XXV
AT Pensevern, Mrs. Severing had received one of her son’s infrequent, and generally ill-timed, suggestions of a return to the parental roof.
“Will join you in London,” was Nina’s immediate telegraphic reply.
She did not definitely assure herself that she wished to preclude, as far as might be, the possibility of arapprochementbetween her son and Rosamund Grantham, but situations in which Nina Severing did not play the principal rôle were ever distasteful to her, and she gracefully eluded the possibility of involving herself in such a situation by a murmured fear that Morris would find Pensevern and the depths of the country too uneventful.
Having skilfully guarded against events which might serve to vary the uneventful, Nina felt able to rejoice in the self-sacrifice of leaving “the beloved country and God’s own peace and quiet there” in favour of the Ritz Hotel.
Morris, within twenty-four hours of her arrival there, disconcerted her by inquiring, with a piercing glance, whether Rosamund was at Porthlew.
Nina raised her eyebrows.
“Of course,” she said easily. “Why should she be anywhere else? She always is at Porthlew.”
“I heard she was in London with the Argents the other day.”
“The other day! What nonsense you talk, Morris. Rosamund spent two or three nights with them just about Easter-time, so as to go down to poor little Frances’ ceremony, whatever it was.”
“What a shame it is to let a little thing like that go and shut herself up for life,” said Morris warmly.
Nina immediately looked pained.
“There are one or two ways of looking at it,” she said slowly. “I don’t like to hear you making sweeping assertions like that, Morris, especially when you know nothing about the matter. It doesn’t matter when you only say it to me, of course, though it’s neither very polite nor very dutiful, but I should dislike it very much if anyone else were to hear you laying down the law as you sometimes do.”
Morris was aware that there were indeed few things that his mother disliked more than to hear him express an independent opinion on any subject whatever, and he consequently said, with a decision of manner that almost bordered upon violence:
“My dear mother, there really can’t be two opinions about the question of a child of eighteen or nineteen being allowed to take vows which will bind her to a life of that sort. It’s simply iniquitous.”
“You talk like a child, Morris!” exclaimed his parent, pale with annoyance. “But it only makes me laugh, a little sadly, to hear you. You’ll feel so very differently in a few years’ time.”
“I doubt it,” declared Morris easily. “A friend of mine—no one whom you’d know, mother dear—has gone into that sort of thing a good deal, and is thinking of being a Trappist monk. We’ve naturally had a good deal of discussion on the subject.”
Nina gazed at her son with a freezing eye. It gave her the most acute sensation of annoyance every time that she realized afresh in him the self-opinionated arrogance which he derived from her.
“My poor boy,” she said at last, “you don’t really suppose, do you, that your discussion of any of the real things of life can count for anything? Why, your opinions have no more value, to those of us whoknow, than the little idle chirpings of a baby bird that thinks it knows how to fly without waiting to be taught.”
The vigor of this trenchant simile carried Nina sublimely past its ornithological inexactitude, and she recovered her poise of mind.
“Little Frances will have a very beautiful, peaceful, sheltered life,” she observed thoughtfully. “She has shirked all the responsibility, all the sorrow and suffering, that others have to face. She will never grow up—life will always be a soft, childish, happy dream for her. It’s a very easy way out.”
Morris gazed at her with the expression which both of them felt to pertain to one who knew better.
“That remains open to question,” he enunciated with thoughtful deliberation. “To those outside, the idle, the rich, the thoughtless, it may seem a sheltered life in a garden of roses—but what about the vigils and fastings and scourgings, mother?”
“Morris,” inquired his mother coldly, “what have you been reading?”
Her son left the room in a fury.
That night at dinner he refused several courses with an air of asceticism, and drank only water, feeling that in some subtle manner this abstemiousness justified his attitude of the morning. Nina, perfectly following the workings of this strange law, remained serenely unmoved.
The astonishing ease with which Nina and Morris invariably penetrated one another’s poses was perhaps due less to years of practice than to the fundamental similarity of their methods and outlook.
