“You said I was a fighter,” she exclaimed bitterly, “this is what I had to fight.”
She passed on swiftly to her girlhood, its outward triumphs and the shadowed internecine struggle between her beautiful young mother and herself. She struck again and again at the man beside her, pointing out to him his neglect, his lazy partisanship of his wife, chosen out of selfishness and fear.
“You never helped me,” she said bitterly, “you only wanted peace.”
She spoke of his careless consent to her European travels, the unsuitable chaperonage that had thrown her, young and inexperienced, into the fastest American set in Paris.
Without hesitation or restraint she gave him the story of her marriage. Mr. Brett had heard it before, but there were details she had spared him, moments of her dressed-up sacrifices and of her attitude of outraged womanhood, which convinced her of her own sincerity. He was spared nothing now. He was told of every physical brutality and of every irregular, inconsiderate word forced out of Prince Girla. Hermione had never forgotten a word that had displeased her, nor had she ever let his tenderness or repentance wash out a single stain.
There had never been a moment when Hermione was not in her own eyes an heroic, persecuted figure. She had kept her code unspotted from an alien and repulsive world. The mere facts of life were outrages upon her delicacy of temperament, and her rigid acceptance of propriety was a loophole by which she had escaped self-surrender.
Her low, exhausted voice moved on with the persistence of a gimlet. She stood surrounded by her negative virtues, covered with the insults of her foes, as St. Sebastian stands in old Tuscan pictures, imperturbable under a lacework of arrows.
Her eyes never left her father’s face: this picture, this continuous exposition of herself, was her answer to him.
She had been horribly startled by the unveiling of his point of view; her self-control had been stabbed into an acute resistance.
Now with the force of her delirium behind her she pinned him against her own interpretation of herself. She dared him with her exhausted, fevered eyes not to believe that she was faultless.
In the grey shadows of the gathering dawn she seemed to threaten him with her death.
“Do you understand me?” she murmured at last. “Do you see now what I’ve had to bear and what I’m really like?”
“Why, yes, Hermione,” said Mr. Brett patiently. “I guess I see what you’re like.”
Her eyes questioned him doubtfully, but there was nothing in his expression which revealed any latent sarcasm.
Mr. Brett had no expression in his face at all, beyond his grave attentiveness.
Hermione was completely exhausted now: she had spoken for nearly two hours without a pause. She closed her searching eyes and slept.
Mr. Brett looked out of the open window. It was a still dawn, full of the returning movements of arrested life.
Outside in the grey garden the stars were pale in a cloudy sky, the small battered moon was surrounded by an opalescent fiery ring.
The silence was broken by the scurry and hoot of hunting owls. A heavy mist swept over the garden and blotted out the shapes of the trees.
Mr. Brett did not take up again “The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine.” Even that immortal classic failed to rouse any amusement in him.
Hermione breathed with the refreshing regularity of a child; her beauty slowly reasserted itself, but Mr. Brett did not see the beauty in her face: he noticed instead, with a pang at his heart, the lines of selfishness and unwavering vanity which her own character had engraved upon it.
“I reckon,” he said to himself, “that ‘the last enemy to be destroyed’ is vanity. Murder isn’t a habit, cruelty can’t get on long without conceit. Lies run to it. I never knew a humble liar.
“Vanity is the toughest human quality there is—and it’s the most vital. You take it out with a trowel and it gets back with a spade.
“It’s trapped Hermione just the way it trapped Theodora.
“She just had to be thought smart, saint-like and brainy. She couldn’t face a back seat. Hermione don’t care a row of buttons what I think on any other subject, but she’d care what a roadside hog thought of the figure she made passing by. I cut into her because she saw I despised her. Then she lay and brooded till her vanity got so fire-heated it came mighty near burning her up. Poor child! She’s got a lot of qualities put into that fire of hers, and there ain’t any of ’em that’ll come out again. I startled her but I won’t have changed her. You can always startle a person out of themselves for a moment, and they thresh round and think they’ll never go back again, but it’s the same person threshing who was sitting quiet before the shock. Threshing don’t change them. I had to do it, and I guess it’ll turn out somehow the way I meant. Most things answer to a handle if you ain’t afraid to turn it and will take the consequences. There was a dog’s chance I could have squeezed out without having to pay all I had, but I wasn’t the dog that had that chance.”
