"My name is Lucy," said Mrs. Friend faintly. There was something so seductive in the neighbourhood of the girl's warm youth and in the new sweetness of her voice that she could not make any further defence of her "dignity."
"I might have guessed Lucy. It's just like you," said the girl triumphantly. "Wordsworth's Lucy—do you remember her?—'A violet by a mossy stone'—That's you exactly. I adore Wordsworth. Do you care about poetry?"
The eager eyes looked peremptorily into hers.
"Yes," said Mrs. Friend shyly—"I'm very fond of some things. But you'd think them old-fashioned!"
"What—Byron?—Shelley? They're never old-fashioned!"
"I never read much of them. But—I love Tennyson—and Mrs. Browning."
Helena made a face—
"Oh, I don't care a hang for her. She's so dreadfully pious and sentimental. I laughed till I cried over 'Aurora Leigh.' But now—French things! If you lived all that time in France, you must have read French poetry. Alfred de Musset?—Madame de Noailles?"
Mrs. Friend shook her head.
"We went to lectures. I learnt a great deal of Racine—a little Victor
Hugo—and Rostand—because the people I boarded with took me to
'Cyrano'!"
"Ah, Rostand—" cried Helena, springing up. "Well, of course he's vieux jeu now. The best people make mock of him. Julian does. I don't care—he gives me thrills down my back, and I love him. But then panache means a good deal to me. And Julian doesn't care a bit. He despises people who talk about glory and honour—and that kind of thing. Well—Lucy—"
She stopped mischievously, her head on one side.
"Sorry!—but it slipped out. Lucy—good-night."
Mrs. Friend hurriedly caught hold of her.
"And you won't do anything hasty—about Lord Donald?"
"Oh, I can't promise anything. One must stand by one's friends. One simply must. But I'll take care Cousin Philip doesn't blame you."
"If I'm no use, you know—I can't stay."
"No use to Cousin Philip, you mean, in policing me?" said Helena, with a good-humoured laugh. "Well, we'll talk about it again to-morrow. Good-night—Lucy!"
The sly gaiety of the voice was most disarming.
"Good-night, Miss Pitstone."
"No, that won't do. It's absurd! I never ask people to call me Helena, unless I like them. I certainly never expected—there, I'll be frank!—that I should want to ask you—the very first night too. But I do want you to. Please, Lucy, call me Helena. Please!"
Mrs. Friend did as she was told.
"Sleep well," said Helena from the door. "I hope the housemaid's put enough on your bed, and given you a hot water-bottle? If anything scares you in the night, wake me—that is, if you can!" She disappeared.
Outside Mrs. Friend's door the old house was in darkness, save for a single light in the hall, which burnt all night. The hall was the feature of the house. A gallery ran round it supported by columns from below, and spaced by answering columns which carried the roof. The bedrooms ran round the hall, and opened into the gallery. The columns were of yellow marble brought from Italy, and faded blue curtains hung between them. Helena went cautiously to the balustrade, drew one of the blue curtains round her, and looked down into the hall. Was everybody gone to bed? No. There were movements in a distant room. Somebody coughed, and seemed to be walking about. But she couldn't hear any talking. If Cousin Philip were still up, he was alone.
Her anger came back upon her, and then curiosity. What was he thinking about, as he paced his room like a caged squirrel? About the trouble she was likely to give him—and what a fool he had been to take the job? She would like to go and reason with him. The excess of vitality that was in her, sighing for fresh worlds to conquer, urged her to vehement and self-confident action,—action for its own sake, for the mere joy of the heat and movement that go with it. Part of the impulse depended on the new light in which the gentleman walking about downstairs had begun to appear to her. She had known him hitherto as "Mummy's friend," always to be counted upon when any practical difficulty arose, and ready on occasion to put in a sharp word in defence of an invalid's peace, when a girl's unruliness threatened it. Remembering one or two such collisions, Helena felt her cheeks burn, as she hung over the hall, in the darkness. But those had been such passing matters. Now, as she recalled the expression of his eyes, during their clash at the dinner-table, she realized, with an excitement which was not disagreeable, that something much more prolonged and serious might lie before her. Accomplished modern, as she knew him to be in most things, he was going to be "stuffy" and "stupid" in some. Lord Donald's proceedings in the matter of Lady Preston evidently seemed to him—she had been made to feel it—frankly abominable. And he was not going to ask the man capable of them within his own doors. Well and good. "But as I don't agree with him—Donald was only larking!—I shall take my own way. A telegram goes anyway to Donald to-morrow morning—and we shall see. So good-night, Cousin Philip!" And blowing a kiss towards the empty hall, she gathered her white skirts round her, and fled laughing towards her own room.
But just as she neared it, a door in front of her, leading to a staircase, opened, and a man in khaki appeared, carrying a candle. It was Captain Lodge, her neighbour at the dinner-table. The young man stared with amazement at the apparition rushing along the gallery towards him,—the girl's floating hair, and flushed loveliness as his candle revealed it. Helena evidently enjoyed his astonishment, and his sudden look of admiration. But before he could speak, she had vanished within her own door, just holding it open long enough to give him a laughing nod before it shut, and darkness closed with it on the gallery.
"A man would need to keep his head with that girl!" thought Captain
Lodge, with tantalized amusement. "But, my hat, what a beauty!"
Meanwhile in the library downstairs a good deal of thinking was going on. Lord Buntingford was taking more serious stock of his new duties than he had done yet. As he walked, smoking, up and down, his thoughts were full of his poor little cousin Rachel Pitstone. She had always been a favourite of his; and she had always known him better than any other person among his kinsfolk. He had found it easy to tell her secrets, when nobody else could have dragged a word from him; and as a matter of fact she had known before she died practically all that there was to know about him. And she had been so kind, and simple and wise. Had she perhaps once had a tendresse for him—before she met Ned Pitstone?—and if things had gone—differently—might he not, perhaps, have married her? Quite possibly. In any case the bond between them had always been one of peculiar intimacy; and in looking back on it he had nothing to reproach himself with. He had done what he could to ease her suffering life. Struck down in her prime by a mortal disease, a widow at thirty, with her one beautiful child, her chief misfortune had been the melancholy and sensitive temperament, which filled the rooms in which she lived as full of phantoms as the palace of Odysseus in the vision of Theoclymenus.
She was afraid for her child; afraid for her friend; afraid for the world. The only hope of happiness for a woman, she believed, lay in an honest lover, if such a lover could be found. Herself an intellectual, and a freed spirit, she had no trust in any of the new professional and technical careers into which she saw women crowding. Sex seemed to her now as always the dominating fact of life. Votes did not matter, or degrees, or the astonishing but quite irrelevant fact, as the papers announced it, that women should now be able not only to fit but to plan a battleship. Love, and a child's clinging mouth, and the sweetness of a Darby and Joan old age, for these all but the perverted women had always lived, and would always live.
