* * * * *It was always Maud's function in this sad world to attend to the plain matters of business whilst others gave way to a grief that knew no solace, or a joy that spurned formalities. So it was she who left the ship at Naples, called on Roger's old friend, Ted Parsons, the Consul-General, sent telegrams in all the necessary directions, and fulfilled all necessary forms and ceremonies. Whether it was an unusual concession or not, it was at once agreed that the body of Mrs. Brentham, enclosed in a "shell"—they obtained what was necessary from Naples—should be carried on with her grief-distraught husband and her husband's sister to Southampton. There all three of them were landed, and thence they proceeded in a very humdrum way by South-Western and Great-Western railways to Reading, where the two live ones put up at an hotel so commonplace and out of date that it momentarily wiped up sentiment and froze the tears in their tear-glands; while poor Lucy's remains were temporarily lodged in a kind ofChapelle ardenteused by the chief undertaker, who did things in style. No sign of life from Sibyl. Evidently there was no one at home at Engledene. Lucy's parents and Lucy's children were communicated with, and in due course the funeral took place at Aldermaston. Roger even sent word of it—remembering Lucy's message—to Mrs. Baines at Theale; and to the intense surprise of every one in the neighbourhood Mrs. Baines stalked into the church and churchyard, attended the burial, and then strode away to the station, and so back to Theale, refusing hospitality at Church Farm by a simple shake of the gaunt grey head, down the cheeks of which, however, a tear or two had trickled.Lucy came to rest at last in the churchyard of Aldermaston, under the boughs of one of those superb blue cedars of the Park which lean out over the walls of mellow brick. She had so admired these cedars in her dawning sense of beauty when she taught in the neighbouring school; and when she was wont to pace up and down the Mortimer Road considering whether or not she should go out to Africa to marry John Baines.CHAPTER XXIIITHE END OF SIBYLFor three weeks after Lucy's burial, Roger scarcely knew what he did or whom he saw. His boys and girls went back to school and college; Maud busied herself in reconnoitring for a home, some place not too expensive to keep up, where the children might come in school holidays, where Roger might find rest, isolation, the healing power of country life when he was wearied with towns and travel. She designed to acquire for him and her the old Vicarage at Farleigh Wallop. The Vicar who had succeeded their father, instead of being an archæologist, to whom present-day life was a wearisome fact that must obtrude itself as little as possible on his studies, liked to reside where the population was thickest. Of the two villages, therefore, within his cure of souls he chose Cliddesden for his residence as being the more populous, and let the vicarage at Farleigh whenever he could find a tenant. This of course was the old home of the Brenthams and the place where Maud had lived up to the time of her father's death. She had no inquiries to make as to drainage or water. She knew its charms and its weaknesses; and finding it untenanted she soon concluded an agreement with the Vicar to take it on a reasonable rent and with some security of tenure. To live there once more would be for her and Roger—and for Maurice too, and Geoffrey when he chose to come and see them—a pleasant linking-up of past with present.Meantime, Roger returned from three weeks of aimless wanderings on a bicycle or in a motor, and from visits to bankers, tailors, and the Foreign Office in London, to spend a few days with Maurice at Englefield Lodge.The first question he put to his brother was, "Whereon earthis Sibyl?"Maurice: "I didn't like to tell you before, Sibyl is rather under the weather, as Geoffrey would say. Silchester—Clithy, as she always will call him—came of age last year, as you know. Sibyl seemed a bit off colour then, and began really to look somewhere near her age—at last. But she carried off things well. Gave fêtes on all the different properties and attended most of them.... Gave political dinner parties in London to introduce her son to such great pots as she could get to come to them, before he took his seat in the House of Lords. She was present at the Trustees' meetings to give an account of her stewardship. They congratulated her—and me—and you, in retrospect—on the way in which the Estate had been managed during the long minority; and told Master Clithy he was remarkably lucky to have such a mother and such Agents. He took it all with a certain amount of pompous acquiescence.... He has grown into an awful prig, you will find, and thinks a tremendous lot of himself. Whether I shall stay on with him I hardly know. I've saved a bit, haven't spent any of my share in Dad's money, and I could always go back to the Bar. P'raps if you returned to Africa I'd go with you if you'd let me? I'm rather fed up with England and office work...."However, about Sib.... She came down here last summer anddidn'thave a house party. Lived quite alone with your kids. They've come to look upon Engledene as quite their home. Of course, when she couldn't put 'em up I had them here. Well, as I say, she seemed 'under the weather.' Once or twice when I rather bounced in on Estate business, I thought she'd been crying. Wasn't my business to ask what for. She wasn't an easy person to question and could lay you out with her tongue if you seemed to be meddling with what didn't concern you. Then all at once last October I had a note from her to say that she had gone into a nursing home to have an operation, that I wasn't to fuss about it or come to inquire, that if she was away at Christmas time your children were to come here from school just the same and I was to represent her as host...."Roger: "What was the operation for? All this is news to me."Maurice: "So I guessed. She made me promise not to write and tell you or Lucy ... said it would be all over, long before you were back, and turn out to be a fuss about nothing. As to what itwas, why I suppose she had reached a certain stage in life when most women have complications and ten per cent. of 'em are operated on—glands, cysts, tumours...."The operation took place—she was jolly careful to keep it out of the papers—I doubt if even Clithy knew anything till it was well over. He was travelling in Russia to study the Russian theatres and their arrangements about scenery.... After she recovered the doctors sent her to Aix and then to St. Tropez on the Riviera.... Clithy joined her there. I sent her the telegram about ... about ... Lucy's death. I dare say you noticed the perfectly magnificent wreaths they both sent for the funeral. Clithy's came down from some place in Regent Street and had a card on it 'To my dear Aunt Lucy.' ... Only human touch about him ... awfully fond of your wife ... always said he liked her much more than his mother.... But he needn't have said it so often, though Sibyl only used to laugh. Her wreath was made here from the very best things we had got in the hot-houses ... only because Sibyl wrote that Lucy so loved to walk in these houses and fancy she was back in Africa.... However, I had a letter from her three days ago...." (Takes it out and reads: "Tell Roger not to dream of coming out here, because I am just going away. I am writing him in a few days.") "There! Now she'll soon tell you everything about herself....""What aboutyou? Have you made any plans as yet?"Roger: "Lucy's death has cut my life in two; I shall have to alter all the programme we used, to plan out together, she and I and Maud. Of course there are the children to think about.... Where are the matches? I'll light a pipe and tell you my ideas...." (A silence ... puffs ...) ... "I've not done badly out of this Happy Valley Concession. I've sold my shares in it—all but five hundred, keptthemjust to retain an interest, don't you know, get the Company's reports from time to time—I've sold my shares at two pounds a share to the Schräders' group. That brings me in close upon £75,000. I haven't saved much besides ... purposely lived well out there and entertained a good deal, and gave ... Lucy ... and Maud all they wanted, and had to pay for the little 'uns' schooling at home. However, there I am at this moment with about £75,000 at my bank on deposit and twelve hundred or so outstanding to my current account.... I'm going first of all to give ten thousand poundsdownto Maud. I consider she hasearnedit."And then I must make a new will ... and I want to ask you, old chap, to be one of the executors. Will you? And p'raps Geoff the other. After all, it isn't Geoff we dislike, it's that confounded, pious doe-rabbit of a wife of his. However...."Well then, about my plans. I suppose I ought to stay at home at Farleigh—I shall look out for a decent flat in London—and get to know my children. Somehow it'sthatI can't take to. They have grown up so outside all my thoughts and schemes and interests. They don't care a hang about Africa. John has been making a young fool of himself at Sandhurst ... been betting and borrowing and getting into debt. I'm glad his mother didn't know.... Well, I shall square up all that, but I shall insist on his going in for the Indian Army—Staff Corps—same as I did.... A man if he's got ability couldn't have a better education.... He's a good-looking boy, John—I expect he thinks me an old fogey from the backwoods.... India's the school for him. And as to Ambrose, he must go to Cambridge, when he leaves Harrow, and I shall try and get him a nomination for the Consular Service.... That's the other good school for a British citizen. You'll think me jolly conceited, just because those are the two careersI'vefollowed. But..." (smokes and puffs)."Well then, there are the two girls. Fat Maud—she was furious because I revived the old name—says long ago 'Aunt Sibyl' agreed it should be compromised by her being called Fatima.... Fatima, I gather, is eighteen, and young Sibyl is fourteen.... For the present Maud will look after them, and I shall have 'em up to London every now and then for a few weeks. In course of time I suppose they'll want to be presented. Dare say old Sibyl will do that, or if she's away, Lady Dewburn. By the bye,shewrote me an awfully sweet letter about Lucy..." (ponders and smokes)."In due time the girls'll marry, and if they pick up the right kind of