It was no surprise to Morris Severing, although it irritated him very considerably, when two days later, Nina exclaimed over her correspondence in impassioned accents:
“Bertie Tregaskis is miserable about Frances—miserable! And no wonder. The child has written that she isn’t well—has been in the infirmary or something—some kind of epidemic, I imagine, as the Superior is ill too, which seems to be all that Frances writes about. She givesnodetails about herself, and persists in declaring that she’s perfectly happy and doesn’t want to come away. It’s scandalous.”
“What is?” coldly inquired Morris, who had not forgotten Nina’s recent reception of his views on the cloistered life.
“This convent system. I’ve a very good mind....”
Nina assumed an aspect of deep consideration and of a preoccupation which Morris did not judge sufficiently deep to prevent his gazing with ostentatious inattention out of the window.
“Averygood mind,” Nina repeated, and paused. Morris took advantage of the pause, which his parent obviously desired broken by a question, to light a cigarette with every appearance of deliberation and in perfect silence.
But Mrs. Severing’s determinations were not easily baffled.
“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, and thereby with great skill bridging over the pause, “I’m not at all sure I oughtn’t to go down there myself.”
Morris raised his eyebrows, an exercise ever effectual in conveying to his mother various undutiful sentiments which could not easily have been put into words.
“To Porthlew, mother?” he inquired, aware that she meant to the convent.
“Why do you say ‘to Porthlew,’ Morris, when you know perfectly well that I don’t mean that at all? Your affectation is unbearable, and no one but your mother would put up with it. I’m forbearing and long-suffering with you, because you’re my son, but who else in the world, do you suppose, would have patience with your endless petty insincerities and your insolent manners?”
This profitless inquiry, which Nina had hurled at her son some three times a week from the date of his tenth birthday, he allowed to drop unheeded.
Nina, having voiced her annoyance that Morris had not put the obvious inquiry which she had meant him to put asto her newly-taken decision, allowed a moment to elapse, and then resumed in ordinary conversational tones:
“They know me at the convent, and they’ll letmesee her, all right. I could tell in one moment how things were.”
“I should have thought Mrs. Tregaskis would be the best person to go, or Rosamund.”
“Rosamund!” Nina laughed, shrilly, as she herself recognized with inward annoyance. “Rosamund is a little girl, my dear Morris. A child is of no use. It’s a matter for a woman of the world, with tact and experience. As for poor dear Bertie, with her sledge-hammer ways, I’m afraid she’d be worse than useless. But the Superior knows me—dear Mère Pauline!”
Nina, with a slight effort, recalled the name of the Superior, and uttered it with a marked effect of intimacy.
Morris laughed a little.
“You could hardly count on her remembering you, could you, considering that it’s nearly two years since you went down for those few days, and were so terribly bored? I shall never forget coming down to fetch you home, and how thankful you were to get away from it all!”
“Morris,” said Nina with dignity, replying to the spirit which had prompted this ingeniously perverted reminiscence, “if you can speak like that to your widowed mother, there is no more to be said to you.”
Nina seldom claimed official rank, as it were, as Morris’ widowed mother, until the last outpost of her endurance had been reached, and as Morris was in reality sincerely grateful to her for never having presented him with a stepfather, he changed his tactics.
“Of course, you could quite well go down from here for the day, but do you really think there’s anything wrong? If she was really ill, they’d send for Mrs. Tregaskis, I suppose. Anyway, she’s always been more or less delicate, hasn’t she?”
“That sort of quiet, regular life ought to have made her quite strong,” said Nina negligently. “I must say, though,this is the first time one’s heard of her having a day’s illness there. The ungrateful little thing has never written to me, either, except one rather stilted, affected letter, just after she’d been given her religious habit. Evidently she was so pleased with the novelty of it all, she couldn’t help rather playing a part. Poor little thing! It didn’t ring quite true, somehow, when she spoke of praying for one, and signed herself, ‘Yours affectionately in Christ, Sister Frances Mary.’”
Morris laughed, with a note of indulgence that appeared to Nina’s sensitive perceptions to savour somewhat too nearly of superiority.
“That sort of posing never rings quite true, if very young people would only realize it,” she said, skillfully transferring her condemnation from the particular to the general, whence it might safely be assumed to include her son.
“Frances was anything but aposeuse, mother.”
