I put the finishing touches to Bettina's dress in our mother's room that night, so that the invalid might have the pleasure of lying there and looking at Betty, all white and golden in the candle-light.
While I tied her sash I noticed her frowning at herself in the glass.
"I look dreadfully missish," she said.
When I protested, she said: "Worse, then! Like a charity child at a school-treat!"
We were amazed. My mother asked where she had got such ideas. I heard Hermione behind Betty's voice.
She turned round and faced our mother with her most beguiling air. "It's going to be mine some day ... lend me the pearl and emerald pendant." That my mother should be surprised at the suggestion, seemed only natural. But I could not see why she should be so annoyed. I, too, begged her to let Bettina wear the pendant. After all, Bettina was in her seventeenth year ... and this was a real party.
"A girl of sixteen wanting to wear a thing like that!"
Bettina frowned. How old must she be before she could wear the pendant?
My mother wouldn't say....
After Bettina had gone, I asked about the market value of jewels.
My mother seemed to think the inquiry very odd and somehow offensive. I asked if she thought the big diamond star was worth as much as £600.
She said I appeared to have a very sordid way of looking at things whose real value was that they were symbolic of something beyond price.
I said I knew that. But did she not think that for some great and important end, my father would have been the first to say, let the jewels be sold?
My mother put her hand up to her eyes. I blew out one candle and set a shield before the other.
She spoke my name and I started—the voice sounded odd. I went back to the bedside. "Are you ill?" I said. She shook her head and motioned me to sit down.
Then she told me. We were living on the proceeds of the diamond star.
The pendant had been sold last summer. There was nothing more worth selling except the furniture, and possibly a few prints.
We owed Lord Helmstone six months' rent.
I met the shock with the help of my secret. I steadied myself against the thought that, at the worst, I would find the means (through Aunt Josephine or somebody) for qualifying myself to support my mother and sister. I saw myself, at the worst, a humble soldier enlisting in that army where Eric held command. I, too, marching with that high companionship ... marching to the world's relief.
In the midst of telling how I was forging ahead with my London University Tutorial Correspondence, and to what the year's successful work was leading, I kept thinking that, after all, this ill wind might help to blow away the cloud that Eric's disapproval had brought lowering over the present and obscuring all the future. My mother will be proud of me, I thought. She will even be a little touched; and then, for all the light was so dim, I saw her face of horror!
It was a mad idea. Her daughter a "female doctor"! Never!
"Not—not female doctor," I protested. "Thatdoessound——"
"Well, you see for yourself how the very sound of it——"
I assured her that I didn't dislike the sound of "medical woman." But there was no necessity to emphasise "woman" at all; the only thing important was whether the person was qualified to treat the sick. People did not feel they had to say male doctor. "Doctor is enough."
I was told that the reason no one said male doctor was because "doctor"wasmale, and everyone understood that.
I left the point, and I pleaded my main cause with all my might. I hadn't any accomplishments—no music, nothing. "I'm not the decorative one, and I like 'doing things'; plain, everyday things." There had to be people like that.
It was all no use.
That confession of mine, more than hers about the jewels, goaded my mother into taking a step which even we, blind as we were, felt to be epoch-making in our history.
That same evening she began to talk about Aunt Josephine—to excuse her. Mrs. Harborough had been so wrapped up in her brilliant young step-brother (and Aunt Josephine would never allow the "step") thatanyother person's coming in must inevitably have been resented. "She idolised your father." A woman of high character. Given to good works. Busied about the redemption of long-shoremen and about country treats for jam-factory girls. Knee-deep in philanthropy. And childless. Shecouldnot, especially now after that old first anger had long cooled, she could not be indifferent to the fate of her brother's children.
"Are you thinking of writing to her?" I said. She explained that for her to address Mrs. Harborough was, under the circumstances, hardly possible. But there was no reason in the world why I should not.
I felt there were reasons, but I could not think what they were. My mother, meanwhile, grew almost cheerful, outlining the sort of thing I might say. No requests in this first communication. A letter, merely—if it found her so inclined—merely to open a long-closed door.
I did not like my task. I decided I would put it off till morning, though I knew that at any timeI should find it easier to write: "Please lend me £1,000 for a course of study," than write such a letter as my mother had dictated.
Betty came back from her dinner-party in great excitement. Ranny Dallas had motored over from Dartmoor that very day—with a man friend. They had been at the Helmstones' to tea.
I wondered, dully, that Lady Helmstone had said nothing whatever about Ranny during her visit. She must have just parted from him. Another curious thing was that Ranny had not stayed for the dinner-party. He and his friend were at the inn.
"What in the world do you think that means?" I asked Bettina, glad enough to escape from my own thoughts.
She was smiling. "I think it is very natural."
And why was it natural for a luxurious young man to put up with tough mutton and watery potatoes at a village inn, when he and any friend of his were certain of a welcome, and the best possible dinner, in a house like the Helmstones'?
Betty merely continued to smile in that beatific,but somewhat foolish fashion. I said, rather more to make her speak than for any soberer reason, "Perhaps he isn't so sure of his welcome"; and then in a flash I saw quite clearly something I had been blind to till that instant. For all the liking the Helmstones felt for Betty they may not have liked being undeceived about Ranny's supposed devotion to Hermione. That this idea had never occurred to me before showed me stupid, I saw, as well as self-absorbed. But the idea would not have occurred to me at all, I think, but for some of the things Lady Helmstone had said to my mother that afternoon.
