She said good-bye to her.
“I’ll let you know what happens,” Mrs. Carey promised. “I feel you reallydocare, you know. I shall think of you when I’m taking that horrid journey tonight all the way to Scotland. Perhaps I really will settle down there, if Fred is willing to make it up, and if he lets me have a decent allowance, and part of the year over here.”
She no longer looked desperate, and she bent overthe banisters and waved to Flora with the little handkerchief that was still drenched by the tears she had been shedding.
Flora did not suppose that she should ever hear from her. Impressions made upon Mrs. Carey seemed to be transient affairs.
She was conscious of nothing so much as of extreme physical fatigue, and the intense relief of her new certainty that David had not, after all, sought the last desperate remedy. She could be certain of that, now.
“Perhaps Owen won’t understand why I’m so positive of that now,” she reflected. “But after all, I knew David. She counted on him, and he’d promised to marry her. David would never have failed her deliberately—it wasn’t in him. And he was taken away from committing a frightful sin. Besides, who knows how much he repented, poor boy?”
Within a few yards of the hotel, Flora met Quentillian.
He turned and accompanied her to the door.
“David didn’t take his own life, Owen. It was what they said—he must have been taken ill suddenly.”
“You know for certain?”
“For certain.”
He told her that he understood her relief, but his next words were:
“And do you still think you were right, about going alone to this woman?”
“Whether I was right or not, I’m thankful I did. She would have broken my father’s heart. She was a sort of—emotion-monger. She’d have spared him nothing.”
“She spared you nothing, then, Flora?”
“It’s different, for me. I would do anything in the world, for my father’s sake. That’s my only excuse, possibly, for deceiving him.”
“Do you want excuses?”
“No, I don’t. You’re right,” she said gravely. “I’ve planned it all deliberately, and I’ve got to see it through.”
“I think you’re wrong, all along the line, and I want to talk it over with you. It will be a bitter disappointment to the Canon to be told that he has missed seeing Mrs. Carey.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re going to leave it at that?”
“Yes, more than ever. Owen, when do you go to Stear?”
“As soon as possible.”
“Then could you travel down with us tomorrow? We go by the three o’clock train. I think it may do him good, to have you, and you see, he’ll be thinking that the whole expedition has been a failure. It will be easier for both of us, if you’re there.”
“Very well, I’ll come.”
They parted, and Flora went to seek her father. Except from a certain curiosity, it could not be said that Quentillian looked forward to an agreeable journey.
By the time that he joined Canon Morchard and his daughter at the railway station, he was beginning to feel as though the whole of the involved deception perpetrated with such a conviction of righteousness by Flora, must have been a figment of imagination. Oneglance at the Canon’s sombre and pallid face dispelled the illusion.
Flora looked pallid also, but her expression was one of rapt intensity, as though only her own strange vision, that Quentillian felt to be so singularly perverted, were before her. She had, undeniably, shielded her father from knowledge that must have appalled him, and in that security, remained calm.
The Canon, out of his lesser awareness, had not, however, remained calm at all.
“I have been angry, Owen,” he admitted, as they paced the platform together, at the Canon’s own invitation. “My disappointment has been very bitter. This lady, this Mrs. Carey, the friend of my dear boy David, left for Scotland last night. I went to her house this morning, only to find her gone. Flora, whom I trusted, had made a mistake of incredible carelessness. I could not have believed it, in a matter whichmusttouch us all so nearly, which lay so close to my own heart. Poor child, she has been highly tried of late, and I have thought her looking ill. I should not have trusted to her accuracy. Lucilla, who has been my right hand, my secretary ever since her childhood, could never have failed me thus. I forgot that her sister was younger, unaccustomed to the task, less to be relied upon. But it has been a cruel disappointment, and I vented my first grief upon the culprit. Is therenostage of the journey, Owen, when one can see the undisciplined impulse driven underfoot, the hasty word bridled? I, who have striven all my life, I have again shown anger and violence—to my own child!”
The Canon’s peculiar predilection for making an amateur confessor of Quentillian, was by force of repetition ceasing to seem anything but natural.
Quentillian said: “Flora looks overwrought, sir,” and inwardly hoped that the train would arrive shortly.
“Aye, poor Flora! She was David’s especial favourite, his best correspondent. This stroke has fallen heavily upon Flora, Owen. And I, who should have made all allowance, I turned against her! In my sharp disappointment, I uttered those strong expressions that come back to one, when the moment’s passion has cooled, as they must have sounded to the unhappy sinner by whom they were provoked.”
It was the same piteous round of self-reproach, remorse and profound depression to which Owen had so frequently listened. He hoped that he might be of some assistance, however, incomprehensibly to himself, in listening yet once again.
“I have written to Mrs. Carey. She must indeed have thought my behaviour strange, ungrateful, unnatural even. That matters little enough, yet it adds its feather weight to the burden—its feather weight to the burden. That I should have appeared careless, indifferent, where news of David was concerned! I, who would have given my heart’s blood, for one hour’s intercourse with him since he left us for the last time! Ah, well, it does not bear dwelling upon.”
