Henry and Cato Read Online Free Page A

Rhoda, thank you, dear—’
    Bird-headed Rhoda, the maid, had come in soft-footed and without knocking, as she had used to do when she carried in the oil lamps, in the days before electricity came to the Hall. She moved across the room in her ambiguous uniform and reached high up with her gloved hands to check the windows, her nightly task, to see if they were securely fastened. Company or no company, she came always at the same hour and never knocked.
    â€˜Rhoda, I think we’ll put Mr Henry in the cherry blossom room.’
    Rhoda replied.
    â€˜He isn’t coming for a week, you know.’
    Rhoda replied.
    â€˜Well, make it up in the cherry blossom room, and make sure the radiator’s working. Good night, Rhoda.’
    The door closed.
    â€˜What did she say?’ said Lucius.
    Rhoda, who had an impediment in her speech, was comprehensible only to Gerda.
    â€˜She says she’s already made up Henry’s bed in his old room.’
    Lucius had taken the opportunity to rise. ‘I think I’ll be off to bed now, darling, I’m flaked.’
    â€˜I wonder if I ought to—’
    â€˜Oh do stop wondering. It doesn’t matter, the details don’t matter. Henry will only want one thing when he arrives here.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Your love.’
    There was a silence. Gerda, on Rhoda’s entrance, had stopped pacing and now stood at the chimney piece, one hand touching the warm burnished wood of the superstructure. A sudden flicker revealed her face and Lucius saw tears.
    â€˜Oh darling—’
    â€˜How can you be so cruel.’
    â€˜I don’t understand.’
    â€˜Go to bed.’
    â€˜Gerda, don’t be angry with me, you know I won’t sleep if you’ve been angry with me. I never sleep if—’
    â€˜I’m not angry. Just go away. It’s late.’
    â€˜Forgive me, darling Gerda, don’t stay up and—I know what you—do go to bed now, dear—’
    â€˜Yes, yes. Good night.’
    â€˜Don’t cry.’
    â€˜Good night.’
    Lucius went upstairs slowly, as he had used to do holding his candle in the old days, in Burke’s time, when he had been a guest at the Hall. Well, was he not still a guest at the Hall? A little breathless after the climb he went on over creaking boards to his bedroom. This large room, which was also his study, occupied a corner on the second floor, on the drawing-room side of the house, with a view one way towards the lake, and the other towards the grove of beeches which were always called ‘the big trees’. The room was rather bare as Lucius, who had lived in tiny rooms most of his life, liked to emphasize its barn-like size. He liked to feel himself loose, lost somehow in the room, wandering. The cushions on the big divan bed were a recent concession to Gerda’s desire to prettify. Sometimes Rhoda put flowers in the room. Tonight upon the carved oak chest of drawers was a brown jar full of bluebells. The window, which he now closed, had let in the cold earth-smelling April air. The radiator was not working, only with so much else amiss Lucius had not liked to mention it. His bed had been neatly undone and turned down by Rhoda, as it had been every night for years, but there was no hot water bottle. Hot water bottles were not issued after the end of March.
    Lucius sat down on the bed. He would have liked some Bach now, only it was too late. Why had that particular remark made Gerda cry? He would never understand her. His awful mistake, never to have forced her into bed. Did it matter now? He knew that her unspeakable terrible grief at Sandy’s death was still there, hidden from him now as at first it could not be. He had thought at first that she would die of grief, die of shock, die screaming in a frenzy of bereavement such as he had never witnessed or imagined. He shuddered at the memory. But with the fearsome strength that was in her she had collected