husband I shall give 'em each a portion of my ill-gotten wealth. There! That's what I've planned out, and I dare say it 'ud ha' been quite different if my darling Luce had lived. I should have been reconciled then to settling down at home. As it is—I shall travel a bit—Go to Germany and try to find out what the Germans are up to.... Go back to Africa p'raps ...Idon't know...."A few days after this conversation, Roger received a letter from Sibyl:Villa les Pins,Grimaud, près St. Tropez,Var,June 12, 1909.DEAR ROGER,—Maurice will have given you all the news there is about me, except what I am going to add in this letter.I am not going to attempt any sympathy at present over your loss. Maud's telegram from Naples was forwarded on to me here and it gave me a horrid turn. I often used to tease Lucy: I am cat-scratchy to every one, I fear. Why?Idon't know: something to do with my internal organs, I dare say. But I became sincerely fond of her, after being perfectly horrid to her when we first met. She seemed to grow on one. I should have liked her always to stay at Englefield.Heigh ho! I am very much inclined to whimper about myself. I have, been through aghastlytime.... Some day, if I live, I will tell you. Meantime, though I amachingto see you I am going to postpone that happiness, and instead am going round the world with Vicky Masham.The doctors seem to think—I dare say it is only because they have nothing else to suggest—that if I went on a long sea voyage for about a year—I mean, kept constantly travelling on the sea—I should get quite strong again. Perhaps I shall. I want to give myself every chance—it seemsso stupidto die before you're seventy. Also it occurred to me the other day that for a woman to have raved for twenty years about the British Empire and yet never to have seen any part of it outside Great Britain, except Cape Town and Stellenbosch, and once when we went to Jersey from Dinant—was rather silly. So Vicky and I are starting from Marseilles next Sunday in a P. and O., bound for Ceylon, and after that Japan. Not that Japan is British—I believe—but of course we aren't going to be pedantic. Then I suppose we shall "do" Australia and New Zealand—only I'm afraid New Zealand is rather muttony, isn't it? Excessively worthy and all that, but lives chiefly on mutton and stewed tea. However, there are geysers and pink terraces, if you look for them. Then there will be a lovely cruise across the Pacific, and beach-combers and impossibly large oysters that would dine a family of six, and brown people with no morals and beautiful sinuous forms, and finally San Francisco and California. After that—however, sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. Vicky or I will bombard you with picture post-cards recording our progress, and when—and when I'mquitewell and look less like a doomed woman—I will let you know, and, dearest Roger, we will pass the rest of our lives together, or at least not far away from one another. Your children shall be the children of my old age....Clithy is here, but as soon as I leave for Marseilles he is off again to Russia. He has promised me to look you up when he returns. You will find him now definitely fixed as to appearance. People of his stamp are like that. Between nineteen and twenty-one, they quite quickly assume the figure, face, style by which they are ever after going to be known. He will remind you most of Lord R——, though I assure you there is no innuendo in this. I dare say the L——'s are distant cousins of the Mallards. But Clithy is essentially the aristocratic young peer who may be a fount of wisdom or a hollow fraud with nothing inside an irreproachable exterior. He is a mystery to me. And I am of little interest to him. The only woman I ever heard him mention with anything like a kind look in his eyes was Lucy. The Anne of Denmark nose is still there, undulating and with a bump in the middle; but the rest of the face has grown up more and his hair is a nice dark chestnut brown.—Well, you will see him later, so why waste time in describing him?As to Vicky Masham.... Of course you want to know why, etc.Well: Vicky, at the death of her patron saint, Victoria the Good, was left with little more than her pension of £500 a year. She ought to have had ten thousand pounds of her own, but—I dare say you saw the scandal in the papers? She and her sisters gave up much of their means to save their shockingly bad brother from going to prison over some swindle that ... Again why waste words? Maurice could tell you all about it. Well, when I came to the South of France after Aix, last December, I wasdreadfullyhipped, fighting a certain Terror—a muchworseterror than the one you used to write to me about who lived in a Red Crater (rather a distinguished address: "The Red Crater, Iraku"), and who went to Hell by the direct route. I came to Monte Carlo amongst other places and thought if I kept on a veil and wore blue glasses no one would recognize me. In the Rooms I saw Victoria Masham, looking very melancholy—and oh, so old—and quite alone. My heart was touched, I spoke to her and we went to sit on the terrace. I told her my troubles and she told me hers. Result: I struck a bargain. She is to live with me till we have our first quarrel; I am to board her, lodge her, wash her, pay all possible expenses, and give her a little pocket money, over and above. And d'you know, I think it's going to be quite a success! We haven't had a quarrel yet! I've had her teeth beautifully done by an American dentist at Cannes, so my nickname only applies a little—he was too clever not to give the new set a soupçon of horsiness. And I've made her buy a quite wonderful "transformation"—chez Nicole—reddish-brown, streaked with grey.—You'd never guess. She has plumped out a good deal, for although I've a wretched appetite myself I keep a good table, and upon my word when we get to the Colonies I shouldn't wonder if she had shoals of proposals. She never talks about anything but Queen Victoria, but I find that—somehow—awfully soothing—takes me back to the happy old time when I was a care-free girl, proud of my secret engagement to you.* * * * *DearRoger. I have lostallmy good looks. That's why I don't want you to see me till I recover them—a little. Meantime, dearest of friends and cousins, if you believe inAnythingwith a power to save—alas!Idon't—pray to it to save me from this terror that hangs over me—especially in the silent watches of the night—and bring me back safe from my world-tour, with at least another ten years of life before me.Whilst I am away, remember Engledene is entirely at your children's disposal. I have written to the head gardener to see that fresh flowers are sent every now and again to Lucy's grave. You will tell him when? Lucy was areal good sortand I think she came to understand me and forgive....Ever yours,SIBYL.Roger spent the remainder of 1909 as he had planned: looking after his boys and girls to some extent, trying to get interested in his children. The girls bored him with their chatter of surface things: school quarrels and rivalries, school friendships, school mistresses; their individual tastes in chocolate creams and caramels; their school sports; the actors whom they adored—at a distance—and whose photographs they collected; their disdain for those silly asses the Suffragettes—theythemselves wouldneverwant a vote! The two boys were not much less shallow with their Sandhurst and school-boy slang—"top-hole, sir," "ripping," "ruddy," "rotters," "we rotted 'em a bit"—their school-boy games of such vast importance; their dislike of anything sincere, original, warm-hearted; their rash criticisms of great writers, frantic admiration for great sportsmen, religious reverence for cut and colour, style and form; enthusiasm in general for things that did not matter and contempt for things that did.Was he like that at their age? Had Sibyl the elder at sixteen been such a goose as Sibyl the younger? Was it the hollow falsity of a classical education, the dreary sham of School Christianity which had made his boys so cynical, so coarse in their tastes? His children were good to look at, handsome, healthy, physically well-bred. But weren't they—weren't their contemporaries a bit heartless? These in particular had forgotten their mother completely. Yet surely they might have remembered Lucy's unceasing tenderness and the many sacrifices of health and convenience she had made for them?In the press of that day and in the books and plays most in vogue you were supposed to make everything give way to the pleasures, needs, caprices, expectations of the young, of the coming generation. But why had no author the courage to point out the lack of interest which youth under twenty-one possessed for most persons of matured mind? Girls of eighteen wrote novels entirely without experience and direct observation of life, merely based on their wishy-washy recollections of books written by "grown-ups"; boys of eighteen published sardonic poems and green-cheese essays for which they ought to have been birched, not boomed. How infinitely preferable to Roger, when he put his secret thoughts into words, was the society of middle-aged friends and relations of his own period in life, who really had brain convolutions moulded by sad and joyous, sharp and unusual experience.Aunt Maud said there was something evidently very wrong with his liver, and his sons and daughters in an interchange of eye-glances gave a tacit assent. They had felt (though they had never dared to say so in his hearing) a tiny bit ashamed of their ineffective mother. Wasn't it ratherinfra dig.to have been a school-teacher and a missionary? But of their father they all stood in awe, because he was considered in his time a handsome man, was now of distinguished appearance, and was respected in the best circles as an explorer, a big-game shot, a naturalist, and a man who had made some part of Africa pay. But if he stooped to their level and attempted to justify this eminence by talking technically on African subjects or on home problems they soon showed they thought him a bore.Aunt Sibyl they spoke of warmly, and wailed over the illness which kept her absent from their circle. She was their ideal of a modern great lady. Her cynical speeches appealed to their own lack of convictions; there was nothing "soppy" about Aunt Sibyl.So Roger escaped whenever he could from his home circle and travelled in Germany, France, Holland, Italy, in order to study the game of foreign politics, find