XXIX
“What have you been doing to Jennie?” asked Joyce Damerel next morning, in her manner that so oddly mingled disagreeableness with a sort of friendly interest.
Lydia was not in the least surprised by the question. Her own wakeful and wretched night had left no such traces as were plainly to be seen in the unaccustomed rings round Jennie’s eyes, and the heavy, swollen look of young eyelids unused to tears and to vigils alike.
“Jennie must have been crying almost all night.”
“She got overtired in London,” Lydia said unemotionally. “She was thoroughly upset last night.”
“Poor little thing!”
Joyce sought for no further explanation, it was evident.
But Lydia knew, quite as well as though she had been within earshot of the lovers, what had been Roland Valentine’s first startled inquiry when he and Jennie met outside the church porch.
And after the two had walked across the fields together to Quintmere, whither Lady Lucy drove Lydia, she was aware of a new hostility in Roland Valentine’s manner to herself.
The words of the night before, Lydia told herself with a strange apathy, were destined to echo long and far. She wondered dully how they had come to speak them—why she, with her lifelong instincts of self-control, had madly, at this eleventh hour, brought about a crisis that Jennie, the child, had so obviously tried to avert.
Her perceptions were so dulled by the suffering of the last few months, culminating in the breaking-point of yesterday, that she heard hardly anything of the conversation at lunch, and herself took part in it quite automatically.
It seemed to her that Lady Lucy looked at her compassionately once or twice.
“This is a trying time for you, my dear,” said the old lady kindly, when they found themselves alone together in the drawing-room later on. “But you must think of dear little Jennie’s happiness—and trust that the Infinite Mercy will bring her husband back to her at the end of this cruel war.”
Lydia smiled faintly, listening to the gentle platitudes that were the means of expression most natural to Lady Lucy’s spirit of quiet fortitude.
She thought that the turbulent depths of her own wretchedness could never be even apprehended by her mother-in-law.
Without being aware of it, however, Lydia had reached those last outposts of endurance when mental anguish must have the relief of speech, or plunge into the abyss of madness.
Because she could bear Lady Lucy’s kindly, simple commonplaces no longer, Lydia announced a sudden intention of walking home.
“Before tea!” protested Lady Lucy. “I couldn’t hear of it, my dear. Besides, the Kennedys are coming up this afternoon, and the dear old Rector.”
Quite suddenly, the remembrance flashed across Lydia of the day that she had first told Nathalie and her husband of Roland Valentine, and his pretensions to become engaged to Jennie. The Kennedys had been thinking only of the war then, and of their own two boys. They had cared little enough for Jennie’s romance, less still for Lydia’s state of mind on the subject.
But the Rector had looked at her.
Lydia remembered the look with odd distinctness, and the impression of an understanding almost apprehensive in its completeness, that it had produced upon her.
She had hardly seen the Rector since that day. Had he, perhaps, understood?
“I should like to see Mr. Palmer and Nathalie,” she murmured mechanically.
“Oh, yes, and, besides, you must drive back. The pony and cart are ordered for five o’clock, as I thought you would want Jennie to be early. Poor little girl, she looks pale and tired to-day, but I’m sure that’s very natural. Even in ordinary times a girl is apt to look worn out with all the excitement and the preparations just before the wedding....”
Lady Lucy talked on, and Lydia stared out of the window.
It was a bleak, windy day, with scudding clouds flying across a dark sky. Perhaps they would say it was too cold for the Rector to be out of doors, and Nathalie and her husband would come alone.
If so, Lydia felt that her last hope would have failed her.
She looked at the clock.
It was not yet quite three, and they would probably not arrive before four o’clock.
Waiting had become unendurable.
“Where is Joyce?” she asked, wondering if it could be borne, were she obliged to sit tête-à-tête for another whole hour with the old lady, who would resent any pretence at reading, when she was desirous of talking about the morrow’s wedding.
“I think she went to see about poor little Solomon, my dear. You know, Solly feels the cold weather now he’s getting to be an old dog. Joyce has had his basket put by the fire in the housekeeper’s room. We’ve got some stuff for his poor eyes, and he can’t bear anyone but Joyce to put it on....”
The placid old voice rambled on and on. It seemed to Lydia ages and ages before she ventured again to look at the clock.
It must have stopped.
The hands did not even yet indicate three o’clock.
“That clock is fast, my dear,” said Lady Lucy. “It isn’t more than a quarter to three, I feel sure. This new man who comes up from the village on Saturdays now doesn’t seem to understand the clocks in the same way that young Davy did. You know young Davy is actually at the front now? His mother had a field postcard last week. Everything crossed out except ‘I am quite well.’ You’ve seen those curious, printed field postcards, I suppose, haven’t you?”