Mr. Brett leaned back in his arm chair and turned his face towards the open window. The light was beating slowly through the white mist into the room.
Hermione slept steadily; there was nothing further to do for her.
Death lay definitely behind her.
Death lay in front of Mr. Brett and it was the only thing that was still in front of him.
CHAPTER IX
For several days after her attack, Hermione was very weak and prostrate.
She was able, however, on the following morning to refer indirectly to Bodger. She asked in a low, broken whisper if Bichette was perfectly safe. Bichette was full in view at the moment, noisily engaged in eating creamed chicken at the foot of Hermione’s bed; and Hermione was instantly told that Bodger was no longer on the premises.
After this enquiry Hermione closed her eyes and retired into a state of even completer exhaustion.
She was physically prostrate but her mind was vividly alert. Hermione was thinking out several problems. She had her conscience to deal with, and her future life.
Her conscience was a comparatively easy affair: even in a high fever, she had been able to justify herself to her own complete satisfaction. Hermione had a little manual of “Self-Examination” questions which always lay beside her bed, and she could go through the whole list with perfect confidence day or night. But did her father sufficiently believe in her? And was it worth while that he should? Hermione did not put these two questions to herself as crudely as this—she saw them, as she would have expressed it, “on a higher plane.” It was her duty to make her father realise that she was a power for good in the world, and he had not yet appeared to think so with sufficient conviction; if she had succeeded in convincing him, might she not, with him at her side, win moral successes upon a larger scale? Hermione told herself that she must not be ambitious about spiritual openings and she emptied her mind—with an effort of concentration and by the help of several ejaculatory prayers—of all memory of the house and garden in the Champs Elysées. But on the other hand she had been broken-hearted and helpful to young wives for several years; perhaps more was now asked of her. She could not, in justice to herself, change her ideal, but she might change the channel of her efforts. Perhaps Papa was right—he had distinctly spoken of a wider field—the time might have arrived for her to make fresh efforts. Papa was worldly, of course, and hideously astray if he expected her to give up her present situation for the sake of any material profit. But she had never intended to stay permanently with Elise and John, and her father was her first duty.
They might live in Paris, which was dryer than London, and therefore, no doubt, more suitable for diabetics. Papa could not really care for Mambles or he would not have given it to John.
Hermione was the person who really ought to make a home for her father. Perhaps this was what he had always felt, and the singular tone of misinformed bitterness with which he had addressed her had been caused by a feeling of neglect.
Hermione lay with her eyes shut, reconstructing the neglected past of Mr. Brett and the rose-coloured future with which she intended to present him. Yes—she was prepared to sacrifice Elise and John to give herself up to her ill and aged parent. The house in the Champs Elysées shot through her mind again, but would she have the physical strength to entertain properly? And how large was the garden? It was no use her undertaking what she could not carry through.
Hermione had had a long career full of excitements, and even perils; but she had foreseen the excitements and been able as a rule to terminate any dangers which had arisen from them. But the night of her attack she had neither foreseen how ill she would be, nor been able to control it. A sensation which she had not roused in herself had frightened her. She had suddenly felt that something might happen to her which she could not prevent.
Hermione shivered a little as she realised how very near she had been to that final trickster, Immortality.
She had often spoken of longing for death, and she had even experienced baffling moments of exasperation with human material, when she had thought of death as a supreme restfulness where she would be enshrined forever in the right, beyond the criticism of ignorant Roumanians; but these moments of longing had come to her when she knew she wasn’t going to die. She had never been conscious of any desire for death when it was at all likely. At the birth of her child, for instance, the very idea of her own insecurity had shocked her, and she had neither forgotten nor forgiven those preposterous, precipitate hours.
The night of her attack reminded her of them: something had turned on her and forced her beyond her pace.
Might this happen again? And what steps should she take to prevent it?
She remembered that the doctor had been no use, but her father had.
The instant her eyes met his, this violent force in her had recognised a resistance stronger than her own, and had yielded to it. But she was not going to speak to her father about it.
He might be an asset for the future, and you do not tell assets that they have the power of control.
