“Owen, dear, I’ve got your letter. I can’t answer it in the way I should like to, making you understand everything that I mean. But do understand first of all that your thinking of me like that makes me very proud, and I wish I was more worth it all.“I’m glad you loved someone else before, and thank you for telling me. The reason I’m glad is because I used to like someone very much myself once, but it wasn’t like yours, it was only my own foolishness, and never came to anything. But I think perhaps it’s prevented my falling really in love, because, dear Owen, I am not in love with you. If I married you, it would be because you are, as you say, very lonely, and because I am very, very fond of you, and also perhaps, a little, because it would make Father so happy. But none of those reasons arethereal, true reason for marrying, are they?“We have known one another so long, and understand one another. Can’t we discuss it honestly together, before settling anything? Either way, we are always friends, so I will sign myself your friend.“Valeria Morchard.”
“Owen, dear, I’ve got your letter. I can’t answer it in the way I should like to, making you understand everything that I mean. But do understand first of all that your thinking of me like that makes me very proud, and I wish I was more worth it all.
“I’m glad you loved someone else before, and thank you for telling me. The reason I’m glad is because I used to like someone very much myself once, but it wasn’t like yours, it was only my own foolishness, and never came to anything. But I think perhaps it’s prevented my falling really in love, because, dear Owen, I am not in love with you. If I married you, it would be because you are, as you say, very lonely, and because I am very, very fond of you, and also perhaps, a little, because it would make Father so happy. But none of those reasons arethereal, true reason for marrying, are they?
“We have known one another so long, and understand one another. Can’t we discuss it honestly together, before settling anything? Either way, we are always friends, so I will sign myself your friend.
“Valeria Morchard.”
Quentillian read the letter with a strange mingling of disappointment, relief, and mortification.
Nevertheless it was in all sincerity that he wrote to Val of his admiration for her candour.
“You and I are moderns, my dear. Let us, as you wish, discuss the future impersonally, but let me first of all say that when—or if—ever you should come to the decision which I want you to come to, then so far as I am concerned, philosophical discussion will go for nothing. I shall wait for your sign, Val, and if it comes, there shall be no more pen and ink between us, but a meeting for which I long with all my heart.”
“Academic,” said Owen’s inner monitor, relentless as ever.
He posted his letter in spite of it.
It was with relief, and yet with a happiness less defined than he had expected it to be, that Quentillian found himself engaged to Valeria.
He regretted his own absence of ardour, and was all the time aware of a faint, lurking gratification at having so early outlived the illusions of passionate emotion.
He returned to St. Gwenllian.
This time it was Valeria who met him. Something in the simplicity with which she accepted their new relationship touched him profoundly, and rendered of no account his own temperamental subtleties.
It was with a deepening sense of sincerity that Quentillian said to her:
“You have made me very happy, dearest.”
“I’m glad, Owen. I’m happy too.”
Her hand lay trustfully in his.
“They want to see you so much, at home, Owen. I’ve told them. They’re all so pleased.”
It evidently added to Valeria’s content, that it should be so.
“You know that Father has always really looked upon you as another son, even in the days when you and I got into trouble for playing at Greek sacrificial processions with the guinea pigs on silver salvers.”
They laughed together at the recollection.
The Canon had not been hard upon the classically-minded delinquents.
Quentillian believed himself to have realized fully the adjuncts, necessary and fitting in the eyes of the Morchard family, but to himself distasteful in the extreme, of his engagement to Valeria.
He was prepared for conventional congratulations, for the abhorrent necessity of discussing his personal affairs, for an emotional absence of reticence that would differ as widely from his own impersonal, dissecting-room outspokenness as would the Canon’s effusive periods from Quentillian’s cultivated terseness of expression.
Nevertheless, he was less well-armoured, or more severely tried, than he had expected to be.
Canon Morchard seemed to shower welcome, blessings, congratulations upon him. He said:
“Dear lad, you and I must have a long talk together, at no distant date.”
They had many.
It seemed to Quentillian that he saw more of the Canon than of Valeria, in the days that ensued.
“Val, when will you marry me? I’m quite selfishenough to want you to myself,” Quentillian said to her with firmness after a week at St. Gwenllian that seemed to him to have been mainly differentiated from his last visit there by the increased number of one-sided talks with the Canon to which he had been subjected.
Val said tentatively: “The end of January?”
“Why not before Christmas? Stear should be quite ready for us by then.”
It relieved him with a strange intensity to know that he would not, after all, go alone to Stear.
Valeria looked at him, and although her voice when she spoke was serious, a certain mischievous amusement lurked in her eyes.
“Before Christmas, it’s Advent,” she said.
“Advent?”
“I don’t think Father would like my wedding to be during Advent, at all.”
“I see.”
“Oh, don’t be vexed, Owen. It’s only a month’s difference after all.”
“It isn’t that,” began Quentillian candidly, and then shared in her slight, unoffended laughter at his lack of gallantry.
“I only mean, my dear, that I don’t like to see you bound by that sort of convention. Do you really think it can make any difference if we’re married on one particular date rather than another?”
“I’m thinking entirely of Father,” gently said Val, thus altogether evading the real point at issue.
Quentillian was again and again made aware of thiscapacity in Val for the avoidance of any discussion between them on the subject of religion.
It was as though the faint rebellion that he had discerned in her at her own way of life had been extinguished by the mere prospect of its coming to an end. Nor, when he finally forced an issue, did Val appear to possess his own capacities for impartial, essentially impersonal, discussion.
“Can’t we leave it alone, Owen? You told me what your views were—and you know what mine are. We’ve been honest with one another—isn’t that all that matters?”
“In a sense, of course it is. You don’t think that perhaps it’s a pity to know there’s one subject we must tacitly avoid—that we can’t discuss freely?”
He spoke without emphasis of any kind.
“Itisa pity, of course,” said Val literally. “But how can we help it? I can hardly listen to you without disloyalty of the worst kind. If you look at it from my point of view for a moment, you do see that, don’t you, Owen?”
“Yes, I suppose I do see that,” he said heavily.
He felt strangely disappointed and disillusioned.