Nevertheless, the Canon dwelt upon it until it became necessary to rejoin Flora and enter the train.
During the journey he remained silent, with a profoundand unhappy silence. His manner towards his daughter was peculiarly gentle and melancholy.
Presently he leant back in the corner, the sad lines of his face relaxing, and slept.
Flora spoke to Quentillian in a low voice.
“I’m so glad he’s asleep. Last night I heard him walking up and down his room for such a long while.”
“He is very much distressed,” said Quentillian severely.
“I know.” She acquiesced apathetically in the truth of the statement.
“Do you know that he has written to Mrs. Carey?”
“Yes.”
“How are you going to prevent her replying, and exposing the fact that you have seen her?”
Flora whitened perceptibly, but she answered him with sudden spirit.
“You have no right to question me, Owen, or to demand explanations from me in that tone.”
“I have this right, that you have made me a passive partner in your extraordinary schemes.”
Owen, too, was conscious of a rising anger.
“I feel like a traitor to your father, Flora. What are you going to do next?”
“I am going to see it through,” said Flora doggedly. “At least you will admit that to do a thing like this by halves, is a great deal worse than useless. I have saved my father from what must have broken his heart.”
“You have done evil that good may come,” he quoted grimly.
“If you like to put it so.” Flora was inexorable.
“He has suffered too much already.”
“You mock your own God,” said Quentillian, with sudden, low vehemence. “You profess to believe in Him, to trust Him, and yet you deceive and manoeuvre and plot, sooner than leave your father to his dealings. I have small belief in a personal God, Flora, but I can see no justification in endeavouring madly to stand between another soul, and life.”
She gazed at him piteously.
“Do you think I am not unhappy—that I have not been torn in two? He was angry, Owen, when he thought I had made a mistake about the appointment, and oh, the relief of it! I should have welcomed it if he had hit me—I deserved it all, and far more besides. If I am doing wrong, I am suffering for it.”
Quentillian, looking at her haggard, tragic face, felt sure that she spoke literal truth.
“When does Lucilla come home?” he suddenly asked.
“I don’t know. Soon, I hope.”
Quentillian hoped so too. It seemed to him that only Lucilla’s normality could adjust to any sort of balance the mental atmosphere of St. Gwenllian.
Flora gazed at her father.
“Think what it would have been to him to know, now, that David had sinned, even that he contemplated going through the form of marriage, with that poor thing! The world’s standards of honour are not those of my father.”
“Nor yours either,” Quentillian had almost said, but he checked the cheap retort as it rose.
An impulse made him say instead:
“Promise me at least, Flora, that if this becomestoo much for you, if it all breaks down, you will let me share it with you. You owe it to me, I think, having let me be partly responsible. Will you promise?”
“You are very good,” said Flora, her mouth quivering for the first time. “But I don’t mean to fail.”
It was evident enough that her whole being was strung up to the accomplishment of her purpose, and that she was incapable of seeing beyond it.
Quentillian, at his own station, parted from Canon Morchard and his daughter with the direst forebodings. Insensibly, he, too, had almost come to feel that anxious preoccupation with the Canon’s peace of mind that exercised the Canon’s daughters.
Within a fortnight of his return he went over to St. Gwenllian and found there no trace of catastrophe such as he had half expected, but the usual atmosphere of calm melancholy.
He had no conversation with Flora, but she told him briefly that there would be no correspondence between her father and Mrs. Carey, and Quentillian was left to surmise by what peculiar methods Flora had achieved her ends.
On the whole, he preferred not to dwell upon the subject. He had a certain unwilling respect for Flora, even if none for her casuistries, and he had no wish to dwell either upon her astonishing machinations or his own complicity.
Inthe spring Lucilla came back to St. Gwenllian.
The first time that Owen saw her was in the presence of the Canon.
In his relief at her return, Canon Morchard had evidently forgotten that he had thought it undutiful of her to go.
“You see I have my right hand once more,” he said fondly. “Owen here can tell you that you have been sadly missed, my daughter. Little Flora did her best, but she is not my housekeeper, my experienced secretary. Neither she nor our poor Valeria can equal Lucilla there.”
Quentillian took his advantage and asked Lucilla for news of Valeria. The Canon, habitually, seemed only too much inclined to view any mention of Valeria and her husband as a rank indecency in the presence of her quondam betrothed.
“Val is very well and very busy,” said Lucilla. “George is doing well, on the whole, though it’s a struggle, but the land there is wonderful. I should like to show you the photographs of their little farm, and the children.”
“Lucilla is our photographer,” said the Canon forbearingly, as though in extenuation of what Quentillian felt certain that he regarded as Lucilla’s indiscretion.
Not for the first time, Quentillian suspected that Lucilla was the only one of the Canon’s children able to contemplate the Canon by the light of a sense of humour, that detracted not at all from her affection and respect.
“They are not thinking of a visit to England, I suppose?”
“No. Expense is a consideration, and there are the children.”