Betty was asking me with a superior air, if I couldn't understand that Ranny would "prefer to talk things over" before meeting her at a dinner-party "with everybody looking on." She reminded me a little tremulously that it would be their very first meeting "since...." There was a moment when I thought she was going to cry. And then, without any sense of transition, I wondered how anybody in the world could be as happy as Betty looked.
The next morning, still in a mood of the deepestdejection, I dated a sheet of paper, and began: "My dear Aunt Josephine."
I looked at the words for full five minutes, with a feeling of intense unwillingness to set down another syllable. And then I yielded to the impulse which made certain other words so easy, so delicious to say or trace. I took a fresh sheet. Before I knew, I had written: "Dear Mr. Annan."
Well, why not? Was it not better to write to him, rather than face another afternoon like yesterday? My mother wondering, suspicious; my own eyes flying back and forth like distracted shuttles from window to clock—from clock to window, hour after hour.
Dear Mr. Annan,—I have told my mother. She feels as you do. She does not like my idea. So I have agreed for the present not to think about it any more.
Dear Mr. Annan,—I have told my mother. She feels as you do. She does not like my idea. So I have agreed for the present not to think about it any more.
I was his "sincerely," and I sent the note by one of the little Klauses.
I imagined that day I should never again have to live through a time of such suspense.
Waiting, till I could get away without being noticed, to carry my note to Kleiner Klaus's.
Waiting, for the Klaus's boy to come home.
Waiting, while his mother brushed his clothes and cuffed him. Waiting, while he recovered his spirits. Waiting, while slowly, slowly, his mind took in the particulars of his errand, and the most particular part of it, in his eyes—the penny he should have when he brought me back an answer.
And the long hours of that afternoon waiting for the answer, or even for the errand-boy to come back. When I was not looking out of the window my mind was still so bent on listening for one particular footstep on the brick walk, and at the door his voice—the only voice in the world with meaning in it—that scarcely any impression was made on me by other steps and other voices. I heard them, subconsciously, to dismiss them; for everything was irrelevance that wasn't Eric.
But my mother interrupted my mechanical reading aloud. "Who," (with her air of listening to sounds beyond my ken) "who can all those people be?"
There was Bettina in the passage making frantic signs that I was to hurry out and speak to her. And voices of men and women came up from the open door. I recognised Lord Helmstone's. I heard him asking the maid if Mr. Annan were here.
"No? That's very odd," said Hermione in her sceptical way—"Perhaps he's come in without your knowing. Will you just find out?"
My mother, too, had heard Lord Helmstone's cheerful bass, suggesting that his party might take shelter here. I had not noticed before the slight rain falling. "Go and ask him to come upstairs," my mother said. And lower: "I don't wanthimto take it amiss." I saw she was thinking of her refusal to let Betty go on the yacht.
Betty was waiting for me in ambush near the head of the stair: "You must come down and help me. Ranny is there, too."
I was bewildered at finding so many at thedoor. For besides Lord Helmstone and Hermione, there was Lady Barbara, and Ranny Dallas and his friend—a cheerful, talkative, red-haired man they called Courtney.
The Helmstones were still discussing whether they should come in. Hermione said it was only a slight sprinkle, and her mother was expecting them back to tea. Lady Barbara, with engaging simplicity, insisted there was no object in going back without Mr. Annan.
I saw at once that Ranny looked different. Just in what way, or to what extent, I could not at first have said. A very little thinner, too little to account for the change I was dimly conscious of. And when he first came in, he came with some nonsense, and that pleasant laugh, that always "started things" in an easy harmonious key.
"We've descended on you," Lord Helmstone said, "like a posse of detectives. Sleuth-hounds on that fella Annan's track. We've our instructions to bag him and carry him home to tea."
Bettina (oh, I could have beaten her for that!) said Mr. Annan would very probably come in presently. And she led the way into the drawing-room, while I took Lord Helmstone upstairs. Bythe time I came down again Bettina had ordered tea.
Hermione turned round as I came in. "What have you done with my father! Now father's disappeared!"—as if she had only just grasped the fact. "Didn't I tell you," she said to Ranny, "Duncombe is a place where if a man goes in, he doesn't come out?"
Betty and I gave them tea.
I lashed myself up to being almost talkative. I am sure they never guessed the effort I was making. I had not taken my usual place for pouring out tea. I sat where I could see the gate. My mind and eyes were so on the watch for Eric I should not have noticed Ranny much, but for an odd new feeling of comradeship that sprang up, I cannot tell how, as the minutes went by and still brought no sign of Eric. Not even a note in answer to mine.
As tea went on, and I grew more miserable, I noticed that Ranny flagged, too. After saying something Ranny-ish enough, he would fall into quiet, looking straight in front of him as though we none of us were there. As though even Bettina were not there. Bettina's eyes kept turninghis way. But Ranny never once looked at her. And the more I looked at him, the more I felt he was changed. He would rouse himself abruptly out of that new stillness and take part for a moment in the talk. His very laugh, that I have spoken of as so reassuring—his laugh most of all gave me a sense of uneasiness. It was a kind of laughter that seemed just a tribute to other people's light-heartedness and, more than anything about him, a betrayal of his own bankruptcy in cheer.
When he fell silent again, and in a way "out of the running," when that blindness came into his face, Ranny Dallas looks as I feel, I said to myself. And then I talked the more and smiled at everybody in a way probably more imbecile than pleasing.
I consoled myself with thinking neither Ranny nor I were being much noticed, for Hermione talked very fast, and rather louder than usual, to Bettina and to the other, newer, swain—one of the apparently endless supply of "weak-ending young men" as Ranny called them.