The sound of Colonel Kennedy’s newly-acquired two-seater was heard outside quite early in the afternoon—long before four o’clock; nevertheless it seemed to Lydia that she had lived through a lifetime of waiting that afternoon.
The quivering nerves of her mind, wrenched to the point of uttermost tension, had with almost irrational intensity fixed upon speech with old Mr. Palmer as the one forlorn hope of relief.
She clenched her hands upon the arms of her chair while the sounds of arrival in the hall outside penetrated to the drawing-room.
“How nice and early they are!” said Lady Lucy. “Will you ring the bell, my dear? Nathalie will be glad of some tea, after that cold drive. I’m sure her father won’t have ventured out of doors in such an east wind.”
Lydia cast upon her a look of affrighted anguish.
What did her mother-in-law mean by so calm a prophecy of a disaster that now presented itself to Lydia’s disordered perceptions as one of almost incredible magnitude?
The door opened and Nathalie came into the room with Joyce Damerel. Colonel Kennedy, alone, followed them, and the door shut behind him.
The Rector had not come.
“Father was disappointed, but we didn’t dare to risk it—the wind has gone right round to the east. He wanted so much to see Jennie, too, Lydia—but he wouldn’t run the chance of catching cold before the wedding. My dear, the church looks lovely—they’ve decorated it all. Where’s Jennie?”
“They’re both in the library,” said Lady Lucy with a significant smile.
“Oh, well, we shall see them presently. I suppose all the preparations are finished, Lydia? You look very tired. Was there a great deal to do?”
“Quite a lot,” said Lydia, and smiled faintly.
They went on talking all round her.
Colonel Kennedy spoke about the war-news, and the others listened to him anxiously, with the deference accorded to the opinion of an old soldier. News of Billy Damerel and of Aleck and Charlie Kennedy was exchanged between Joyce and Nathalie. Old Lady Lucy talked about the family of Belgian refugees installed in the village.
“Poor things, one was so dreadfully sorry for them—and still is—but they are very difficult to please. The mother and the aunt quarrel terribly, and the aunt wants to be sent somewhere else.... How do you find yours, Nathalie?”
“Not at all easy to manage, either. They grumbled so at having to drink tea, that the Committee has had to arrange a special supply of coffee for them—and Monsieur Mertens came up the other day and told us it was such bad coffee that it was making his wife ill. He said she was énervée au possible, but Dr. West couldn’t find anything wrong with her.”
“That’s just it! One of ours—that young chemist from Antwerp—says he spits blood every night and is going to die, but he seems as well as possible.”
“I suppose,” said Colonel Kennedy tritely, “that we have the worst specimens over here. The decent ones—the men, at all events—are fighting.”
Lydia heard it all without attending to it. So many similar conversations had been held at Quintmere and elsewhere since the war.
Tea was brought, and Jennie and Roland Valentine came in together, and the talk was then altogether of the wedding. It seemed that, for Jennie’s sake, everyone was anxious not to recall the war by the mention of anything connected with it.
“It’s so nice that you should have it here, Jennie, and not in London. Everyone is so pleased, and they’ve decorated the church—we looked in as we came up, to leave some flowers....”
“Have you had any more presents, Jennie?”
“Some lovely cut-glass from Roland’s aunt in Oxford—it’s in the library. Grandmama is letting me have everything sent here.”
“I can pack it all up myself and send it anywhere you like afterwards,” said Lydia, almost from force of habit.
She saw herself toiling over the wearisome task when Jennie had left her, gone away to her new life.
“We can all help,” said Joyce Damerel briskly. “Or perhaps Jennie would like her things to stay here until she comes to fetch them herself.”
With the faintest possible start, Lydia realized the intention, hostile to herself, of the little speech.
Joyce had never liked her.
“I think we ought to start,” she said suddenly. “Nathalie, will your father be in if I go round that way?”
Nathalie looked rather surprised.
“Oh, yes. Shall I take a message, Lydia, if it’s anything about to-morrow?”
Lydia heard herself utter a disagreeable laugh.
“No, it’s nothing to do with Jennie or with Jennie’s concerns. I want to speak to the Rector.”
She could not herself have told when the wish had crystallized into a determination.
“Will you ring, Roland, if you please,” said Lady Lucy quietly, “and order the pony-cart to be brought to the door?”
When they left Quintmere, the old lady solemnly kissed and blessed her granddaughter, and Joyce, most undemonstrative of women, put her arms round the girl for a moment.