“My grandsons!” said the Canon. “I should like a sight of my grandsons, but there could not be unalloyed joy in the meeting. Nay, I ask myself sometimes if there can be any unalloyed joy here below. Are not the warp and woof intermingled even in the nearest and dearest relationships? And the manner of poor Valeria’s leaving home was such as to make one’s heart ache, both for her and with her. But enough of reminiscences, my children. I am in no mood for them tonight. I wish to rest, and perhaps read. You may some of you remember a very favourite old story of mine,” said Canon Morchard genially. “That of the famous saying, ‘We are none of us infallible,not even the youngest.’”
This terrible pronouncement, however historical, seldom amused the juniors of itsraconteur, and Flora and Lucilla only accorded to it the most perfunctory of smiles. Owen Quentillian remained entirely grave.
“No one has more admiration than myself for the quality of infallibility,” the Canon continued, humourously “(always provided that it is not that which is claimed by the Pope of Rome), but I must confess that I am not amongst those who take the modern craze for youthful intellectuals very seriously. This being so, dear Owen, you will forgive me in that I have not yet read anything of yours. Tonight I have a free hour—a rare treat—and I am going to rectify the omission. Will you read aloud to us of your work, or is that too much to ask?”
It was indeed too much to ask, Owen felt.
He could have read his own work aloud with comparative complacency to any critic capable of takingit seriously, but to Canon Morchard the slight, cynical epigrams, the terse, essentially unsentimental rationalism of Owen’s views upon God and man, must come either as wanton impertinence, or as meaningless folly.
It was impossible to suppose that the Canon would keep either opinion to himself, and Quentillian felt it unlikely that he would either find himself capable of listening to him tolerantly, or be given an opportunity for demolishing his views.
“I think I had rather not inflict my trivialities upon you at all, sir,” he remarked, with truth, and yet with an absence of sincerity of which he felt that Lucilla, at all events, was quite as well aware as he was himself.
“I assure you that I’m not worth reading.”
“I shall judge of that for myself,” said the Canon kindly. “Was there not something in that Review that was sent to you, Flora?”
“Yes,” said Flora unwillingly.
“Fetch it, my dear.”
Quentillian cast his mind over his more recent productions, and was invaded by a grim dismay.
His opinion of the Canon’s literary judgment, where writings not directly connected with Church matters were concerned, was of the slightest, but he disliked the thought both of the pain that the elder man would feel in reading that which would offend his taste, and of the remonstrance that he would certainly believe it his duty to make.
It was a relief to him when Flora returned without the Review, and said:
“There is someone who wants to speak to you in the hall, Father. I’m so sorry.”
The Canon rose at once.
“‘The man who wants me is the man I want’,” he quoted, and left the room.
When the door had closed behind him, Flora said to her sister, with a certain ruthless disregard of Quentillian’s presence that at least established the earnestness of her concern:
“What shall we do?”
“Nothing,” said Lucilla laconically.
“But we can’t let him see that Review. Adrian sent it to me—it’s got something in it by that man Hale. Father would hate the whole thing.”
Lucilla looked at Quentillian.
“He won’t like my article, and I should very much prefer him not to read it,” said the author candidly.
She smiled slightly.
“It’s the one on the Myth of Self-Sacrifice?”
Owen nodded.
“It might have been worse,” said Lucilla. “It might have been the one in which you said that the parental instinct was only another name for the possessive instinct. And now I come to think of it, that one was called The Sanctification of Domestic Tyranny, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” said Quentillian, in a tone which struck himself as being rather that of a defiant child to its nurse.
“Well, Father would have liked that even less than the Myth of Self-Sacrifice, I imagine.”
She spoke without acrimony, without, in fact, anyeffect at all of personal bias, but Quentillian said dispassionately:
“You dislike the modern school of thought of which my writings are a feeble example. May I ask why you read them?”
“But I don’t dislike it, Owen,” she returned with a calm at least equal to his own. “As for what you write, I think you’re very often mistaken, but that doesn’t prevent my being interested.”
Quentillian was slightly taken aback at being considered mistaken, and still more at being told so. He had always respected Lucilla, both morally and intellectually, and he would have preferred to suppose the admiration mutual.
“Owen, haven’t you got anything else that he could have to read?” broke in Flora.
“Nothing that he would—care for,” answered Quentillian, who had very nearly said “Nothing that he would understand.”
“Father has asked for the Review, Flossie, and you’d better get it. You needn’t work yourself up about it. He knows its general character quite as well as you do.”
“I don’t think he ought to be allowed to make himself needlessly unhappy,” said Flora obstinately.
“You can’t prevent it.”
“I suppose it would be wrong to say that I don’t know where the Review is?”
“It would be foolish, which is worse,” said Lucilla curtly. Her un-moral pronouncement closed the discussion.
Flora, looking grave and unhappy, left the room,and presently returned with the instrument of destruction, as she evidently regarded the production.
“Let us hope that Canon Morchard will continue to be detained,” said Quentillian, not altogether ironically.
Flora made no reply.
In less than a quarter of an hour’s time, the Canon came back again, picked up the Review and made a careful scrutiny of the table of contents.
