The very next day Ranny Dallas went away to shoot somewhere in the North.
Bettina did not hide from me how unhappy she was.
"Perhaps he will write," I said.
"He isn't the sort that writes—not even when he's friends with a person." Then, with a rather miserable laugh, Betty added: "Hesayshe can't spell."
So I gathered that she had asked him to try.
And I gathered, too, that Hermione made light of the disagreement at the ball. She predicted that he'd be wanting to come back in a week or two, and Betty would find he had forgotten about the Battle of the Boyne.
We all came tacitly to agree that was precisely what would happen—all, that is, except my mother, who knew nothing about the matter.
It was a somewhat subdued Bettina who began that year; but I don't think it was in the Bettina of those days to be unhappy long.
(Oh, Bettina! how is it now?)
I don't know how anyone so loved and cherished could have gone on being actively unhappy. Besides, though the weeks went by and still Ranny did not reappear, there was a family reason to account for that. His father was very ill. Ranny's place was at home.
Hermione often gave us news of him that came through friends they had in common. And she spoke as though any week-end that found his father better, Ranny might motor down.
So we waited.
Bettina was a great deal with the Helmstone girls and their friends.
As for me, I was a great deal with my books in the copse. February, that year, was more like April, and all the violets and primroses rejoiced prematurely.
I, too.
I was extraordinarily happy. For I was sure I was finding a way out of all our difficulties. A glorious way. A way Eric would applaud and love me for finding—all alone like this.
I had a recurring struggle with myself not to write and tell him. When I had been "good"and wanted to give myself a treat, I allowed myself to go over in imagination that coming scene in which he should be told the Great Secret.
My mother sometimes spoke a little anxiously about Bettina's being so much with Hermione. She surprised me one day by asking me outright if I thought the increasing intimacy was likely to do Bettina harm.
My feeling about it was too vague to produce. I could only suggest that if she was afraid of anything of the kind, why should she not speak to Betty?
"The child has so few pleasures," was the answer, with that brooding look of tenderness which the thought of Betty often brought into my mother's face. "Does she tell you what they talk about?"
"Oh, the usual things!" I answered discreetly. "Clothes, and people and dogs."
"Oh, as for dogs!—--" My mother dismissed the Chows. Bettina, in an unguarded moment, had admitted that she thought she could care for one dog. But she couldn't possibly care for eighteen. "What people do they discuss?"
"Oh, pretty much everybody, I should say."
She looked at me. "But some more than others. The Boynes, for instance."
When I said I didn't think so, my mother seemed a little chilled, as though she might be feeling "out of things."
Her face troubled me. "I am afraid," I said, "that you are thinking Betty and I have been leaving you a good deal alone of late."
"Oh," she answered hastily, "I was not thinking about myself."
At that, of course, conscience pricked the more. "Anyhow,Ihave been away too much," I confessed. "And there's no excuse for me. For Betty is the one they chiefly want."
She saw I was making resolutions. "I like you two to be together," she said. "Bettina needs you more than I. I should feel much less easy in my mind about Bettina if you weren't there to watch over her, and" (she added significantly) "to tell me anything I ought to know."
As I look back, I pray that my mother did not feel we were growing away from her. But I cannot be sure some fine intuition did not visit her of the difficulty of confidence on our part—ofhow our very devotion and craving for her good opinion made Betty, for instance, shy of telling her things that a younger sister could easily tell to one near her own age. I knew my mother's view about the relations that should exist between mothers and daughters. I made up my mind to speak to Betty about it. So I asked her one night if she didn't think she ought to "let her know about Ranny."
"Heavens, no! She is the last person I could tell!"
I felt for my mother the wound of that. And why, I asked Bettina, did she feel so?
Almost sulkily she said that if I wanted our mother told things, I could tell her about myself.
"What on earth do you mean?" I said. "There's nothing to hear about me."
"Oh, very well," Betty said; "then there's nothing to tell."
And the sad part of it was that, after that, Betty began to be reserved with me too.
I was so afraid of the effect of our secretiveness on my mother that I learned how to interest her in people neither Betty nor I were the least interested in. I saved up stories and "characteristics"to tell. The very success of these small efforts gave me secretly a sense of the emptiness of her life. To have nothing to think about but a couple of girls!—girls who were thinking all the while about things their mother didn't know. I could have cried out at the dreadfulness of such a fate. I felt it uneasily as a menace. Could she, when she was in her teens, have felt the least as I did? Oh, impossible! And yet....
"Tell me about when you were young," I said; but with the new insistence, now, of one bent on grasping the unexplained things in another's life, the better to understand the unexplained things in her own.
I could not make much of the few bony facts. Her father had had a small Government post, and she had told us before that when she was three she lost her mother. The only new fact to emerge was that she had not been happy at home. She tried to make out the reason was that she loved fields and gardens, and her father's pursuits kept them in the town. But try as I might I couldn't see the life she led there. I struggled against the sense of my impotence to realise her under any conditions but those at Duncombe. Feeling myselfincredibly bold, I reminded her of old sayings about confidence between mothers and daughters. "I am always telling you things about us. You know exactly," I said (unconscious at the moment of the lie)—"you know all that happens to us, and what life looks like at every turn. We know so little about you except where the house was you lived in, and that it was dingy and big."