Under cover of Hermione's gaiety, I managed to ask Bettina what was the matter with Ranny.
"I don't know," she whispered.
I saw it was true. Bettina did not know.
She leaned across me to find a place on the crowded table for her teacup and the low voice was earnest enough: "Find out."
The rain had been only a passing shower.
"Oh, yes, the sun has come out—but my father hasn't! Didn't I say," Hermione laughed, "no man ever knows when to come away from this place?" Then she swept us all into the garden. "If he doesn't come soon I shall throw gravel up at the window. Isn't it this window?"
Bettina said very likely Lord Helmstone was having tea upstairs and that it had not gone up till after ours. Ranny and I left the new young man and Bettina trying to prevent Hermione from carrying out her audacious plan and apparently succeeding. For Lord Helmstone did not appear for another half-hour. And still no sign of Eric.
Ranny asked me how the sunk garden was coming on. I didn't like going so far from the gate, but Betty's earnest "find out" was ringing in my ears. I sent a searching look across the heath, and then Ranny and I left the others and wentdown to the rock-quadrangle that used to be so tidily affluent in stone-loving mosses, sedums and suchlike. The weeds were fast driving the more delicate things out of the neglected tangle. For the old gardener had been gone a year, now, and there was overmuch for a jobbing person to do in a day or two a week.
I apologised for the poor unkempt place, thinking how different I might have made it, but for the hours I spent over books. And would Eric have liked me better if——
I craned my neck, uneasy at not being able to see the gate nor any part of the bypath. Only the higher reach of heath road.
Ranny had not pretended to be listening. I don't think he so much as saw how changed the garden was. We talked about the new young man—"awful good sort," according to Ranny. But that testimony, too, he gave in an absent-minded, perfunctory way.
"Can't we sit down?" he said, looking blindly at a garden seat still shining-wet.
I said we'd better walk. I lead him back near enough the house to see if the others had waylaid Eric.
No, just the same group under my mother's window—Hermione and Babs arguing hotly about something. The red-haired young man aiming at an imaginary golf-ball with the crook-handle of his heavy walking-stick, and swinging it violently over his shoulder, that Bettina might see the approved position of feet and body before, and after, a furious drive. Whether Bettina made a practice of asking for this information I cannot say. But every man who came our way, young or old, was seized with an uncontrollable desire to teach Bettina the difference between good form and bad form at the game of golf.
Ranny had been walking with his head bent and no pretence at making conversation. When I stopped, he looked up suddenly and caught sight of the group. He wheeled about, and stood with his back to the house and his face averted from me as well.
"Look here," he said, "why shouldn't we go and meet Annan?—warn him—eh?"
My heart leapt at the suggestion. And yet.... "Why should you want to do that?" I said suspiciously.
"Oh, well, I don't care where we go—only..." His voice sounded so queer I felt frightened.
"I don't think I'll go back tothemjust yet," he managed to bring out. "Do you mind?"
We turned off through the shrubbery, and went out by the side gate along the bypath to the links.
Ranny walked behind, absolutely silent, till he burst out: "May I smoke?"
When he had lit a cigarette, I glanced back. I thought he looked a shade less miserable. I could see the four figures standing out against the house, and still no sign anywhere of Eric.
I asked Ranny if he was to be one of the yachting party.
"Lord, no!"
Perhaps they had not asked him. Maybe that was it. I said something about how we should miss Hermione.
"Er—yes," he said. "I suppose you will," and I noticed his voice was steadier.
"Don't be ungrateful," I said. "So will you."
"Me?"
Then, as I reproached him, he said: "Oh, yes; awfully nice people the Helmstones. I used to be rather fond of Lady Helmstone. But she's awoman who doesn't know how to take 'No.' That's partly why I came."
I looked back again: "Is that the only reason?"
"Well, she kept writing, and making out, in spite of what I'd said, that she was expecting me to join them at Marseilles. And had put off somebody else who wanted to go. If I backed out—I had never backed in—I would be breaking up the party and behaving like the devil." He spoke more ill-temperedly than I had ever heard him.
"How will it end?" I asked.
"End? I'm hanged if I'll go. I've told her I wouldn't, from the beginning. But I only convinced her yesterday."
We walked on.
"They've asked Betty," I said.
"No!" He caught me up and walked at my side. "When did they do that?"
"Yesterday evening."
"Is Betty going?"
"No," I said.
And very sharp on that: "Why not?" he asked. "Doesn't she want to?"
"She doesn't know anything about it. Mymother doesn't want her to go." And while he fell into silence again, I sent my eyes about the heath. No sign.
Suddenly I remembered Betty's "find out." I had not found out. I hadn't even tried, and I realised myself for a monster of selfishness—thinking Eric, Eric, and nothing but Eric the livelong day.
I pulled myself together and asked Ranny what he had been doing since Christmas.
"Since New Year's Eve, you mean." He frowned, and threw away a cigarette half-smoked, and lit another. When he had puffed and frowned a little more he said he had been going through a ghastly experience with a great friend of his. "Not a bad chap on the whole," he said, in a hesitating, almost appealing voice. But this not bad chap had "got himself badly bunkered." Ranny hesitated, and then: "Yes, I've been thinking I'd tell you about it, and see if—if you thought I've advised him right...." The friend, he said, had been "one of a house party at a place up in Norfolk. He'd gone for the fag end of the shooting. Last month it was. Beastly dull people. Awful good shooting—as a rule. But the weatherwas rotten. All shut up together in that beastly dull house. Nothing earthly to do, except rag, and—you know the kind of thing."