“TheMythof Self-Sacrifice?” he enunciated, with a strongly-enquiring inflexion in his tone, as though prepared to receive the writer’s instant assurance that he was not responsible for so strange a heading.
Owen desired to leave the room, but was mysteriously compelled to remain in it, glancing at intervals at the all-too expressive face of his reader.
The Canon read very attentively, pausing every now and then to turn back a page or two, as though comparing inconsistencies of text, and sometimes also turning on a page or two ahead, as if desirous of establishing the certainty that a conclusion was eventually to be attained. His eyebrows worked as he read, after a fashion habitual with him.
There had been evenings when Flora had made the slightest of pencil sketches, hardly caricaturing, but embodying, this peculiarity, for her father’s subsequent indulgent amusement. But no such artistic pleasantry was undertaken tonight. The atmosphere did not lend itself to pleasantry of any kind.
At last the Canon closed the volume, laid it down, and removed his glasses with some deliberation.
“Dear lad, I am disappointed.”
“I was afraid you would be.”
“Is this quite worthy of you?”
Owen felt that a reply either in the affirmative or in the negative, would be equally unsatisfactory, and made none.
“You have adopted the tone of the day to an extent for which I was by no means prepared,” the Canon said gently. “I am sorry for it, Owen—very sorry. I think you have heard me speak before of my dislike for the modern note, that emphasises the material aspect, that miscalls ugliness realism, and coarseness strength. Forgive me, dear Owen, if I hurt you, but this—this trivial flippancy of yours, has hurtme.”
Owen had no doubt that Canon Morchard spoke the truth.
“How emphatically he belongs to the generation that took the errors of other people to heart,” Quentillian reflected.
He felt no great sympathy with such vicarious distresses.
“There is so much that is sad and bad in life, that one longs to read of happiness, and hope, and beauty,” said the Canon. “Why not, dear Owen, seek out and write of the ‘something afar from the sphere of our sorrow’?”
“Because to my way of thinking, only first-hand impressions are of any value. The only value that any point of view of mine can lay claim to, must lie in its sincerity.”
“Words, words! You delude yourself with many words,” said the Canon sadly, rousing in Quentillian a strong desire to retort with the obvioustu quoque.
“Do not misunderstand me, dear fellow—there istalent there—perversely exercised, if you will, but talent. I cannot but believe that life has many lessons in store for you, and when you have learnt them, then you will write more kindly of human nature, more reverently of Divine.”
Hope was once more discernible in the Canon’s voice and on his face, and as he rose he laid his hand affectionately upon the young man’s arm. “Hoping all things—believing all things,” he murmured, as he left the room.
Quentillian was left to the certainty that his brief exposition of his literarycredohad entirely failed to convey any meaning to the Canon, and that the long list of the Canon’s optimistic articles of faith now included his own regeneration.
“Father, I think Flora looks ill.”
Canon Morchard gazed with concern at Lucilla as she made the announcement, and at once devoted himself to the anxious analysis that he always accorded to any problem affecting one of his children.
“I have thought her altered myself, by the great grief of last year. Spiritually, it has developed her, I believe. But there is a sustained melancholy about her, an absence of all hopeful reaction such as one looks for from youth, that is certainly not wholly natural. You, too, have observed it?”
“Yes.”
Lucilla had observed a great deal more besides, andshe was at a loss for a definition of her secret, latent fears.
“Flossie has become very irritable,” she said at last, voicing the least of her anxieties.
“My dear, is that perfectly kind? Flora has had much to try her, and your own absence in Canada threw a great deal for which she is scarcely fitted, upon her shoulders. I do so want you to overcome thatcriticalspirit of yours, dear Lucilla. It has very often disturbed me.”
Lucilla thought for a moment, and decided, without resentment as without surprise, that it would be of no use to say that her observation had not contained any of the spirit of criticism at all. She said instead:
“She doesn’t sleep well, and she is always up very early.”
“She is always at the early Celebration, dear child,” said the Canon tenderly. “Our Flora’s religion is a very living reality to her—more so than ever, of late, I think.”
“It’s a pity that it should make her unhappy, instead of happy.”
“What are you saying, Lucilla?” the Canon enquired in highly-displeased accents.
“It is perfectly true. She is very restless, and very unhappy, and the more she goes to church, the less it seems to satisfy her.”
“And who are you, to judge thus of another’s spiritual experiences? You mean well, Lucilla, but there is a materialism about your point of view that has long made me uneasy—exceedingly uneasy. You were encumbered with household cares very young, and ithas given you the spirit of Martha, rather than the spirit of Mary. Leave Flora to my direction, if you please.”
“I should like her to see the doctor.”
“Has she complained of ill-health?”
“No, not at all. She resents being asked if she is well.”
“Most naturally. She is not a child. You take too much upon yourself, Lucilla, as I have told you before. Leave Flora’s welfare in Higher hands than ours, and remember that it is not the part of a Christian to anticipate trouble. Where is your faith?”
