XXI
Noel, embryo warrior, was a very different personage from the Noel of six weeks ago looking forward without enthusiasm to the stool in St Mary Axe.
The sudden enlargement of his horizon to the boundless possibilities of military life and active warfare had, unconsciously, and perhaps unavoidably, wrought changes in him.
From being a boy, dependent on his father for both present and future, he had become suddenly a man, independent, and at times somewhat resentful of either control or advice.
His whole heart and mind were given with his active body to his new duties. He was soldier first, and anything else afterwards. To Honor it was quite understandable. He was jovially patronising to her and she held her own by chaffing him royally when chance offered. To his father and mother it was understandable also, but none the less somewhat of a trial at times.
Their boy was no longer wholly theirs. He had suddenly become a soldier and considered himself a man. They rejoiced in the better points of his manly development, but both felt keenly their deprivation in him; Mr Dare perhaps the most.
They saw very little of him. He was away early and home late. He was making many new acquaintances. Home and its associations counted for less with him. There was a general loosening of the old ties. They felt it, indeed, a beginning of the end that might find its consummation out there in the battle-smoke.
“We are losing him already,” said Mr Dare with a sigh, one night when a telegram had come from Noel saying thatas he had to be on orderly duty early next morning he would sleep at the Soldiers’ Home opposite Head-Quarters. He had hinted at the possibility once or twice, but they had not taken it very seriously.
“We must not lose him,” said Mrs Dare quietly. “He is keeping all right, John, I feel sure. He said he might have to stop now and then, you know. He’s got to take his turn with the rest.”
“I know, I know,” said Mr Dare, a trifle irritably. “All the same I feel as if we were losing our hold on him.”
“I suppose it’s inevitable to some extent. We must do our best to hold on to the little that is left us.... If he ... if he comes through it safely, as we pray that he may, perhaps he will come all back to us.... Perhaps,” she said, following up a side thought, “it is nature’s way of softening the blow if he should not come back to us. The parting is beginning even now.”
“Hmph!” grunted Mr Dare resentfully. “He’s getting out of hand, that’s certain. I asked him to see to something the other day ... I really forget what it was,—some small thing that he’d have done in a moment two months ago,—and he simply let it slide,—never gave it another thoughtapparently——”
“Boys are very thoughtless when their minds are full of their own concerns. I expect he just forgot all about it.”
“That doesn’t make it any easier to bear.”
“I know. It only explains it perhaps.”
“And I’m beginning to doubt if he’ll ever settle down to ordinary work again. He has never been so keen on anything in his life before. I don’t understand it. Where does he get it from?”
“It’s partly boyish love of adventure, and partly, I don’t doubt, real feeling that every man is needed, and when so many are going he wouldn’t be one to stop behind. We will give him credit for that. But, indeed, it is the last thing in the world I would have desired for him.”
“Or I,” said Mr Dare, with a sigh.
The change in their relationship manifested itself inmany little ways,—quite trifling some of them, but to Mr Dare’s already bruised and sensitive feelings none the less galling.
The frank confidences of boyhood, which kept back nothing, were gone. Beyond the bare statement that they had done a route march to Richmond or Hampstead, or had been mouching about Head-Quarters all day, or playing about in Hyde Park, even his mother’s interested attempts to draw him out came to little.
His manner at times seemed to hint that it would be waste of time on his part to enter into the details they would so have enjoyed hearing, since, being mere civilians, they could not possibly understand purely military matters.
When, occasionally, by some lucky chance, his Company was dismissed earlier than usual, if he did not stop in town to go to a theatre or music-hall with some of his fellows, he would rush in for a meal and off again almost before he had swallowed it, to call on this one or that one where he evidently found more congenial company than at home.
If they all happened to meet outside, at Oakdene or elsewhere, they would find him in the highest of spirits, reeling off merry yarns of their doings en route or at Head-Quarters, and they felt a little sore that all this brighter side of him should be kept for foreign consumption when the home market was pining for it.
“Have we failed in any way in our duty to him?” grumbled Mr Dare, after one such evening at Oakdene, as he and Mrs Dare went along together to their own house, which had never felt so lonely since they came to it.
“No, John, we haven’t,” said Mrs Dare. “It’s just that he’s very young still though he thinks he’s a man, and youth draws to youth. It’s always the way, I expect.”
“It wasn’t so with Con, or Lois.”
“They had the younger ones—and they were allyounger together. Young birds must quit the nest, you know.”
“Youth is apt to run to selfishness, it seems to me. I think we’d better take a smaller house.”
“We might well do that, but I would be sorry to leave Willstead and all our friends.”