out why in most people's light-hearted opinion a great war was "inevitable" as a solution of conflicting ambitions, and whether it might not be possible to avert it completely if only Britain, Germany, the United States and France could form a League for the maintenance of peace.The Schräders made much of him in Germany. Rather timidly they stood up against Potsdam, tried to create an opinion in the South German States—their Alsatian origin carried them in that direction—favourable to a Naval and Colonial understanding with Britain. At their instigation Roger gave a series of addresses in western and southern Germany in 1910 which were deemed a great success, though they were rather frowned on in Berlin. He promised to renew his visit and his lectures in the autumn of 1911.Meanwhile, Sibyl had returned to London in the early autumn of 1910. It was of course the dead season, but it gradually dawned on Society that she intended to entertain no more. She was probably going to write a book about the British Empire; she had turned quite serious, others said, and was going in for religion. She had evidently lost her health and—no doubt—her appearance.Roger had hastened to greet her in the much shut-up house in Carlton House Terrace. Here she sat, generally with her back to the light. He was prepared to find her greatly altered. What struck him most was the pathetic thinness of face and hands, and the shapelessness of the figure. The new fashions in dress—straight up and down, no waist, one of the greatest revolutions of our age—helped her here, but at the expense of womanly charm. For Roger had the old-fashioned man-mind which has for some twenty thousand years—did it not begin in Aurignacian times?—admired the incurve below the well-furnished female bust and the outcurve from waist to hip."I'm glad you came so promptly," said Sibyl, "because I'm turning out of this gloomy mansion and surrendering it to Clithy. I simply can't afford to keep it upandEngledene too, and although he says of course he will pay for everything and I can have my own suite of rooms, I somehow fancy a cosy little flat which I could share with Maud, or Vicky Masham when she comes back from the States.... Yes, I left her at Washington, going to stay at the White House. I came back alone from there, but I had sulky Sophie to look after me. One thing that makes me think, Roger, that I amreallyill, really doomed, is that Sophie no longer gives me notice whenever any whim of mine displeases her. I am sure she is saying to herself now, 'The poor old gal won't be with us much longer: better hang on with her and then she may leave me something.' But about Vicky, for it really is a good story.... Only first I'm going to—or you might—ring for tea. Of course you'll stay? You couldn't in decency refuse.—Do you know, we haven't set eyes on one another for ... for ...three years? We are both swallowing pungent things we might say about one another's appearance, and both resolving to bite our tongues off rather than say them." ... (To servant: "Tea please; and ask Miss Mills to make the sandwiches,mysandwiches, I mean.") ... "I have to take these frame-foods in the form of sandwiches, and Sophie has learnt the art of making them so seductive that I get them down without any difficulty...."About Vicky.—Do draw up your chair; you needn't be so frigid with a moribund friend. Directly it became known in California that Vicky had been a maid of honour to the late Queen Victoria, my dear, the Americans nearly killed us with kindness! Our roles were reversed.Shewas the lady of distinction andIwas her travelling companion. You know the Americans, especially in the west and east, have acultefor Queen Victoria, and Vicky's stories of her home life held them spell-bound. She felt in her position it wouldn't be right tolecture publiclyon her late mistress, but the difficulty was got over.—D'you still drink tea without sugar? I'm told Ioughtto take it—got over by drawing-room meetings, tickets subscribed for, and no charge at the door, a sumptuous tea—supposed to be modelled on the kind of tea the Queen took at Osborne—served in the middle of Vicky's talk. She refused to take any direct payment, so they sent herthumpingcheques for her travelling expenses. And now she's going to put her talks on Queen Victoria as Mother, Wife and Queen into a book.—One way and another, she'll make five or six thousand pounds out of the whole business. And I'mjollyglad. It'll be some provision for her real old age, after I'm gone—for I shan't have much to leave, and most of that I must give to my sisters in the Colonies and to your Sibyl, and some of my servants...."Now: you've gotendlessthings to tellme. Indeed I really can't see why we should be separated, now, except when we are put to bed. You must be a mental wreck, and I am a physical one.... I got frightfully tired in the States—it spoilt much of the good I derived from the long steamer voyages.... We are simply two imprisoned souls in very battered cages. All the gilding is off mine."Roger saw as much of Lady Silchester as he could during the last months of 1910. He and Maud assisted her to find just the right sort of flat, where she would have no household worries, where, in fact, she need only keep Sophie to look after her. They all spent a reasonably merry Christmas at Engledene, where Lord Silchester joined them, and where Fatima—Maud junior—expressed and perhaps felt such an intense interest in his Keltic operas and reforms in stage scenery that a glint of the match-maker's eagerness came into Sibyl's tired eyes; she pressed Roger's hand and murmured, "Wouldn'tit betoodelightful...?"During the first half of 1911 the Intelligence Division of the War Office discovered Major Brentham as a really great authority on African geography and African campaigns, and he worked there over maps, and gave them in addition much other information. As some return he was gazetted Colonel, and again there was talk of utilizing such an administrative capacity in our own dominions.In June, 1911, Sibyl's physician and surgeon were not altogether satisfied as to her progress towards recovery, and suggested she might derive great benefit from the waters of Villette, a thermal station in the east of France near the Vosges. So she said to Roger: "You lookquite as ill as Ifeel. It's malaria. You never quite got rid of that blackwater fever. Come to Villette later on. Maud and the girls and Clithy could join us too. I'll have a month first of all, alone except for Vicky. I'll give the closest attention to the cure, and then perhaps when you arrive I may be able to sit up and take notice and even do a little motoring...."Accordingly the scene of this dwindling story changes in Villette-ès-Vosges, aVille d'eauxin eastern France, in the month of August and September, 1911. Germany has spoilt the summer for all statesmen, soldiers and sailors by challenging the French protectorate of Morocco at Agadir. It is supposed by the middle of August, after Mr. Lloyd George's speech in the City, and after a succession of "kraches" in German banking firms, that the Kaiser's Government is hesitating to go the full length of War: but Germany is growling horribly because she is realizing that her financial arrangements for a war of great dimensions are imperfect, and that she is unprepared with aircraft to cope with the French aeroplanes.So she is consenting topourparlersfor the purpose of ascertaining the terms on which she may be bought off, persuaded to leave Agadir, and withdraw a portion of the army she is crowding into Alsace-Lorraine.Villette-ès-Vosges is well suited for the work of the old diplomacy. It is, to begin with, aVille d'eaux; and in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, statesmen who were negotiating treaties and alliances or resolving problems which threatened war, usually met at some gay place near their frontiers where they could, under the guise of "taking the waters," carry on their conversations with one another and draft protocols of conspiracy or of agreement. Consequently, in late August and early September, 1911, Villette was unusually thronged: not only by its accustomed clientèle of middle-aged invalids trying to combat all manner of diseases for which its springs were efficacious, but also by theirdemoiselles-à-marier, their gawky boys and bread-and-butter, pigtailed girls, playing tennis, croquet, and crowding into the cinemas while their parents sip and bathe and undergomassage sous l'eau; by wicked gamblers, obvious adventurers, demure cocottes (needing a month's repose and a reduction of their figures); and by European statesmen trying to look like tourists. The German diplomatists have dressed and hatted themselves to resemble the Frenchman of caricature; the French ministers and ex-ministers are out-doing the average English gentleman in bluff "sports" costumes; and there are Russians and Austrians too quaint for words,à pouffer de rire, as Sibyl says; with such weeping whiskers, such forked beards, such frock-coats in the early morning and such tall hats as you never saw, except in pictures of Society in Paris under the Second Empire.These diplomatists foregather in the theatrically beautiful park with its swan-pools, its canalized river, its groves and bosquets, pavilions, tea-houses, summer-houses, chalets, kiosques of newspapers and salacious novels, open-air orchestras, croquet-lawns, and tennis-courts. Or if the problem is very grave, and excited speech should not be audible nor gesticulations visible to prowling journalists, they stroll away to the race-course, to the golf links.It is the glorious summer of 1911, when there was little rain between the beginning of June and the end of September. Nevertheless, if you should weary of the heat or if there should be a sudden shower you have a long cool arcade of tempting shops, a Grand Guignol, and the necessary retreats—on a large scale—for those who are summarily affected by the cathartic action of the waters, especially that very potentSource Salée, which is never mentioned without respect, except where it is the foundation of Rabelaisian stories. The medicinal springs are housed in temples of great architectural beauty. The town of pleasure, with its eight or nine hotels, rises in terraces that survey the park—not long ago a forest in which wolves roamed in winter time. New Villette contains a theatre, aClub des Étrangerswith gambling rooms, aSalle de lecture, a Concert Hall, anÉglise Anglicane, and a Catholic