It would be a great help to have Papa with her, if he could influence her at a moment when she wished to be influenced, but Hermione felt that she must first make sure of her need. Perhaps she would have got better in any case; and she had a wholesome dread of undue personal influence.
Hermione decided to send for Dr. Raymond and ask him how ill she had been.
Hermione did not like Dr. Raymond; she had always been accustomed to make intimate friends with her doctors, and she had spared no pains to create a happy relationship. They admired her first, and they admired her symptoms afterwards. But Dr. Raymond had evaded his opportunities. He was a busy man who did not want hurried intimacies with attractive women patients.
He insisted from the first on only being told Hermione’s symptoms, and he insisted upon them merely to assure her that they were not of much importance. He was a young man and he had come straight from a military hospital in France. Still, he was honest.
Hermione always realised the useful qualities of the people she disliked; and she knew that if she asked Dr. Raymond a straight question he would produce a straight answer, and keep both question and answer to himself.
It was difficult to Hermione to listen to what she did not wish to hear, and it very rarely occurred to her to be necessary; but when it did occur to her she had never been known to shirk it.
She waited till she felt she had sufficient physical strength to deal with the occasion successfully, and on the third day after her illness, she told Nurse Davies that she would see Dr. Raymond alone.
Dr. Raymond did not come immediately he was telephoned for, and when he did come he began their conversation by bluntly telling Hermione that she looked a great deal better.
He sat opposite her, waving his hat tiresomely in his hand, as if he wanted to go. Hermione ignored his clumsiness with difficulty.
“I should like you to tell me,” she said quietly, “two things—then I need not detain you further. Was I dangerously ill the other night? And in your opinion could I ever become normally well?”
Dr. Raymond stopped swinging his hat and looked at her with sudden attention.
He had often wanted to speak straight to the Princess Girla, but she had never given him the least opportunity. Now that she had given him the opportunity he felt that it would be brutal to take too great an advantage of it; besides he respected her for her frankness.
Hermione leaned back on her pillow, flushed, and with her grey eyes very wide open and steady. She knew exactly what effect her frankness would have upon Dr. Raymond and she realised that it would be easier to hear an unpalatable truth if it should be presented to her with respect.
“You were very ill indeed the other night,” Dr. Raymond said after a short pause, meeting her eyes with equal steadiness. “I think it is possible you might have died, but I think it is more probable that you might have gone out of your mind. You have a very excitable brain, and it was keyed up on one point rather tighter than it could stand.”
Hermione nodded.
“I know I am unduly sensitive,” she murmured, “something had been said to me which I could not break away from in my mind, although I was conscious of its complete unfairness.”
Dr. Raymond’s eyes seemed to grow smaller and keener. He no longer desired to spare the Princess anything; it flashed across him that she would always spare herself.
“As to your future condition,” he went on, “I must tell you frankly that it depends on you. There are people whose sensitiveness about their own sensations presupposes physical ill health.
“I do not wish to sound impertinent, but ill health when there is no organic cause for it is chiefly egoism.
“It comes from the fact that personal sensation is more interesting than outside facts. We all of us, even the strongest, have physical sensations which, if they interest us too much, become accentuated and may produce disease.
“You have a very powerful will, Princess Girla, and if your mind should become sufficiently interested on any outside line, I see no reason why you should not become normally strong, providing you pay attention to common sense, eat regular and healthy meals, and take enough fresh air and exercise.
“On the other hand, a few more such serious nerve and brain attacks will land you in a permanently bad physical condition out of which it would be practically impossible to break. You are an interesting invalid now, but as your ill health becomes chronic, you will become less and less interesting and more and more of an invalid.
“That is all I can tell you; the choice lies in your own hands.”
Hermione’s eyes remained steady, although they became a trifle glassy in expression.
“Thank you,” she said gently, “and may I ask when you came to this conclusion about my case?”
“I think I thought so, more or less, the first time I saw you,” said Dr. Raymond reflectively.
Hermione lowered her eyes. They became fixed upon Dr. Raymond’s hat.
“How very curious,” she said, “that you did not let me know what you thought on that first occasion. Let me see, I think this must be your twelfth visit?