I didn't know a bit, but I said I did.
"Well, his friend had nothing to do, and he got it into his head that the girl of the house rather liked him. And there wasn't another blessed thing to do, so—— Oh, well, they got engaged."
He waited for a moment, and then he said that when his friend went back to Aldershot he found "he wasn't any more in love with that girl than he was with the cat. It was all just a beastly mistake. So he got leave and went home to think it out.Couldn'tthink it out. Felt he'd better go and talk it over with somebody——" Ranny hesitated again. "Awful hole to be in, isn't it?"
I agreed it must have been very dreadful for his friend to have to tell the girl he'd made a mistake.
"Oh, but he couldn't dothat!" With a shocked look, Ranny stopped dead for a second. Then, as he went on, he said that he had told his friend of course he'd have to go through with it.
"You don't mean," I said, "that when he wasfeeling like that you think he ought to let the poor girl marry him!"
He said I didn't see the point. It would probably spoil the girl's life if his friend drew back.
I said he would spoil her life if he didn't draw back.
Ranny looked merely bewildered. "Oh ... but ..." then he caught hold of a mainstay, "my friend—he isn't a cad you know. A mancan'tback out of a thing like that."
Then I told him, without the names, about Guy Whitby-Dawson. Guy had "backed out." Guy had made up his mind to the sacrifice of "running in single harness," and had said so, frankly. I praised him.
"Naturally," Ranny answered, "if people hadn't enough money to marry, nobody would expect them to marry. But in the case I'm talking about," he said gloomily, "the man, my friend, is an eldest son. He is going to have—oh, it's rotten luck!"
I asked him if he really thought that not to have enough money to keep house on was worse than not to have enough love to keep house on. He said that whathethought wasn't the question.The question was what the girl would think. And what the girl's family would think. I asked how anybody was to know what the girl would think unless she was asked. Ranny gave his rough head a despairing shake.
Of course I couldn't tell him half of what I felt about that girl, but I kept seeing her. Very happy. Never dreaming what her lover was feeling. I saw them going up the church aisle to be married. All the smiling and congratulating afterwards. I saw them "going away." And I felt sick.
But I did try to make him feel a little for the girl. He said that "feeling for the girl" was precisely what had decided the business. The girlcouldn'tbe told the truth.
"She'll guess it!"
But that didn't comfort him as I had expected. "Even if she guesses she couldn't be expected to release—m—my friend."
"Why?"
"Because," said Ranny with his childlike air, "because she'll probably never have as good an offer again."
I was conscious of an inner fury when he saidthat. I turned on him. And all of a sudden, quite curiously, my feeling changed. His face showed not only utter innocence of any arrogance, the expression on it was of great misery. And this was so at odds with the roundness and the hint of dimples, the roughened hair that the damp air had begun to curl, that as I looked at him, I felt the queer, stirring-at-the-heart sort of softness perhaps only women know, when they catch a glimpse in some man's face of the child that died when he grew up. I could see just what Ranny had been like when he was in short dresses. Full of laughter; as he was still when we first knew him. And in face of those earlier bumps and bruises, just this bewilderment overmastering the pain of the baby who is outraged at the disproportion between desert and reward—the baby who thinks, if he doesn't say: "I never did a single thing, and here all this has tumbled down on my head."
In that instant I saw how lovable Ranny Dallas was, and instead of reproaching him, I found myself saying: "If that's true—what you say—it is very horrible for the girl, but I see it is probably nearly as horrible for the man."
And Ranny sat down on the wet heather under a gorse bush and buried his face in his hands.
"Get up," I said; "here's my handkerchief. Get up quickly. Lady Helmstone is coming."
But who was the man with her?
It was Eric Annan.
Before those two were visible to the group round Duncombe front door, or within hailing distance of us, they turned into the bypath leading to Big Klaus's.
I could not tell whether Eric had seen us. But I was quite sure Lady Helmstone had. Sure, too, that she had deliberately avoided us.
Ranny didn't want to come back with me, and I didn't press him. I promised him I would say he was going to walk across the heath to the inn—"hadto get back—expecting a telegram."
I stayed behind in the gorse bushes alone, till I saw Lord Helmstone and all his party going home.
I couldn't bear the thought of meeting Betty.
I went round by the kitchen and crept up the back stairs. I listened at my mother's door.
Not a sound. Then I heard Betty downstairs playing the accompaniment to a song she and Ranny used to sing.
So I opened my mother's door and went in.
The first thing she said was, without any preface, "I know, now, why Lady Helmstone invited a child like Bettina to go yachting for six months rather than you."
"So do I," I answered; "they all adore Bettina. And then she is Hermione's special friend."
"There is another reason," my mother said, looking out of the window. "A reason that concerns—Lady Barbara." Then she glanced at me, a little shyly, and away her eyes went again to the window. "Lord Helmstone thinks a sea-voyage would be the best thing in the world for Mr. Annan. They are asking him to be one of the party."
I felt as if some hard substance had struck me violently in the face. But I managed to bring out the words: "Is he going, do you think?"
"No doubt he will go," she said.
Already I seemed to have lost him as utterly as though he had died. Yet with none of that sad comfort my mother had spoken of—the comfort of knowing one's possession safe beyond all risk of loss or tarnishing.
I had never been on a yacht.
I had never seen a yacht.
Yet I could see Eric on theNautch Girl. And Lady Barbara!