church, a post-office, doctors' houses and laboratories, and the necessaryusinesandgarages. A mile away is the real Villette, a common-place Lorraine town of purely agricultural interests, turning its back, so to speak, on the adjoining health resort which has made its name famous.In the arcade is a large black notice-board, whereon besides local notices are pinned theHavastelegrams. Hither, during one critical week, comes a throng of anxious readers.Is it to be peace or War? Will Germany be satisfied with French Congo and give up Morocco? Should we pack to-night and leave before Mother has completed her cure,in casemobilization upsets the trains? Will my husband be called up?Whatwill happen to my boy?Sibyl, lying on her comfortably-sloped invalid chair in the verandah of the Pavilion des Déjeuners, opines the Germans must beperfect beaststo upset every one like this, and all over some place on the Sahara coast where there are just a few verminous Moors. She is not in favour of anarchism, but she reallydoeswish some one would assassinate the Kaiser....Roger looks grave and essays the hopeless task of defending Germany. "It is all this mania for 'Empires across the Seas.' Germany gets mad when our Empire, the French Empire, the Russian Empire each year get bigger, while she is prevented everywhere from expanding——, etc., etc."Victoria Mashamhazards the conjecture: "If onlythe dear Queen were alive! She would soon...."Sibylinterrupts: "My dear Vicky, you must look facts in the face. Queen Victoria would now be 92. She would not be of much use at that age ... See! There is obviously our Foreign Minister ... disguised with smoked glasses, but you can't mistake his nose. I think he'ssogood-looking.... And there is young Hawk of the F.O. He's just been sent to Brussels. I hear the Villierses are expected to-morrow. That man in the straw hat and the cricketing flannels is Monsieur Viviani, and the handsome old lion with the grey mane is Léon Bourgeois. The tight-trousered man you'd take for a 'booky' is Count Palastro—and there's no mistaking that stuffed figure of the last century, in a stove-pipe hat, a buttoned-up frock-coat, and pointed whiskers: that's Polánoff of the Russian Foreign Office. We saw him when we were in Japan.... 'Whithersoever the carcass is, there are the eagles gathered together.'"Roger: "I suppose the carcass is the unhappy peoples of Europe?"Sibyl: "I suppose so. Vicky, dear. Go and have breakfast at the hotel this morning. D'you mind? Maud has taken off the two girls to some violent sports' competition, and Clithy has motored over to Domrémy." (To Roger): "He is studying local colour for the libretto of an opera on Joan of Arc. His greatclou—if he can only bring it off—is the last scene. Joan of Arc, while bound to the stake and encircled with flames, sings a scena of the fireworks kind. Clithy says it would be natural under the circumstances. He thinks if they can devise some kind of asbestos shift for the prima donna and the usual chemical flames that don't burn much it could be arranged...." (To Vicky): "I want Roger all to myself this morning. We are going to have our breakfast together, here, in case events call him to sterner duties...." (Vicky acquiesces with a good grace—in her new transformation to which alittlemore grey has been added, she looks surprisingly well, and younger than Sibyl, though she is ten years older).A pause. The waiter lays the table between them for Roger's déjeuner à la fourchette. He is accustomed to preparing Sibyl's special dietary and arranges for that also. He is a pleasant-faced man, deeply deploring "le peu de progrès que fait M'ame la Baronne...."Sibyl: "What a scene for a dying woman to be looking at!"Roger: "Sibyl!Don'tbe so lugubrious...."Sibyl: "Why? Do you suppose I don't pretty well know my own condition? I am dying slowly of cancer, what the doctors call 'un lent dépérissement.' I expect this is what Mother died of later in life. The doctors would be ready enough to operate again if there was any chance.... As it is, they know it is more merciful to let me linger out my few remaining weeks or months than submit me to the shock of an operation which might kill me at once. Imaylive to October, Dr. Périgord thinks. Or he puts it more pleasantly: 'Vers le mois d'Octobre nous saurons oui ou non, si la guérison de M'ame la Baronne s'effectuera. Les eaux de Villette opèrent parfois des miracles: espérons toujours.' ... And so on.... I don't suffer much pain—as yet. When it comes on they'll put me under morphia. I shall stay here till this political crisis is over or the fine weather begins to break. Then Clithy will motor me to Calais and from Dover to Engledene. Engledene will be the best place to die at. And, of course,remember, I want to be buried at Aldermaston, near Lucy—and near where you'll be laid some day—unless you marry again, which I should hardly think you'll do. I shall have a perfect right to occupy a small space in Aldermaston churchyard, because I'm a parishioner. I bought the farm that father so ridiculously mismanaged and that you made so prosperous. I've left it in my will to my brother Gerry, as some compensation for having taken no notice of him since I got married.... But, as I said before,whata scene! Not even your beloved Happy Valley could better those flowers in the urns and vases and borders and parterres—those scarlet geraniums, scarlet cannas, scarlet salvias, and scarlety-crimson Lobelia cardinalis. We grow them at Engledene, but they're nothing like these.Andthe heliotrope, and ageratum ... and those blue salvias and orange calceolarias. I know it's rather vulgar, but the whole effect is superbly staged; don't you think so?...."And the women's dresses. Many of them, of course, are mannequins, just showing off for the Paris shops. And then to see pass by all the celebrated if over-rated people you've heard so much about, just as though they were well-made-up supers on the stage. And the music of those alternate orchestras... and such African sunlight ... and ...younext to me...."Roger: "Look here, if you talk so much I shan't wonder you get weaker instead of stronger. Eat up your breakfast and drink your milk."Sibyl: "I will. But Imusttalk to you. I shall soon be silenced for ever...."Roger: "So shallI, when my time comes. So will every one. You don't give yourself a chance, talking in this morbid way. The doctors are often wrong. Remember the case of Lady Waterford?"Sibyl: "Blanchie?"Roger: "Yes.... A good soaking in Villette water may get rid of all your trouble and some day you may be weeping over me as I lie dying of Bright's disease."Sibyl(not paying much attention): "Roger! Do you think there is going to be War?"Roger: "Not this time. Look there! D'you see thosegardes champêtresin that green uniform?"Sibyl: "That nice-looking man, with the blond moustaches?"Roger: "Yes, and that ugly-looking fellow with the red nose. Well: a week ago they mysteriously vanished, and I asked what had become of them. I was told they had joined up ... the Reserve, you know. Now they're back again.Thatshows the Germans and French have come to terms. The War ispartie remise—this year—but it's certain to come, unless Germany can be squared. Remains to be seen what she wants and what we can afford to give...."A pause. Sibyl eats a little food and sips her milk. Roger finishes his breakfast and lights a cigarette.Sibyl: "Do you think there can beanysurvival after death?"Roger: "How canItell? Who knowsanythingabout it? Not even Edison or Marconi. And they come nearest..."Sibyl: "I mean, of course, our minds, our intelligence, our love. Our poor diseased bodies simply dissolve and are redistributed and worked up again. But thepersonalitywe have created in our brains?"... (takes a cigarette from Roger and smokes it). "Talking of personality, isn't itextraordinaryhowthatcan be affected through our stomachs; chemically, so to speak? You saw that woman in the dark green dress, who waved to me just now? Recognize her?" (Roger shakes his head)... "Thatis Cecilia Bosworth, the Marchioness of Bosworth, quite the proudest woman in the Three kingdoms—enough in herself to provoke a middle-class revolution. Her husband's remote ancestor was a by-blow of the Plantagenets, a natural son of 'false fleeting Clarence.' He went over to that usurper—I've always spoken up for Richard the Third—thatusurper, Henry the Seventh, at the battle of Bosworth, and so was created Earl of Bosworth, and afterwards Elizabeth made his grandson a marquis. Well, even you, as an African hermit,musthave heard of that woman's insolence in Society? She even mocked at the Royal Family and said her husband—a perfect oaf—was more Plantadge than they were and the rightful king.... She wanted Prince Eddy to marry her daughter and make things come right." (A pause ... smokes)..."Well, when she came here six weeks ago, nobody was good enough to mix with her; she went round blighting us all. My doctor said it was all due to liver and he'd soon cure her. He put her on toLa Source Salée—and a slice of melon afterwards. And,my dear, she went throughagonies, I believe. I used to hear hershriekingas she passed along the corridor...."But it's cured her. See what a pleasant nod she gave me just now? And there she is, talking to those very pretty girls—and their father's only a Leeds manufacturer."Well, how do you workthatproblem out?"Roger: "Give it up! ... But by the look in your eyes, I should sayyou'vegot the beginning of a temperature. Let me wheel you back to the Hotel and call for Sophie. Then if you are good and obedient and get an after-breakfast nap, I will come at three and take you and Vicky out for a very gentle motor drive...."Sibyl submits. The waiter assists with the chair till it is out of the intricacies of the approach to the Breakfast Pavilion. Roger draws it through the gay throng. The church bells of all denominations are clanging in carillons, either because it is Sunday or because Peace—this time—has been definitely assured by an exchange of signatures. A few people raise their hats or wave hands to Sibyl, though she is semi-disguised in smoked glasses and a diaphanous veil; and numerous men nod to Colonel Brentham: who, panting, draws the wheeled chair up to the perron of the hotel.Here there is a pause while Sophie is sent for. Then the disentanglement of the sick woman from the chair and from shawls, and her slow walk, supported by Roger and her maid, to the ground floor rooms where a white-capped nurse receives her.