“It will be perhaps unnecessary for you to call again as I understand that my case is in my own hands—and has always been so.”
Dr. Raymond never knew how he got out of the Princess Girla’s room. He felt profoundly uncomfortable and he was conscious that he looked a fool.
Hermione said nothing further to him, but she watched him step on his hat, and nearly overturn his chair. He carried away the impression that Hermione thought he had deliberately made a case out of her for money.
Hermione’s quiet eyes could say a great deal, and Dr. Raymond forgot that he had told the Princess Girla that she was guilty of egoism in the shock of being considered not only an inefficient, but a dishonest practitioner.
Hermione saw with satisfaction the impression that she had produced. She did not even smile at Dr. Raymond’s undignified exit. She was not easily amused, but she enjoyed it. Dr. Raymond had told her what she felt it necessary to know, and she had made him suffer for the inconvenience of truth.
Somebody has always to suffer in the cause of truth, and it is usually the person who attaches the greater importance to it.
CHAPTER X
If you devote your life to studying the feelings of others you may get a little overtired, and see things out of proportion, but you are not likely to be mistaken in what these feelings are.
During Hermione’s convalescence Elise discovered that there was an alteration in her father. Mr. Brett appeared superficially the same, but there was, so Elise fancied, an undercurrent of restlessness in him.
He did not walk any further than usual, and he was always to be found in his accustomed haunts, but behind his quiet eyes and his unperturbed domestic comments there was a strange new grip of attention.
He knew that he was seeing the fuchsia hedges and the bird bath for the last time. He would not often sit under the giant black yew, and watch the retreating harvest fields stretch yellow and pale to the Downs’ edge.
He would not often see Elise standing at the top of a flight of steps, balancing a white parasol over her sunny hair.
Mr. Brett did not look at Elise with emotion, he was not an emotional man, but he looked at her with a prolonged attentiveness.
Elise did not ask him any questions, but she became daily more and more conscious that change was in the air.
She came out oftener to look at her father, to share his gentle prowls to the garden’s edge, and sit with him in the last patches of the retreating sun.
Summer was drawing slowly to an end at Mambles, the colour of the garden had changed, the delicate, myriad shades of the flowers had singled and massed themselves into the hard and flaunting gold of sunflowers, dull mauves, and stalwart reds and browns. Only a bush of pale blue flax burned on as if it were still June.
The birds were all about the sky, practising unendingly their migratory flights. They broke and clustered and spread open fans above the garden hedges, crying instead of singing their last songs. The garden at Mambles was full of their agitated wings and leave-takings.
John alone noticed no sign of change, except in the weather, and Elise forbore to tell him of her premonitions.
She had discovered that John did not like changes and that it was better to let them happen to him of their own accord than to prepare him for them with a prevision that might look like consent. Elise was no doubt very bad for men because she always altered herself to suit their conveniences. She never expected attention, and she made John feel that his wishes were a pleasure to her, and his tastes and habits part of the fixed laws of the universe.
Nothing must stand between John and Yorkshire pudding with beef. She felt the same about her father, only with Mr. Brett it was horse-radish sauce.
Elise went to Church regularly with Mr. Brett because he said he had come to the conclusion that religion should be like tobacco, got from an old firm and mild, but she told John quite truthfully that she loved to hear him read free-thinking books out loud on Sunday evenings. When John said that you could not be orthodox and honest simultaneously, Elise saw what he meant; and when Mr. Brett said very few men were honest anyway—even a first-class infidel rubbed all over by the higher criticisms could tell a lie at a pinch—Elise saw an equal significance in her father’s opinion.
Nevertheless Elise had a mind of her own, she knew what was going to happen before anybody else did, and she never repeated facts which were inconvenient for other people to know unless it was absolutely necessary that they should know them.
If Elise was more with her father than she had been before Hermione’s illness, John made up for it by being oftener with Hermione.
John had been extremely impressed by Hermione’s illness. It struck him that nobody else realised how seriously ill she had been.
Elise had been temporarily alarmed, but having seen Hermione very ill before and known her to recover, she seemed to think that the process would reassert itself.