“Do you wish me to say anything to your father about that?”
Val blushed deeply, but spoke quite resolutely.
“No, I don’t. I’ve thought it over, and I can’t see that it concerns anyone but you and me. Lucilla says so, too. I asked her what she thought. It’s not as though I were eighteen, and it’s not as though I didn’t trust you, absolutely, not to interfere with my beliefs, any more than I with your—unbeliefs.”
Confronted with her grave trustfulness, no less than with the obvious justice of her words, Quentillian could only agree with her.
His rather arrogant conviction of earlier days, that Val’s beliefs must go, gave place to an unescapable certainty that they would not even be modified. Rather would Valeria, enforced by tradition and by the inherited faith that was in her, expect with the course of years to influence her husband’s views.
Owen felt strongly the hopelessness of such expectation, and still more strongly the inexpediency, not to say the impossibility, of urging that hopelessness upon Valeria.
It was decided that the wedding should take place in January, and the engagement be made public just before Christmas.
“You do not want to let the world in upon your joy too soon, young people,” the Canon told them with a grave smile.
Val’s answering smile acquiesced in the assumption, as indeed the smiles and silences, no less than the spoken words, of his entire family were always apt to acquiesce in any assumption made by Canon Morchard, whether the facts warranted such acquiescence or not.
The days slipped by, very much as they had slipped by before Quentillian and Valeria had become engaged. If Quentillian had expected a greater difference, a more profound element, he was destined to be disappointed.
Val was charming and—he would not have to face loneliness at Stear.
Indeed at one moment, it almost appeared as thoughValeria would not be alone in accomplishing the destruction of the spirit of solitude at Stear.
Adrian Morchard sought his prospective brother-in-law, and said, with singularly ill-chosen colloquialism:
“Tell me, old thing, have you had any talk with the governor about that living at Stear?”
“Not yet. The present incumbent hasn’t even resigned.”
“I suppose—ha-ha—you’ll laugh—in fact I shouldn’t be surprised if you thought it dashed funny—it makes me smile myself, in a way—you’llroarwhen I tell you what I’m thinking of.”
Quentillian felt as melancholy as do the majority of people thus apostrophised, and was aware that his melancholy was reflected on his face in a forbidding expression.
Adrian had turned rather pale.
“You know the old man’s always been desperately keen on my going into the Church? Well—I say, you can laugh as much as you want to, I shan’t be offended—I’m not at all sure I shan’t do it.”
Quentillian felt no inclination whatever to indulge in the prescribed orgy of merriment.
“You coming into the family like this, with a good living going begging, makes it a pretty obvious move in a way, doesn’t it—and then it’d please the old man frightfully—and really there are precious few openings for a man who hasn’t been brought up to anything special, nowadays.”
“Yes. And what is the real reason?”
Adrian laughed uncomfortably.
“Sherlock Holmes! Well, between ourselves, I don’tmind telling you that I want to see some prospect of being able to marry, and if I had a definite thing in view, like Stear, I might be able to bring it off.”
“You can’t be ordained in five minutes. Don’t be absurd.”
“I’ve got to wait, anyhow,” said Adrian gloomily. “She won’t even be engaged, yet. I thought I might as well fill in the time at Cambridge or somewhere, if it’s going to lead to something. I’m quite willing to wait if I must, and of course I shall never change.”
“It’s Miss Duffle, I suppose. I can’t say I should have thought she’d enjoy the life of a country parson’s wife.”
“You haven’t the least idea of what she’s really like.”
“Perhaps not.” Owen’s voice implied the contrary. “What about yourself? Do you really suppose you could stand it?”
“Of course I could, if it meanther. My dear fellow, my mind’sabsolutelymade up, I may tell you, and has been for—for days. But, of course,” he added ingenuously, “it does depend a good deal on whether you’ll promise me Stear or not at the end of it all.”
“What about your father?”
“Oh, he’ll jump at it, of course. It’s been the one wish of his heart, all along,” said Adrian easily.
Quentillian wondered how it was possible that any youth, brought up in the intellectual atmosphere of St. Gwenllian, could be so entirely devoid of insight. To his own way of thinking, it was utterly incredible that Canon Morchard, ardent Christian and idealist, should contemplate with any degree of equanimity, his son’sproposed flippant adoption of a vocation which he regarded as sacred.
Owen committed himself to no promises.
“I should like to talk it over with Val.”
“I suppose if you must you must,” said Adrian, grudgingly. “But don’t let her tell anyone else.”
Valeria’s views were not far removed from Quentillian’s own.
It sometimes, indeed, seemed to Owen that the identity of their points of view on every other subject only rendered more evident the deep gulf dividing them on the topic that Valeria had decreed should be a barred one—that of religion.
Spoken, their very difference might have brought them closer together. Unspoken, it seemed to Owen to pervade all their intercourse since their engagement as it had never done before.
Valeriahad been engaged for nearly a month when she wrote a letter.
“Dear Captain Cuscaden,“I thought I would like to tell you myself that I am engaged to be married. It is to Owen Quentillian, whom I have known all my life, almost, and we hope to be married in January.“I hope you will have very good luck in Canada, and that you will sometimes let us know how you get on. We are expecting you on Saturday, to come and say good-bye.“Yours sincerely,“Valeria Morchard.”
“Dear Captain Cuscaden,
“I thought I would like to tell you myself that I am engaged to be married. It is to Owen Quentillian, whom I have known all my life, almost, and we hope to be married in January.
“I hope you will have very good luck in Canada, and that you will sometimes let us know how you get on. We are expecting you on Saturday, to come and say good-bye.
“Yours sincerely,“Valeria Morchard.”
Val spent a long while over the composition of her brief letter, re-read it a great number of times, and finally tore it up very carefully into small pieces.
“What’s the use?” she said.
Captain Cuscaden, however, did not seem to have been dependent upon Valeria for news of Valeria’s engagement. He congratulated her formally on the Saturday afternoon when he came to pay his farewell visit to St. Gwenllian.
Olga Duffle was there, too, and Miss Admaston.
“No more tennis this year. It’s going to rain again,” said Flora.