She saw in her Helena the strong beginnings of sex. But she also realized the promise of intelligence, of remarkable brain development, and it seemed to her of supreme importance that sex should have the first innings in her child's life.
"If she goes to college at once, as soon as I am gone, and her brain and her ambition are appealed to, before she has time to fall in love, she will develop on that side, prematurely—marvellously—and the rest will atrophy. And then when the moment for falling in love is over—and with her it mayn't be a long one—she will be a lecturer, a member of Parliament perhaps—a Socialist agitator—a woman preacher,—who knows?—there are all kinds of possibilities in Helena. But she will have missed her chance of being a woman, and a happy one; and thirty years hence she will realize it, when it is too late, and think bitterly of us both. Believe me, dear Philip, the moment for love won't last long in Helena's life. I have seen it come and go so rapidly, in the case of some of the most charming women. For after all, the world is now so much richer for women; and many women don't know their own minds in time, or get lost among the new landmarks. And of course all women can't marry; and thank God, there are a thousand new chances of happiness for those who don't. But there are some—and Helena, I am certain, will be one—who will be miserable, and probably wicked, unless they fall in love, and are happy. And it is a strait gate they will have to pass through. For their own natures and the new voices in the world will tempt them to this side and that. And before they know where they are—the moment will have gone—the wish—and the power.
"So, dear Philip, lend yourself to my plan; though you may seem to yourself the wrong person, and though it imposes—as I know it will—a rather heavy responsibility on you. But once or twice you have told me that I have helped you—through difficult places. That makes me dare to ask you this thing. There is no one else I can ask. And it won't be bad for you, Philip,—it is good for us all, to have to think intimately—seriously—for some other human being or beings; and owing to circumstances, not your own fault, you have missed just this in life—except for your thoughts and care for me—bless you always, my dear friend.
"Am I preaching? Well, in my case the time for make-believe is over. I am too near the end. The simple and austere soul of things seems to shine out—
"And yet what I ask you is neither simple, nor austere! Take care of Helena for two years. Give her fun, and society,—a good time, and every chance to marry. Then, after two years, if she hasn't married—if she hasn't fallen in love—-she must choose her course.
"You may well feel you are too young—indeed I wish, for this business, you were older!—but you will find some nice woman to be hostess and chaperon; the experiment will interest and amuse you, and the time will soon go. You know I could not ask you—unless some things were—as they are. But that being so, I feel as if I were putting into your hands the chance of a good deed, a kind deed,—blessing, possibly, him that gives, and her that takes. And I am just now in the mood to feel that kindness is all that matters, in this mysterious life of ours. Oh, I wish I had been kinder—to so many people!—I wish—I wish! The hands stretched out to me in the dark that I have passed by—the voices that have piped to me, and I have not danced—
"I mustn't cry. It is hard that in one of the few cases when I had the chance to be kind, and did not wholly miss it, I should be making in the end a selfish bargain of it—claiming so much more than I ever gave!
"Forgive me, my best of friends—
"You shall come and see me once about this letter, and then we won't discuss it again—ever. I have talked over the business side of it with my lawyer, and asked him to tell you anything you don't yet know about my affairs and Helena's. We needn't go into them."
"One of the few cases where I had the chance to be kind." Why, Rachel Pitstone's life had been one continuous selfless offering to God and man, from her childhood to her last hour! He knew very well what he had owed her—what others had owed—to her genius for sympathy, for understanding, for a compassion which was also a stimulus. He missed her sorely. At that very moment, he was in great practical need of her help, her guidance.
Whereas it was he—worse luck!—who must be the stumbling and unwelcomed guide of Rachel's child! How, in the name of mystery, had the child grown up so different from the mother? Well, impatience wouldn't help him—he must set his mind to it. That scoundrel, Jim Donald!
CHAPTER IV
Mrs. Friend passed a somewhat wakeful night after the scene in which Helena Pitstone had bestowed her first confidences on her new companion. For Lucy Friend the experience had been unprecedented and agitating. She had lived in a world where men and women do not talk much about themselves, and as a rule instinctively avoid thinking much about themselves, as a habit tending to something they call "morbid." This at least had been the tone in her parents' house. The old woman in Lancaster Gate had not been capable either of talking or thinking about herself, except as a fretful animal with certain simple bodily wants. In Helena, Lucy Friend had for the first time come cross the type of which the world is now full—men and women, but especially women, who have no use any longer for the reticence of the past, who desire to know all they possibly can about themselves, their own thoughts and sensations, their own peculiarities and powers, all of which are endlessly interesting to them; and especially to the intellectual élite among them. Already, before the war, the younger generation, which was to meet the brunt of it, was an introspective, a psychological generation. And the great war has made it doubly introspective, and doubly absorbed in itself. The mere perpetual strain on the individual consciousness, under the rush of strange events, has developed men and women abnormally.
Only now it is not an introspection, or a psychology, which writes journals or autobiography. It is an introspection which talks; a psychology which chatters, of all things small and great; asking its Socratic way through all the questions of the moment, the most trivial, and the most tremendous.
Coolness, an absence of the old tremors and misgivings that used especially to haunt the female breast in the days of Miss Austen, is a leading mark of the new type. So that Mrs. Friend need not have been astonished to find Helena meeting her guardian next morning at breakfast as though nothing had happened. He, like a man of the world, took his cue immediately from her, and the conversation—whether it ran on the return of Karsavina to the Russian Ballet, or the success of "Abraham Lincoln"; or the prospects of the Peace, or merely the weddings and buryings of certain common acquaintances which appeared in the morning's Times—was so free and merry, that Mrs. Friend began soon to feel her anxieties of the night dropping away, to enjoy the little luxuries of the breakfast table, and the pleasant outlook on the park, of the high, faded, and yet stately room.
"What a charming view!" she said to Lord Buntingford, when they rose from breakfast, and she made her way to the open window, while Helena was still deep in the papers.
"You think so?" he said indifferently, standing beside her. "I'm afraid I prefer London. But now on another matter—Do you mind taking up your duties instanter?"
"Please—please let me!" she said, turning eagerly to him.
"Well—there is a cook-housekeeper somewhere—who, I believe, expects orders. Do you mind giving them? Please do not look so alarmed! It is the simplest matter in the world. You will appear to give orders. In reality Mrs. Mawson will have everything cut and dried, and you will not dare to alter a thing. But she expects you or me to pretend. And I should be greatly relieved if you would do the pretending?"
"Certainly," murmured Mrs. Friend.
Lord Buntingford, looking at the terrace outside, made a sudden gesture—half despair, half impatience.