* * * * *
It was always Maud's function in this sad world to attend to the plain matters of business whilst others gave way to a grief that knew no solace, or a joy that spurned formalities. So it was she who left the ship at Naples, called on Roger's old friend, Ted Parsons, the Consul-General, sent telegrams in all the necessary directions, and fulfilled all necessary forms and ceremonies. Whether it was an unusual concession or not, it was at once agreed that the body of Mrs. Brentham, enclosed in a "shell"—they obtained what was necessary from Naples—should be carried on with her grief-distraught husband and her husband's sister to Southampton. There all three of them were landed, and thence they proceeded in a very humdrum way by South-Western and Great-Western railways to Reading, where the two live ones put up at an hotel so commonplace and out of date that it momentarily wiped up sentiment and froze the tears in their tear-glands; while poor Lucy's remains were temporarily lodged in a kind ofChapelle ardenteused by the chief undertaker, who did things in style. No sign of life from Sibyl. Evidently there was no one at home at Engledene. Lucy's parents and Lucy's children were communicated with, and in due course the funeral took place at Aldermaston. Roger even sent word of it—remembering Lucy's message—to Mrs. Baines at Theale; and to the intense surprise of every one in the neighbourhood Mrs. Baines stalked into the church and churchyard, attended the burial, and then strode away to the station, and so back to Theale, refusing hospitality at Church Farm by a simple shake of the gaunt grey head, down the cheeks of which, however, a tear or two had trickled.
Lucy came to rest at last in the churchyard of Aldermaston, under the boughs of one of those superb blue cedars of the Park which lean out over the walls of mellow brick. She had so admired these cedars in her dawning sense of beauty when she taught in the neighbouring school; and when she was wont to pace up and down the Mortimer Road considering whether or not she should go out to Africa to marry John Baines.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE END OF SIBYL
For three weeks after Lucy's burial, Roger scarcely knew what he did or whom he saw. His boys and girls went back to school and college; Maud busied herself in reconnoitring for a home, some place not too expensive to keep up, where the children might come in school holidays, where Roger might find rest, isolation, the healing power of country life when he was wearied with towns and travel. She designed to acquire for him and her the old Vicarage at Farleigh Wallop. The Vicar who had succeeded their father, instead of being an archæologist, to whom present-day life was a wearisome fact that must obtrude itself as little as possible on his studies, liked to reside where the population was thickest. Of the two villages, therefore, within his cure of souls he chose Cliddesden for his residence as being the more populous, and let the vicarage at Farleigh whenever he could find a tenant. This of course was the old home of the Brenthams and the place where Maud had lived up to the time of her father's death. She had no inquiries to make as to drainage or water. She knew its charms and its weaknesses; and finding it untenanted she soon concluded an agreement with the Vicar to take it on a reasonable rent and with some security of tenure. To live there once more would be for her and Roger—and for Maurice too, and Geoffrey when he chose to come and see them—a pleasant linking-up of past with present.
Meantime, Roger returned from three weeks of aimless wanderings on a bicycle or in a motor, and from visits to bankers, tailors, and the Foreign Office in London, to spend a few days with Maurice at Englefield Lodge.
The first question he put to his brother was, "Whereon earthis Sibyl?"
Maurice: "I didn't like to tell you before, Sibyl is rather under the weather, as Geoffrey would say. Silchester—Clithy, as she always will call him—came of age last year, as you know. Sibyl seemed a bit off colour then, and began really to look somewhere near her age—at last. But she carried off things well. Gave fêtes on all the different properties and attended most of them.... Gave political dinner parties in London to introduce her son to such great pots as she could get to come to them, before he took his seat in the House of Lords. She was present at the Trustees' meetings to give an account of her stewardship. They congratulated her—and me—and you, in retrospect—on the way in which the Estate had been managed during the long minority; and told Master Clithy he was remarkably lucky to have such a mother and such Agents. He took it all with a certain amount of pompous acquiescence.... He has grown into an awful prig, you will find, and thinks a tremendous lot of himself. Whether I shall stay on with him I hardly know. I've saved a bit, haven't spent any of my share in Dad's money, and I could always go back to the Bar. P'raps if you returned to Africa I'd go with you if you'd let me? I'm rather fed up with England and office work....
"However, about Sib.... She came down here last summer anddidn'thave a house party. Lived quite alone with your kids. They've come to look upon Engledene as quite their home. Of course, when she couldn't put 'em up I had them here. Well, as I say, she seemed 'under the weather.' Once or twice when I rather bounced in on Estate business, I thought she'd been crying. Wasn't my business to ask what for. She wasn't an easy person to question and could lay you out with her tongue if you seemed to be meddling with what didn't concern you. Then all at once last October I had a note from her to say that she had gone into a nursing home to have an operation, that I wasn't to fuss about it or come to inquire, that if she was away at Christmas time your children were to come here from school just the same and I was to represent her as host...."
Roger: "What was the operation for? All this is news to me."
Maurice: "So I guessed. She made me promise not to write and tell you or Lucy ... said it would be all over, long before you were back, and turn out to be a fuss about nothing. As to what itwas, why I suppose she had reached a certain stage in life when most women have complications and ten per cent. of 'em are operated on—glands, cysts, tumours....
"The operation took place—she was jolly careful to keep it out of the papers—I doubt if even Clithy knew anything till it was well over. He was travelling in Russia to study the Russian theatres and their arrangements about scenery.... After she recovered the doctors sent her to Aix and then to St. Tropez on the Riviera.... Clithy joined her there. I sent her the telegram about ... about ... Lucy's death. I dare say you noticed the perfectly magnificent wreaths they both sent for the funeral. Clithy's came down from some place in Regent Street and had a card on it 'To my dear Aunt Lucy.' ... Only human touch about him ... awfully fond of your wife ... always said he liked her much more than his mother.... But he needn't have said it so often, though Sibyl only used to laugh. Her wreath was made here from the very best things we had got in the hot-houses ... only because Sibyl wrote that Lucy so loved to walk in these houses and fancy she was back in Africa.... However, I had a letter from her three days ago...." (Takes it out and reads: "Tell Roger not to dream of coming out here, because I am just going away. I am writing him in a few days.") "There! Now she'll soon tell you everything about herself...."
"What aboutyou? Have you made any plans as yet?"
Roger: "Lucy's death has cut my life in two; I shall have to alter all the programme we used, to plan out together, she and I and Maud. Of course there are the children to think about.... Where are the matches? I'll light a pipe and tell you my ideas...." (A silence ... puffs ...) ... "I've not done badly out of this Happy Valley Concession. I've sold my shares in it—all but five hundred, keptthemjust to retain an interest, don't you know, get the Company's reports from time to time—I've sold my shares at two pounds a share to the Schräders' group. That brings me in close upon £75,000. I haven't saved much besides ... purposely lived well out there and entertained a good deal, and gave ... Lucy ... and Maud all they wanted, and had to pay for the little 'uns' schooling at home. However, there I am at this moment with about £75,000 at my bank on deposit and twelve hundred or so outstanding to my current account.... I'm going first of all to give ten thousand poundsdownto Maud. I consider she hasearnedit.
"And then I must make a new will ... and I want to ask you, old chap, to be one of the executors. Will you? And p'raps Geoff the other. After all, it isn't Geoff we dislike, it's that confounded, pious doe-rabbit of a wife of his. However....
"Well then, about my plans. I suppose I ought to stay at home at Farleigh—I shall look out for a decent flat in London—and get to know my children. Somehow it'sthatI can't take to. They have grown up so outside all my thoughts and schemes and interests. They don't care a hang about Africa. John has been making a young fool of himself at Sandhurst ... been betting and borrowing and getting into debt. I'm glad his mother didn't know.... Well, I shall square up all that, but I shall insist on his going in for the Indian Army—Staff Corps—same as I did.... A man if he's got ability couldn't have a better education.... He's a good-looking boy, John—I expect he thinks me an old fogey from the backwoods.... India's the school for him. And as to Ambrose, he must go to Cambridge, when he leaves Harrow, and I shall try and get him a nomination for the Consular Service.... That's the other good school for a British citizen. You'll think me jolly conceited, just because those are the two careersI'vefollowed. But..." (smokes and puffs).
"Well then, there are the two girls. Fat Maud—she was furious because I revived the old name—says long ago 'Aunt Sibyl' agreed it should be compromised by her being called Fatima.... Fatima, I gather, is eighteen, and young Sibyl is fourteen.... For the present Maud will look after them, and I shall have 'em up to London every now and then for a few weeks. In course of time I suppose they'll want to be presented. Dare say old Sibyl will do that, or if she's away, Lady Dewburn. By the bye,shewrote me an awfully sweet letter about Lucy..." (ponders and smokes).
"In due time the girls'll marry, and if they pick up the right kind of husband I shall give 'em each a portion of my ill-gotten wealth. There! That's what I've planned out, and I dare say it 'ud ha' been quite different if my darling Luce had lived. I should have been reconciled then to settling down at home. As it is—I shall travel a bit—Go to Germany and try to find out what the Germans are up to.... Go back to Africa p'raps ...Idon't know...."