“My dear boy, you haven’t the least idea—how could you at your age—of the effect that an atmosphere of that sort can have on a silly, impressionable girl. Poor little Frances probably wrote in that exaggerated convent style simply because she thought it would impress me with her holiness,” said the discerning Mrs. Severing.
Morris shook his head, and even indulged in the cheap provocation of slightly curling his lip.
“However that may be,” he said tolerantly, and disregarded Nina’s interpolated: “I’ve just told you how it is——” “However that may be, mother, if you really want to go down there, we could take the car to-morrow. It would be a really long run.”
He was quite aware that his mother had never for a moment seriously entertained the project of raiding the convent and obtaining an interview with Frances.
“I don’t know,” said Nina austerely. “I shall have to consider very carefully, Morris. It’s not the sort of undertaking that can be lightly rushed into.”
“Why not? The car is running beautifully just now.”
Nina gave him a glance of contemptuous rebuke. She could be flippant herself, but the flippancy of Morris caused her acute vexation.
“You are too inexperienced to know how extremely cautiously one may have to move in this sort of matter,” she said coldly. “People talk only too readily, and for the sake of poor little Frances, I don’t want gossip about her being kept at the convent against her will.”
“Considering she didn’t know a soul to speak of, and wasn’t even ‘come out’ before she went, I don’t think anyone is very likely to talk about her, I must say. Besides, no one is particularly likely to know whether you go down there or not, surely?” inquired Morris in tones of simplicity.
Few things, indeed, were better calculated to annoy the composer of the “Kismet” series than an assumption that her movements were left unchronicled and unregarded by the public eye. She now laughed with all the violent amusement so frequently simulated by intense fury.
“My dear, ridiculous boy! You’ve no idea how you make me laugh—if anybody couldhearyou! Do you really think that your little, stupid, childish innuendoes, which one can see through so easily, can touchme—an experienced woman of the world?”
Nina made this inquiry of her son so frequently that only an infinitesimal pause was ever consecrated by either of them to the reply which Morris invariably confined to a sudden sulky lowering of his whole expression. He had brought the production of this look to a fine art, and it gave an admirable representation of frank happy-hearted youth and confidence sharply transformed into sullen, hopeless misery by the recurrence of an unjust, and yet oft-repeated, attack.
Inwardly, he was always rather relieved when his parent proceeded to definite rhetoric. It justified his own sense of grievance far more effectually than the covert and undignified verbal sparring which marked their more surface intercourse.
When Nina pitched her voice some three semitones lower than its natural note and said,“The day will come, my poor Morris——” her son felt that she was safely embarked upon a course well known to them both, and merely retained his sombre expression by a mechanical effort of will.
The successive stages of Nina’s contempt, her amused toleration, and at the same time her almost supernatural supply of patience and love for the blind and erring Morris, were reached and left behind, the youth and ignorance and folly of Morris and the store of regrets and bitter memories awaiting him in that future when Nina’s understanding and forgiveness would no longer be available, were all touched upon with the sure hand of long practice, and the final peroration beginning, “Ah, if youth but knew!” was almost in sight when Nina suddenly, and, her son considered, most unjustly, interpolated into her discourse a reference which she seldom made us of, and which always disquieted Morris profoundly.
“And, mind you, Morris, you won’t be able to go on like this with impunity, heartless and undutiful, and ungrateful to your mother, trading on her never giving you away to other people. The day will come when peoplewillknow, andwilltalk about it. That sort of thing doesn’t remain hidden for ever. You know very well that I would rather die than betray you, but—later on—that sort of thing comes out, Morris.”
Morris’ thoughts, not for the first time, fled apprehensively to his mother’s diaries.
These volumes, slowly accumulating ever since he could remember, had always held for him a subtle menace.
He knew that Mrs. Severing flew to them for solace, and had seen her more than once, with tears still gleaming on her golden lashes, bent over her desk, after interviews with her son similar to the present one.
And although Morris did not take his parent’s fame as a composer at her own valuation, he had never been devoidof an uneasy conviction that she meant to present posterity with her own conception of the author of the “Kismet” series, and a lively apprehension had consequently circled for him round the thought of her diaries almost ever since he could remember.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said sullenly, and wishing that he did not.