Lucilla was not unaccustomed to this enquiry, and did not deem any specific reply to be necessary. Whatever the whereabouts of that which the Canon termed her faith, it did not serve in any way to allay her anxiety.
She watched Flora day by day.
She saw her increasing pallor, her gradual loss of weight, the black lines that deepened beneath her eyes. Above all, she saw the mysterious sense of grievance, that most salient characteristic of the neurotic, gather round her sister’s spirit.
After a little while, she ceased to talk of her visit to Canada, of Valeria, and Valeria’s children, because she saw that Flora could not bear these subjects.
“She’sjealous,” thought Lucilla, with a sick pang of pity.
“I’m sorry for poor Val, living right away from civilization, and absorbed by commonplace things all the time,” said Flora.
She went to church more frequently than ever.
Lucilla wondered very often if anything had happened while she was away.
One day she asked Owen Quentillian.
“There was the shock of David’s death,” he said rather lamely.
“Yes. Father says it affected Flora terribly for a long while.”
“Do you find her much changed, then?”
“I find her very unbalanced,” said Lucilla with her usual directness.
“I think sheisan unbalanced person,” Quentillian assented, levelly.
“I wish she could leave home for a time.”
But Flora, when this was suggested to her, said that she did not wish to leave home. Her manner implied that the suggestion hurt her.
At first the Canon was pleased, assuring Lucilla that the pleasant home-life at St. Gwenllian, even if robbed of its old-time joyousness, would best restore Flora to herself. But after a time, he, too, watched her with anxiety.
“Little Flora is not herself,” he began to say.
“Let me send for the doctor, Father,” Lucilla urged.
“We will see, my dear, later on. The unsettled weather is trying to us all just now—no doubt things will right themselves in a day or two, and we shall smile at our own foolish, faithless fears.”
Meanwhile, however, no one at St. Gwenllian evinced any desire to smile at anything, and Flora became subject to violent fits of crying.
Her dignity and her delicate reticence seemed alike to have deserted her. She cried in church, and sometimesshe cried at home, regardless of the presence of her father and sister.
“My dear, what is it?” the Canon enquired at last, long after Lucilla had given up asking the same question in despair.
“Nothing,” said Flora.
“It is not right to prolong your sorrow for your dear one in this fashion,” said the Canon. “Can we not trust dear David to the Everlasting Arms, and fulfil our own appointed days here below?”
His daughter made no reply.
“This is reaction, Flora,” said Canon Morchard decisively. “When this heavy blow first fell upon us, you were my courageous daughter, my comforter—so far as that was humanly possible. Do not falter now—remember that whom He loveth, He chastizeth.”
“I do remember,” she said, her face a mask of misery.
“You are not well,” said the Canon tenderly. “I shall no longer allow you to exert yourself as you have been doing. Lucilla here will arrange that your class shall be temporarily given over to other management, and no doubt she can herself arrange to replace you at the choir-practices.”
“I can arrange it,” Lucilla said, “but——”
She looked at her sister.
Flora broke into a tempest of tears.
“Don’t take away what work Icando,” she sobbed out. “My life is useless enough, in all conscience.”
“Flora!” the Canon thundered. “Have a care! Such a thought is perilously near to being a blasphemous one.”
She hid her face in her hands.
“You are unstrung, my poor child,” said her father. He took to treating her almost as an invalid, and failed to perceive that his watchful and incessant solicitude produced upon Flora’s nerves an effect that was the very reverse of soothing.
“She ought to go right away from home,” said Lucilla to Quentillian. “But it’s difficult to suggest it again, she was so much upset when I spoke of it before. Will you try what you can do, Owen? She is a great deal more likely to listen to someone who is not one of the family. It’s one of the symptoms.”
“Symptoms of what?”
“Of hysteria,” said Lucilla succinctly, facing the word as she had already faced the fact.
Quentillian admired her directness, but it did not breed in him any desire to adopt the measure suggested, and speak to Flora.
At last, however, he did so. They had scarcely been alone together since the day when she had told him of her visit to Mrs. Carey.
“Is that business on your mind, Flora?”
He had thought for some time that it might be.
“What?”
“Mrs. Carey, I mean.”
She coloured deeply.
“I did what I thought right at the time, Owen. Is there any necessity to discuss it again?”
“Not if you don’t wish to, certainly. I had an idea that it might be a relief. I suppose no one knows besides ourselves?”
“No one. She never wrote to me, you know, and I feel sure she never will. She was the sort of personto be thoroughly absorbed by her impressions of the moment. I sometimes wonder what happened to her, in Scotland.”
“It is not very difficult to guess whatwillhappen, sooner or later, from what you told me. People like Mrs. Carey live from one emotional crisis to another.”
She gave him a curious look.
“At least it’s living—not stagnation. That interview with Mrs. Carey seems like a dream, almost, nowadays—something quite apart from the rest of my life. I suppose it’s because it’s the only thing I’ve ever done entirely by myself, without any of the family knowing about it. I’ve never even seen anyone else at all like Mrs. Carey—it was impossible to get into touch with her, really. She was like a painted cardboard figure, with no back to it—nothing solid.”