I could not have approached her in any way more telling than to make confidence on her part seem a corollary to confidence on ours. She cast about with an indulgent air for something new. And then I heard for the first time of the "sort of cousin" who had come to keep house for my grandfather, and to bring up the little girl of four. I wondered the more at so important a figure having been left out of all previous pictures, when I heard that my grandfather had cared more for this "sort of cousin" than he had cared for his only child. The cousin must have been a horrible woman, though my mother told me so little about her, I cannot think how I knew. The most definite thing that was said was: "She brought out all that was least good in your grandfather."And when he ceased to care for the cousin in one way, she made him care for her in another. "She ministered to all his whims and perversities." My mother dismissed the first sixteen years of her life with: "I had seen a great deal of evil before I was grown; mercifully, I met your father when I was still very young."
He was the one man, I gathered, whom she had ever found worthy of all trust, all love; and she had been so glad to leave home—to leave England!
But out there in India she must have seen plenty of nice army people.
Oh, plenty of army people.
She seemed not to want to dwell much even on the happy time. She had her two children in three years. The babies kept her at home, and she had loved being at home with the babies—and above all with my father in his spare hours. Then, as we knew, he had been killed out tiger-hunting. And she broke off, "Now go on about the Boynes."
I asked her, mischievously, why she took such an interest in the Boynes, as though I had not tried to bring that very thing about. Her idealof "the confidence that should exist" broke down even here; the navy, she said evasively, was "the finest of the services."
"Not finer than the army," I protested.
"Yes, finer than the army. Peace was the real 'enemy' to soldiers; but peace did not demoralise sailors, for there was always the sea for them to conquer. Was Hermione expecting to see the Boynes soon again?"
I smiled inwardly. She might as well have confessed that she thought the older Boyne might "do" for me, and the younger Boyne for Betty.
But what had become of the ideal of confidence?
Confidence, to be complete, must needs be mutual. If Betty and I had not been able to tear out of our hearts and hold up for inspection those shy hopes of ours, neither had our mother been able to show us the true face of memory. I did not know then how hard this was to do, or that the faithfullest intention must fall short; that genius itself cannot pass on to others all the poignancy of past Hope, or—mercifully—more than a pale reflection of past Despair.
There are no Dark Ages more impenetrable than those that lie immediately behind. Theymay put on an air of the explained and the familiar; they are a mystery for ever and for ever sealed.
The young are secretly perplexed when the great words are used about the immediate past. They hear of Love and Joy, and when they see the issue, stand appalled.
The idea that my mother could have felt, even about my own father, as I felt about—— No! I looked at her lying on the sofa with her eyes raised, and that air, anxious, intent, of the eavesdropper overhearing ill. So, then, one could have had all that love, and live to wear a look like this.
I held fast to such reassurance as I could recall. I remembered how, when we were younger, the mere tone of voice in which she said "your father" had seemed to bring back the warmth of that old Happiness, the lamp of that old Safety which had lit the happy time. Out of those far-off days, so momentous for Bettina and me—days which our mother must recall so vividly, and which I saw, now, I should never have the key to—there nevertheless had come to me, as come to other children, an echo of the music that had fallen silent; dim apprehensions of the beauty of life to those twolovers in the gorgeous East; and out of starlit Indian nights, "hot and scented," came vague wafts of bygone sweetness that moved me to the verge of tears. For it was all ended.
The strange thing was that, if she had never known that happiness, I should have felt less sorry for my mother now; less uneasy, in a way, at the Janus-face which life could hide until some unexpected hour.
Perhaps to a good many young people comes this haunting sense of the sadness of life to older people.
Especially when I thought of Eric I felt sharp pity for the race of older women—that grey majority for whom the Great Radiance had faded little by little; or those like my mother, out of whose hand the torch had been struck sharply and the darkness swallowed.
She very seldom touched the piano at this time; but often, when I was with her, that old feeling, which belonged to the evenings when she sang to herself, came back to me; a feeling of overwhelming sadness—and a fear.
Not even my secret could console me at such moments.
Eric will never come back, I said to myself; or he will come back with a wife. And, with that start I had learned from my mother—where was Betty?
She was late.
She was very late.
Unaccountably, alarmingly late.
She had come running in a little after six o'clock to ask if we mightn't, both of us, go and dine with Hermione. I said I didn't see why Bettina shouldn't go, but we could not ask till my mother was awake; she had been having broken nights, and had just fallen asleep. So Bettina waited—nearly half an hour; still my mother slept. Then Bettina went away softly and dressed, "so as to be ready, in case."
She came back in her white frock, and still the sleeper had not waked nor stirred.
We went out in the hall and held a whispered conference. "She won't mind a bit," Bettina was sure. "It isn't as if it would do another time"—for the Helmstones were off again to-morrow. To clinch the argument, Betty told me that Hermione was expecting a letter, by the last post, from a friend of Ranny's; the one chance of hearing anything for Heaven knew how long.
So I let Bettina go.
My mother never woke till nearly nine, and of course the first thing she asked was, "Where is Betty?"
I said the maid had taken her, and Lady Helmstone had promised to send her home.
