XXX
“Poor child—poor, dear child!” said the Rector.
“I’m so miserable!” cried Lydia, like an unhappy child.
“Yes—yes. Is it about little Jennie?”
She answered brokenly and with incoherent vehemence, the accumulated suffering of the past months finding vent in disconnected words, and sobbing, elliptical phrases.
She scarcely knew what she said.
Jennie was going away from her—marrying a man who hated her mother, and who thought, and was teaching Jennie to think, that all her life she had been tyrannized over. Roland Valentine had said outright that Lydia had made Jennie afraid of her.
Joyce had been cruel, too. She had accused Lydia of not knowing what love meant—of having disappointed Clement, and done her best to spoil Jennie’s life.
“No, no, my poor child!”
“She said I wanted the beau rôle for myself always, that I would only let Jennie have the little trivial things—that I grudged her the experience of reality——”
Lydia broke off and gazed at the old man with terrified eyes, seeing no protesting denial in his face.
“It’s the tendency of us all,” he said dreamily. “We grudge the young folk the privilege of suffering and learning—we seek to shelter them, for the sake of our own peace of mind, and call it devotion.”
“But—but,” stammered Lydia, “to love anyone is to want to protect them—to save them from pain—to bear it instead. I have loved Jennie, God knows—I do love her. My care for her, and over-anxiety, and perhaps over-solicitude, have all been love.”
“Love,” said the Rector in the same dreamy, monotonous voice, as of one voicing a conviction too intimate for vehement upholding, “Love is suffering. Whether it is love for man, or woman or child—for husband or wife, little child or dear friend, always remember that, Lydia. Love is suffering in this life. It is only afterwards, when we have mastered that truth, and accepted all that it implies, that no doubt there is some further stage, undreamed-of by poor humanity, when the suffering is all transmuted, and love becomes joy.”
Slowly a dim understanding of the words seemed to come to Lydia.
Oddly, and not irrelevantly, she remembered once more the pronouncement of the little girl who had worked with her in a London shop twenty years earlier.
“You’ve never cared for anyone—when you do love somebody ... you won’t know how to set about it....”
Was she learning now—for the first time?
No longer wrenched by the hard sobs of her despair, she continued to gaze at the old, unlearned man, so much less well equipped for life than she had seemed to herself to be.
“Do you know, my dear,” said the Rector in a tone of gentle narrative, “what always strikes me as the most sublime illustration of the true love that is suffering? One has seen it reproduced in Roman Catholic churches, although I do not know if they give it any special significance. It is generally only one of many little pictures placed round the church, and it represents the Virgin Mary’s meeting with her Son on His way to Mount Calvary.”
Lydia felt bewildered and almost disappointed. Did the consciousness of his profession oblige the Rector to try and turn her thoughts thus?
Here was no revealing formula, such as she had half hoped might throw a new light on all that perplexed and tortured her, but merely the old allusion to the great Figure of Christianity that, for Lydia, held no real relation to the problems of life.
“It isn’t religion I want,” she said dully. “I—I believe in it all, of course, but it doesn’t seem to help me now in this.”
“Lydia, my dear child,” said the Rector, in a tone that seemed to hold a little surprised admonition. “I am not in the pulpit. I am not speaking as a priest, nor at this moment am I urging upon you the consolations of religion. Later on, you will seek and find for yourself, perhaps. I am not asking you to look at the Divine Lord, but at the human Christ, and at His human Mother. Think of them as two figures of mythology, if you will—or as two figures in some great tragedy of which we have all read. And ask yourself if there could have been such suffering without such love—such love without such suffering.”
He looked at her fixedly for a moment, and then went on speaking very slowly, as though giving her time to form to herself some mental image from each of his halting phrases.
“Think of that meeting between Mary of Bethlehem and her Son. To her He must have been still the little Child of Nazareth, for whom she had no doubt done everything that other mothers do for their little children—whom she had loved and guarded and cherished, whom she had lain in the tiny, poor little manger at Bethlehem, whom she had carried before her on the back of the ass during the flight into Egypt, safe in her arms. During the three years of His ministry no doubt they were much separated,” said the Rector in the same simple, narrative manner, “but there must have been many times when He came back to her—for instance, they were together for the festival at the marriage of Cana. She knew about His work, and I feel sure that they talked about it all together.
“Think, my dear, what it must have been to a mother to meet her son like that. On His way to be tortured and put to death like a malefactor, the blood and the sweat all streaming down His face, and carrying on His shoulders that heavy Cross. She must have felt then that it would be a million times easier to suffer it all herself, don’t you think? It would have hurt her far less, surely.
“And she went up the hill, too, my dear, and stood by the Cross and saw it all. And I have always thought to myself—I trust there is nothing irreverent in the idea—that her suffering must have surpassed Christ’s. One knows very well,” said the old Rector, “that it is less painful to endure bodily anguish than to watch it endured by one’s beloved.”
Lydia uttered a stifled, startled cry.
“But that is love, to find it easier to endure oneself than to let one’s beloved endure!”
“It is a stage of love,” the Rector acquiesced gently.
“And beyond that?” asked Lydia fearfully.