“But you’ve turned down that page, now—it’s finished with?”
“Yes,” she said, looking down.
He had wondered whether that which he sometimes thought of as Flora’s Jesuitical plotting had come to prey upon her mind.
Evidently, if it did, he was not to be told so.
In the end he could think of no more subtle enquiry than:
“Why are you unhappy?”
“I don’t know,” she said with a trembling lip.
“I feel I’m of no use in the world. Wouldn’t you be unhappy, if you felt like that—that nobody really needed you in any way, and you had nothing to do?”
“Not in the least,” said Quentillian reflectively. “I am quite sure that nobody does need me, and it doesn’tdistress me. As for having nothing to do, I imagine—if you will forgive me for saying so—that one can always find something if one looks far enough.”
“It’s different for a man.”
“Perhaps.”
Quentillian went away still undetermined whether Flora’s conduct of theaffaireCarey was the cause or the result of her present deplorable condition.
That she had all the makings of a fanatic, he had long suspected, and the Canon’s determination to treat her as an invalid, in need of rest and complete inaction, seemed to him to be a singularly ill-advised one.
In spite of his disapproval of her methods, Quentillian had come to feel a certain affection for Flora, and he could not avoid a sense of complicity that drew him to her, even while it chafed his self-righteousness.
With an entire lack of originality, he informed Lucilla that he thought her sister would be better away from home.
“Well, so do I. But even to go away for a few weeks would only be a half-measure. Owen, I’m frightened about Flora—far more than I’ve ever been about anyone before.”
He could partly apprehend her meaning.
“Don’t you think that perhaps this—phase—is only another manifestation of the same spirit that made Val want to go and work somewhere?”
“In a sense, yes. You see, all the intellectual interests, and the mental appreciations, to which we were brought up, although those things did fill our days—at least before the war—were only superimposed onwhat Val and Flossie and Adrian really were, in themselves. Not essentials, I mean, to either of them.”
Quentillian wondered what Lucilla’s own essentials might be. She had given him no hint of them, ever, and yet he suspected her of an almost aggressive neutrality with regard to the imposed interests of which she had spoken.
The odd contradiction in terms seemed to him expressive of the difference that he felt certain existed between Lucilla’s daily life, and the personal, intimate standpoint from which she all the time regarded that life.
Something of the same ruthlessness of purpose that had once characterized Flora, he had always discerned in Lucilla, but he felt very certain that her essential sanity and humour would have kept her forever from the strange and tortuous means adopted by Flora to safeguard those interests of which she apparently felt herself to be a better judge than her Creator.
Lucilla would neither juggle with fate, nor see any justification for tampering with other people’s correspondence.
“Flora thinks, now, that she doesn’t want to go away from home.”
“It’s a pity, perhaps, that she didn’t go to Canada instead of you.”
“Yes, but you see Father didn’t really want either of us to go, and Flossie wouldn’t have disobeyed him.”
Flora’s conscience! Owen felt as impatient at the thought of it, as he had frequently felt before. He had, however, long ago sufficiently assimilated the atmosphere of St. Gwenllian to refrain from pointing outthat Flora had been for some years of an age to act for herself, independently of the parental sanction. He did not, indeed, suppose that Lucilla needed to have anything so self-evident put before her.
“Do you think Flora would consent to see a doctor?”
“No.”
Miss Morchard’s unvarnished No-es and Yes-es always took him slightly by surprise, especially after any time spent with the Canon.
“The fact is,” said Lucilla vigorously, “that Flora needs something to occupy her mind. She is preying on herself, and unless something happens to take her out of herself, Owen, I think she will go mad.”
He instinctively paid the homage due to her habitual precision of expression, by taking the startling phrase literally.
“Have you told anyone?”
“Not yet.”
“But you must. If you really think that, you must tell the Canon so.”
“I know.” Her voice was rather faint, but she repeated, more strongly and with entire acceptance in her voice, “I know I must.”
It reminded him of the long past days when one of the St. Gwenllian children had been naughty, and the task of taking the culprit before the Canon had invariably, and as a matter of course, devolved upon Lucilla.
“Florais treading the thorny way that saints have trodden. If your own spirituality, which is in its infancy—inits cradle, I may say—does not enable you to understand thatvia dolorosa, at least refrain from trivial interpolations and misrepresentations, Lucilla, I beg.”
Canon Morchard’s tone rather suggested commanding, than begging, and his large eyes seemed to flash with indignation as they looked, from beneath corrugated brows, at Lucilla.
She was rather paler than her usually colourless wont.
“I am afraid that Flora is suffering from a very common form of hysteria, father, and I thoroughly distrust any inspiration of hers in her present state of health.”
“She has told me herself that she is in her usual health, and that she positively objects to the idea of seeing a medical man. I see no reason for disbelieving her own statement.”
“Well, I do.”
“Lucilla, you forget yourself.”
Lucilla and the Canon looked at one another, each seeming momentarily to despair of the other.