My mother was extremely ill-pleased that Bettina had gone. I had hoped that after that profound sleep she would wake up feeling better, as I have noticed the books nearly always say is what will happen. But I have noticed, since, that people who have been sleeping heavily at some unseasonable hour will often waken not refreshed and calmed, but out of sorts, and easily fretted by quite small things. They seem to require time before they can collect themselves and see the waking world in true proportion.
"We thought you wouldn't mind," I said.
And whyshouldwe? Why, above all, should I, who was so much older...?
"To go anywhere else ... I should have been against it," I said, "but to the Helmstones—where you let her go so constantly."
Saying that was a mistake.
Did not Betty know, above all, did not I know, the feeling of all the proper sort of mothers aboutyoung girls being away from home at night? Day-visiting—a totally different matter.
It was "the last evening for weeks," I reminded her. The Helmstones were going back to town....
"I am not sorry," said my mother.
To my surprise the circumstance that seemed to annoy her most was that I had not gone with Bettina. She spoke to me in such a way I felt the tears come into my eyes. "I stayed on your account," I said.
"I have told you before"—and she told me again.
The supper tray came up, and went down scarcely touched. I asked if I should read to her.
No. There had been reading enough for that day.
So I mended the fire and brought some sewing.
She lay with the candle alight on the night table, waiting, listening.
"Who is to be there?"
"Oh, just the family, I suppose."
"Did you ask?"
"No—but Betty would have said, if...."
"——never even asked!"
We sat in silence.
"What time is it?"
"A quarter to ten."
"It is not like Bettina," she said presently. Bettina had never in her life done such a thing before.
I agreed she never had. If Bettina transgressed (and I admit that this was seldom), she never did so outright. And she was not sly. She did not so much evade as avoid an inconvenient rule.
My mother remembered, no doubt, that any sin of deliberate disobedience was far more likely to be mine. "I suppose the child, not able to ask my permission, came to you."
Yes, she had consulted me.
"And you took it upon yourself——"
I sat there, in disgrace.
Presently: "Perhaps the Boynes have motored down. Or one of them."
I said I had no reason to think so. All the same, I couldn't help welcoming the suggestion. For the idea that the Boynes, "or one of them," might be there, seemed, oddly enough, to excuse Bettina in my mother's eyes. And she was movedto make me understand why I had been reproached. We had to be far more careful than most girls. I heard about the heavy responsibility of bringing up "girls without a father."
I wondered in what way our father's being here would have altered the events of this particular evening. And since he had been quoted to justify anxiety, I made bold to go to him for cheer. At times of stress before, I had invoked my father. Not often, and all-cautiously. And never yet in vain. That night I wondered aloud what were the kind of things our father would have done.
"His mere being here would make all the difference."
His mere name certainly did much. Once again I had cause to bless him for taking the chill out of the domestic atmosphere.
She talked more about him and, by implication, more about herself that night than ever before or after. She told me of the mistakes he had saved her from. The things he had warned her against. Though he was brave as a lion, she would have me believe that he was afraid of trusting people. He had said to her after a certain occurrence——
"What occurrence?" I interrupted.
"No need to go into that," she said hurriedly. The point lay in his comment: "The safe course is not to trust anyone."
"That is very uncomfortable," I said.
It was better, she answered, to be less comfortable and safe, than to be more comfortable and——
"And what?"
She had stopped suddenly, and felt for her watch on the night table. "Ten minutes past. They will surely see that she starts for home by ten o'clock."
We sat for five minutes without speaking. I thinking of my father.
Then we heard the maids making the nightly round, shutting and locking up the house.
"Look out of the window," my mother said.
I could see nothing. The night was dark and still.
"She can't be long now," my mother said. "But go and tell them they may bolt the front door. We are sure to hear her coming up the walk."
She called me back. "Tell them not to forget to put the chain on the door."
Oh, the times we had been told that!
Downstairs I found the house shut up and barred as for a siege. The maids had done their work and vanished. I was the only creature stirring. Upstairs the same. My mother seemed not to hear me come back into the room. She was lying with the candle-light on her face, and on her face the old listening fear. What made her look like that?
If there had been anything, if there had been even that old mournful sound of the wind, I could have minded less. But the night was very quiet. The house was hushed as death. And still she listened.
Now and then she would lift her eyelids suddenly, and the intense white of the eyeballs shone, while she strained to catch some sound beyond my narrower range.
I sat there by the fire a long, long time. And she never spoke—until I, unable to bear the stillness any longer, fell back for that last time on the familiar Magic—my father, and the old, beautiful days. She stirred. She folded and unfolded her hands, and then took up the theme. But in a different key.
"The more I came to understand other women's lives," she said, "the more I saw that my happiness was like the safety of a person walking a narrow plank across a chasm." Then after a moment, she added, "A question of nice equilibrium."
"I don't know how you ever bore the fall," I said.
"The fall?"
"Yes—when father was killed—and all the happiness fell down."
Then she said something wholly incomprehensible at the time, but which I understand better now. "Perhaps," she said, "I would have borne what you call 'the fall' less well if I hadn't known ... there are worse than tigers in the world's jungle."
I felt I was on the track of some truer understanding, and a secret excitement took hold of me. "How was it you came to know that?" I asked.