"Oh, and there's old Fenn,—my head gardener. He's been here forty years, and he sits on me like an old man of the sea. I know what he wants. He's coming up to ask me about something he calls a herbaceous border. You see that border there?"—he pointed—"Well, I barely know a peony from a cabbage. Perhaps you do?" He turned towards her hopefully; and Mrs. Friend felt the charm, as many other women had felt it before her, of the meditative blue eyes, under the black and heavy brow. She shook her head smiling.
He smiled in return.
"But, if you don't—would you mind—again—pretending? Would you see the old fellow, some time this morning—and tell him to do exactly what he damn pleases—I beg your pardon!—it slipped out. If not, he'll come into my study, and talk a jargon of which I don't understand a word, for half an hour. And as he's stone deaf, he doesn't understand a word I say. Moreover when he's once there I can't get him out. And I've got a bit of rather tough county business this morning. Would you mind? It's a great deal to ask. But if you only let him talk—and look intelligent—"
"Of course I will," said Mrs. Friend, bewildered, adding rather desperately, "But I don't know anything at all about it."
"Oh, that doesn't matter. Perhaps Helena does! By the way, she hasn't seen her sitting-room."
He turned towards his ward, who was still reading at the table.
"I have arranged a special sitting-room for you, Helena. Would you like to come and look at it?"
"What fun!" said Helena, jumping up. "And may I do what I like in it?"
Buntingford's mouth twisted a little.
"Naturally! The house is at your disposal. Turn anything out you like—and bring anything else in. There is some nice old stuff about, if you look for it. If you send for the odd man he'll move anything. Well, I'd better show you what I arranged. But you can have any other room you prefer."
He led the way to the first floor, and opened a door in a corner of the pillared gallery.
"Oh, jolly!" cried Helena.
For they entered a lofty room, with white Georgian panelling, a few pretty old cabinets and chairs, a chintz-covered sofa, a stand of stuffed humming-birds, a picture or two, a blue Persian carpet, and a large book-case full of books.
"My books!" cried Helena in amazement. "I was just going to ask if the cases had come. How ever did you get them unpacked, and put here so quickly?"
"Nothing easier. They arrived three days ago. I telephoned to a man I know in Leicester Square. He sent some one down, and they were all finished before you came down. Perhaps you won't like the arrangement? Well, it will amuse you to undo it!"
If there was the slightest touch of sarcasm in the eyes that travelled from her to the books, Helena took it meekly. She went to the bookshelves. Poets, novelists, plays, philosophers, economists, some French and Italian books, they were all in their proper places. The books were partly her own, partly her mother's. Helena eyed them thoughtfully.
"You must have taken a lot of trouble."
"Not at all. The man took all the trouble. There wasn't much."
As he spoke, her eye caught a piano standing between the windows.
"Mummy's piano! Why, I thought we agreed it should be stored?"
"It seemed to me you might as well have it down here. We can easily hire one for London."
"Awfully nice of you," murmured Helena. She opened it and stood with her hand on the keys, looking out into the park, as though she pursued some thought or memory of her own. It was a brilliant May morning, and the windows were open. Helena's slim figure in a white dress, the reddish touch in her brown hair, the lovely rounding of her cheek and neck, were thrown sharply against a background of new leaf made by a giant beech tree just outside. Mrs. Friend looked at Lord Buntingford. The thought leaped into her mind—"How can he help making love to her himself?"—only to be immediately chidden. Buntingford was not looking at Helena but at his watch.
"Well, I must go and do some drivelling work before lunch. I have given
Mrs. Friend carte blanche, Helena. Order what you like, and if Mrs.
Mawson bothers you, send her to me. Geoffrey comes to-night, and we shall
be seven to-morrow."
He made for the door. Helena had turned suddenly at his last words, eye and cheek kindling.
"Hm—" she said, under her breath—"So he has sent the telegram."
She left the window, and began to walk restlessly about the room, looking now at the books, now at the piano. Her face hardened, and she paid no attention to Mrs. Friend's little comments of pleasure on the room and its contents. Presently indeed she cut brusquely across.
"I am just going down to the stables to see whether my horse has arrived. A friend of mine bought her for me in town—and she was to be here early this morning. I want, too, to see where they're going to put her."
"Mayn't I come too?" said Mrs. Friend, puzzled by the sudden clouding of the girl's beautiful looks.
"Oh, no—please don't. You've got to see the housekeeper! I'll get my hat and run down. I found out last night where the stables are. I shan't be more than ten minutes or so."
She hurried away, leaving Mrs. Friend once more a prey to anxieties. She recalled the threat of the night before. But no, impossible! After all the kindness and the forethought! She dismissed it from her mind.
The interview with the housekeeper was an ordeal to the gentle inexperienced woman. But her entire lack of any sort of pretension was in itself ingratiating; and her manner had the timid charm of her character. Mrs. Mawson, who might have bristled or sulked in stronger hands, in order to mark her distaste for the advent of a mistress in the house she had been long accustomed to rule, was soon melted by the docility of the little lady, and graciously consented to see her own plans approved en bloc, by one so frankly ignorant of how a country house party should be conducted. Then it was the turn of old Fenn; a more difficult matter, since he did genuinely want instructions, and Mrs. Friend had none to give him. But kind looks, and sympathetic murmurs, mingled with honest delight in the show of azaleas in the conservatory carried her through. Old Fenn too, instead of resenting her, adopted her. She went back to the house flushed with a little modest triumph.
Housewifely instincts revived in her. Her hands wanted to be doing. She had ventured to ask Fenn for some flowers, and would dare to arrange them herself if Mrs. Mawson would let her.
Then, as she re-entered the house, she came back at a bound to reality. "If I can't keep Miss Pitstone out of mischief, I shan't be here a month!" she thought pitifully; and how was it to be done?
She found Helena sitting demurely in the sitting-room, pretending to read a magazine, but really, or so it seemed to Mrs. Friend, keeping both eyes and ears open for events.
"I'm trying to get ready for Julian—" she said impatiently, throwing away her book. "He sent me his article in the Market Place, but it's so stiff that I can't make head or tail of it. I like to hear him talk—but he doesn't write English."
Mrs. Friend took up the magazine, and perceived a marked item in the table of contents—"A New Theory of Value."
"What does it mean?" she asked.
"Oh, I wish I knew!" said Helena, with a little yawn. "And then he changes so. Last year he made me read Meredith—the novels, I mean. One of Our Conquerors, he vowed, was the finest thing ever written. He scoffed at me for liking Diana and Richard Feverel better, because they were easier. And now, nothing's bad enough for Meredith's 'stilted nonsense'—'characters without a spark of life in them'—'horrible mannerisms'—you should hear him. Except the poems—ah, except the poems! He daren't touch them. I say—do you know the 'Hymn to Colour'?" The girl's eager eyes questioned her companion. Her face in a moment was all softness and passion.