“Beyond that there is a greater immolation. That of relinquishing the privilege of suffering to another, and accepting the pain of watching that suffering.”
There is a certain strong sense of inner conviction that strikes, with a pang as that of birth, through the very soul, and which is experienced but once or twice in a lifetime.
Such a pang struck through Lydia now.
It was this, then, that they had all been trying, in their varying degrees, to tell her.
Jennie, with her inarticulate, struggling rebelliousness, that held all the blundering ungraciousness of a young, blind thing still unaware of its own objective—Roland Valentine, with his strong, personal resentment on behalf of his love, and his hard, new-world standards of independence; Joyce Damerel, with her narrow, inflexible judgments and personality antagonistic to Lydia’s; old Lady Lucy, with the conventional shibboleths of her creed and her generation, that yet stood for selflessness and high courage; Aunt Beryl, with her simple, matter-of-fact statement of a truth evidently accepted by her without question: “Jennie has to live her own life ... it’s more sacrificing yourself that I meant—sacrificing your own feelings, like.”
They had all meant the same thing—even silly, ill-advised Aunt Evelyn, grumbling at the tardy independence of her middle-aged daughter, and yet acquiescing in it with the rueful finality: “We must just make the best of our shelf now we’re on it.” Even, incredibly enough, poor, forgotten, unaltered Maria Nettleship, with her uneloquently expressed realization of having been spared the strange, paradoxical, immeasurable suffering of love, that in the ultimate analysis meant the relinquishment of suffering to the beloved.
“That is all, my dear,” said the Rector gently.
Lydia had heard nothing of what he had been saying, although she had been aware of the kindly, monotonous old voice, talking on and on in careful, halting sentences.
Her every faculty had been absorbed in the tardy revelation that was at length hers.
As her mental equilibrium slowly swung back to its habitual poise once more, the fundamentally practical outlook that would always be Lydia’s, asserted itself.
“But it’s too late now. Jennie is going away from me to-morrow.”
“To-morrow,” repeated the Rector almost maunderingly.
Voices became audible in the hall outside, and Lydia knew that the Kennedys had returned.
She could even conjecture, from the murmur of the maid Alice’s voice that the Rector’s message had been given to them.
The sounds dispersed and ceased altogether.
“I must go,” said Lydia. “You’ve been so good to me—I was nearly mad when I came, I think. I can be braver now—I can be brave to-morrow.”
“To-morrow,” said the Rector again. “Let to-morrow be Jennie’s day.”
Some glimmering of his meaning brought a flash of irrepressible resentment into the inquiry of Lydia’s gaze.
“My dear child—my dear Lydia,” said the old man apologetically, “let little Jennie have the foreground to-morrow. Let hers be the bravery, and the sacrifice, and the sorrow, and the gladness. It need matter to no one what anybody else feels, or has to undergo—it need distract no attention from the child. Let it,” said the Rector pleadingly, “let it all form a background.”
Lydia understood.
There was a conscious relinquishment, a displayed self-abnegation, that would infallibly attract the sympathy and the compassion of all but the ultra-critical, that might not be hers.
Very tentatively, perhaps guided more by instinct than by full awareness, the Rector was pointing out to her the infinitely subtle atonement that might yet be hers.
To-morrow—her wedding-day—to be solely Jennie’s. After all, Lydia reflected, with that strange clarity of mind that sometimes follows upon extreme physical exhaustion induced by violent and unaccustomed emotion, those to-morrows when her daily life would be linked with Jennie’s might be few indeed now. If the future was to hold crisis again for Jennie—as who could doubt—it might well be that she would choose to encounter her experiences alone.
Let to-morrow be Jennie’s, as nothing in her young life had yet been hers.
And again, another echo of words long since uttered by a more cynical, less kindly voice than that of the Rector, brought a shadowy smile that held no mirth to Lydia’s lips as she walked home through the darkness.
Grandpapa, who knew, had called her “a situation-snatcher.”
Again and again, the strange expression, grotesque to the verge of anti-climax, haunted Lydia.
She thought of it as she entered her own house, and heard the exclamations of the servant Susan.
“Oh, ma’am, we’ve been wondering where you was! Miss Jennie’s been in quite a way—it’s past dinner-time, and knowing you were walking——”
“I was detained at Mrs. Kennedy’s,” said Lydia briefly.
Jennie ran out of the drawing-room.
“Oh, mama! I’m glad you’ve come—I was getting so worried, thinking of you out in the cold....”
Jennie stopped nervously, and Lydia knew intuitively that she was remembering her mother’s old, implied claim to the sole prerogative for all such expressions of concern.
“I stayed longer than I meant to with the Rector. He sent you his love.”
“Did he? Shall we have dinner now, mama, or are you going to change?”
“I’ll change,” said Lydia, and went slowly upstairs.
She carefully removed the traces of weeping from her face before she came down again.
The short evening was a very quiet one. In the drawing-room Jennie sat with her cheek resting upon her hand, gazing into the fire. Once she said rather timidly:
“The packing is all finished. Susan and I put the things into my new dressing-bag when I came in this afternoon.”