"It is a thing," she said, "that even happy women learn." Then, hurriedly, she went on: "And it ended—my happiness—before any stain or tarnish dimmed it. All bright and shining one moment, the next all vanished."
I watched the face I knew so well. Covertly,I watched it. Saw the delicate lineaments a little pinched with anxiety. The eyes veiled one moment, the next lifting wide as at a sudden call.
"What was that?" she said.
I heard nothing.
Oftenest that quick lift of heavy eyelids, and the flash of bright fixity, would come without any following of speech. And the eloquence of that silence, tense, glittering, wrought more upon my nerves than any words. All my body strung to attention, I listened with my soul.
No sound.
No sound at all. Then, inwardly, I rebelled against the tyranny and waste of this emotion.
Why was she like this?
"Have they put on the chain?" she asked.
"Yes."
"And bolted the door?"
"Yes."
"How do you know they have bolted it?"
"I heard them."
"Heardthem?"
"Heard the bolt."
"One may easily think a stiff bolt has gone home, and all the while——"
"But I am sure."
My easy certainty seemed to anger her. "I thought so, too, once." She said it with a vehemence that startled me.
After a moment: "Was that here?" I asked.
"No, no, no"—she shook it off.
I went and knelt down by the bed. "Tell me about it, mother."
"No, no. It is not the kind of thing you need ever know."
"How can you be sure?Youweren't expecting anything to happen." I felt my way by the shrinking in her face. "Yet someone came to the unbolted door——?"
"What makes you think that!" she exclaimed, and I was hot and cold under her look.
"It—it only came into my head"; and then, with fresh courage, or renewed curiosity, "But I am right!" I said, with sudden firmness. "Isn't it so? You were horribly frightened,weren'tyou?" I touched her hand, expecting she would draw it away from me, but the fingers had locked on the silk frill of the quilt. They were cold; they made me think of death.
"Yes," she said, very low, "I was horriblyfrightened." I felt the shuddering that ran along her wrist, and the chill of that old fear of hers crept into my blood, too. She looked through me, as though I were vapour, as though the bodyless Dread her eyes were fixed on once again for that instant—as thoughthatwere the most real presence in the room.
"Tell me," I whispered, "tell me what it was."
"——impossible to talk about such things." She drew away her hand. "All you need to know is ... the need of taking care. Of never running risks. What time is it?"
"Five minutes past eleven."
"Did Lady Helmstone say she and Hermione would walk back with Bettina?"
"No, she didn't say that."
"What did she say?"
"Just that she would send Betty home."
After some time she said quite suddenly: "That might mean alone in the motor."
I was going to say "Why not?" But as I looked up from my work at the face under the candle light, a most foolish and indefinable fear flashed across my mind—a feeling too ridiculous to own—sudden, indefinable dread of that inoffensiveman, the Helmstones' head chauffeur. I had no sooner cast out the childish thought than I remembered the two under men. One only a sort of motor-house "odd man." To that hangdog creature might fall the task of driving Betty home! I had thought of this man vaguely enough before, yet with some dash of human sympathy, for it was common talk that he was "put upon" by the other men. He was a weakling, and unhappy; now I suddenly felt him to be evil—desperate.
Oh, why had I let Bettina go!
Even if the chauffeurs, all three, were decent enough ordinarily, what if just to-night they had been drinking?
Betty coming across the deserted heath with a drunken driver——
Oh, God, I prayed, don't let anything happen to Bettina....
A quarter past eleven.
I put on a bold face. "They wouldn't, I think, have a motor-car out for Betty at this hour, and the reason she is late is because she has told them she would like the walk."
"They will hardly send a woman with her at this time of night."
We both started violently, and all because a coal had fallen out of the grate on the metal fender.
My mother was the first to speak: "They are haphazard people, I sometimes think.... You don't suppose they would send her back with a groom...?"
I said I was sure they would not, though an hour before I would have asked, Why not?
"Lord Helmstone couldn't be expected to put himself out. IwishI had not let the servants go to bed!" she exclaimed. "Why didn't you think of it? Of course,theyshould have gone and brought Bettina home."
I saw now how right and proper this would have been.
Half past eleven.
"It is very strange," I said.
"Go and look out again, you may see a lantern, or the motor-lamps."
I leaned out into the fresh-smelling darkness, and I saw nothing, I heard nothing.
I hung there, unwilling to draw in my head andadmit the world without was empty of Bettina. She had been thrown out of the car. She was lying by the roadside somewhere, dead, that was why she didn't come home.
Suddenly I thought of Gerald Boyne. What if, after all, he had been dining there. He would be sure to want to bring Bettina home. Yes, and those casual Helmstones would turn Bettina over to him without a thought. A man Ranny wouldn't let his sister dance with in a room full of her friends.... Bettina, setting out with Gerald Boyne to cross the lonely heath—and never reaching home.
I knew all this was wild and foolish ... then why did these imaginings make me feel I could not bear the suspense another moment? I shut the window and turned round. "You must let me go for her," I said.
The same suggestion must have been that moment on her lips. "Go, wake the servants," she said, "tell them to dress quickly. Get your cloak and light the lantern." She gave her short sharp directions. The young servant was to go with me. The old one was to lock the door behind us, and wait up with my mother. I went with acandle through silent passages, and knocked on doors.
