of us, I began to realize that she, too, had a beauty of her own.
'I saw Sebastian last month.'
'What a time he's been gone! Was he quite well?'
'Not very. That's why I went. It's quite near you know from Spain to Tunis. He's with the monks there.'
'I hope they look- after him properly. I expect they find him a regular handful. He always sends to me at Christmas, but it's not the same as having him home. Why you must all always be going abroad I never did understand. Just like his Lordship. When there was that talk about going to war with Munich, I said to myself, "There's Cordelia and Sebastian and his Lordship all abroad; that'll be very awkward for them." '
'I wanted him to come home with me, but he wouldn't. He's got a beard now, you know, and he's very religious.'
'That I won't believe, not even if I see it. He was always a little heathen. Brideshead was one for church, not Sebastian. And a beard, only fancy; such a nice fair skin as he had; always looked clean though he'd not been near water all day, while Brideshead there was no doing anything with, scrub as you might.'
'It's frightening,' Julia once said, 'to think how completely you have forgotten Sebastian.'
'He was the forerunner.'
'That's what you said 'in the storm. I've thought since, perhaps I am only a forerunner, too.'
'Perhaps,' I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smoke—a thought to fade and vanish like, smoke without a trace—'perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that other have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in. our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.'
I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather it was Julia I had known in him, in those distant Arcadian days.
'That's cold comfort for a girl,' she said when I tried to explain. 'How do I know I shan't suddenly turn out to be somebody else? It's an easy way to chuck.'
I had not forgotten Sebastian; every stone of the house had a memory of him, and hearing him spoken of by Cordelia as someone she had seen a month ago, my lost friend filled my thoughts. When we left the nursery, I said, 'I want to hear all about Sebastian.'
'Tomorrow. It's a long story.'
And next day, walking through the windswept park, she told me:
'I heard he was dying, ' she said. 'A journalist