“Here it comes,” Mr. Clover pointed out.
“It may clear up later—let’s have tea.”
After tea the rain was still falling heavily.
“How are all you young folks going to amuse yourselves?” genially enquired the Canon. “Lucilla, can you not organize some of our oldjeux d’esprit, with pencil and paper?”
There was an inarticulate protest from the Captain, to which no one paid any attention except Valeria, who heard it, and Olga, who replied to it: “I’ll help you, Dzorze, if you’re very good.”
Mr. Clover was zealous in finding paper and pencils.
“I can’t resist this,” said the Canon boyishly. “I must give some of my old favourites a turn before going to more serious affairs. Now what is it to be?”
No one appeared to be very ready with suggestions. Captain Cuscaden was gloomily gazing out of the window. Olga and Adrian were talking in undertones, and Miss Admaston was telling Quentillian how verymuch she dreaded and disliked any games that required the use of brains.
“Are we all ready?” said Mr. Clover joyously.
“I suppose we’re as ready as we ever shall be,” said Captain Cuscaden.
Thus encouraged, they began.
Canon Morchard, Lucilla, and Owen Quentillian outmatched the rest of the players with ease. Each seemed to think with promptitude of great men whose names started with A, battles that began with M, or quotations—English—of which the initial letter was W.
They challenged one another’s references, and verified one another’s dates. They capped quotations, and they provided originalbouts rimés.
The entertainment gradually resolved itself into one animated trio, with a faithful but halting chorus, in the persons of Mr. Clover and Flora, and a rapid and low-toned aside between Adrian and Miss Duffle.
Captain Cuscaden played a listless game of noughts and crosses with Miss Admaston, and Valeria leant back in her chair and ceased to pretend that she was occupied.
She looked at the sapphire and diamond ring on her finger, and thought about Owen’s cleverness. She remembered that Lucilla had said he would be a difficult person to live with. She remembered her own secret desires for a life of work, and her assurance to herself that such ambitions were out of place. She reminded herself that her father had been, in his own parlance, glad beyond words to welcome Owen Quentillian as a son. And she looked at Owen himself, andsaw him intent, over his little slips of paper, and a sudden rush of tenderness came over her. His absorption in the game seemed to make him younger, and in more need of her. She could remember Owen as a flaxen-haired, solemn, rather priggish little boy, and she suddenly felt that perhaps he had not changed a very great deal since those days, after all.
Val felt happier, in a subdued and wistful way. She woke to the realization that the games were ended.
The Canon had arisen.
“Look up that derivation, Clover, dear man, and let me have it. I shall be curious.... Fare ye well, young people, I recommend Lucilla here as a veritable dictionary of dates, if you wish to continue your amusement.”
Nothing could have been more evident, the moment the Canon had left the room, than that no one wished to pursue amusement on the lines indicated.
Even Mr. Clover joined in the general movement that thankfully relinquished paper and pencil, and sent everyone to the piano, flung open by Olga Duffle.
“Do play something,” Adrian pleaded.
“Oh, not me. Make your sister play. She plays so much better than I do.”
It was indubitably true that Flora played a great deal better than did Olga, yet nobody seemed to want Flora to play the piano, and Olga, even as she protested, slipped on to the music stool and ran her small fingers over the keys.
“I say, how well you do everything!” Adrian murmured ecstatically above her.
She looked up at him and smiled, showing all her little pointed teeth.
They clustered round her.
“Do you know ‘Oh, Kiss Me and I’ll Never Tell,’ that comes in that revue—I forget it’s name—the new one? It’s lovely.”
To the perceptions of Valeria Morchard, trained in the eclectic school of the Canon’s taste, the musical inspiration in question was not only undeserving of being called lovely, but was vulgar to the point of blatancy, ringing through the St. Gwenllian drawing-room in Olga’s little, high, soprano voice.
She was not at all surprised that Owen should look at her through hispince-nezwith eyebrows expressively elevated, nor that Mr. Clover, presumably in a futile endeavour to spare the Canon’s ears, should unobtrusively go and shut the door.
Val looked at Lucilla.
There was something not at all unlike amusement on Miss Morchard’s face, but Val did not think that it was caused by the humour of “Oh, Kiss Me and I’ll Never Tell.” Rather it might have been born of a gentle irony, embracing alike the puzzled distaste of Flora, the obvious terror of the curate lest he should be supposed to be enjoying the entertainment, the absorption with which Captain Cuscaden, Adrian, and even Miss Admaston stood and listened, the supercilious detachment of Owen Quentillian, the complacent unconsciousness of the small, pert singer at the piano. No doubt Lucilla could have detected, had she cared to do so, the unspecified emotions that Val suspected of being written upon her own unsmiling face.
She felt suddenly impatient.
“We’re all intolerable. Lucilla is superior, and Flossie takes this rubbishau grand serieux, like a crime, and Owen is thinking how deplorable it is that idiotic words should be set to inferior music, and put before the British public for its education.... I can hear exactly what he’ll say about it afterwards.”
It struck her that the anticipation scarcely boded well for a life that was in future to be spent in Quentillian’s company.
“My dusky gal is black as coal“But she’s just the whitest, brightest soul.”
“My dusky gal is black as coal“But she’s just the whitest, brightest soul.”
“My dusky gal is black as coal
“But she’s just the whitest, brightest soul.”
carolled Olga.
“I love the darky girls, don’t you?”
“Rather.”
“Why does the English youth of today seek artistic inspiration from the uncivilized population of Central Africa, I wonder?” said Owen Quentillian. He addressed himself to Lucilla, but his very distinct utterance was perfectly audible to everybody else.
Captain Cuscaden laughed, and Olga looked round with perfect good humour. It was Adrian who glared at Quentillian, and Mr. Clover who observed reproachfully:
“I’m sure those old plantation songs are charming,asMiss Olga renders them.”
“You shouldn’t be so superior, Owen,” said Lucilla tranquilly.
It was what Val had been thinking, but she had found herself quite unable to say it, from the very intensity of her feeling.