I left the lantern burning down in the hall, and in my cloak went back to my mother's room.
She was leaning out, over the side of the bed listening.
"Aren't they ready?"
"They are only just roused."
"Servants take ten times as long to dress as——Hark. Look out!"
I went back to the window and peered between the close-drawn curtains, with hands at my temples on either side of my eyes.
Nothing.
Except.... Yes, I could hear the heavy step of the older woman down in the hall unlocking, unbolting, unchaining the door ... that the housemaid and I might lose no time when she was ready.
The old woman must be waiting for us there below, with the lantern in her hand. A faint light was lying on the path. Not a sound now in all the world except my mother's voice behind me:
"You will take the short cut."
"Oh yes."
"And as you go don't talk—listen."
"Listen!" I echoed, with mounting horror. "What should I hear?"
"How do we know?"
A chill went down my back.
The bedroom-door opened, and Bettina walked in.
"Such a nice evening! They've been teaching me bridge. Why have you put on your cloak? Why are you looking—oh! what has happened to you?"
Not very much was said to Bettina that night. She and two of the Helmstones' maids had come round by the orchard-gate, walking softly on the grass, "so as not to waken mother."
Only a little crestfallen, she was sent away to bed. My mother had motioned me to wait. As I watched Bettina making her apologies and her good-night, I thought how worse than useless had been all that anxiety and strain. "I shall remember to-night," I said to myself, "whenever I am frightened again."
But this, I could see before she spoke, was not the moral my mother was drawing. "Shut the door," she signed. And when I had come back toher, she drew herself up in bed and laid her hand on mine. "I want you to make me a promise," she said. "It is not fair to girls not to let them know that terrible thingscanhappen. Promise me that you will take better care of Bettina. Never let anyone make you forget——"
I promised—oh, I promised that!
Eric, like the violets and primroses, came earlier that third spring.
He seemed an old friend now, with an established footing in the house. Yet I had never been alone with him for more than five minutes before the day I told him my secret.
I had imagined it all so different from the way it fell out. I said to myself that I would meet him on his way home some evening, after he had played the last round. He would never know that I had been waiting for him in the copse; but that would be where I should tell him, standing by the nearer stile, where I had first seen kindness in his eyes.
My mother's health was worse again that spring, and when I wasn't studying I was much with her. After Eric came I stayed with her even more, for he said she had lost ground.
He discouraged her from coming downstairs. I believe he prevailed on her to keep her room chiefly by coming constantly to see her, bringingbooks and papers. My mother's sick-room was not like any other I have seen. It was full of light and air, and hope and pleasantness. She would lie on the sofa in one of the loose gowns she looked so lovely in, and we would have tea up there.
Nearly always I managed to go down to the door with Eric.
One day, that very first week, he came a good hour before we expected him. Bettina had shut herself up to write to Hermione, "——and I am afraid my mother is asleep," I said.
"Well, you are not," he answered. I saw his eyes fall on the books and papers that littered the morning-room sofa, and I felt myself grow red. The books would betray me!
The strange thing was that he pushed them away without ever looking at them! And he sat down beside me.
He had never been so close to me before. I think I was outwardly quite unmoved. But I could not see him, even at a distance, without inward commotion. When he sat down so near me, a great many pulses I had not known before were in my body began to beat and hammer. Ifelt my heart grow many sizes too big, and my breast-bone ache under the pressure. I said to myself the one essential was that he should not suspect—for him to guess the state he had thrown me into would be the supreme disaster. He might despise me. Almost certainly he would think I was hysterical. I knew the contempt he felt for hysterical women. Never, never should he think me one! I would rather die, sitting rigidly in my corner without a sign, than let him think I had any taint of the hysterical in me!
Above all, for my Great Secret's sake, I must show self-command. Upon that I saw, in a flash, this was the ideal moment for telling him about The Plan.
He asked how had my mother slept. I don't know what I said. But I remember that he spoke very gently of her. And he said I must husband my strength. I stayed too much indoors, he said. Hereafter I was to take an hour's brisk walk every day of my life.
I told him I couldn't always do that in these days.
"You must," he said.
I thought of my books, and shook my head.
"Won't you do it if I ask you to?" he said.
He leaned a little towards me. I dared not look up.
"I understand your not wanting to leave your mother," he said. "But couldn't your sister——" Then, before I could answer, "No," he said, smiling a little, "I suppose she couldn't."
There was something in his tone that did not please me. "You mean Betty is too young?"
No; he didn't mean that, he said.
Whatdidhe mean?
"Well, she has other preoccupations, hasn't she?" he said lightly.
"You mean Hermione? Hermione and all the family are in London."
No; he didn't mean Hermione. I was in too much inner turmoil to disentangle his meaning then. For he went on quickly to say: "Suppose I sit with your mother for that hour, while you go out and get some exercise?"
I was to lose an hour of him—tramping about alone! The very thought gave me an immense self-pity. My eyes grew moist.... "Come, come!" I said to myself, "keep a tight rein!"
Just as I was getting myself under controlagain, he undid it all by laying his hand over mine.
"Let me help you," he said.
"Oh, w-will you?" I stammered; while to myself I said: "He is being kind; don't think it is more—don'tdarethink it is more!"