A few days after this conversation, Roger received a letter from Sibyl:
June 12, 1909.
DEAR ROGER,—
Maurice will have given you all the news there is about me, except what I am going to add in this letter.
I am not going to attempt any sympathy at present over your loss. Maud's telegram from Naples was forwarded on to me here and it gave me a horrid turn. I often used to tease Lucy: I am cat-scratchy to every one, I fear. Why?Idon't know: something to do with my internal organs, I dare say. But I became sincerely fond of her, after being perfectly horrid to her when we first met. She seemed to grow on one. I should have liked her always to stay at Englefield.
Heigh ho! I am very much inclined to whimper about myself. I have, been through aghastlytime.... Some day, if I live, I will tell you. Meantime, though I amachingto see you I am going to postpone that happiness, and instead am going round the world with Vicky Masham.
The doctors seem to think—I dare say it is only because they have nothing else to suggest—that if I went on a long sea voyage for about a year—I mean, kept constantly travelling on the sea—I should get quite strong again. Perhaps I shall. I want to give myself every chance—it seemsso stupidto die before you're seventy. Also it occurred to me the other day that for a woman to have raved for twenty years about the British Empire and yet never to have seen any part of it outside Great Britain, except Cape Town and Stellenbosch, and once when we went to Jersey from Dinant—was rather silly. So Vicky and I are starting from Marseilles next Sunday in a P. and O., bound for Ceylon, and after that Japan. Not that Japan is British—I believe—but of course we aren't going to be pedantic. Then I suppose we shall "do" Australia and New Zealand—only I'm afraid New Zealand is rather muttony, isn't it? Excessively worthy and all that, but lives chiefly on mutton and stewed tea. However, there are geysers and pink terraces, if you look for them. Then there will be a lovely cruise across the Pacific, and beach-combers and impossibly large oysters that would dine a family of six, and brown people with no morals and beautiful sinuous forms, and finally San Francisco and California. After that—however, sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. Vicky or I will bombard you with picture post-cards recording our progress, and when—and when I'mquitewell and look less like a doomed woman—I will let you know, and, dearest Roger, we will pass the rest of our lives together, or at least not far away from one another. Your children shall be the children of my old age....
Clithy is here, but as soon as I leave for Marseilles he is off again to Russia. He has promised me to look you up when he returns. You will find him now definitely fixed as to appearance. People of his stamp are like that. Between nineteen and twenty-one, they quite quickly assume the figure, face, style by which they are ever after going to be known. He will remind you most of Lord R——, though I assure you there is no innuendo in this. I dare say the L——'s are distant cousins of the Mallards. But Clithy is essentially the aristocratic young peer who may be a fount of wisdom or a hollow fraud with nothing inside an irreproachable exterior. He is a mystery to me. And I am of little interest to him. The only woman I ever heard him mention with anything like a kind look in his eyes was Lucy. The Anne of Denmark nose is still there, undulating and with a bump in the middle; but the rest of the face has grown up more and his hair is a nice dark chestnut brown.—Well, you will see him later, so why waste time in describing him?
As to Vicky Masham.... Of course you want to know why, etc.
Well: Vicky, at the death of her patron saint, Victoria the Good, was left with little more than her pension of £500 a year. She ought to have had ten thousand pounds of her own, but—I dare say you saw the scandal in the papers? She and her sisters gave up much of their means to save their shockingly bad brother from going to prison over some swindle that ... Again why waste words? Maurice could tell you all about it. Well, when I came to the South of France after Aix, last December, I wasdreadfullyhipped, fighting a certain Terror—a muchworseterror than the one you used to write to me about who lived in a Red Crater (rather a distinguished address: "The Red Crater, Iraku"), and who went to Hell by the direct route. I came to Monte Carlo amongst other places and thought if I kept on a veil and wore blue glasses no one would recognize me. In the Rooms I saw Victoria Masham, looking very melancholy—and oh, so old—and quite alone. My heart was touched, I spoke to her and we went to sit on the terrace. I told her my troubles and she told me hers. Result: I struck a bargain. She is to live with me till we have our first quarrel; I am to board her, lodge her, wash her, pay all possible expenses, and give her a little pocket money, over and above. And d'you know, I think it's going to be quite a success! We haven't had a quarrel yet! I've had her teeth beautifully done by an American dentist at Cannes, so my nickname only applies a little—he was too clever not to give the new set a soupçon of horsiness. And I've made her buy a quite wonderful "transformation"—chez Nicole—reddish-brown, streaked with grey.—You'd never guess. She has plumped out a good deal, for although I've a wretched appetite myself I keep a good table, and upon my word when we get to the Colonies I shouldn't wonder if she had shoals of proposals. She never talks about anything but Queen Victoria, but I find that—somehow—awfully soothing—takes me back to the happy old time when I was a care-free girl, proud of my secret engagement to you.
* * * * *
DearRoger. I have lostallmy good looks. That's why I don't want you to see me till I recover them—a little. Meantime, dearest of friends and cousins, if you believe inAnythingwith a power to save—alas!Idon't—pray to it to save me from this terror that hangs over me—especially in the silent watches of the night—and bring me back safe from my world-tour, with at least another ten years of life before me.
Whilst I am away, remember Engledene is entirely at your children's disposal. I have written to the head gardener to see that fresh flowers are sent every now and again to Lucy's grave. You will tell him when? Lucy was areal good sortand I think she came to understand me and forgive....
SIBYL.
Roger spent the remainder of 1909 as he had planned: looking after his boys and girls to some extent, trying to get interested in his children. The girls bored him with their chatter of surface things: school quarrels and rivalries, school friendships, school mistresses; their individual tastes in chocolate creams and caramels; their school sports; the actors whom they adored—at a distance—and whose photographs they collected; their disdain for those silly asses the Suffragettes—theythemselves wouldneverwant a vote! The two boys were not much less shallow with their Sandhurst and school-boy slang—"top-hole, sir," "ripping," "ruddy," "rotters," "we rotted 'em a bit"—their school-boy games of such vast importance; their dislike of anything sincere, original, warm-hearted; their rash criticisms of great writers, frantic admiration for great sportsmen, religious reverence for cut and colour, style and form; enthusiasm in general for things that did not matter and contempt for things that did.
Was he like that at their age? Had Sibyl the elder at sixteen been such a goose as Sibyl the younger? Was it the hollow falsity of a classical education, the dreary sham of School Christianity which had made his boys so cynical, so coarse in their tastes? His children were good to look at, handsome, healthy, physically well-bred. But weren't they—weren't their contemporaries a bit heartless? These in particular had forgotten their mother completely. Yet surely they might have remembered Lucy's unceasing tenderness and the many sacrifices of health and convenience she had made for them?
In the press of that day and in the books and plays most in vogue you were supposed to make everything give way to the pleasures, needs, caprices, expectations of the young, of the coming generation. But why had no author the courage to point out the lack of interest which youth under twenty-one possessed for most persons of matured mind? Girls of eighteen wrote novels entirely without experience and direct observation of life, merely based on their wishy-washy recollections of books written by "grown-ups"; boys of eighteen published sardonic poems and green-cheese essays for which they ought to have been birched, not boomed. How infinitely preferable to Roger, when he put his secret thoughts into words, was the society of middle-aged friends and relations of his own period in life, who really had brain convolutions moulded by sad and joyous, sharp and unusual experience.
Aunt Maud said there was something evidently very wrong with his liver, and his sons and daughters in an interchange of eye-glances gave a tacit assent. They had felt (though they had never dared to say so in his hearing) a tiny bit ashamed of their ineffective mother. Wasn't it ratherinfra dig.to have been a school-teacher and a missionary? But of their father they all stood in awe, because he was considered in his time a handsome man, was now of distinguished appearance, and was respected in the best circles as an explorer, a big-game shot, a naturalist, and a man who had made some part of Africa pay. But if he stooped to their level and attempted to justify this eminence by talking technically on African subjects or on home problems they soon showed they thought him a bore.
Aunt Sibyl they spoke of warmly, and wailed over the illness which kept her absent from their circle. She was their ideal of a modern great lady. Her cynical speeches appealed to their own lack of convictions; there was nothing "soppy" about Aunt Sibyl.
So Roger escaped whenever he could from his home circle and travelled in Germany, France, Holland, Italy, in order to study the game of foreign politics, find out why in most people's light-hearted opinion a great war was "inevitable" as a solution of conflicting ambitions, and whether it might not be possible to avert it completely if only Britain, Germany, the United States and France could form a League for the maintenance of peace.
The Schräders made much of him in Germany. Rather timidly they stood up against Potsdam, tried to create an opinion in the South German States—their Alsatian origin carried them in that direction—favourable to a Naval and Colonial understanding with Britain. At their instigation Roger gave a series of addresses in western and southern Germany in 1910 which were deemed a great success, though they were rather frowned on in Berlin. He promised to renew his visit and his lectures in the autumn of 1911.