Nina looked at him pityingly.
“You must know very well, Morris, that your mother is a woman with an enormous circle of friends. One doesn’t want to be blatant,” said Nina, merely meaning that she did not want to be thought so, “but do you suppose that one day there isn’t bound to be some sort of record made—letters or journals published——” She hesitated artistically, as though implying an unlimited posthumous publicity which might doubtless be insisted upon by the enormous circle of friends, but of which modesty forbade her to speak. Morris, always more or less hypnotized by the perfect assurance which characterized his mother’s most outrageous utterances, into believing them, made a violent mental effort, and told himself that he was no longer a child.
“I don’t know what you mean, mother,” he untruly assured her; “but I can tell you one thing, and that is, as far as I am concerned, letters and everything else are invariably destroyed.”
“I should never count upon your loyalty to my memory, Morris,” said his mother sombrely.
A heavy silence prevailed.
Morris wondered vaguely, as he had often wondered before: “What is it all about?”
There never seemed to be any definite reason for the state of strain which existed between Mrs. Severing and her son, nor for the crisis of anger and reproach to which that strain was the inevitable prelude.
Morris could not see any definite reason why amicable relations between them should ever be resumed, and yet he knew that in the space of an hour, or less, it was quite possiblethat the atmosphere would have changed, by degrees as rapid as imperceptible, to one of complete sympathy.
That this forecast was in no way an exaggerated one was amply demonstrated on this occasion.
After her withdrawal from the room in all the dignity of grief and forgiveness—a withdrawal fraught for Morris with hypothetical diary-writing—Nina suddenly sought her son again in the course of that afternoon with every appearance of affectionate confidence.
“Morris, I’m really worried about poor Bertie. Did I tell you that I heard from her this morning? Frederick Tregaskis is ill—a chill or something—and she doesn’t like to leave him, and yet these convent people are writing to say that Frances is in the infirmary, and giving no details whatever. Simply say she’s very anæmic, and it may be what the doctor calls ‘pernicious.’ Bertie is torn in two.”
Morris, who was relieved at his parent’s altered tone, felt it due to her to reply with sympathetic concern, and even added:
“Couldn’t you go down to the convent yourself, and see about Frances? They’d be sure to letyouin, and then you could relieve Mrs. Tregaskis’ mind.”
Nina looked pleased.
“I might do that. But really I don’t know whether their rules and regulations would admit of a surprise visit. It’s possible, too, that they mightn’t quite realize who one was, as it is so long since I went there,” said Nina with gracious humility, making it evident that Morris was not to be alone in his concessions.
But the next day was a Saturday, and as neither of them had ever had the faintest intention of proceeding to the convent, it was in perfect harmony that Morris and his mother motored down to Hurlingham for the afternoon.
On their return, Nina took up a small sheaf of letters in her white-gloved hand.
“Bertie again!” she exclaimed lightly. “What an insatiable letter-writer that dear woman is.”
As she read the letter her face changed with that dramatic suddenness of which Morris considered only himself to be past master.
Contrary to his wont, however, he did not ignore his mother’s only less admirable histrionic effort.
“What is it?” he inquired, in suitably sharpened accents of apprehension.
Nina contrived to raise a face which had paled perceptibly, an effect which Morris regretfully noted as being beyond his compass.
“Poor little Frances! Bertha writes in the greatest terror and distress. Those convent people have actually telegraphed that she is very ill indeed, and in danger. Something about the Last Sacraments. They don’t say anything about wanting Bertie to go there, and in any case she’s not able to leave Frederick. But Rosamund went down there yesterday.”
Morris felt vaguely resentful. He disliked hearing of anyone else’s grief or anxiety, and he thought his mother’s agitation distinctly overdone.
“I hope she’s better by this time,” he said with reserve.
Nina turned slowly away, her hand pressed to her heart, every symptom of distress emphasized in contrast to Morris’ obvious desire to be rid of the subject.
“This is a heavier blow to me than you can realize, my poor boy,” she murmured in stricken accents. “It has been mother and daughter between Frances and me.”