Lucilla placed an old album on the music stand, and they all began to sing together “Comin’ through the Rye.”
The music affected Valeria almost intolerably.
All the Morchards had good voices, and both Flora and Lucilla sang well. Their true, deep voices gradually dominated Olga’s high pipe, and the four men sank to a mere murmur of accompaniment. Miss Admaston had never done more than crane over everybody’s shoulder in turn in an endeavour to see the page at close quarters, and murmur the last words of a verse in an undertone when everyone else was singing the first line of the refrain. She was now altogether silent.
“Sing the Russian songs, Flora,” said Quentillian.
Valeria pressed her hands closer together, and leant against the wall.
It was growing dark.
The air of the Russian song that Flora chose was wild and sweet.
“You are my darling, you are my soulLight of my life, my sun, my goal ...You are my being, my delightStar of my darkest night.”
“You are my darling, you are my soulLight of my life, my sun, my goal ...You are my being, my delightStar of my darkest night.”
“You are my darling, you are my soul
Light of my life, my sun, my goal ...
You are my being, my delight
Star of my darkest night.”
Direct, primitive worship of one man for one woman: Flora’s voice held all the passion that was not in her, save at her music.
The ache at Val’s heart seemed to her physical in its intensity.
She knew what she wanted, now, and she knew that Owen Quentillian would not give it her.
To her own horror, a rush of tears blinded her.
“But all is well for thou art with me“The world is full of only thee.”
“But all is well for thou art with me“The world is full of only thee.”
“But all is well for thou art with me
“The world is full of only thee.”
sang Flora.
“What is the matter?” said the low, troubled voice of Cuscaden beside her.
Val started violently.
“Val, youmusttell me. What is it...?”
They looked at each other.
It suddenly became the thing that mattered most in the world that Val Morchard and George Cuscaden should speak alone to one another.
Regardless of the rain pouring outside, Valeria gently opened the French window behind her.
“Come outside. I must speak to you,” she said urgently.
She had no idea what she was going to say.
Outside, in the rapidly gathering darkness, the rain fell in torrents and splashed up from the ground against the stone step of the low veranda that ran round the house.
Cuscaden stepped out of the warm room and closed the window again behind him. It was as though he had shut them out of the world of music and companionship, into some colder, more virile atmosphere.
“But all is well for thou art with me“The world is full of only thee.”
“But all is well for thou art with me“The world is full of only thee.”
“But all is well for thou art with me
“The world is full of only thee.”
Flora’s song reached them as faintly as possible, and neither heeded it.
They faced one another, and Val found that she was shivering from head to foot.
“Why do I never get a chance of speaking to you nowadays?” said Captain Cuscaden violently.
“You could have,” said Valeria, and her voice broke.
His arms went round her.
“Val, Val, I love you so.”
It was as though Quentillian had never existed.
“And you’re going to Canada,” she wailed.
“You’re coming with me.”
“I must,” Val said, and surrendered herself to his kisses.
“My daughter, how wet you are!” exclaimed the Canon.
His daughter, hastening to her own room, paused under the light of a lamp, and inadvertently thereby gave the Canon an opportunity of verifying his statement.
Val, beneath his astonished gaze, became acutely aware that her rain-wet hair was disordered, her face flaming, and showing all the marks of recent and violent weeping.
“What is all this?” the Canon enquired rather sternly.
Valeria felt utterly incapable of replying.
“Answer me, Valeria.”
“Captain Cuscaden is looking for you,” said Valeria almost inaudibly.
“Captain Cuscaden?”
“Yes.”
They gazed speechlessly at one another.
A weight had descended upon the Canon’s brow and the lines round his mouth were set sternly.
“Valeria, has he insulted you?”
The intimate conviction overwhelmed her that the Canon’s opinion of her recent interview with Captain Cuscaden would certainly demand an emphatically affirmative reply to the enquiry. She felt a purely hysterical desire to burst out laughing at the thought.
“How is Captain Cuscaden concerned with you? If it is as I think, Valeria, you did well to refer him to me.”
“But it isn’t. He—I—we are both to blame, Father. I’m going to break off my engagement to Owen. I love George.”
The words were said, and although Valeria broke into a flood of tears, it was with a sense of relief. Telling Owen that she did not intend to marry him after all, was, she honestly felt, nothing to telling the Canon so.
She sank down on the stairs and hid her face in her hands, afraid to face her father’s realization of the implication that her words contained.
It did not tarry.
“Do you want me to understand that you are under a solemn engagement to marry Owen Quentillian, and that you have at the same time been allowing—encouraging—the clandestine attentions of this—thisfellow? You, my daughter, behaving like a wanton? I won’t believe it—I can’t believe it—” the Canon’s voice rose violently. “Valeria, for God’s sake tell me I’m mistaken—don’t crouch there like a guilty creature—tell me I’m wrong, tell me you’re the pure, honestmaiden I’ve tried to make you and not—not—a creature without honour, without decency——”
The rising note of anguish broke on a strangled sob.
Below, a door was shut sharply.
“Get up,” said the Canon with violence.
Valeria rose, and he pulled her to her feet and gazed searchingly into her face.
“And this is my child!” said the Canon, and in his turn dropped his face into his hands, groaning.
“I couldn’t help it,” she spoke between her sobs, like a child. “Owen knew I wasn’t in love with him ... only I never realized, I didn’t know George cared, too—it was always him....”
“Stop!” thundered the Canon. “Are you without shame, Valeria? Is that fellow waiting for me downstairs, or has he crawled away as I should expect, from one who has so repaid my hospitality?”
The words gave Valeria a needed impetus.
“He is ready to meet you, Father—he went to find you. And I love him—I suppose I’ve been very dishonourable, but I—I believe Owen will understand.”
She broke into tears again, and left him.
Overwhelmed with the sense of her own dishonour, regarding the Canon’s wrath as might have a child, in the light of the greatest calamity that life could present, she turned with absolute relief to the thought of Owen’s dispassionate judgments, his studiously impersonal attitude towards life. Owen would understand.
There came a knock at the door.
“Val, may I come in?”
“What is it?” said Valeria unwillingly.