Though I couldn't help thinking itwasmore, I turned to the thought of my Great Scheme as a kind of refuge from a feeling too overwhelming to be faced.
And yet, I don't know, it may have been partly some survival in me of the coquetry I thought I hated; that, too, may have helped to make me catch nervously at a change of subject. So I interrupted with something about: "If you really do want to help me——"
But I found I could not talk coherently while his touch was on my hand. The words I had rehearsed and meant to say—they flew away. I felt my thoughts dissolving, my brain a jelly, my bones turning to water.
With the little remnant of will-power left I drew my hand away. My soul and my body seemed to bleed at the wound of that sundering. For in those few seconds' contact we two seemedto have grown into one. I found I had risen to my feet and gone to sit by the table, with a sense of having left most of myself behind clinging to his hand. I made an immense effort to remember things he had told us about those early struggles of his. And I asked questions about that time—questions that made him stare: "How did you guess? What put that in your head?" I said I imagined it would be like that.
"Well, itwaslike that."
"And you overcame everything!" I triumphed. "You are the fortunate one of your family."
He laughed a little grim kind of laugh. "The standard of fortune is not very high with us." He looked thoroughly discontented.
"I am afraid," I said, "you are one of the ungrateful people."
What had he to be grateful for? He threw the question at me.
"Why, that you have the most interesting profession in the world," I said.
"You don't mean the practice of medicine!—mere bread-and-butter."
"You don't love your profession!"
He smiled, and that time the smile was lessungenial. But I had not liked the tone of patronage about his work.
"They were all wasted on you, then—those splendid opportunities—the clinic in Hamburg, the years in Paris——"
"Oh, well"—he looked taken aback at my arraignment—"I mayn't be a thundering success, but I won't say I'm a waster."
"If you don't love and adore the finest profession in the world——! Yes, somebody else ought to have had your chances. Me, for instance."
"You! Oh, I dare say," his smile was humorous and humouring.
"You think I'm not in earnest. But I am." I went to the cupboard where Bettina and I each had a shelf, and brought out an old wooden workbox. I opened it with the little key on my chain. I took out papers and letters. "These are from the Women's Medical School in Hunter Street"—I laid the letters open before him—"answers to my inquiries about terms and conditions."
He glanced through one or two. "What put this into your head?" he said, astonished, and not the least pleased so far as one could see. "How did you know of the existence of these people?"
"You left a copy of theLancethere once." Something in his face made me add: "But I should have found a way without that."
"What way—way to what?" He spoke irritably in a raised voice. I looked anxiously at the door. "We won't say anything just yet to my mother," I begged. "My mother wouldn't—understand."
"What wouldn't she understand?" All his kindness had gone. He was once more the cold inaccessible creature I had seen that first day stalking up to Big Klaus's door.
"What I mean is," I explained, quite miserably crestfallen, "my mother wouldn't understand what I feel about studying medicine. Butyou"—and I had a struggle to keep the tears back—"I've looked forward so to telling you——"
He turned the papers over with an odd misliking expression.
"For one thing, you could never pass the entrance examination," he said. I asked why he thought that.
"Do you see yourself going to classes in London, cramming yourself with all this?"—his hand swept the qualifications list.
"Not classes in London," I said. "But people do the London Matriculation without that. I am taking the University Tutorial Correspondence Course," I said.
I was swallowing tears as I boasted myself already rather good at Botany and French. My mother thought even my German tolerable.
I picked up the little pamphlet issued by the University of London on the subject of Matriculation Regulations, and I pointed out Section III., "Provincial Examinations." The January and June Matriculation Examinations were held at the Brighton Municipal Technical College. He could see that made it all quite convenient and easy.
"I can see it is all quite mad," he answered. "Suppose by some miracle you were to pass the entrance exams.—have you any idea how long they keep you grinding away afterwards?"
"Five to seven years," I said.
"Well! Can't you see what a wild idea it is?"
I said to myself: he knows about our straitened means. "You mean it costs such a great deal."
"It costs a great deal more than you think," he said, shifting about discontentedly in his chair.
Then I told him that my mother had some jewels. "I am sure that when she sees I am in earnest, when I have got my B. A., she will be willing I should use the jewels——"
"It's a dog's life," he said, "for a woman."
I gathered my precious papers together. "You think I shall mind the hard work. But I shan't."
"It isn't the hard work," he said, "though it's not easy for a man. For a woman——" he left the woman medical-student hanging over the abyss.
For all my questions I could not bring him to the point of saying what these bugbears were.
He was plainly tired of the subject.
My first disappointment had yielded to a spiritless catechism of how this and how that.
My persistent canvass of the matter brought him nearer a manifestation of ill-temper than I had ever seen in him.
There was a great deal, he said, that he couldn't talk about to a girl of eighteen. But had I or anybody else ever heard of a man who was a doctor himself wanting his sister, or his daughter to study medicine? He had never known one.Not one.
I confessed I couldn't think why that was, exceptthat nobody belonging to a girl ever wanted her to do anything, except—I stopped short and then hurried on.... "But after all, you know that women do go through the medical schools and come out all right."
He shook his head. "They've lost something. Though I admit most of the women you mean, never had the thing I mean."
I said I didn't understand.