Her mother's words came back: "Very little is done at balls." Very much, the story-books had told me, was done by throwing people together on a long voyage. My own heart told me the same.
Yes, I had lost him.
And I had lost myself.
The next day was Sunday. In the morning Hermione came to carry Bettina off for their last day together. I had to promise that, if Ranny should come to Duncombe, I would send for Betty.
As I sat with my mother, that same afternoon, the door opened, and there was the maid bringing in Mr. Annan.
I think I scarcely spoke or moved.
It was my mother who said: "I thought you would come to say good-bye."
"'Good-bye'?" Then, with unusualbrusqueriewhere my mother was concerned, he added: "WhenIcome to see people, what I say is, 'How do you do?'"
"But aren't you going away to-morrow?"
"Why should I?"
"Why, to catch theNautch Girl."
"I can't think of a girl I should so little care to catch."
And he wasn't going at all! Had never contemplated it for a moment!
The weight of the world fell off my shoulders. And for nearly five minutes of a joy almost too great to be borne, I believed that it was because of me he wasn't going.
Then he told my mother it was because of his work. And so it was that, unconsciously, he made good the excuse I had offered for his bolting off the afternoon I told him my secret. He seemed to have forgotten that episode. At least, he behaved as though it had never happened.
He laughed a little over his interview with her ladyship. "Very determined individual, Lady Helmstone." He had told her, finally, that he hadn't time even to go to his sister's wedding. He had not thought it necessary, he said to addthat he wouldn't have gone to his sister's wedding however much time he had.
Of course, my mother asked why such unbrotherly behaviour? He told us that he didn't approve of the marriage. There was nothing against the man's character. He was a "Writer to the Signet," which seemed in Scotland to mean a sort of barrister. I said "Writer to the Signet" sounded much finer than "barrister." I was told that Maggie Annan could not be expected to live on a fine sound. And that was about all they would have. This particular "Writer to the Signet" was poor. "Oh, poorer than poor!"
I didn't like his way of saying that.
As we went downstairs I was rather glad of being able to disagree with him about something. It would keep me from being foolish. I had that feeling of the creature who has been straining long at bonds, and finds the sudden loosing a test of equilibrium. For fear I should seem too gloriously content with him, I taxed Eric with thinking over much about money. He said a man may put up with any sort of hardship he likes for himself. But no man had a right to marry till he could support a wife in some sort of comfort. Isuggested that perhaps Maggie Annan cared less about comfort than she cared about other things. He retorted that Maggie probably hadn't thought it out at all. She was acting on impulse. "To think it out—that was the man's business." And so on.
I felt myself growing impatient when he said "comfort" for the second time.
"When people are old, yes! 'Comfort' then. But when they're young, whatdoesit matter?"
He leaned against the newel of the staircase and looked at me, quite surprised. "I thought you were more practical," he said.
"Iampractical. That's why I say comfort is wasted on the young. They don't even want it—unless they're rather horrid sort of young people."
"Thank you," he said, laughing, and I felt hot. I tried to explain. Such a lot of things were fun when you were young, especially when they were shared. I had noticed that. Things that made you cross, and made you ill when you were older—— Suddenly I stopped, saying in my heart: "Heavens! isn't this the kind of foolishness I was hoping to be saved from? Or is it worse?..." For Eric was smiling in such a disconcerting way.
I said primly that Miss Maggie did not need me to defend her, and that I must not keep him from his work.
That word was like the touch of a whip. In two seconds he was gone.
The next day, Monday, just the same. He ran in only for a moment to see my mother. He could not sit down; he could not do this, nor that. Work, work! It had seized him in a fresh grip.
I was thankful to the work for having carried him away that Monday afternoon, when Betty came back from seeing the Helmstones off. It was a Betty we had never seen before. I don't know what else Hermione had said to her, but Betty had been told that she, too, might have gone yachting.
It was like a stab to see my mother's face now, and to remember the confidence with which she had quoted the old story about Bettina's insisting on the promise that she should not be made to pay visits: "Notnever?" "Not never!"
I had hated Lady Helmstone for saying that Bettina would, in her ladyship's opinion, be found to have outgrown her reluctance.
It was true.
Bettina wanted to go!
My mother, unwisely I felt, reminded Betty of the old pledge.
"I was a baby then. What did I know?"
And now there were tears in Bettina's eyes because she wasnotgoing to leave her mother.
I don't like to think of those next days. They were all a strain and a tangle.
I cannot imagine what we should have done without Eric. For the way Bettina took her disappointment made my mother positively ill. Eric's prescription was hard to fill: "Peace of mind—absolute quiet and tranquillity."
"You are less alarmed," he said in that direct way of his, "than you were that first day you brought me here. But you have more reason."
I did not want Bettina fully to realise the cloud that was so surely gathering to burst—and yet I was angry at her failure to realise. So unreasonable, so unkind I found I could be! Oh, I lost patience more than once. But my mother, never.
"You will see all the beautiful places some day, my darling."
Bettina was sure she never should. This had been her one chance—who else was likely to take her?
"The fit and proper person. Your husband will take you, as your father took me."
That answer surprised us both.
I could not blame Bettina for feeling that it seemed to postpone the delights of travel overlong.
The strange new Bettina went about the house, settling to nothing, at once restive and idle. All on edge. The worst sign of all was that she neglected her music. My mother remonstrated.
"What's the use?"
"You will find your music a very important part of your equipment."
"Equipment!" said the new Bettina scornfully. "Equipment for what?"
"For taking your place in the world."