Mrs. Friend shook her head. The nature and deficiencies of her own education were becoming terribly plain to her with every hour in Helena's company.
Helena sprang up, fetched the book, put Mrs. Friend forcibly into an arm-chair, and read aloud. Mrs. Friend listened with all her ears, and was at the end, like Faust, no wiser than before. What did it all mean? She groped, dazzled, among the Meredithian mists and splendours. But Helena read with a growing excitement, as though the flashing mysterious verse were part of her very being. When the last stanza was done, she flung herself fiercely down on a stool at Mrs. Friend's feet, breathing fast:
"Glorious!—oh, glorious!—
"Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes
The House of Heaven splendid for the Bride."
She turned to look up at the little figure in the chair, half laughing, half passionate: "You do understand, don't you?" Mrs. Friend again shook her head despairingly.
"It sounds wonderful—but I haven't a notion what it means!" Helena laughed again, but without a touch of mockery.
"One has to be taught—coached—regularly coached. Julian coached me."
"What is meant by Colour?" asked Mrs. Friend faintly.
"Colour is Passion, Beauty, Freedom!" said Helena, her cheek glowing. "It is just the opposite of dulness—and routine—and make-believe. It's what makes life worth while. And it is the young who feel it—the young who hear it calling—the young who obey it! And then when they are old, they have it to remember. Now, do you understand?"
Lucy Friend did not answer. But involuntarily, two shining tears stood in her eyes. There was something extraordinarily moving in the girl's ardour. She could hardly bear it. There came back to her momentary visions from her own quiet past—a country lane at evening where a man had put his arm round her and kissed her—her wedding-evening by the sea, when the sun went down, and all the ways were darkened, and the stars came out—and that telegram which put an end to everything, which she had scarcely had time to feel, because her mother was so ill, and wanted her every moment. Had she—even she—in her poor, drab, little life—had her moments of living Poetry, of transforming Colour, like others—without knowing it?
Helena watched her, as though in a quick, unspoken sympathy, her own storm of feeling subsiding.
"Do you know, Lucy, you look very nice indeed in that little black dress!" she said, in her soft, low voice, like the voice of an incantation, that she had used the night before. "You are the neatest, daintiest person!—not prim—but you make everything you wear refined. When I compare you with Cynthia Welwyn!"
She raised her shoulders scornfully. Lucy Friend, aghast at the outrageousness of the comparison, tried to silence her—but quite in vain. Helena ran on.
"Did you watch Cynthia last night? She was playing for Cousin Philip with all her might. Why doesn't he marry her? She would suit his autocratic ideas very well. He is forty-four. She must be thirty-eight if she is a day. They have both got money—which Cynthia can't do without, for she is horribly extravagant. But I wouldn't give much for her chances. Cousin Philip is a tough proposition, as the American says. There is no getting at his real mind. All one knows is that it is a tyrannical mind!"
All softness had died from the girl's face and sparkling eyes. She sat on the floor, her hands round her knees, defiance in every tense feature. Mrs. Friend was conscious of renewed alarm and astonishment, and at last found the nerve to express them.
"How can you call it tyrannical when he spends all this time and thought upon you!"
"The gilding of the cage," said Helena stubbornly. "That is the way women have always been taken in. Men fling them scraps to keep them quiet. But as to the real feast—liberty to discover the world for themselves, make their own experiments—choose and test their own friends—no, thank you! And what is life worth if it is only to be lived at somebody's else's dictation?"
"But you have only been here twenty-four hours—not so much! And you don't know Lord Buntingford's reasons—"
"Oh, yes, I do know!" said Helena, undisturbed—"more or less. I told you last night. They don't matter to me. It's the principle involved that matters. Am I free, or am I not free? Anyway, I've just sent that telegram."
"To whom?" cried Mrs. Friend.
"To Lord Donald, of course, asking him to meet me at the Ritz next Wednesday. If you will be so good"—the brown head made her a ceremonial bow—"as to go up with me to town—we can go to my dressmaker's together—I have got heaps to do there—then I can leave you somewhere for lunch—and pick you up again afterwards!"
"Of course, Miss Pitstone—Helena!—I can't do anything of the sort, unless your guardian agrees."
"Well, we shall see," said Helena coolly, jumping up. "I mean to tell him after lunch. Don't please worry. And good-bye till lunch. This time I am really going to look after my horse!"
A laugh, and a wave of the hand—she had disappeared. Mrs. Friend was left to reflect on the New Woman. Was it in truth the war that had produced her?—and if so, how and why? All that seemed probable was that in two or three weeks' time, perhaps, she would be again appealing to the same agency that had sent her to Beechmark. She believed she was entitled to a month's notice.
Poor Lord Buntingford! Her sympathies were hotly on his side, so far as she had any understanding of the situation into which she had been plunged with so little warning. Yet when Helena was actually there at her feet, she was hypnotized. The most inscrutable thing of all was, how she could ever have supposed herself capable of undertaking such a charge!
The two ladies were already lunching when Lord Buntingford appeared, bringing with him another neighbouring squire, come to consult him on certain local affairs. Sir Henry Bostock, one of those solid, grey-haired pillars of Church and State in which rural England abounds, was first dazzled by Miss Pitstone's beauty, and then clearly scandalized by some of her conversation, and perhaps—or so Mrs. Friend imagined—by the rather astonishing "make-up" which disfigured lips and cheeks Nature had already done her best with.
He departed immediately after lunch. Lord Buntingford accompanied him to the front door, saw him mount his horse, and was returning to the library, when a white figure crossed his path.
"Cousin Philip, I want to speak to you."
He looked up at once.
"All right, Helena. Will you come into the library?"
He ushered her in, shut the door behind her, and pushed forward an arm-chair.
"You'll find that comfortable, I think?"
"Thank you, I'd rather stand. Cousin Philip, did you send that telegram this morning?"
"Certainly. I told you I should."
"Then you won't be surprised that I too sent mine."
"I don't understand what you mean?"
"When this morning you said there would be seven for dinner to-night, I of course realized that you meant to stick to what you had said about Lord Donald yesterday; and as I particularly want to see Lord Donald, I sent the new groom to the village this morning with a wire to him to say that I should be glad if he would arrange to give me luncheon at the Ritz next Wednesday. I have to go up to try a dress on."
Lord Buntingford paused a moment, looking apparently at the cigarette with which his fingers were playing.
"You proposed, I imagine, that Mrs. Friend should go with you?"
"Oh, yes, to my dressmaker's. Then I would arrange for her to go somewhere to lunch—Debenham's, perhaps."
"And it was your idea then to go alone—to meet Lord Donald?" He looked up.
"He would wait for me in the lounge at the Ritz. It's quite simple!"
Philip Buntingford laughed—good-humouredly.