At last Lucilla said:
“A little time ago, you thought she was ill, too.”
“Mind and body react upon one another, no doubt, and our little Flora is highly strung. I do not recognize it as being in any way incumbent upon me to explain to you my treatment of any soul in my charge, Lucilla, but I may say that I have now come to the conclusion that Flora’s malady was of the soul. With that, you must rest content.”
Lucilla did not rest content at all.
A philosophical acceptance of the inevitable had long been part of Miss Morchard’s life, but in the weeks that followed she came nearer to the futility of the spoken protest than ever before.
From seemingly eternal weeping, however, Flora presently passed to a tense exaltation of spirit that found its culmination in long hours spent upon her knees.
Lucilla made only one appeal to her.
“Flossie, won’t you tell me what’s happening? I can’t help knowing that you’ve been very unhappy.”
“I’m not unhappy now,” said Flora quickly. “At least, not like I was before. You know I’ve put myself absolutely under father’s direction, Lucilla? How wonderful he is!”
“He has made you happier?”
“Not he himself. He has shown me where to find peace, at last.”
“If you mean Church, I should have thought you’d known about it ever since you were born, very nearly.”
If the faint hint of impatient derision latent in her sister’s tone was perceptible to Flora, she showed no resentment at it.
She flushed deeply and looked earnestly at Lucilla.
“I wish I could make you understand. But some things are too sacred to be described, even if one could. The only thing I can say is that I was unhappy, I felt I was wasting my life, and that nobody cared. And I was full of remorse for a wrong I had done. I can’t tell you what it was, Lucilla, nor anyone else, ever, and I can’t undo it, now, but at least I can expiate it, and all my other failings.”
“Expiation?” Lucilla spoke the word unenthusiastically. “But if you can’t undo whatever it was you did—and really, Flossie, I can’t believe it was anything so very desperate—will it be a good plan to go on being miserable about it for the rest of your life, all to no purpose?”
“‘The heart knoweth its own bitterness,’” Flora replied gently.
Lucilla was left to apply the truth of the adage to her own condition of mind.
She was very unhappy about her sister.
Nevertheless, Flora had ceased to weep, and although she ate less than ever and rose early for the purpose of going to church, she looked rather less ill. Only the strained look in her eyes remained, ever increasing, to justify Lucilla’s feeling of sick dismay.
That it was entirely unshared by Canon Morchard, she knew already, but she was not altogether prepared for the announcement that he presently made.
“I am very happy about dear Flora—peculiarly and wonderfully so. What think you, Lucilla, of this? Flora is turning her thoughts towards the Sisterhood at St. Marychurch.”
It was never Miss Morchard’s way to respond over-emphatically to an invitation from her father to state her thoughts freely, experience having long since taught her what a tangled web we weave when first we practice speaking the truth inopportunely.
“Has she only just started the idea?”
“Nay, she tells me—and I can readily believe it—that the grace of God, according to its mysterious wont, has been working within her for a long whilenow. There has been a period of darkness for Flora, undoubtedly, but she is emerging more and more into the light—that light that shineth into the Perfect Day!”
The Canon seemed rather inclined to forget himself in profound musings.
“It implies losing her,” said Lucilla.
“Humanly speaking, yes, and it is hard to eradicate the human element. But once that is done—and done itshallbe—what remains is altogether joyful. I shall see her go, if go she does, with feelings far other than those with which I saw our poor Valeria leave home!”
Lucilla thought so, too, and would emphatically have given the preference to Valeria’s method of inaugurating an independent career.
“Icannotbe anything but glad that one of mine should be dedicated!” the Canon exclaimed, as though the exclamation broke from him almost irrepressibly.
“But does Flora mean to go away at once?”
“She wishes it greatly, and I should hardly feel justified in restraining her. Flora is not a child, and her own desire, as she says herself, is to feel that wayward, wayless will of hers at safe anchorage at last. Dear child, her one regret is for me.”
Tears stood in the Canon’s eyes.
“The grief of last winter greatly developed Flora, I believe. There has been a tendency to dreaminess, to a too great absorption in her music, that I confess has made me anxious in the past. But she speaks most rightly and nobly of her certainty that a call has come to her, and if so, it is indeed a vocation that must not be gainsayed. She is all ardour and anxiety to begin, and if all is well, she and I go to St. Marychurchto view the establishment there next week, and enter into the necessary arrangements.”
“What sort of life will it mean for her?”
“One of direct service, dear Lucilla, of shelter from the temptations of this world, of close personal union with Christ Himself, I trust. All indeed are not called to such union, but I believe with all my heart that our Flora is amongst the chosen few, and grievous though it be to lose her from our sadly diminished home-circle, I cannot but rejoice for her, and with her.”
The Canon’s voice trembled very much as he spoke, but his smile was one of single-hearted sincerity.
“Butdoesshe rejoice?” said Lucilla rather faintly.
“Indeed she does. I confess that Flora’s earnest desire for self-immolation, her ardent spirit, have taken me by surprise. She is of the stuff of which the martyrs were made. No austerity has any terrors for her—she is already far advanced upon the way of the mystic.”