Lucilla entered the room, unperturbed, but fully accepting the disordered aspect of its occupant.
“I’m afraid, Val, that the drawing-room door was open, and it was impossible to help hearing Father. I thought you’d rather know, in case you wanted to speak to Owen.”
“Owen knows?” almost shrieked Valeria.
“I suppose he does. He must have drawn his own conclusions.”
“I couldn’t help it,” said Val again. “I never meant anything like that to happen—it’s George Cuscaden, Lucilla. It was always him, indeed it was, only I didn’t know it, and it all seemed to happen in a minute—it was stronger than either of us.”
“I daresay you did quite right. Why don’t you wash, Val?”
“Oh, Lucilla, how like you!”
Valeria laughed shakily, but she followed her sister’s advice.
Lucilla methodically produced Val’s brush and comb, and dry clothing.
“Maud Admaston and Miss Duffle have gone, and Adrian went with them. Mr. Clover has gone, too, so it was only Owen and Flossie and I that heard.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything. Shall I fasten you up, Val?”
“Lucilla—what am I to do?”
“Tell Owen you can’t marry him, and tell George you will marry him.”
“I wish it was as simple as that! You always take things so literally.”
“Well,” said Lucilla unmoved, “I don’t see any other way of taking this. You can’t be engaged to two people at once. You know—Owen will understand.”
“That’s what I feel,” said Val to her own surprise. “But Father—Father will never, never understand.”
“Probably not. But after all, it’s you, and Owen, and George, isn’t it, that are concerned? I shouldn’t let there be scenes and upsets about it, Val, if I were you—really I shouldn’t. Why don’t you just see Owen tonight, and tell him about it, and then you and he and George could all talk it over quietly tomorrow morning?”
Val was conscious of profound astonishment and also of extreme relief.
“Do you think one could? But Father——”
“You needn’t go downstairs again. I quite understand that you don’t want to see Father again tonight. Shall I tell Owen to come up here?”
“Here? How could he, in my bedroom?”
“Goodness me, child, you may just as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, surely. But if you think it’s so dreadful, I suppose you can come out on the landing and speak to him.”
Impossible to disconcert Lucilla!
Val assented to the surprising propositions so matter-of-factly delivered.
“Yes, tell Owen to come up. I’d better get it over. But Lucilla—George——”
“Do you want me to see him, or give him a message?”
“I want to know what Father says to him,” Val said faintly.
“Very well. I’ll ask Father if George has gone.”
“And, oh, Lucilla! I know you can’t prevent it, really, but if only you could make Father not come up to me tonight! I can’t bear any more—indeed I can’t.”
“Well,” said Lucilla, “you’d better lock the door then.” She took the key from the lock, put it on the inside of the door and tried it in a practical manner. “That’s all right. You can lock it on the inside as soon as Owen has gone.”
She went downstairs, but turned and came up again the next moment.
“I’ll have dinner sent up to you, shall I?”
“I don’t want any.”
“I should think you’d better have something, Val. I’ll send up soup and chicken. The pudding is only ginger, and you know how badly she makes ginger pudding.”
Lucilla departed in earnest, upon this prosaic pronouncement.
She was succeeded by Owen Quentillian, and Val went out upon the landing to meet him.
“Will you forgive me, Owen? I can’t marry you.”
“What has happened?”
“I thought you knew,” she said piteously.
“I suppose I do. Is it Cuscaden?”
“Yes.”
“Then why,” Owen demanded in reasonable accents, “couldn’t he have proposed to you himself without waiting for you to be engaged to me?”
“He thought he couldn’t ask me to go to Canada—and he’s badly off—and then, when you came, he—he thought it was you I cared about.”
“I see,” said Quentillian dryly.
“I don’t think I knew, exactly, that I still cared for him, and I was sure he hadn’t meant anything, and it—it was really all over—only then—Flora’s music, somehow—and he asked me what it was—and I cried. Owen, won’t you forgive me? Surely it’s better than if I’d tried to go on with it?”
“Of course it is.”
They looked at one another rather helplessly.
“Val, if I can do anything to help you, of course I will. What are you going to do?”
“I can’t think,” said Valeria faintly.
“When does Cuscaden sail?”
“Next week.”
“That’s bad luck,” said Owen impartially. “Look here, my dear, you must be tired out. Won’t you go and sleep now, and in the morning we could see what’s to be done?”
“Oh, how good you are!”
He frowned slightly.
“Surely the day of heroics is over. I haven’t the slightest desire to exchange pistol-shots with Captain Cuscaden, I assure you. We are three reasonable human beings, and we find ourselves in a difficulty from which only clear thinking and absolute plain speaking can extricate us. You may believe me when I tell you that I am perfectly prepared to discuss the case upon its own merits.”
Valeria could believe him without difficulty. Evenin the midst of her distress, she could not altogether stifle a slight suspicion that Owen was appreciating the opportunity afforded him of being thoroughly modern and rational.
“Have you seen Father?”
“Not yet.”
Quentillian’s tone betrayed no great eagerness for the prospective interview.
“He is very, very angry with me, and I know he has every right to be. But indeed, Owen, I was coming straight to you, only I met him first, and it somehow came out. George was going to tell him.”
“Your father has never liked Captain Cuscaden,” said Quentillian meditatively. “I am afraid he will make things very difficult.”
“I deserve it.”
“Don’t be absurd,” said Quentillian, with severity. “This is that foolish idea of atonement and repentance—and all the other cheap salves to the humiliation of having made a mistake. Don’t you see that it’s all waste of time and energy, Val? You ought to be thinking of what you’re going to do next, and how you can do it with least wear and tear for us all. Life isn’t a series of sins and punishments or virtues and rewards, as it is in one’s nursery story-books. There are actions and their consequences—that’s all.”
She looked up at him, bewildered, and yet slightly relieved at perceiving that he still possessed the power of sententiousness.
“Only say you forgive me, Owen.”
“If you wish it, my dear, of course. Please don’t cry any more.”
Valeria, however, crying more than ever, drew the sapphire and diamond ring from her finger and mutely held it out to him.