"The world!" Bettina exchanged looks with me. Yes, the world seemed far away. Inaccessible.
"If we never go anywhere—never see anyone, what is the use in being equipped?"
I think Bettina was sorry she said that. Theeffect of it was as though some rude hand had thrown down a screen. My mother looking up with hollow, startled eyes must have caught a glimpse of something that she dreaded.
"Don't put it off," she whispered. "Write to your Aunt Josephine to-night."
I composed my letter very carefully.
My sister and I had often wished, I wrote, that we had some acquaintance with our only relation. Especially as she and our father had been so much to each other. Our mother was in poor health. We lived very quietly. But we all hoped if ever Aunt Josephine came to this part of the world—a very pretty part—she would come to see us. I was nearly nineteen now, and I was hers "affectionately."
Feeling myself very diplomatic and "deep," I enclosed the last photograph Hermione had taken of Bettina. I wrote on it "Betty at sixteen—but it does not do her justice."
If anything could win her over, it would be that snapshot of Betty dancing on Duncombe lawn.
I posted the letter in an access of remorse and wretchedness—afraid I had left it too late. Formy mother had said, "After all, instead of your leaving me, I shall have to leave you."
That same night Eric told me that he had sent to London for a heart-specialist. And the heart-specialist had answered he would be down on Thursday, which was the day after to-morrow. I saw in Eric's face that he was anxious at the delay. He admitted that he was "afraid" to wait. Yes, he would wire for another man.
Eric—"afraid"!
"You don't," I whispered, "you don't mean ... quite soon?"
He repeated that he was "afraid."
Then I felt I knew all that any specialist could tell me.
That was the day I came to know the steadying influence of a call to face great issues. They bring their own greatness with them. They wrap it round our littleness. Only afterwards, thinking how gentle and watchful Eric looked in telling me, I remembered that people were supposed to faint when they heard news like that. For myself I had never felt so clear-headed. Never felt the responsibility of life so great. Never feltthat for us to fail in bearing our share was so unthinkable.
If this Majesty of Death were soon to clothe my mother, her children must not hide and weep. They must help her, help each other to meet the Great King at the gate.
All the little troubles fell away. I was kind again to Betty.
I called my lover "Eric." He called me by my name. Just that.
No more passed between him and me. But I felt I had taken this man and that he had taken this woman "for better or worse."
Bettina came into the room and handed me a letter.
"Mrs. Harborough!"—my mother drew herself up on the pillow with an animation I had not thought to see again.
I opened and read: "My dear niece——"
"Ah!" my mother brought out the ejaculation with an effect of having doubted if the relationship would be owned.
That introductory phrase turned out to be the most comprehensible part of the first half of Aunt Josephine's letter. As for me, I was completely floored by "the Dynamism of Mind," after I had stumbled over a cryptic reference to my mother's state—"which you must not expect me to call sickness. There is no such thing. There is only harmony or unharmony, whether of the so-called body or the soul."
On the third page, the writer descendedfrom these Alpine heights, to say that it had been "inspirationally borne in upon" her that the time was come for her brother's daughters to widen their horizon, and incidentally, to see something of their father's world.
The implied slur upon our mother's world was, to my surprise, not resented.
"Go on. Go on."
The letter ended by saying that, in spite of very grave and urgent preoccupations, Aunt Josephine would endeavour to draw a little of the old life round her, if her nieces would come and stay with her in Lowndes Square for a few weeks.
"A London season!" Bettina cried.
I looked up from the letter and saw my mother watching with hungry delight Bettina's face of rapture. Bettina had not looked like that since the Helmstones went away.
But the most marked change, after all, was in my mother herself.
When Eric came he was staggered. "I'll believe in miracles after this!"—and we joked about the Dynamism of Mind.
My mother had taken for granted that both Bettina and I would accept Aunt Josephine's invitation,though I said at onceIcould not leave home. My mother put this aside with: "Bettina go alone! A wild idea."
When the question came up again in Eric's presence I did not press it far. But, going downstairs, I asked him howwasI to put it to my mother?
"Put what?" he asked.
"Why, the fact that we can't leave her. Or, at least, that I can't." I agreed Betty must go.
"So must you," he said. My heart beat faster. His villeggiatura was near the end. London, for me, meant Eric. "You need the change," he said, "more than Betty does."
"You forget," I said, a little sadly, "what we've been facing here. The specialist coming——"
"Well, he will find she has rallied."
Nevertheless, she was in no condition, Eric said, to be crossed. Had she not told me herself that my first duty was to take care of Betty? That was not how he would put it—all the same, the change would do me good. Then a word about our "trustworthy servants." In any event I wasnot to say any more about not going, till we had seen the "London chap."
She went on quite wonderfully.
We were positively gay again—she and I and Bettina—the three of us laying plans.
We talked about clothes, and planned how we should look very nice on very little money.
When the great specialist came, he found my mother sitting up in a bed covered with old evening-gowns, old laces, and embroidered muslins; things she had worn long ago in India, and which should help to make us brave for our first London season. Smart little blouses, morning-gowns and afternoon-gowns, could be made in the house or in the village. But who was worthy to make an evening-frock fit for London? My mother was much more concerned about this than about the great specialist, whom she received rather as a friend of Eric's. He echoed all that Eric had said.
My mother had made me write to Aunt Josephine on the evening of the same day that brought her letter. I did not tell anyone, but I put offposting my answer till the London doctor had gone.