Mr. Brett went still further. He said:
“Why, John, she’s got to recover—she wants to.” It was only John who faithfully believed that Hermione’s illness was the stroke of a Higher Power, and watched her convalescence with the painstaking anxiety which such a belief suggested.
Hermione made a steady and courageous recovery, she dismissed Nurse Davies with three new hats and a long list of errands to do for her in town, and then she proceeded to eat normally and assume the habits of other people.
It was not an easy task to undertake for any one who had been a dangerous invalid for five years, but Hermione did not only undertake it, she carried it out with fortitude and common sense.
A fortnight after her illness she came down to a meal and ate it without having ordered it beforehand. The cook was thunderstruck.
Afterwards Hermione went out into the garden. She expected Elise to accompany her, but Elise with her hand in her father’s arm wandered off heartlessly in the direction of the village; she did not even say where she was going, and Hermione particularly resented the mysterious disappearances of other people. Elise was absorbed in Mr. Brett. Hermione, watching her with aggrieved eyes, felt that it was time this unreflecting intimacy was destroyed.
“If I let her,” she said to herself, “I believe she would put Papa before John and ruin her life’s happiness—Elise never had any judgment.”
Elise and Mr. Brett had gone to see Bodger. He had been boarded out in the village with a thick chain and a large quantity of dog biscuits, but in the evening he was allowed to go for a walk by himself, and from his lack of appetite when he returned it was supposed he had, with gross lack of patriotism, accounted for many rabbits. On the whole Bodger had a happy life though he missed John.
When they returned, Mr. Brett went into the library and Hermione advanced across the lawn to meet Elise, carrying, with obvious difficulty, an enormous vegetable marrow.
“Dearest Hermione!” cried Elise. “What are you doing that for?”
Hermione laid the marrow reverently upon the grass and, with a lace pocket handkerchief, delicately wiped the dirt off her long, carefully manicured fingers.
“I did it to save you, dear,” she said panting. “I did not wish you to be overtired after your walk—perhaps a long one—with Papa.”
“Oh, but—” cried Elise aghast, “I never do pick marrows—Demster always does!”
“Not, I think,” said Hermione gently but implacably, “for the soldiers’ hospital. I understand from Demster that the vegetables for the hospital you always pick yourself.”
“How very, very good of you,” said Elise gratefully. “You must sit right down and rest.”
Hermione sat down but she had no intention of resting. She took an erect, uncomfortable chair, the only one of the kind in the garden.
“Don’t trouble about me, dear,” she said meekly. “I do not mind discomfort; but promise me you will not go again into the marrow bed yourself?”
“Oh, why?” asked Elise remorsefully choosing the next most uncomfortable chair she could find, because it looked so awful to lounge in the face of a full-fledged invalid determined on discomfort.
“There are adders there,” said Hermione impressively. “It would not be safe. I have heard that the sting of an adder can easily prove fatal.”
“Oh, but Hermione!” cried Elise. “You oughtn’t to have gone there yourself. But are you sure there are adders? I thought—”
Hermione interrupted her smilingly.
“Dear,” she said, “I don’t grudge a personal risk to serve our splendid men. Think what they do for us!”
Elise bit her lips and looked into the laurel bush. John had investigated the marrow bed himself that morning and he had found there were no adders there, but one panic-stricken slow worm, which gave up its taste for marrows from that hour. But Elise was a generous soul. She saw that for dramatic reasons Hermione wanted adders and she forbore to replace them by a slow worm.
“Demster can easily take the marrow down to the hospital to-night,” she said gently.
“Forgive me,” said Hermione bitterly, “if I have been officious. You sometimes make me feel as if I were a little in the way.”
Elise winced as if she had been struck.
“Oh, Hermione!” was all she said.
“Do not be distressed, dear,” said Hermione kindly. “Young married people like to feel their new authority, I know; it is a punishment I deserve.
“I stepped out of my path to come here. I must now step back again.” Hermione looked at the house and let her eyes wander across the garden to the hills. She would have liked a country house to be larger than Mambles. “It is all too simple and happy and peaceful for me here,” she added. “You do not feel so deeply about it I know. Why should you? John is safe—and for you the cataclysm of nations is but a humming in the air. I cannot take it so calmly. I feel as if a knife were pressing against me every hour.”