Owen gazed at it for a moment through hispince-nez.
Then he put it gently back into her hand again, and closed her fingers round it with his own.
“Please, Val.”
Still holding her hand, he bent forward and very softly kissed her wet cheek.
“If we’re not engaged any more, we’ve got to go back to what we were before—brother and sister, Val. Good-night—don’t cry any more.”
The smile with which he left her was in his eyes as well as on his lips, and held nothing so much as very gentle amusement, and an affectionate concern.
Theamusement was no longer to be seen in the eyes of Quentillian, and the concern had no affinity with affectionateness, when he reached the door of the Canon’s study.
He felt himself to be eleven years old once more, and in complete uncertainty as to the manner in which he might be received, after the discovery of some unwonted misdemeanour.
The thunderous voice that bade him come in did nothing to dispel the unpleasing illusion.
The Canon was sitting at the writing-table, under the carved crucifix that hung against the green velvet plaque. A blotting pad, deeply scored with heavy blacklines, lay beneath his hand, and a broken lead pencil testified to the energy with which that hand had sought an outlet for the feelings that presumably agitated its owner.
The Canon swung round in his chair as the door closed behind Quentillian.
“Owen, Owen!” His voice broke. “My boy, how can I face you?”
The Canon answered his own question by rising impetuously and leaning heavily upon Quentillian’s shoulder, one hand across his eyes.
“My dear, dear fellow!”
His voice, charged with emotion, broke horribly over each fresh ejaculation.
“My son—Owen—you’ve been nothing less to me—and now—treated like this—one of mine own household—what can I say, what can I say?”
Quentillian longed heartily to implore the Canon to say nothing at all.
“Won’t you sit down, sir? I thought I’d better come and talk to you, if I may.”
“Anything, anything, dear lad. Have you seen my unhappy child?”
“Valeria and I have agreed that we are no longer engaged,” said Owen carefully. “I don’t consider that I have been unfairly treated. She discovered, rather before the eleventh hour, that she and Captain Cuscaden were in love with one another, and it would have been quite as unjust to me as to herself, if she had not acted upon the discovery.”
Canon Morchard gazed anxiously at the victim of this neatly-analysed situation.
“For Heaven’s sake, Owen, don’t let yourself become bitter. It is so easy—so fatally easy, when one is suffering. Take a stronger grip of your faith than ever before, dear lad—remember that ‘allthings work together for good.’ One learns to dwell upon those words, and the meaning deepens into something so unspeakably precious....”
To Owen’s relief the Canon sank back into his chair again.
“I can offer you no atonement,” he said presently, with a deep weariness in his voice.
“I am still unutterably bewildered. How I have failed, how I have failed, with my motherless girl! And I thought I knew my child—my merry Valeria, as I have called her from her babyhood—I thought I knew her through and through!Sheto be dishonourable,sheto be heartless,sheto attach herself to a godless, brainless, mannerless fellow—and when a man like yourself had received her troth! Owen, it is as though mine own right hand had turned against me.”
The Canon held out a trembling right hand and gazed upon it.
“Where is Captain Cuscaden now, sir?” enquired Quentillian, almost expecting to hear that the object of his solicitude had been bound and cast into outer darkness.
“Where!” Canon Morchard struck the table with his clenched fist until the blotting-paper and the broken pencil bounded again. “Where! I have dismissed him, Owen. Does he think that I shall give my daughter to one who comes like a thief in the night? Thereis such a thing as a righteous anger, and such an anger was mine then.”
It seemed to be his still, Owen reflected, and boded ill for his own wish to discuss the situation impartially.
“Valeria is very unhappy, sir.”
The Canon groaned.
“I can’t trust myself to see her, to speak to her. God knows that my place is with my unhappy child, but my shameful lack of self-control makes me tremble. I have been angry—I am angry still.”
He looked piteously at Owen.
“I have thought to get the better of my devil with prayer and fasting, but the old Adam is strong—terribly strong. When I saw my child—my little Valeria—her eyes wild, her person disordered, dashing upstairs as might a shamed creature, to hide itself—when I realized the depths of her dishonour—Owen, it was in me to have struck her. I could have raised my hand against my own child!”
His head sank upon his breast.
Quentillian waited before making a further, strangely inadequate, contribution to the conversation.
“Do you think, sir, perhaps you may be taking this too seriously?”
Canon Morchard stared at him. Then he smiled grimly.
“Generous—very generous, Owen. But I am to be deceived by no such feint. I, who have had the care of souls these thirty years! Do you think that, whatever front you may present to the world, my eyes—mine—areto be blinded? Do you think thatIdo not know that the iron has entered into your soul?”
The Canon’s eyes were so extraordinarily piercing as they gazed into Quentillian’s, that the object of his penetration sought in himself almost hopefully for some of the searing emotions attributed to him.
He discovered none.
Wounded in his vanity, annoyed, disappointed even,—but nothing more.
Owen, quite aware of futility, inwardly formed phrases of complete truthfulness, only to reject them.
“I assure you that I am not in the least unhappy at having been jilted by your daughter ... it leaves me quite cold ... I don’t think I ever really wanted to marry Val very much ... we were much better friends before we tried to become engaged....”
Or, with a yet more devastating candour:
“I’ve been certain for days that I made a complete fool of myself by ever proposing marriage to Valeria....”
This surprisingly agile form of mental gymnastics was tempestuously interrupted by the Canon.
“For God’s sake, Owen, break down!” he groaned. “My boy, my boy, you’re safe with me. Forget that I’m Valeria’s father—think of me only as one who has known suffering—aye, and sin, too. Make a safety-valve of me—let yourself go. But I can bear this sham cynicism of yours no longer. It’s wrong, Owen, it’s wrong. True fortitude faces what lies before it, finds its Gethsemane, and rises, purged of bitterness. Break down—weep, nay, curse if you will, only castopen the floodgates. Let loose whatever devils possess your soul, you, the victim of treachery—let them loose, I say, and we will conquer them together.”
For an instant, all that Quentillian could do hardly sufficed to prevent his letting loose a violent fit of laughter.