Nathalie, her soft blue eyes full of ready, emotional tears, let them fall unabashed, as she said, smiling:
“Till to-morrow, Jennie darling!”
No one gave a thought or a look to Lydia, except Roland Valentine, and his eyes were like steel.
“You can drive, Jennie.”
The girl took up the reins.
“Do you really want to go all that way round, by the Kennedys, mama?” she asked presently.
“Yes, I do,” Lydia replied, with a stubborn inflexion in her voice that she herself heard with surprise.
It was as though any questioning of that decision would rouse in her a veritable frenzy, but Jennie made no attempt to question it.
They drove almost in silence.
“I’ll wait outside with the pony. Or shall I come in?” Jennie asked rather timidly.
“Wait? No. Don’t wait—it’s cold. Drive on, and leave the pony at the inn, as usual, and go home as quick as you can. I’ll walk.”
“Oh, mama!”
“What’s the matter?” Lydia asked sharply.
“Won’t you be tired?”
“No,” said Lydia inflexibly.
She always disliked any display of thoughtfulness or anxiety on her behalf from Jennie. It seemed somehow to minimize her own self-abnegating maternity, and to assert on Jennie’s part an unfounded claim to maturity.
“Then please come back fairly early. It’ll be our last evening—at least, the last before—to-morrow,” Jennie pleaded confusedly.
The personal claim Lydia could not only tolerate, but it touched her strongly and suddenly.
“Yes—yes, my darling. Go home now.”
The words seemed to break up some constriction that had hitherto bound her, and even as she watched Jennie turn the pony’s head obediently, and heard the sound of the wheels recede, Lydia became aware that a violent rush of uncontrollable tears suddenly threatened her.
“Is the Rector in, Alice?” she asked the maid, and heard with horror the quivering of her own voice.
The Rector was in the study.
Lydia had only to cross the hall and open the familiar door, but before she entered the little lamp-lit room her face was drenched with tears.
She pulled down her veil in desperation.
“Lydia!” said the old Rector in pleased surprise.
Then his face altered pitifully. “What—who is it?” he stammered. “Not Nathalie—not one of the boys?”
“No—no. Only myself. It’s nothing—I mean nothing has happened, only I can’t bear things any longer—I thought perhaps you’d understand—I had to speak to someone——”
The sound of her own incoherence, by its very unfamiliarity, served to destroy Lydia’s last defences.
She sank into a chair and wept wildly and bitterly as she had never in all her life wept before.
The Rector stood still for a moment and looked at her, then walked slowly, with the careful gait of age and obesity, to the door.
“Alice!” Lydia heard him call.
“Alice! I am engaged with Mrs. Damerel and do not wish to be disturbed. Please tell Colonel and Mrs. Kennedy when they come in. Thank you, Alice.”
He closed the door, and came slowly and carefully back again to his seat in front of the writing-table.
His attitude was one familiar to Lydia, and, indeed, to all those who knew him: one knee crossed over the other, his hands lightly joined together, his chair turned sideways to the light that fell from the little reading-lamp upon his thin grey hair and kind, simple face, that held little of learning or of great shrewdness.
Lydia had never looked upon him as a very wise old man.
He had lived in her house for a number of years, had been often unpunctual and untidy, and always apologetic for both failings, and also always grateful to her for letting him remain on in his old home after it had virtually become hers and Clement’s.
He had spoilt Jennie and his own grandchildren when they came home from India, and his weakness and lack of judgment had often made Lydia’s work with Clement in the parish unnecessarily difficult.
Lydia, in common with everyone else, had often said of him: “The Rector really is a saint—too good for this world.” She had only meant that the old man was unpractical, behind the times, and yet too well-meaning and conscientious to be unkindly criticized by anyone.
She had never sought spiritual counsel of him. It was not in her nature to feel any need of such a thing, and although she would have thought it wrong, without analyzing wherein the wrong would lie, to omit any of the customary religious exercises to which she had been brought up, it had never in her life occurred to her, and would not occur now, to connect what she supposed to be “religion” with such an emotional crisis as she was at present passing through.
As to many another before her, the one was a poignant and present reality, the other a meaningless convention that slipped away with all other conventions when the bedrock of life was touched.
It was not for the possible comfort or guidance to be found in religion that she had come to the Rector, whose halting, ineloquent sermons she knew almost as well as he did himself.
She had come merely because the breaking-point had been reached, there was no one to understand, and her wild, forlorn, last hope centred on this old man from whom she had never heard a word of condemnation of anyone.