My letter was not only thanks and acceptance. I felt I ought, in common civility, to try to make some more or less intelligent rejoinder to the odd part of my aunt's letter. And this modest effort seemed not to displease her. For she replied in eight pages of cloudy metaphysic and a highly lucid cheque. The cheque alone supported us in our attempt to grapple with those eight bewildering pages. The first introduced us, by way of the Psychology of the Solar Plexus, to the Self-Superlative:
"If this view-point interests you, I will later explain to you—in terms of inclusiveness and totalism—the mystical activities of the Ever-Creative Self."
"If this view-point interests you, I will later explain to you—in terms of inclusiveness and totalism—the mystical activities of the Ever-Creative Self."
"Isn't she awfully learned!" said Bettina in a scared voice.
"On your return home, having 'contacted,' as we say, the talents and the tranquillity of others—instead of contacting things of lack and fear—you will be able to think happily and sweetly about matters that formerly disturbed you. All the ills of life are curable from within. Complete health is wisdom. I do not go so far as to predictthat you will find yourself instantly able to adopt the bio-vibratory sympathism which habitualises thought to the Majesty of Choice. But Idosay that after giving the deeper and sweeter Self a chance to unite the self of common consciousness, constructively, with the Powers Within, that you, too, may find yourself a Healer—that is, Harmoniser—clothed in the Regal Now."
"On your return home, having 'contacted,' as we say, the talents and the tranquillity of others—instead of contacting things of lack and fear—you will be able to think happily and sweetly about matters that formerly disturbed you. All the ills of life are curable from within. Complete health is wisdom. I do not go so far as to predictthat you will find yourself instantly able to adopt the bio-vibratory sympathism which habitualises thought to the Majesty of Choice. But Idosay that after giving the deeper and sweeter Self a chance to unite the self of common consciousness, constructively, with the Powers Within, that you, too, may find yourself a Healer—that is, Harmoniser—clothed in the Regal Now."
After that plunge, Aunt Josephine came to the surface for breath, so to speak, and to say that she thought it only fair to tell us that she herself had seen almost nothing of general society for the past ten years. She had her work. She had her classes in which we might take some interest. I was to tell "the musical one" that Self-Expression, through voice-culture and pianoforte playing, was one of the Keys to the Biosophian System.
Aunt Josephine had already taken opera-tickets for the season. And we should go to as many concerts as we liked. We should see pictures and we should see people. We should "learn to use the plus sign in thought." We should "recognise the cosmic truth thatall is good."
This concluding phrase was underscored three times. And still, despite its provokingly obvious aspect, I felt that I had not a notion what AuntJosephine meant by it. My mother said the reason was that I knew nothing of mysticism. Eric said neither did he. But he knew stark, staring lunacy when he saw it. And he was more than doubtful if we ought to be entrusted to this demented step-aunt.
My mother reproved Eric's flippancy. Either she really did see daylight, and most excellent meaning, in the Biosophical Theory, or she concerned herself to make out a case for the defence of Aunt Josephine. She told Eric she was surprised that a man of science should at this time of the day cast ridicule on the doctrine of an essential harmony between "soul states" and the health of the body. For her part, she felt the attraction of this idea of ceasing the little lonely personal fight against overwhelming odds—this putting oneself into direct relation with the Infinite.
Eric stared.
Yes, my mother maintained, there was much to be said for Mrs. Harborough's idea that each individual should learn to think of his life in connection with this underlying force. If, instead of denying God we affirmed Him ... refusing to accept or to believe in evil——
"All very jolly for us," Eric said, "but what about the poor cancerous devils in our hospital? I see us looking in on them and saying: 'Oh, you're all right! Three cheers for harmony. Come out and play golf with the staff.'"
After Eric had gone my mother lay back on the pillow, her shining eyes on Bettina pirouetting noiselessly about the room. I begged Bettina to stop her gyrating.
She explained she was doing the cheque dance. Mercifully there was this antidote—I mean postscript to Aunt Josephine's letter. "Nearer the time" she would send us the money for our tickets. The enclosed £40 was for clothes.
Now the way was clear!
No.
The question still was, Who, this side of London, could be trusted to make our frocks? The seriousness of the consideration brought the cheque dance to an end. We sat and thought.
The precise date of this visit was not yet fixed. Aunt Josephine had asked what time would suit us best.
With one voice, Betty and I cried, "June!"
But we were promptly told (and we agreed) that to suggest June would be too grasping. Aunt Josephine would have other, more important, guests eager to come to her for the Coronation month. So we answered: Any time convenient to her.
Then that admirable Aunt wrote back: "Would next month do?" And would we stay for the Coronation?
In spite of the breathless shortness of the time of preparation, Bettina composed Coronation dances and practised curtseying to the Queen, though she knew quite well that she would only see Her Majesty at a distance driving by in her golden coach.
The one consideration that sobered Bettina was who,who—on this short notice, with all the feminine world crying passionately for frocks—who could be found to make ours? The more plain and simple, the more important was style and cut. Nobody in the country-side was competent for such an undertaking.
Brighton? Very dear, and not first-rate.
Suddenly Bettina clapped her hands.
"The little French dressmaker Hermione told us about."
The very person! Only, wouldn't she be up to the eyes in work? We remembered, too, she was said to be "not strong." She didn't care, as a rule, to work out of London. But she had come to sew for those horrid people Lord Helmstone let the Pond House to the year before. The people turned out to be badly off, and, after doing some damage, they had gone away without paying their rent. A law-suit was pending between them and Lord Helmstone. We had never known them, but we could not help noticing their clothes. They were beautiful. Even my mother said so.