He drove his teeth into his lower lip. It was his increasing perception of the Canon’s overwhelming misery that steadied him.
“Val has hurt me less than you think, sir,” he said gently at last. “I have sometimes thought that she and I had made a mistake.”
The Canon gazed at him with a pathetic unbelief.
“My unhappy child does not know what she has lost.”
“I hope she is going to be happy in her own way,” said Quentillian.
The Canon’s brow instantly became thunderous again.
“Not one word, Owen, not one word on those lines,” he commanded sternly. “I appreciate your generosity deeply, but there is such a thing as carrying generosity too far.”
“I can see small generosity in relinquishing to someone else what is no longer mine.”
The Canon swept on, unheeding.
“My faith in my child has received a rude shock. Valeria is unfit for wifehood and motherhood. How can I let her undertake responsibility when she has proved herself unworthy up to the hilt? No, Owen, let it rest there.Iwill deal with Valeria, and may God help us both!”
Quentillian felt inclined to echo the petition whole-heartedly.
He could not doubt that the Canon’s misery was utterly unfeigned. So, also, was his wrath.
The incongruous sound of the dinner-gong vibrated violently through the room.
The Canon did not stir.
His voice, when next he spoke, was almost a groan.
“I cannot see Valeria tonight. God forgive me, I am not master of myself. Your calm shames me, Owen. But it is not natural, not natural. You will, and must, suffer for it later on. Tell me, dear fellow—that I should have to say it!—do you wish to leave us—do you wish to go?”
Owen wished for nothing so much as an immediate adjournment to the dining-room, but he felt that it would indeed be impossible to say so.
“You would not wish me to send Valeria from home, I know. Nor do I know where I could send her.”
“Let her marry Cuscaden,” said Quentillian boldly.
“Never, Owen. Give my child—my weak, untrustworthy child, to a man who could behave as Cuscaden has behaved? Believe me, I appreciate the generosity that prompts you, but you know not what you ask—you know not what you ask.”
Quentillian, entirely unaccustomed to any such accusation, was silently annoyed.
He was also hungry.
“I have sometimes thought,” said the Canon with a trembling voice, “that my tendency has been to idolize my children. I lost their mother so early! Youknow how it was with me, Owen. Lucilla was my eldest born, my right hand. I have come to depend upon Lucilla, paradoxical though it may sound, from a father towards his child. David, my eldest son ...” the Canon paused a long while, and then murmured softly: “‘Whilst he was yet a great way off’—David is in a far country, but he will return to us yet, and though his Morning Prayer be our Evensong, who shall say that there is separation between us? And I have kept my other children by my side, Owen. Little Flora has never yet tried her wings away from home. She is more like her mother than any of them—she and the dear Adrian.”
A smile like an illumination came into the Canon’s eyes as he spoke Adrian’s name. “The light of mine eyes, that dear lad has always been. My Benjamin! There are no words for what I went through whilst Adrian was fighting, Owen. One could only remember in Whose keeping he was, and that allmustbe well, in reality. But all one’s faith was needed—it must be so, with poor human nature. The soul goes through dark waters, Owen, as you are finding now.”
The protest which Owen almost automatically registered within himself at this interpolated reference to the despair which he could not feel, was necessarily a silent one.
“Valeria has been the brightest, the most lighthearted, of all my children. She is naturally gifted with high spirits, and she and I have made innocent fun together, have shared the humourous view of life, a thousand times. Have I allowed that gaiety of hers to turn to flippancy—that mirthful spirit to cloak alack of principle? I ask myself again and again wherein I have erred, for I cannot hold myself blameless, Owen. I have thought over my motherless children, I have prayed, and yet it has come to this—it has come to this!”
The Canon’s head dropped back into his hands once more, and Quentillian felt as though this despairing round of anger, self-blame, self-pity, and genuine misery, might go on forever.
He glanced at the clock. The dinner-gong having failed of its appeal, it appeared as though nothing need ever interrupt them again.
“I will give him five minutes more, and then I shall stand up,” Quentillian decided.
The Canon lifted a haggard face.
“Perhaps I had set my heart overmuch upon your marriage with my child, Owen. It may be so—it may be so. I may have forgotten that we poor mortals cannot, after all, see very far—that all plannings and schemings are very vain, seen by the light of Immortal Wisdom. If so, I am receiving my punishment now.”
The Canon groaned again.
“I am at a loss how to act. I can decide nothing. I must see Valeria, but how can I do so until I can command myself?”
Even as he asked the question, the veins stood out upon the Canon’s forehead, his nostrils quivered and his face became suffused.
“Three minutes more,” Quentillian reflected.
“Owen, one thing I must ask. Has she asked your pardon?”
“Yes, but indeed I don’t think——”
“No, Owen, no.” The Canon raised his hand in instant protest. “Each generous plea from you, stabs me afresh. I ask myself if my unhappy child even knows what she has lost. I thought I knew Valeria through and through—that nothing in her nature was hidden from me, from her father. I have been strangely mistaken, indeed.”
(“Another half minute.”)
“Am I harsh with her, am I harsh to my motherless girl? God knows that I was angry when I met her this evening, distraught-looking, crouching before me like a shamed and terrified creature. I cannot even now fully understand what has occurred, but her own admission was that, engaged to you, she believed herself to love another man—that she had allowed him to make love to her.”
Owen stood up resolutely.
“Aye, Owen, I do not wonder at it, if you seek the relief of movement. It is more natural so. I, too, in my day, have paced this room.”
Quentillian, however, had no desire to pace the room except for the very few steps that would put him outside it.
He debated in vain within himself the most tactful method of making this clear to Canon Morchard.
“I suppose I have been blind. This blow has come upon me with fearful suddenness—I suspected nothing—nothing. How could I——”
The door opened.
Quentillian looked round thankfully at Lucilla. Shedid not go up to her father, but spoke quietly from the door.
“Father, don’t you think Owen should come to dinner?”
A quick frown drew the Canon’s always formidable brows together.
“Since when do my children interrupt me in my own room, at my work, Lucilla?” he enquired.
Her face did not change, but she looked at Quentillian.