"Well, it is very kind of you to have told me so frankly, Helena—because now I shall prevent it. It is the last thing in the world that your mother would have wished, that you should be seen at the Ritz alone with Lord Donald. I therefore have her authority with me in asking you either to write or telegraph to him again to-night, giving up the plan. Better still if you would depute me to do it. It is really a very foolish plan—if I may say so."
"Why?"
"Because—well, there are certain things a girl of nineteen can't do without spoiling her chances in life—and one of them is to be seen about alone with a man like Lord Donald."
"And again I ask—why?"
"I really can't discuss his misdoings with you, Helena. Won't you trust me in the matter? I thought I had made it plain that having been devoted to your mother, I was prepared to be equally devoted to you, and wished you to be as happy and free as possible."
"That's an appeal to sentiment," said Helena, resolutely. "Of course I know it all sounds horrid. You've been as nice as possible; and anybody who didn't sympathize with my views would think me a nasty, ungrateful toad. But I'm not going to be coaxed into giving them up, any more than I'm going to be bullied."
Lord Buntingford surveyed her. The habitual slight pucker—as though of anxiety or doubt—in his brow was much in evidence. It might have meant the chronic effort of a short-sighted man to see. But the fine candid eyes were not short-sighted. The pucker meant something deeper.
"Of course I should like to understand what your views are," he said at last, throwing away one cigarette, and lighting another.
Helena's look kindled. She looked handsomer and more maenad-like than ever, as she stood leaning against Buntingford's writing-table, her arms folded, one slim foot crossed over the other.
"The gist of them is," she said eagerly, "that we—the women of the present day—are not going to accept our principles—moral—or political—or economic—on anybody's authority. You seem, Cousin Philip, in my case at any rate, to divide the world into two sets of people, moral and immoral, good and bad—desirable and undesirable—that kind of thing! And you expect me to know the one set, and ignore the other set. Well, we don't see it that way at all. We think that everybody is a pretty mixed lot. I know I am myself. At any rate I'm not going to begin my life by laying down a heap of rules about things I don't understand—or by accepting them from you, or anybody. If Lord Donald's a bad man, I want to know why he is a bad man—and then I'll decide. If he revolts my moral sense, of course I'll cut him. But I won't take anybody else's moral sense for judge. We've got to overhaul that sort of thing from top to bottom."
Buntingford looked thoughtfully at the passionate speaker. Should he—could he argue with her? Could he show her, for instance, a letter, or parts of it, which he had received that very morning from poor Luke Preston, his old Eton and Oxford friend? No!—it would be useless. In her present mood she might treat it so as to rouse his own temper—let alone the unseemliness of the discussion it must raise between them. Or should he give her a fairly full biography of Jim Donald, as he happened to know it? He revolted against the notion, astonished to find how strong certain old-fashioned instincts still were in his composition. And, after all, he had said a good deal the night before, at dinner, when Helena's invitation to a man he despised as a coward and a libertine had been first sprung upon him. There really was only one way out. He took it.
"Well, Helena, I'm very sorry," he said slowly. "Your views are very interesting. I should like some day to discuss them with you. But the immediate business is to stop this Ritz plan. You really won't stop it yourself?"
"Certainly not!" said Helena, her breath fluttering.
"Well, then, I must write to Donald myself. I happen to possess the means of making it impossible for him to meet you at the Ritz next Wednesday, Helena; and I shall use them. You must make some other arrangement."
"What means?" she demanded. She had turned very pale.
"Ah, no!—that you must leave to me. Look here, Helena"—his tone softened—"can't we shake hands on it, and make up? I do hate quarrelling with your mother's daughter."
Involuntarily, through all her rage, Helena was struck by the extreme sensitiveness of the face opposite her—a sensitiveness often disguised by the powerful general effect of the man's head and eyes. In a calmer mood she might have said to herself that only some past suffering could have produced it. At the moment, however, she was incapable of anything but passionate resentment.
All the same there was present in her own mind an ideal of what the action and bearing of a girl in her position should be, which, with the help of pride, would not allow her to drift into mere temper. She put her hands firmly behind her; so that Buntingford was forced to withdraw his; but she kept her self-possession.
"I don't see what there is but quarrelling before us, Cousin Philip, if you are to proceed on these lines. Are you really going to keep me to my promise?"
"To let me take care of you—for these two years? It was not a promise to me, Helena."
The girl's calm a little broke down.
"Mummy would never have made me give it," she said fiercely, "if she had known—"
"Well, you can't ask her now," he said gently. "Hadn't we better make the best of it?"
She scorned to reply. He opened the door for her, and she swept through it.
Left to himself, Buntingford gave a great stretch.
"That was strenuous!"—he said to himself—"uncommonly strenuous. How many times a week shall I have to do it? Can't Cynthia Welwyn do anything? I'll go and see Cynthia this afternoon."
With which very natural, but quite foolish resolution, he at last succeeded in quieting his own irritation, and turning his mind to a political speech he had to make next week in his own village.
CHAPTER V
Cynthia Welwyn was giving an account of her evening at Beechmark to her elder sister, Lady Georgina. They had just met in the little drawing-room of Beechmark Cottage, and tea was coming in. It would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast than the two sisters presented. They were the daughters of a peer belonging to what a well-known frequenter of great houses and great families before the war used to call "the inferior aristocracy"—with an inflection of voice caught no doubt from the great families themselves. Yet their father had been an Earl, the second of his name, and was himself the son of a meteoric personage of mid-Victorian days—parliamentary lawyer, peer, and Governor of an Indian Presidency, who had earned his final step in the peerage by the skilful management of a little war, and had then incontinently died, leaving his family his reputation, which was considerable, and his savings, which were disappointingly small. Lady Cynthia and Lady Georgina were his only surviving children, and the earldom was extinct.
The sisters possessed a tiny house in Brompton Square, and rented Beechmark Cottage from Lord Buntingford, of whom their mother, long since dead, had been a cousin. The cottage stood within the enclosure of the park, and to their connection with the big house the sisters owed a number of amenities,—game in winter, flowers and vegetables in summer—which were of importance to their small income. Cynthia Welwyn, however, could never have passed as anybody's dependent. She thanked her cousin occasionally for the kindnesses of which his head gardener and his game-keeper knew much more than he did; and when he said impatiently—"Please never thank for that sort of thing!" she dropped the subject as lightly as she had raised it. Secretly she felt that such things, and much more, were her due. She had not got from life all she should have got; and it was only natural that people should make it up to her a little.