"Well, you ought to. You've got it." He looked at me with an odd expression and asked how long I'd had this notion in my head. I said a year. "All this time! You've been full of this ever since I was here last!"
I lied. I said I had thought of absolutely nothing else all that time. He stood up ... but I still sat there wondering what had made me tell him that lie.
"You won't go," I said, "without seeing my mother."
To-day—he hadn't time.
I went down with him as usual to the front door, weeping inwardly, yet hoping, praying, that before the door closed he would say something that would help—something kind.
He often said the best things of all just as he was going—as though he had not dared to be half so interesting, or a tenth so kind, but in the very act of making his escape.
To-day he put on his covert coat in a moody silence. Still silent, he took his hat.
I stood with the door-knob in my hand. "You think, then, even if Aunt Josephine helped——"
"Who is Aunt Josephine?"
"My father's step-sister. She is well off."
Aunt Josephine's riches made no impression upon him. He was going away a different man from the one who had come in and pushed away my papers, to sit beside me and to take my hand. He pulled his stick out of the umbrella-stand.
"You feel sure I couldn't?" I pleaded at the door.
"I feel sure you could do something better."
He was out on the step. "Good-bye," he said, with the look that hurt me, so tired—disappointed.
He had come for peace—for my mother's tranquil spirit to bring rest to his tired mind. And all he had found here was my mother's daughter fretting to be out in the fray! I hadnot even listened. I had interrupted and pulled away my hand.
After I shut the door, I opened it again, and called out: "Oh, what was it you were going to tell me?"
"It wouldn't interest you," he said, without even turning round.
I had to make use of Eric's old plea, "pressure of work," to account for his going away without seeing my mother.
I watched the clock that next afternoon in a state of fever. Would he come again at three, so that we might talk alone? No. The torturing minute-hand felt its way slowly round the clock-face, its finger, like a surgeon's on my heart, pressing steadily, for all my flinching, to verify the seat and the extent of pain.
Four o'clock. Five. Half-past. No hope now of his coming, I told myself, as those do who cannot give up hope.
My mother questioned me. What had Mr. Annan said the day before? Had he, then, come so early for "nothing in particular"? I said that I supposed he had come early because he found he could not come late.
About six o'clock, as I was counting out some drops for my mother, a ring at the front door made me start and spill the liquid on the table.He had relented! He was coming to say the things I had been so mad as to prevent his saying yesterday. We listened. My heart fell down as a woman's voice came up. Lady Helmstone! Wanting to see my mother "very particularly." We wondered, while the maid went down to bring her, what the errand might be which could not be entrusted to Bettina. For, wonderful to say, Bettina was to be allowed to go to a real dinner-party that night at the Hall. Hermione had written from London, begging that Betty might come and hear all about the yachting party.
This was not the first we had heard of the project. It had been introduced in a way never to be forgotten. We had counted on hearing from the Helmstones all the thrilling details about the Coronation which was fixed for the coming June. We felt ourselves sensibly closer to the august event through our acquaintance with the Helmstones. Lesser folk than they might hope to see the great Procession going to the Abbey—King and Queen in the golden Coach of State, our particular friends the little Princes and the young Princess in yet another shining chariot, followed by the foreign Potentates, the State officials, and byourPeer of theRealm with all his brother Lords and Barons in scarlet and ermine; and the flower of the British Army, a glancing, flaming glory in the rear.
The highly fortunate might see this Greatest Pageant of the Age on its return from the Abbey, when the Sovereigns would be wearing their crowns and their Coronation robes.
But the Helmstones! They would actually see the anointing and the crowning from their High Seats in the Abbey. Even a girl like Hermione would be asked to the State Ball.
Never before had we realised so clearly the advantages of being a Peer.
We thought the Helmstones very modest not to be talking continually about the Coronation. While we waited, impatient to hear more on the great theme, they had introduced the subject of the yachting trip. I remembered this while Lady Helmstone was coming up the stair—I remembered our bewilderment at learning that they hoped to sail "about Easter," and to be cruising in the Ægean at the end of June.
They had forgotten the Coronation!
Then the shock of hearing Lord Helmstone thank God that he would "be well out of it."London, he said, would be intolerable this season. He had let the house in Grosvenor Square "at a good round Coronation figure" to a new-made law-lord—"sort of chap who'll revel in it all." Many of the greatest houses in London were to be let to strangers.
The yachting trip was one of many arranged that people might escape "the Coronation fuss."
According to my mother, Lord Helmstone and his like showed a kind of treason to the country in not doing their share to make the symbolic act of Coronation a public testimony to English devotion to the Monarchy. What would become of the significance of the occasion if the aristocracy (upholders of that order typified by the King) deserted the King on a day when the eyes of the world would be upon the English throne.
Oh, it was pitiable! this leaving the great inherited task to the upstart rich. Lord Helmstone's act showed blacker in the light of remembered honour done him both by the present King and by his father. We knew Lord Helmstone had liked the late King best. Yet even of him we had heard this unworthy subject speak with something less than reverence. With bated breathBettina and I had reported these lapses, as well as the late ironic reference to "the bourgeois standards of the present Court." Our mother said that only meant that the life of the King and Queen was a model for their people. "But Lord Helmstone laughed," we persisted—"they all laughed."