Meanwhile, Sibyl had returned to London in the early autumn of 1910. It was of course the dead season, but it gradually dawned on Society that she intended to entertain no more. She was probably going to write a book about the British Empire; she had turned quite serious, others said, and was going in for religion. She had evidently lost her health and—no doubt—her appearance.
Roger had hastened to greet her in the much shut-up house in Carlton House Terrace. Here she sat, generally with her back to the light. He was prepared to find her greatly altered. What struck him most was the pathetic thinness of face and hands, and the shapelessness of the figure. The new fashions in dress—straight up and down, no waist, one of the greatest revolutions of our age—helped her here, but at the expense of womanly charm. For Roger had the old-fashioned man-mind which has for some twenty thousand years—did it not begin in Aurignacian times?—admired the incurve below the well-furnished female bust and the outcurve from waist to hip.
"I'm glad you came so promptly," said Sibyl, "because I'm turning out of this gloomy mansion and surrendering it to Clithy. I simply can't afford to keep it upandEngledene too, and although he says of course he will pay for everything and I can have my own suite of rooms, I somehow fancy a cosy little flat which I could share with Maud, or Vicky Masham when she comes back from the States.... Yes, I left her at Washington, going to stay at the White House. I came back alone from there, but I had sulky Sophie to look after me. One thing that makes me think, Roger, that I amreallyill, really doomed, is that Sophie no longer gives me notice whenever any whim of mine displeases her. I am sure she is saying to herself now, 'The poor old gal won't be with us much longer: better hang on with her and then she may leave me something.' But about Vicky, for it really is a good story.... Only first I'm going to—or you might—ring for tea. Of course you'll stay? You couldn't in decency refuse.—Do you know, we haven't set eyes on one another for ... for ...three years? We are both swallowing pungent things we might say about one another's appearance, and both resolving to bite our tongues off rather than say them." ... (To servant: "Tea please; and ask Miss Mills to make the sandwiches,mysandwiches, I mean.") ... "I have to take these frame-foods in the form of sandwiches, and Sophie has learnt the art of making them so seductive that I get them down without any difficulty....
"About Vicky.—Do draw up your chair; you needn't be so frigid with a moribund friend. Directly it became known in California that Vicky had been a maid of honour to the late Queen Victoria, my dear, the Americans nearly killed us with kindness! Our roles were reversed.Shewas the lady of distinction andIwas her travelling companion. You know the Americans, especially in the west and east, have acultefor Queen Victoria, and Vicky's stories of her home life held them spell-bound. She felt in her position it wouldn't be right tolecture publiclyon her late mistress, but the difficulty was got over.—D'you still drink tea without sugar? I'm told Ioughtto take it—got over by drawing-room meetings, tickets subscribed for, and no charge at the door, a sumptuous tea—supposed to be modelled on the kind of tea the Queen took at Osborne—served in the middle of Vicky's talk. She refused to take any direct payment, so they sent herthumpingcheques for her travelling expenses. And now she's going to put her talks on Queen Victoria as Mother, Wife and Queen into a book.—One way and another, she'll make five or six thousand pounds out of the whole business. And I'mjollyglad. It'll be some provision for her real old age, after I'm gone—for I shan't have much to leave, and most of that I must give to my sisters in the Colonies and to your Sibyl, and some of my servants....
"Now: you've gotendlessthings to tellme. Indeed I really can't see why we should be separated, now, except when we are put to bed. You must be a mental wreck, and I am a physical one.... I got frightfully tired in the States—it spoilt much of the good I derived from the long steamer voyages.... We are simply two imprisoned souls in very battered cages. All the gilding is off mine."
Roger saw as much of Lady Silchester as he could during the last months of 1910. He and Maud assisted her to find just the right sort of flat, where she would have no household worries, where, in fact, she need only keep Sophie to look after her. They all spent a reasonably merry Christmas at Engledene, where Lord Silchester joined them, and where Fatima—Maud junior—expressed and perhaps felt such an intense interest in his Keltic operas and reforms in stage scenery that a glint of the match-maker's eagerness came into Sibyl's tired eyes; she pressed Roger's hand and murmured, "Wouldn'tit betoodelightful...?"
During the first half of 1911 the Intelligence Division of the War Office discovered Major Brentham as a really great authority on African geography and African campaigns, and he worked there over maps, and gave them in addition much other information. As some return he was gazetted Colonel, and again there was talk of utilizing such an administrative capacity in our own dominions.
In June, 1911, Sibyl's physician and surgeon were not altogether satisfied as to her progress towards recovery, and suggested she might derive great benefit from the waters of Villette, a thermal station in the east of France near the Vosges. So she said to Roger: "You lookquite as ill as Ifeel. It's malaria. You never quite got rid of that blackwater fever. Come to Villette later on. Maud and the girls and Clithy could join us too. I'll have a month first of all, alone except for Vicky. I'll give the closest attention to the cure, and then perhaps when you arrive I may be able to sit up and take notice and even do a little motoring...."
Accordingly the scene of this dwindling story changes in Villette-ès-Vosges, aVille d'eauxin eastern France, in the month of August and September, 1911. Germany has spoilt the summer for all statesmen, soldiers and sailors by challenging the French protectorate of Morocco at Agadir. It is supposed by the middle of August, after Mr. Lloyd George's speech in the City, and after a succession of "kraches" in German banking firms, that the Kaiser's Government is hesitating to go the full length of War: but Germany is growling horribly because she is realizing that her financial arrangements for a war of great dimensions are imperfect, and that she is unprepared with aircraft to cope with the French aeroplanes.
So she is consenting topourparlersfor the purpose of ascertaining the terms on which she may be bought off, persuaded to leave Agadir, and withdraw a portion of the army she is crowding into Alsace-Lorraine.
Villette-ès-Vosges is well suited for the work of the old diplomacy. It is, to begin with, aVille d'eaux; and in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, statesmen who were negotiating treaties and alliances or resolving problems which threatened war, usually met at some gay place near their frontiers where they could, under the guise of "taking the waters," carry on their conversations with one another and draft protocols of conspiracy or of agreement. Consequently, in late August and early September, 1911, Villette was unusually thronged: not only by its accustomed clientèle of middle-aged invalids trying to combat all manner of diseases for which its springs were efficacious, but also by theirdemoiselles-à-marier, their gawky boys and bread-and-butter, pigtailed girls, playing tennis, croquet, and crowding into the cinemas while their parents sip and bathe and undergomassage sous l'eau; by wicked gamblers, obvious adventurers, demure cocottes (needing a month's repose and a reduction of their figures); and by European statesmen trying to look like tourists. The German diplomatists have dressed and hatted themselves to resemble the Frenchman of caricature; the French ministers and ex-ministers are out-doing the average English gentleman in bluff "sports" costumes; and there are Russians and Austrians too quaint for words,à pouffer de rire, as Sibyl says; with such weeping whiskers, such forked beards, such frock-coats in the early morning and such tall hats as you never saw, except in pictures of Society in Paris under the Second Empire.
These diplomatists foregather in the theatrically beautiful park with its swan-pools, its canalized river, its groves and bosquets, pavilions, tea-houses, summer-houses, chalets, kiosques of newspapers and salacious novels, open-air orchestras, croquet-lawns, and tennis-courts. Or if the problem is very grave, and excited speech should not be audible nor gesticulations visible to prowling journalists, they stroll away to the race-course, to the golf links.
It is the glorious summer of 1911, when there was little rain between the beginning of June and the end of September. Nevertheless, if you should weary of the heat or if there should be a sudden shower you have a long cool arcade of tempting shops, a Grand Guignol, and the necessary retreats—on a large scale—for those who are summarily affected by the cathartic action of the waters, especially that very potentSource Salée, which is never mentioned without respect, except where it is the foundation of Rabelaisian stories. The medicinal springs are housed in temples of great architectural beauty. The town of pleasure, with its eight or nine hotels, rises in terraces that survey the park—not long ago a forest in which wolves roamed in winter time. New Villette contains a theatre, aClub des Étrangerswith gambling rooms, aSalle de lecture, a Concert Hall, anÉglise Anglicane, and a Catholic church, a post-office, doctors' houses and laboratories, and the necessaryusinesandgarages. A mile away is the real Villette, a common-place Lorraine town of purely agricultural interests, turning its back, so to speak, on the adjoining health resort which has made its name famous.
In the arcade is a large black notice-board, whereon besides local notices are pinned theHavastelegrams. Hither, during one critical week, comes a throng of anxious readers.Is it to be peace or War? Will Germany be satisfied with French Congo and give up Morocco? Should we pack to-night and leave before Mother has completed her cure,in casemobilization upsets the trains? Will my husband be called up?Whatwill happen to my boy?