For Cynthia, though she had wished to marry, was unmarried, and a secret and melancholy conviction now sometimes possessed her that she would remain Cynthia Welwyn to the end. She knew very well that in the opinion of her friends she had fallen between two stools. Her neighbour, Sir Richard Watson, had proposed to her twice,—on the last occasion some two years before the war. She had not been able to make up her mind to accept him, because on the whole she was more in love with her cousin, Philip Buntingford, and still hoped that his old friendship for her might turn to something deeper. But the war had intervened, and during its four years she and Buntingford had very much lost sight of each other. She had taken her full share in the county war work; while he was absorbed body and soul by the Admiralty.
And now that they were meeting again as of old, she was very conscious, in some undefined way, that she had lost ground with him. Uneasily she felt that her talk sometimes bored him; yet she could not help talking. In the pre-war days, when they met in a drawing-room full of people, he had generally ended his evening beside her. Now his manner, for all its courtesy, seemed to tell her that those times were done; that she was four years older; that she had lost the first brilliance of her looks; and that he himself had grown out of her ken. Helena's young unfriendly eyes had read her rightly. She did wish fervently to recapture Philip Buntingford; and saw no means of doing so. Meanwhile Sir Richard, now demobilized, had come back from the war bringing great glory with him, as one of the business men whom the Army had roped in to help in its vast labour and transport organization behind the lines. He too had reappeared at Beechmark Cottage. But he too was four years older—and dreadfully preoccupied, it seemed to her, with a thousand interests which had mattered nothing to him in the old easy days.
Yet Cynthia Welwyn was still an extremely attractive and desirable woman, and was quite aware of it, as was her elder sister, Lady Georgina, who spent her silent life in alternately admiring and despising the younger. Lady Georgina was short, thin, and nearly white-haired. She had a deep voice, which she used with a harsh abruptness, startling to the newcomer. But she used it very little. Cynthia's friends, were used to see her sitting absolutely silent behind the tea-urn at breakfast or tea, filling the cups while Cynthia handed them and Cynthia talked; and they had learned that it was no use at all to show compassion and try to bring her into the conversation. A quiet rather stony stare, a muttered "Ah" or "Oh," were all that such efforts produced. Some of the frequenters of the cottage drawing-room were convinced that Lady Georgina was "not quite all there." Others had the impression of something watchful and sinister; and were accustomed to pity "dear Cynthia" for having to live with so strange a being.
But in truth the sisters suited each other very fairly, and Lady Georgina found a good deal more tongue when she was alone with Cynthia than at other times.
To the lively account that Cynthia had been giving her of the evening at Beechmark, and the behaviour of Helena Pitstone, Lady Georgina had listened in a sardonic silence; and at the end of it she said—
"What ever made the man such a fool?"
"Who?—Buntingford? My dear, what could he do? Rachel Pitstone was his greatest friend in the world, and when she asked him just the week before she died, how could he say No?" Lady Georgina murmured that in that case Rachel Pitstone also had been a fool—
"Unless, of course, she wanted the girl to marry Buntingford. Why, Philip's only forty-four now. A nice age for a guardian! Of course it's not proper. The neighbours will talk."
"Oh, no,—not with a chaperon. Besides nobody minds anything odd nowadays."
Cynthia meanwhile as she lay stretched in a deep arm-chair, playing with the tea-spoon in her shapely fingers, was a pleasant vision. Since coming in from the village, she had changed her tweed coat and skirt for a tea-frock of some soft silky stuff, hyacinth blue in colour; and Georgina, for whom tea-frocks were a silly abomination, and who was herself sitting bolt upright in a shabby blue serge some five springs old, could not deny the delicate beauty of her sister's still fresh complexion and pale gold hair, nor the effectiveness of the blue dress in combination with them. She did not really want Cynthia to look older, nor to see her ill-dressed; but all the same there were many days when Cynthia's mature perfections roused a secret irritation in her sister—a kind of secret triumph also in the thought that, in the end, Time would be the master even of Cynthia. Perhaps after all she would marry. It did look as though Sir Richard Watson, if properly encouraged, and indemnified for earlier rebuffs, might still mean business. As for Philip Buntingford, it was only Cynthia's vanity that had ever made her imagine him in love with her. Lady Georgina scoffed at the notion.
These fragmentary reflections, and others like them were passing rapidly and disconnectedly through the mind of the elder sister, when her ear caught the sound of footsteps in the drive. Drawing aside a corner of the muslin curtain beside her, which draped one of the French windows of the low room, she perceived the tall figure and scarcely perceptible limp of Lord Buntingford. Cynthia too saw him, and ceased to lounge. She quietly re-lit the tea-kettle, and took a roll of knitting from a table near her. Then as the front bell rang through the small house, she threw a scarcely perceptible look at her sister. Would Georgie "show tact," and leave her and Philip alone, or would she insist on her rights and spoil his visit? Georgina made no sign.
Buntingford entered, flushed with his walk, and carrying a bunch of blue-bells which he presented to Lady Georgina.
"I gathered them in Cricket Wood. The whole wood is a sea of blue. You and Cynthia must really go and see them."
He settled himself in a chair, and plunged into tea and small talk as though to the manner born. But all the time Cynthia, while approving his naval uniform, and his general picturesqueness, was secretly wondering what he had come about. For although he was enjoying a well-earned leave, the first for two years, and had every right to idle, the ordinary afternoon call of country life, rarely, as she knew, came into the scheme of his day. The weather was beautiful and she had made sure that he would be golfing on a well-known links some three miles off.
Presently the small talk flagged, and Buntingford began to fidget. Slowly Lady Georgina rose from her seat, and again extinguished the flame under the silver kettle. Would she go, or would she not go? Cynthia dropped some stitches in the tension of the moment. Then Buntingford got up to open the door for Georgina, who, without deigning to make any conventional excuse for her departure, nevertheless departed.
Buntingford returned to his seat, picked up Cynthia's ball of wool, and sat holding it, his eyes on the down-dropped head of his cousin, and on the beautiful hands holding the knitting-needles. Yes, she was still very good-looking, and had been sensible enough not to spoil herself by paint and powder, unlike that silly child, Helena, who was yet so much younger—twenty-two years younger, almost. It seemed incredible. But he could reckon Cynthia's age to a day; for they had known each other very well as children, and he had often given her a birthday present, till the moment when, in her third season, Cynthia had peremptorily put an end to the custom. Then he had gone abroad, and there had been a wide gap of years when they had never seen each other at all. And now, it was true, she did often bore him, intellectually. But at this moment, he was not bored—quite the contrary. The sunny cottage room, with its flowers and books and needlework, and a charming woman as its centre, evidently very glad to see him, and ready to welcome any confidences he might give her, produced a sudden sharp effect upon him. That hunger for something denied him—the "It" which he was always holding at bay—sprang upon him, and shook his self-control.
"We've known each other a long time, haven't we, Cynthia?" he said, smiling, and holding out her ball of wool.