“It’s a beautiful bag,” said Lydia absently.
The dressing-bag had been Roland Valentine’s gift.
She remembered that she herself had been secretly disappointed, at the time of her marriage, because no one had given her such a thing, and she possessed only the plain, wooden hair brushes and clothes brush, and the celluloid comb, that had figured upon her makeshift dressing-table at Miss Nettleship’s boarding-house. And then Uncle George had given her a cheque, privately and almost shamefacedly, explaining that it had nothing whatever to do with the three-tiered silver cake-stand that was to figure at the wedding as the joint offering of himself and Aunt Beryl. It was merely a trifle, that he could well afford, with which to supplement her trousseau.
And Lydia remembered that, in her estimation, the word “trousseau” had immediately become stretched so as to include the smallest and neatest of silver-fitted dressing-bags. The very next day she had successfully found and purchased the treasure.
She generally had succeeded, Lydia reflected dispassionately. “There’s no such thing as can’t” had been another of Grandpapa’s aphorisms, and his descendant, for many years of her life, had triumphantly proved the axiom in her own person. She had made people like and admire her, she had profited to the full of educational advantages, she had found work and successfully achieved it, had extricated herself unscarred and unblemished from various minor encounters, had made a marriage such as might well have seemed unattainable to Lydia Raymond, working in Madame Elena’s shop, and, even greater achievement, had adequately filled the place open to her by that marriage. The record was to end there, it seemed.
Lydia felt as utterly incapable of envisaging the rest of her life, the complete aloneness that seemed suddenly to have revealed itself to her, as of speaking aloud her thoughts to Jennie, motionless beside her.
They talked very little, and, it seemed to Lydia, only of trivialities, although it was evident that Jennie attached some importance to her speculations as to the morrow’s weather, the seating capacity of the little church, the extent to which choir and organist would do credit to the parish.
“I do want it all to be perfect,” was Jennie’s candid aspiration.
“I hope it will be,” said Lydia tonelessly. “Are you very happy, Jennie?”
“Yes,” said Jennie simply, her grey eyes ecstatic.
Then she looked at her mother, and added wistfully:
“I should be perfectly happy if—if only you were, too.”
Lydia smiled faintly.
She thought that she could appraise at its true value Jennie’s obvious afterthought.
Her fatigue was almost overwhelming, and, to her own surprise, she slept heavily all through the night.
Then it was Jennie’s wedding-day—a clear, grey day, without sunshine and without wind.
Surprisingly enough, Lydia felt, one went through it with very little feeling of any kind. The emotion that struck most sharply at her consciousness was one of surprise that so long a waiting, so many preparations, should have culminated only in so brief an apotheosis.
The wedding was over before she had adjusted herself to the expected pang of it, and actually very little impression of it all remained with her.
The odd epithet that had rung in her ears since the day before rang there still, meaningless, and yet strangely expressive.
“Situation-snatcher.”
It even mingled senselessly in the farewells that rang all round her, when Jennie—Jennie Valentine—took her leave of them all with her husband.
“Good-bye—good luck!”
“Good-bye, dear Aunt Joyce—Grandmama—everybody—I’ll see you all again in a little while——”
“Good-bye, Roland. Take care of her.”
“I will, ma’am—you may be sure of that.”
Roland was bending over old Lady Lucy’s hand.
“Look here, dear, I don’t want to hurry you, but you’ve only just time——”
Colonel Kennedy, of course—always a victim to “train-fever.”
“Oh!”
The bride flung her arms round her mother’s neck.
“It’s only for a week, mama,” she whispered, consolingly. “Thank you for giving me such a lovely wedding——”
The chauffeur started the engine of the waiting motor-car, and its throbbing broke on the air and caused Jennie to detach her clasp from her mother. But she still faced Lydia with a pleading, puzzled look, her eyes tearful, but, lurking in their grey depths, an unconquerable joyousness.
“I must say something,” Lydia reflected desperately, dully astonished at her sudden inability to find any words at all.
A situation-snatcher. No—no—the foolish term was an obsession; she had not been that—not now——
She bent forward and kissed Jennie once more.
“Good-bye, my child. You’ll write....”
The chauffeur held the door of the car open, and Jennie’s foot was on the step.
She was within it, and her husband was beside her. Leaning across him, her fresh face at the lowered window, her bare hand, with the new wedding-ring gleaming upon it, grasped the door.
A sense of wrenching open, as of vistas of finality, suddenly dispersed Lydia’s apathy, and, at the agonizing glimpse of her own bereft and isolated future, she found, as the car began to move slowly from the door, the habitual, instinctive self-expression that alone could drug her misery.
“Good-bye, Jennie! I’ll see to everything—don’t worry about letters or packing—I’ll do it all for you whilst you’re away.”
“Jennie is still waving!” cried Joyce Damerel, and waved back again vigorously.
But at the same instant Lady Lucy laid her tremulous old hand upon Lydia’s, gazing at her compassionately, and Nathalie Kennedy exclaimed aloud, turning towards her:
“Oh, poor Lydia!”
The scattered groups of relatives and friends coalesced, surrounding her.