Sibyl, lying on her comfortably-sloped invalid chair in the verandah of the Pavilion des Déjeuners, opines the Germans must beperfect beaststo upset every one like this, and all over some place on the Sahara coast where there are just a few verminous Moors. She is not in favour of anarchism, but she reallydoeswish some one would assassinate the Kaiser....
Roger looks grave and essays the hopeless task of defending Germany. "It is all this mania for 'Empires across the Seas.' Germany gets mad when our Empire, the French Empire, the Russian Empire each year get bigger, while she is prevented everywhere from expanding——, etc., etc."
Victoria Mashamhazards the conjecture: "If onlythe dear Queen were alive! She would soon...."
Sibylinterrupts: "My dear Vicky, you must look facts in the face. Queen Victoria would now be 92. She would not be of much use at that age ... See! There is obviously our Foreign Minister ... disguised with smoked glasses, but you can't mistake his nose. I think he'ssogood-looking.... And there is young Hawk of the F.O. He's just been sent to Brussels. I hear the Villierses are expected to-morrow. That man in the straw hat and the cricketing flannels is Monsieur Viviani, and the handsome old lion with the grey mane is Léon Bourgeois. The tight-trousered man you'd take for a 'booky' is Count Palastro—and there's no mistaking that stuffed figure of the last century, in a stove-pipe hat, a buttoned-up frock-coat, and pointed whiskers: that's Polánoff of the Russian Foreign Office. We saw him when we were in Japan.... 'Whithersoever the carcass is, there are the eagles gathered together.'"
Roger: "I suppose the carcass is the unhappy peoples of Europe?"
Sibyl: "I suppose so. Vicky, dear. Go and have breakfast at the hotel this morning. D'you mind? Maud has taken off the two girls to some violent sports' competition, and Clithy has motored over to Domrémy." (To Roger): "He is studying local colour for the libretto of an opera on Joan of Arc. His greatclou—if he can only bring it off—is the last scene. Joan of Arc, while bound to the stake and encircled with flames, sings a scena of the fireworks kind. Clithy says it would be natural under the circumstances. He thinks if they can devise some kind of asbestos shift for the prima donna and the usual chemical flames that don't burn much it could be arranged...." (To Vicky): "I want Roger all to myself this morning. We are going to have our breakfast together, here, in case events call him to sterner duties...." (Vicky acquiesces with a good grace—in her new transformation to which alittlemore grey has been added, she looks surprisingly well, and younger than Sibyl, though she is ten years older).
A pause. The waiter lays the table between them for Roger's déjeuner à la fourchette. He is accustomed to preparing Sibyl's special dietary and arranges for that also. He is a pleasant-faced man, deeply deploring "le peu de progrès que fait M'ame la Baronne...."
Sibyl: "What a scene for a dying woman to be looking at!"
Roger: "Sibyl!Don'tbe so lugubrious...."
Sibyl: "Why? Do you suppose I don't pretty well know my own condition? I am dying slowly of cancer, what the doctors call 'un lent dépérissement.' I expect this is what Mother died of later in life. The doctors would be ready enough to operate again if there was any chance.... As it is, they know it is more merciful to let me linger out my few remaining weeks or months than submit me to the shock of an operation which might kill me at once. Imaylive to October, Dr. Périgord thinks. Or he puts it more pleasantly: 'Vers le mois d'Octobre nous saurons oui ou non, si la guérison de M'ame la Baronne s'effectuera. Les eaux de Villette opèrent parfois des miracles: espérons toujours.' ... And so on.... I don't suffer much pain—as yet. When it comes on they'll put me under morphia. I shall stay here till this political crisis is over or the fine weather begins to break. Then Clithy will motor me to Calais and from Dover to Engledene. Engledene will be the best place to die at. And, of course,remember, I want to be buried at Aldermaston, near Lucy—and near where you'll be laid some day—unless you marry again, which I should hardly think you'll do. I shall have a perfect right to occupy a small space in Aldermaston churchyard, because I'm a parishioner. I bought the farm that father so ridiculously mismanaged and that you made so prosperous. I've left it in my will to my brother Gerry, as some compensation for having taken no notice of him since I got married.... But, as I said before,whata scene! Not even your beloved Happy Valley could better those flowers in the urns and vases and borders and parterres—those scarlet geraniums, scarlet cannas, scarlet salvias, and scarlety-crimson Lobelia cardinalis. We grow them at Engledene, but they're nothing like these.Andthe heliotrope, and ageratum ... and those blue salvias and orange calceolarias. I know it's rather vulgar, but the whole effect is superbly staged; don't you think so?....
"And the women's dresses. Many of them, of course, are mannequins, just showing off for the Paris shops. And then to see pass by all the celebrated if over-rated people you've heard so much about, just as though they were well-made-up supers on the stage. And the music of those alternate orchestras... and such African sunlight ... and ...younext to me...."
Roger: "Look here, if you talk so much I shan't wonder you get weaker instead of stronger. Eat up your breakfast and drink your milk."
Sibyl: "I will. But Imusttalk to you. I shall soon be silenced for ever...."
Roger: "So shallI, when my time comes. So will every one. You don't give yourself a chance, talking in this morbid way. The doctors are often wrong. Remember the case of Lady Waterford?"
Sibyl: "Blanchie?"
Roger: "Yes.... A good soaking in Villette water may get rid of all your trouble and some day you may be weeping over me as I lie dying of Bright's disease."
Sibyl(not paying much attention): "Roger! Do you think there is going to be War?"
Roger: "Not this time. Look there! D'you see thosegardes champêtresin that green uniform?"
Sibyl: "That nice-looking man, with the blond moustaches?"
Roger: "Yes, and that ugly-looking fellow with the red nose. Well: a week ago they mysteriously vanished, and I asked what had become of them. I was told they had joined up ... the Reserve, you know. Now they're back again.Thatshows the Germans and French have come to terms. The War ispartie remise—this year—but it's certain to come, unless Germany can be squared. Remains to be seen what she wants and what we can afford to give...."
A pause. Sibyl eats a little food and sips her milk. Roger finishes his breakfast and lights a cigarette.
Sibyl: "Do you think there can beanysurvival after death?"
Roger: "How canItell? Who knowsanythingabout it? Not even Edison or Marconi. And they come nearest..."
Sibyl: "I mean, of course, our minds, our intelligence, our love. Our poor diseased bodies simply dissolve and are redistributed and worked up again. But thepersonalitywe have created in our brains?"... (takes a cigarette from Roger and smokes it). "Talking of personality, isn't itextraordinaryhowthatcan be affected through our stomachs; chemically, so to speak? You saw that woman in the dark green dress, who waved to me just now? Recognize her?" (Roger shakes his head)... "Thatis Cecilia Bosworth, the Marchioness of Bosworth, quite the proudest woman in the Three kingdoms—enough in herself to provoke a middle-class revolution. Her husband's remote ancestor was a by-blow of the Plantagenets, a natural son of 'false fleeting Clarence.' He went over to that usurper—I've always spoken up for Richard the Third—thatusurper, Henry the Seventh, at the battle of Bosworth, and so was created Earl of Bosworth, and afterwards Elizabeth made his grandson a marquis. Well, even you, as an African hermit,musthave heard of that woman's insolence in Society? She even mocked at the Royal Family and said her husband—a perfect oaf—was more Plantadge than they were and the rightful king.... She wanted Prince Eddy to marry her daughter and make things come right." (A pause ... smokes)...
"Well, when she came here six weeks ago, nobody was good enough to mix with her; she went round blighting us all. My doctor said it was all due to liver and he'd soon cure her. He put her on toLa Source Salée—and a slice of melon afterwards. And,my dear, she went throughagonies, I believe. I used to hear hershriekingas she passed along the corridor....
"But it's cured her. See what a pleasant nod she gave me just now? And there she is, talking to those very pretty girls—and their father's only a Leeds manufacturer.
"Well, how do you workthatproblem out?"
Roger: "Give it up! ... But by the look in your eyes, I should sayyou'vegot the beginning of a temperature. Let me wheel you back to the Hotel and call for Sophie. Then if you are good and obedient and get an after-breakfast nap, I will come at three and take you and Vicky out for a very gentle motor drive...."
Sibyl submits. The waiter assists with the chair till it is out of the intricacies of the approach to the Breakfast Pavilion. Roger draws it through the gay throng. The church bells of all denominations are clanging in carillons, either because it is Sunday or because Peace—this time—has been definitely assured by an exchange of signatures. A few people raise their hats or wave hands to Sibyl, though she is semi-disguised in smoked glasses and a diaphanous veil; and numerous men nod to Colonel Brentham: who, panting, draws the wheeled chair up to the perron of the hotel.
Here there is a pause while Sophie is sent for. Then the disentanglement of the sick woman from the chair and from shawls, and her slow walk, supported by Roger and her maid, to the ground floor rooms where a white-capped nurse receives her.