Cynthia hardly concealed her start of pleasure. She looked up, shaking her hair from her white brow and temples with a graceful gesture, half responsive, half melancholy.
"So long!" she said—"it doesn't bear thinking of."
"Not at all. You haven't aged a bit. I want you to help me in something, Cynthia. You remember how you helped me out of one or two scrapes in the old days?"
They both laughed. Cynthia remembered very well. That scrape, for instance, with the seductive little granddaughter of the retired village school-master—a veritable Ancient of Days, who had been the witness of an unlucky kiss behind a hedge, and had marched up instanter, in his wrath, to complain to Lord Buntingford grand-père. Or that much worse scrape, when a lad of nineteen, with not enough to do in his Oxford vacation, had imagined himself in love with a married lady of the neighbourhood, twenty years older than himself, and had had to be packed off in disgrace to Switzerland with a coach:—an angry grandfather breathing fire and slaughter. Certainly in those days Philip had been unusually—remarkably susceptible. Cynthia remembered him as always in or out of a love-affair, while she to whom he never made love was alternately champion and mentor. In those days, he had no expectation of the estates or the title. He was plain Philip Bliss, with an artistic and literary turn, great personal charm, and a temperament that invited catastrophes. That was before he went to Paris and Rome for serious work at painting. Seven years he had been away from England, and she had never seen him. He had announced his marriage to her in a short note containing hardly any particulars—except that his wife was a student like himself, and that he intended to live abroad and work. Some four years later, the Times contained the bare news, in the obituary column, of his wife's death, and about a year afterwards he returned to England, an enormously changed man, with that slight lameness, which seemed somehow to draw a sharp, dividing line between the splendid, impulsive youth who had gone abroad, and the reserved, and self-contained man of thirty-two—pessimist and dilettante—who had returned. His lameness he ascribed to an accident in the Alps, but would never say anything more about it; and his friends presently learned to avoid the subject, and to forget the slight signs of something unexplained which had made them curious at first.
In the intervening years before the war, Cynthia felt tolerably sure that she had been his only intimate woman friend. His former susceptibility seemed to have vanished. On the whole he avoided women's society. Some years after his return he had inherited the title and the estates, and might have been one of the most invited men in London had he wished to be; while Cynthia could remember at least three women, all desirable, who would have liked to marry him. The war had swept him more decidedly than ever out of the ordinary current of society. He had made it both an excuse and a shield. His work was paramount; and even his old friends had lost sight of him. He lived and breathed for an important Committee of the Admiralty, on which as time went on he took a more and more important place. In the four years Cynthia had scarcely seen him more than half a dozen times.
And now the war was over. It was May again, and glorious May with the world all colour and song, the garden a wealth of blossom, and the nights clear and fragrant under moon or stars. And here was Philip again—much more like the old Philip than he had been for years—looking at her with those enchanting blue eyes of his, and asking her to do something for him. No wonder Cynthia's pulses were stirred. The night before, she had come home depressed—very conscious that she had had no particular success with him at dinner, or afterwards. This unexpected tête-à-tête, with its sudden touch of intimacy, made up for it all.
What could she do but assure him—trying hard not to be too forthcoming—that she would be delighted to help him, if she could? What was wrong?
"Nothing but my own idiocy," he said, smiling. "I find myself guardian to an extremely headstrong young woman, and I don't know how to manage her. I want your advice."
Cynthia lay back in her chair, and prepared to give him all her mind. But her eyes showed a certain mockery.
"I wonder why you undertook it!"
"So do I. But—well, I couldn't help it. We won't discuss that. But what
I had very little idea of—was the modern girl!" Cynthia laughed out.
"And now you have discovered her—in one day?" He laughed too, but rather dismally.
"Oh, I am only on the first step. What I shall come to presently, I don't know. But the immediate problem is that Helena bombed me last night by the unexpected announcement that she had asked Donald—Lord Donald—for the week-end. Do you know him?" Cynthia's eyebrows had gone up.
"Very slightly."
"You know his reputation?"
"I begin to remember a good deal about him. Go on."
"Well, Helena had asked that man, without consulting me, to stay at my house, and she sprang the announcement on me, on Thursday, the invitation being for Saturday. I had to tell her then and there—that he couldn't come."
"Naturally. How did she take it?"
"Very ill. You see, in a rash moment, I had told her to invite her friends for week-ends as she pleased. So she holds that I have broken faith, and this morning she told me she had arranged to go up and lunch with Donald at the Ritz next week—alone! So again I had to stop it. But I don't play the jailer even decently. I feel the greatest fool in creation." Cynthia smiled.
"I quite believe you! And this all happened in the first twenty-four hours? Poor Philip!"
"And I have also been informed that Helena's 'views' will not allow her—in the future—to take my advice on any such questions—that she prefers her liberty to her reputation—and 'wants to understand a bad man.' She said so. It's all very well to laugh, Cynthia! But what am I to do?"
Cynthia, however, continued to laugh unrestrainedly. And he joined in.
"And now you want advice?" she said at last, checking her mirth. "I'm awfully sorry for you, Philip. What about the little chaperon?"
"As nice a woman as ever was—but I don't see her preventing Helena from doing anything she wants to do. Helena will jolly well take care of that. Besides she is too new to the job."
"She may get on better with Helena, perhaps, than a stronger woman," mused Cynthia. "But I am afraid you have got your work cut out. Wasn't it very rash of you?"
"I couldn't help it," he repeated briefly. "And I must just do my best. But I'd be awfully grateful if you'd take a hand, Cynthia. Won't you come up and really make friends with her? She might take things from you that she wouldn't from me."
Cynthia looked extremely doubtful.
"I am sure last night she detested me."
"How could you tell? And why should she?"
"I'm twenty years older. That's quite enough."
"You scarcely look a day older, Cynthia."
She sighed, and lightly touched his hand, with a caressing gesture he remembered of old.
"Very nice of you to say it—but of course it isn't true. Well, Philip, I'll do what I can. I'll wander up some time—on Sunday perhaps. With your coaching, I could at least give her a biography of Jim Donald. One needn't be afraid of shocking her?"
His eyebrows lifted.
"Who's shocked at anything nowadays? Look at the things girls read and discuss! I'm old-fashioned, I suppose. But I really couldn't talk about Donald to her this morning. The fellow is such a worm! It would come better from you."
"Tell me a few more facts, then, about him, than I know at present."
He gave her rapidly a sketch of the life and antecedents of Lord Donald of Dunoon—gambler, wastrel, divorcé, et cetera, speaking quite frankly, almost as he would have spoken to a man. For there was nothing at all distasteful to him in Cynthia's knowledge of life. In a woman of forty it was natural and even attractive. The notion of a discussion of Donald's love-affairs with Helena had revolted him. It was on the contrary something of a relief—especially with a practical object in view—to discuss them with Cynthia.