Lucilla wrung her hands together.
“What is it, my dear one?” said her father gently.
She could not tell him. She felt unable to voice the terror and the profound distrust that possessed her at the thought of Flora, fanatically eager for discipline of her own seeking, finding in religious emotionalism an outlet for instincts that she had not dared, so far as Lucilla could judge, to call by their right name.
“One can only let other people go their own way, then?” she murmured, more to herself than to the Canon.
“Say, rather, the way appointed for them, dear Lucilla. Yours and mine may lie together yet awhilelonger, I trust, but I am no longer young, and these repeated partings tell upon me. It is a sacrifice for you, too, to make, but let us do so cheerfully—aye, and right thankfully, too. Our little one has been chosen for the Bride of Heaven, as the beautiful old devotional phrase has it.”
Lucilla was only too conscious that the beautiful old devotional phrase awoke nothing in herself but a shuddering distaste.
She could not doubt, however, that its effect upon Flora was far otherwise.
Although she saw, as time went by, that no outside influence would have power to shatter the vision so clearly before the Canon’s eyes and to which he so unfalteringly directed Flora’s gaze, it brought to her a slight sense of personal relief when the Canon, after inditing a letter of his usual unbridled length and meticulous candour, informed her that he had besought Quentillian to spend at St. Gwenllian that which he emphasized as Flora’s last evening at home.
“It will make it easier for us all, to have that dearest of dear fellows amongst us. He is so truly one of ourselves, and yet the mere presence of someone who does not always form part of our familiar little circle, will prevent overmuch dwelling upon the tender associations of the past that are well-nigh beyond bearing, at such a time as this.”
Owen, laconic as Lucilla herself, made no attempt to conceal either his personal dislike of the solution to Flora’s problem, or his innate conviction of her completeright to any form of self-slaughter that she might select.
They exchanged no opinions, but he found occasion to say to her in private:
“One thing, Flora. Will you leave me to deal with the Mrs. Carey equation, if it ever comes to be necessary?”
“I hope it never will.”
“So do I. But make it your legacy to me, so that if ever it has to be thought of again, I may do as seems best to me.”
Flora smiled, her shadowy, tremulous smile.
“Wouldn’t you do that anyway?”
“Perhaps I should. But I would rather have your permission. And after all, you know, Flora—you won’t be able to pull strings from your Sisterhood.”
It was the last, almost the only, reference that he would permit himself, and both could smile at it faintly.
“Very well, Owen. I don’t want to remember it ever again, and I shall only think of Mrs. Carey now in one way.”
She lacked the Canon’s capacity for outward expression, even now, and her colour rose as she spoke.
Only in earnest and uncondemnatory intercession would Mrs. Carey find place again in Flora’s thoughts.
Owen knew it as well as though she had told him so.
The evening was mild and beautiful, and the Canon sat at the open window, leaning back as though greatly fatigued, and asked Flora for some music.
“Shall I sing?” she asked.
“Are you able to, my dear?”
“Yes, indeed,” she said earnestly, and Quentillian could surmise that she was instinctively eager for the form of self-expression most natural to her, as a vent for her own mingled emotions.
Her voice was more beautiful than ever, with a depth of feeling new to it.
Quentillian was indignant with himself when he found that this perfectly traditional setting for a pathetic situation was unmistakably affecting him.
The only light round them was that of the summer’s evening, and Flora’s voice came with strength and sweetness and purity from her scarcely-seen figure at the far end of the room, in well-remembered and intrinsically-exquisite melody. She was part of his childhood—she was going away—they would none of them ever again see Flora, as they had known her, any more....
Quentillian, in a violent endeavour to react from an emotion that he unsparingly qualified as blatant, turned his eyes away from the singer.
He looked at Lucilla, and saw that she sat very still. He reflected that for a face so sensitive, and possessed of so much latent humour, hers was singularly inexpressive of anything but acceptance. Nevertheless it was an acceptance that had its origin, most unmistakably, in a self-control acquired long since, rather than in an absence of any capacity for strong feeling.
He wondered, not for the first time, what her life had taught Lucilla.
He looked at Canon Morchard.
The Canon had closed his eyes and his face, onwhich the lines were showing heavily at last, was white with the grey pallor of age. Nevertheless he, too, showed the deep, essential placidity of a conscious acceptance, and for the first time Quentillian perceived a fundamental resemblance between the Canon and his eldest daughter.
As though aware of the scrutiny fixed upon him, the Canon opened his eyes, and smiled as they met Quentillian’s.
“That harmony will be lost to us for a time, perhaps,” he said softly. “But is it not a foretaste of that great Song of Praise that will have no ending, and in which all, all, will be able to join together? I think so, Owen.”
He turned his head slightly, his finger-tips joined together in the position habitual to him.
“Flora, my child, my dear daughter, will it be too much if I ask for ‘Lead, Kindly Light,’ as you have so often given it to us on long-ago Sundays when we have been all together—all together?”
For answer, she struck the opening chords very gently.