Hermione had played golf once or twice with the boy and girl. One day she had admired openly something the girl was wearing.
"Yes, looks quite Bond Street, doesn't it?" the girl said. "And all done at home by a little dressmaker at four-and-six a day."
Hermione had got the woman's address, specially for us, she said—meaning for Bettina. Hermione was always advising Bettina about her clothes and making the child discontented with what she had.
We had not wanted any "little tame dressmaker" at the time, but we were enchanted now, when Bettina turned up the card inscribed:
"MADAME AURORE,"87, Crutchley Street,"Leicester Square."
"Madame Aurore!" my mother echoed. "No doubt a cockney of the cockneys!"
She was not a cockney. And she was a great surprise.
The morning she came was the morning Eric said good-bye "just for a few days," he dreaming, as little as we, of what those few days were to bring.
And so, ignorant of what I was facing, I was almost happy in spite of the parting, because of what Eric said to me that last Monday morning.
The cart had been ordered to go for Madame Aurore at 9:42. Directly after breakfast my mother and Bettina set about trimming hats—a business in which they scorned my help. I had something particular to finish in the garden. I went on digging up the bare patches on the south bank, sharing the delight of all things growing and blowing and flying under the glorious cloud-piled sky of May. I listened intently, as I worked, to that orchestra of tiny sound underneath the loud birds' singing. The spring, unlike last year's, had been cold and late; many days like this—with crisp air and fitful sunshine. Only here, in the sheltered south-west corner, werethe bees in any number tuning up their fiddles.
I looked up from my work and saw—at that most unusual hour—Eric Annan at the gate! I saw, too, that he looked odd—excited. I dropped the garden-fork. "What is the matter?" I said.
"Matter? What should be the matter?"
I only smiled. It was so like Eric not to be pleased at hearing he had betrayed himself.
"I thought you looked as if—as if something had happened," I said. What I meant was, as if something were about to happen. Only one thing, I thought, could make Eric look like that; make him interrupt his precious morning; one thing, alone, could have grown so great overnight that the heart of man could not conceal it, or contain it, for another hour.
But, even if my hopes were not misleading me, I felt that Eric would not like my having guessed so much. To hide my eyes from him I bent down over my basket. I lifted out tufts of aromatic green, and set them firmly in the loosened soil. I pressed the earth down tight about their roots.
"What are you planting there?" he asked.
"Re-planting the wild thyme," I said. Something had killed it last year.
"Where do you find wild thyme?" he asked.
I told him how far I had to go for it. And when? Before breakfast! He looked astonished.
I did not like to explain that I had got into the habit of waking early to study. And, now that studying was no use, I spent the time in taking delicious walks in the early morning, before other people were awake. I confessed the walks.
"You ought not to have told me," he said.
"Why?"
"Because, for these next days, I can't come too."
I went on planting thyme.
"Promise me, for these next daysyouwon't go either."
"Why?" I asked again.
"Because my thoughts might go wandering."
I nudged the wild thyme, and we both smiled secretly.
"I can't afford, just at this moment, to have anything distracting me." He said this in an anxious, almost appealing, way.
"Very well," I answered. "I won't go early walks for the next—how many days am I to becooped up when the morning is at its best?"
"Oh, not long." Then with that impatience of his, if you were doing other things while he was there: "How much more of that stuff are you going to put in?"
"All there is," I said provokingly. And I did not hurry.
"Why must you have wild thyme there?" he grumbled.
"So as not to disappoint the blue butterflies," I said gravely. "They 'know a bank' and this is it. They've had an understanding with my mother about it for years. If they don't find thyme here they're annoyed. They go on dying out. My mother says a world without blue butterflies would be a poor sort of place."
We talked irrelevancies for a moment more—the passion of the convolvulus moth for petunias, and the other flowers the different sorts of moths and butterflies preferred.
He was surprised to hear that for years my mother had taken all that trouble to please even the ordinary red admirals and spotted footmen and painted ladies. I explained that I was re-planting this thyme only to please my mother."Personally," I had never bothered much about the butterfly-garden, I said, in what he promptly called a superior tone.
I maintained that the pampered creatures were dreadful "slackers" and sybarites—all for colour and sweet scents.
He stood listening a moment to the bees' band playing in the rhododendron concert, and then he defended the butterflies. Butterflies were much misunderstood. "In their way—and a very good way, too—they answer to the call."
"What call?"
"The call to serve the ends of life."
I looked up, surprised, from my fresh thyme patch, for general moralisings were not much in Eric's way. "What are the ends of life?"
"More life." There was a moment's pause. Then he said butterflies were no more "idle" than bees and birds. Besides attending to their more immediate affairs they were pollen-bringers.
It was such solemn talk for butterflies. I told him the two sulphur yellows reeling in the sunshine were laughing at him. "'Ends of life' indeed! They simplylovebright colour and things that smell sweet...."
"Of course they love them!" Then he said something that sank deeper than any single sentence I ever heard: "Hating never created anything; all life comes from lovers."
At the moment that great saying only frightened me. And the strange thing was it seemed to frighten him.
We were very still for a moment. I thought even the little music of the honey bees had slackened. I and all the world waited—holding breath.
Then a gust of wind veered round the corner, and Eric turned up his collar. He asked if I wasn't cold. I was anything but cold. But I had noticed that after his long hours of motionless concentration indoors, Eric was very sensitive to chill. So I put off planting the rest of the thyme, and I took Eric up to the morning-room.
"What is he going to tell me?" I asked myself on the way. And though I asked, I thought I knew.