We saw we were wrong to dwell upon so grave a lapse. Lord Helmstone's taste was questionable, we heard. "He does not scorn the distinctions His Majesty confers." There were people—my mother was sorry if Lord Helmstone was one—who thought it superior to smile at the Fount of Honour.
Smiling at Founts was one thing. But to go a-yachting when you might help to crown the King of England, Emperor of India, Defender of the Faith...!
Bettina and I had agreed privately that the reason she was allowed the unheard-of licence of dining out alone was that she might embrace this final opportunity of probing the mystery before the Helmstones vanished. They had come down from London for their last week-end before going to Marseilles to join theNautch Girl.
And now Lady Helmstone was passing our bedroom, where Bettina on the other side of the closed door sat working feverishly to finish putting some fresh lace on the gown she was to wear at dinner.
Lady Helmstone came into my mother's room, very smart and smiling, and without preamble proposed to take Bettina along as one of her party. Equally without hesitation my mother said the idea was quite impracticable.
Lady Helmstone was a person accustomed to having her own way. "You cannot expect," she said, "you cannotwantto keep your girls at home for ever."
"N-no," my mother agreed, with that old look of shrinking. But Bettina was far too young——
A niece of Lord Helmstone's, just Bettina's age, was to be of the party.
Ah, well, Bettina was different. Bettina was the sort of child who had never been able to face the idea of a single night away from home. And this was a question of a cruise of—how many weeks?
"Six months," said Lady Helmstone cheerfully.
My mother stared. Lady Helmstone could nothave meant the proposal seriously—"Bettina would die of home-sickness."
Lady Helmstone ventured to think not. As I have said, she was ill-accustomed to seeing her invitations set aside. She spoke of Hermione's disappointment ... they were all so fond of Bettina. She should have every care.
My mother made her acknowledgments—the suggestion was most kind; most hospitably meant. But Lady Helmstone had only to put it to Bettina. She would soon see.
Lady Helmstone smiled. "I think you will find Bettina would like to come with us."
I was annoyed at her way of saying that, as if she knew Bettina better than we. I went into the next room, and got out my school-books. I left the door open in case my mother should need me, and I heard them talking about "daughters."
There was much to be said, Lady Helmstone thought, for the way they did things in France. My mother preferred the English way.
"And yet you will not take it," said the other, with that suavity that allowed her to be impertinent without seeming so. "I don't think—living as you do—you quite realise the troublemothers take to give their girls the sort of opportunity you are refusing." There were changes—"great and radical changes," she said—changes which my mother, leading this life of the religieuse, was possibly not aware of.
My mother deprecated as much as she had heard of these changes.
"Ah, but,necessary—a question of supply and demand. You can afford to disregard them only if you do not expect your daughters to marry."
My mother said stiffly that she saw no reason to suppose her daughters would not marry—"all in good time." They were very young, Bettina a child——
"She is very little younger than I was when I married; or than you were yourself, if I may hazard a guess." My mother was silent. She was still silent when Lady Helmstone laid down the law that a girl's best "opportunities" came before she was twenty. In these days of Gaiety girls and American heiresses the whole question had grown incomparably more difficult. "Mothers with a sense of family duty—I may say of patriotism—have to think seriously about these things." She herself, having married off threedaughters and two nieces, might be considered something of an expert. Indeed, she was so regarded. She had advised hundreds. There was her cousin Mrs. Monmouth. The Monmouths were not at all well off. "I used to come across Rosamund trailing her three girls about London....Three!Conceive the indiscretion!—only the young one really caring about balls—the other two going stolidly through with it, season after season. The mother, every year more worn, more haggard—I changed all that! One chaperon will do for a dozen. A group of us took turns. 'Send the youngest to dance,' I said; 'andnevermore than two at a time.' After all, very little is done at balls!" She spoke impatiently, in a brisk, business-like tone. "As a rule, only boys and ineligibles care about dancing. The thing for people in Rosamund's position to do—I told my cousin, the thing to do was to spend August in London."
There was a pause.
"Do people not leave London in August nowadays?" my mother said, in a tone of perfunctory politeness.
"All the other women leave," said Lady Helmstone,with a rusé significance. "The field is clear. There are always men in London when the town is supposed to be empty. Often Parliament is still sitting. Men have nowhere to go. They accept with gratitude in August an invitation they wouldn't even trouble to answer in June.August is the time.I made Rosamund Monmouth see it. I made her give her common, or garden, cook a holiday. I made her engage a chef—cordon bleu. 'You must give better dinners than men get at their clubs.' She did."
There was another significant pause.
"The least attractive of the Monmouth girls married the rising young barrister Harvey that very autumn. We called him 'Harvest.'" Her laugh rang lonely in the quiet room. "The other is engaged to the member for Durdan. He will be in the Cabinet when our side comes in. Both those girls would be manœuvring for partners at balls still, and their mother would be in her grave, but for...."
The interview ended stiffly.
The only part of my mother's share in it that I regretted was her suggesting that Lady Helmstone should not, after all, let Bettina know therehad been any question of her going. "The child is already disturbed enough at the prospect of losing Hermione."
When Lady Helmstone was gone, my mother sat up with flushed cheeks, and said: "If Betty never wentanywhere, I should not want her to go away in the care of a woman like that."