“Thank you,” he said quickly. “I will come.”
The Canon rose. His hand went once more to the resting-place now rapidly becoming habitual to it—Quentillian’s shoulder.
“Do not let my foolish child impose her trivial urgencies upon you.”
The Canon’s other hand went out towards his daughter.
“Did I speak over-sharply, my daughter? Perhaps Mary was nearer my mood than Martha, just now—Martha, careful and troubled over many things. Go, then, children. Lucilla, you will come to me later. Until then, I do not wish to be disturbed again.”
With a heavy sigh, the Canon turned again to his writing-table.
Owen and Lucilla went out.
“He is terribly upset. Could he not be persuaded to come to dinner?”
“No, I knew he wouldn’t want that. But I shall take in a tray when I go to him later. Sometimes, if he’s talking, he eats without thinking about it. I was counting on that—and besides, he would have dislikedmy suggesting that he should come in to dinner as usual.”
Lucilla’s voice and her face alike were entirely guiltless of irony.
Quentillian followed her into the dining-room:
“The others have finished,” Lucilla said. “Would you rather I stayed, or that I went?”
“Stay, please.”
She sat down opposite to him at once.
“I wish your father were less angry with poor Val, although perhaps it is not my place to say so. But in his—his generous sympathy for me, I am afraid he has rather lost sight of what she must have been suffering.”
“I don’t think suffering, in my father’s eyes, would ever condone what he considers wrong-doing.”
The comment seemed to Owen to be rather an illuminating one.
“I suppose not. It may surprise you to hear that I do not, personally, consider that Canon Morchard is entitled either to condemn or condone whatever Valeria may have done.”
“I quite agree with you.”
Quentillian was less gratified than astonished at the assertion.
“Val herself would hardly agree to that.”
“No.”
“Well, but don’t you see, Lucilla, how difficult that’s going to make things? To my mind, the only natural proceeding is for Valeria and George Cuscaden to marry and go to Canada.”
Quentillian paused almost without meaning to, on apronouncement that would certainly have met with drastic and emphatic interruption from Canon Morchard.
Lucilla, however, received it unmoved.
“Don’t you think so?” said Quentillian, slightly disappointed.
“Yes.”
“But will Valeria do it? Won’t her strange ideas of filial duty interfere? I am absolutely convinced that one of the principal reasons for her ever becoming engaged to me, was her wish to please her father.”
“I don’t think it was altogether that, Owen. But you did ask her to marry you at a time when she was just beginning to realize that the sort of life she led before the war wasn’t going to be enough for her.”
“Need it have taken a European war to make her see that?”
The smile that Lucilla turned upon his petulance was disarming.
“Don’t be so cross, Owen.”
She might have been talking to a little boy.
“I think,” said Quentillian with dignity, “that perhaps you forget it was only a few hours ago that I learnt how completely cheated and—fooled, I have been.”
He could not avoid a recollection that the Canon would not have needed such a reminder.
“Indeed, I don’t forget at all,” said Lucilla earnestly. “It must be very vexing for you, but—Owen, do forgive me for saying that I can’t really feel as if you minded dreadfully. You’re much too understanding, really, not to know that poor Val didn’t wilfully cheatyou, any more than she cheated herself. And I think you, too, perhaps, in another way, were beginning to feel that you’d made a mistake in promising to marry one another.”
Lucilla, Quentillian realized half ruefully and half with amusement, had beaten him at his own game. Her unvarnished appraisement of the situation brought to it no more and no less than the facts warranted.
His answering gaze was as straight as her own.
“You’re right,” he said abruptly.
She held out her hand with a laden plate in it.
“Pudding?” she enquired, prosaically.
“Thanks.”
He made an excellent dinner.
“But what will happen to us now, Lucilla?”
“Well, George Cuscaden will be here again, and that’ll make Val feel better. And you’ll help, won’t you?”
“Certainly.”
And, on the strange assurance, they separated.
It was much later that Owen, from his own room, heard the door of the study immediately below him, open once more, and then shut.
Barely audible, but still unmistakable, he heard a steady stream of sound, rising and falling, easily to be identified as the Canon’s voice.
“Good God, what morecanhe have to say about it?” reflected Quentillian. He was destined to ask himself the question again, for the sounds, punctuated by the briefest of pauses, doubtless consecrated to the delivery of laconic replies from Lucilla, continued far into the small hours of the morning.
Finally, after Quentillian had fallen asleep, he was roused by a gentle, reiterated knocking at the door.
Only too well aware whose hand was responsible for those considerately modified taps, he rose and went to open the door, omitting the usual invitation to enter.
As he expected, the Canon, unutterably pale and weary-looking, stood without.
“Dear fellow, I knew that I should find you awake. Owen, I could not but come to tell you that all is well with me now. I have forgiven, even as I myself hope—and need—to be forgiven. I will see Valeria tomorrow, and tell her that she has my full and free pardon. Together we will consider what is the best thing that we can make of this most unhappy business.”
“And Cuscaden, sir?”
Quentillian intended to suggest the inclusion of Captain Cuscaden in the proposed conference, which might reasonably be supposed to concern him closely, but the Canon misunderstood the elliptical reference.
“Aye, Owen, I have no bitterness left in my heart, even for him. ‘Unto seventy times seven.’ Those words have been ringing in my ears until I could almost bring myself to believe that I heard them uttered aloud. I need not ask if all is well with you, dear boy? Your self-command and generosity have shamed me all along.”
The absolute sincerity of the utterance caused Quentillian, with considerably more reason than the Canon, to feel ashamed in his turn.
“I am very far from being what you think me, sir,”he said, earnestly, and with complete truth. “I am afraid you are very tired.”
The Canon, indeed, looked utterly exhausted.
“If so, it is in my Master’s service,” said Canon Morchard gently. “And you remember, Owen—‘there remaineth a rest.’ May it be mine, and yours, too—all in His own good time! Good-night to you, my dear.”
For the first time since Owen’s childish days, the Canon placed his hand upon his head and murmured a word of blessing.
Then, with a smile as wistful as it was tender, he turned and went away upstairs.