They sat chatting till the shadows lengthened, then wandered into the garden, still talking. Lady Georgina, watching from her window upstairs, had to admit that Buntingford seemed to like her sister's society. But if she had been within earshot at the last five minutes of their conversation, she would perhaps have seen no reason, finally, to change her opinion. Very agreeable that discursive talk had been to both participants. Buntingford had talked with great frankness of his own plans. In three months or so, his Admiralty work would be over. He thought very likely that the Government would then give him a modest place in the Administration. He might begin by representing the Admiralty in the Lords, and as soon as he got a foot on the political ladder prospects would open. On the whole, he thought, politics would be his line. He had no personal axes to grind; was afraid of nothing; wouldn't care if the Lords were done away with to-morrow, and could live on a fraction of his income if the Socialists insisted on grabbing the rest. But the new world which the war had opened was a desperately interesting one. He hadn't enough at stake in it to spoil his nerve. Whatever happened, he implied, he was steeled—politically and intellectually. Nothing could deprive him either of the joy of the fight, or the amusement of the spectacle.
And Cynthia, her honey-gold hair blown back from her white temples by the summer wind, her blue parasol throwing a summer shade about her, showed herself, as they strolled backwards and forwards over the shady lawn of the cottage, a mistress of the listening art; and there is no art more winning, either to men or women.
Then, in a moment, what broke the spell? Some hint or question from her, of a more intimate kind?—something that touched a secret place, wholly unsuspected by her? She racked her brains afterwards to think what it could have been; but in vain. All she knew was that the man beside her had suddenly stiffened. His easy talk had ceased to flow; while still walking beside her, he seemed to be miles away. So that by a quick common impulse both stood still.
"I must go back to the village," said Cynthia. She smiled, but her face had grown a little tired and faded.
He looked at his watch.
"And I told the car to fetch me half an hour ago. You'll be up some time perhaps—luncheon to-morrow?—or Sunday?"
"If I can. I'll do my best."
"Kind Cynthia!" But his tone was perfunctory, and his eyes avoided her. When he had gone, she could only wonder what she had done to offend him; and a certain dreariness crept into the evening light. She was not the least in love with Philip—that she assured herself. But his sudden changes of mood were very trying to one who would like to be his friend.
Buntingford walked rapidly home. His way lay through an oak wood, that was now a revel of spring; overhead, a shimmering roof of golden leaf and wild cherry-blossom, and underfoot a sea of blue-bells. A winding path led through it, and through the lovely open and grassy spaces which from time to time broke up the density of the wood—like so many green floors cleared for the wood nymphs' dancing. From the west a level sun struck through the trees, breaking through storm-clouds which had been rapidly filling the horizon, and kindling the tall trees, with their ribbed grey bark, till they shone for a brief moment like the polished pillars in the house of Odysseus. Then a nightingale sang. Nightingales were rare at Beechmark; and Buntingford would normally have hailed the enchanted flute-notes with a boyish delight. But this evening they fell on deaf ears, and when the garish sunlight gave place to gloom, and drops of rain began to patter on the new leaf, the gathering storm, and the dark silence of the wood, after the nightingale had given her last trill, were welcome to a man struggling with a recurrent and desperate oppression.
Must he always tamely submit to the fetters which bound him? Could he do nothing to free himself? Could the law do nothing? Enquiry—violent action of some sort—rebellion against the conditions which had grown so rigid about him:—for the hundredth time, he canvassed all ways of escape, and for the hundredth time, found none.
He knew very well what was wrong with him. It was simply the imperious need for a woman's companionship in his life—for love. Physically and morally, the longing which had lately taken possession of him, was becoming a gnawing and perpetual distress. There was the plain fact. This hour with Cynthia Welwyn had stirred in him the depths of old pain. But he was not really in love with Cynthia. During the war, amid the absorption of his work, and the fierce pressure of the national need, he had been quite content to forget her. His work—and England's strait—had filled his mind and his time. Except for certain dull resentments and regrets, present at all times in the background of consciousness, the four years of the war had been to him a period of relief, almost of deliverance. He had been able to lose himself; and in that inner history of the soul which is the real history of each one of us, that had been for long years impossible.
But now all that protection and help was gone; the floodgates were loosened again. His work still went on; but it was no longer absorbing; it no longer mattered enough to hold in check the vague impulses and passions that were beating against his will.
And meanwhile the years were running on. He was forty-four, Helena Pitstone's guardian, and clearly relegated already by that unmanageable child to the ranks of the middle-aged. He had read her thought in her great scornful eyes. "What has your generation to do with mine? Your day is over!"
And all the while the ugly truth was that he had never had his "day"—and was likely now to miss it for good. Or at least such "day" as had shone upon him had been so short, so chequered, so tragically wiped out, it might as well never have dawned. Yet the one dear woman friend to whom in these latter years he had spoken freely, who knew him through and through—Helena Pitstone's mother—had taken for granted, in her quiet ascetic way, that he had indeed had his chance, and must accept for good and all what had come of it. It was because she thought of him as set apart, as debarred by what had happened to him, from honest love-making, and protected by his own nature from anything less, that she had asked him to take charge of Helena. He realized it now. It had been the notion of a fanciful idealist, springing from certain sickroom ideas of sacrifice—renunciation—submission to the will of God—and so forth.
It was not the will of God!—that he should live forsaken and die forlorn! He hurled defiance, even at Rachel, his dear dead friend, who had been so full of pity for him, and for whom he had felt the purest and most unselfish affection he had ever known—since his mother's death.
And now the presence of her child in his house seemed to represent a verdict, a sentence—of hers upon him, which he simply refused to accept as just or final. If Rachel had only lived a little longer he would have had it out with her. But in those last terrible days, how could he either argue—or refuse?
All the same, he would utterly do his duty by Helena. If she chose to regard him as an old fogy, well and good—it was perhaps better so. Not that—if circumstances had been other than they were—-he would have been the least inclined to make love to her. Her beauty was astonishing. But the wonderful energy and vitality of her crude youth rather repelled than attracted him.
The thought of the wrestles ahead of him was a weariness to an already tired man. Debate with her, on all the huge insoluble questions she seemed to be determined to raise, was of all things in the world most distasteful to him. He would certainly cut a sorry figure in it; nothing was more probable.
The rain began to plash down upon his face and bared head, cooling an inner fever. The damp wood, the soft continuous dripping of the cherry-blossoms, the scent of the blue-bells,—there was in them a certain shelter and healing. He would have liked to linger there. But already, at Beechmark, guests must have arrived; he was being missed.
The trees thinned, and the broad lawns of Beechmark came in sight. Ah!—there was Geoffrey, walking up and down with Helena. Suppose that really came off? What a comfortable way out! He and Cynthia must back it all they could.