Elise looked conscience-stricken: she could not truthfully say she felt the war every hour. She felt it regularly after breakfast when the newspaper came, and from time to time during the day when there was something she could do about it; but it did not haunt her like the possibility of John’s wet feet.
Hermione looked haunted.
She was suffering from severe indigestion caused by carrying a heavy marrow after an ordinary meal.
“I came to you,” Hermione said gravely, “because you called me.”
Elise did not deny this fact, but she wore a guilty air. She had called Hermione, but she remembered that she had felt she ought to.
“I cannot say that I am sorry that I came,” Hermione continued kindly. “I have seen your life for myself. Perhaps I have been able to remove from your path a few of the stumbling blocks of marriage.”
“Oh, yes!” Elise interrupted gratefully. “I never knew there were so many before!”
“But you know now,” said Hermione tenderly. “And I have seen something else besides, something which it is quite natural that in the first flush of your happiness you should have overlooked—Papa’s dire need.”
“His what?” cried Elise aghast.
“His need of me,” Hermione repeated briefly. Her eyes held Elise’s firmly. Elise could not have looked away if she had wanted to. She felt like a bird fascinated by something that is about to strike it.
“Oh,” she faltered, “I thought Papa was happy.”
“My dear!” said Hermione impatiently. “You never thought at all, your mind was—as it is even now—drugged by the miasma of marriage. Papa has been failing steadily. Mambles does not suit him. He needs a dry, bracing place with plenty of life in it. He has been living here alone with his double tragedy and there are five underground rivers in Sussex. I wonder he has not gone mad!”
“Does he—is he—thinking of going away?” asked Elise apprehensively.
“Yes, dear,” said Hermione impressively. “Papa is coming with me to Paris. I shall make his declining years the study of my life.”
Elise said nothing.
It was a hot, still day—not a leaf stirred in the garden, only above it the swallows took their circling, hurrying flights; they swept across the hedges, and through the red creepers that covered their nests beneath the eaves, with a speed which showed nothing but the quick-blown passage of their flight.
Outside in the fields there was an occasional sharp whir and click of a frightened partridge.
“I thought he liked quiet,” Elise murmured after a pause.
“I daresay we shall have a garden in the Champs Elysées,” said Hermione loftily, “that will be quiet enough for him.”
Mr. Brett appeared in the library door. He advanced slowly across the south terrace.
“Are you warm enough out there?” he asked. “It’s what they call the heat of the day over here, isn’t it? I guess I’ll bring a fur rug along.”
“It will be hotter in Paris,” said Hermione incisively.
Mr. Brett drew forward a long, low chair and made himself thoroughly comfortable.
“Why, yes,” he agreed leaning back and half closing his eyes to study the herbaceous borders at his ease. “I guess there’ll be hot moments over there and cold ones too, as far as that goes. Have you been telling Elise our little plans about Paris?”
“Yes,” said Hermione, “I have told her, Papa.”
Elise said nothing; her eyes rested intently on her father’s face.
Mr. Brett drew his soft hat further forward over his eyes, and stretched out his legs in front of him.
“Hermione,” he said, “is going to devote herself to my declining years. Say, Hermione, I tell you what it is, I want some of that devotion right now. As you are going into the house, I’d like you to tell my man to bring me out an overcoat.
“Do you remember that hymn, Elise, played to a waltz tune, ‘The roseate hues of early dawn how fast they fade away—’? Well, I guess it’s accurate; anything to do with the sun over here is liable to pretty rapid fading.”
Hermione rose slowly and gracefully. She had not been going into the house. She opened her lips to speak, then she shut them again, and walked leisurely towards the open library door.
“Hermione has made a grand recovery,” said her father appreciatively. “She reminds me of Jonah’s gourd: as far as I remember it came up in the night and was powerful shady on the following day. But in the end it crossed Jonah by wilting when he least expected it. Jonah miscalculated that gourd—but he wasn’t much of a stayer as a lodger anyway.”
“Oh, Daddy!” said Elise. “Are you really going to Paris?”
Mr. Brett met her eyes; for a long time they neither of them spoke. Then Mr. Brett said with a gentleness which his voice never held for any one else.
“I guess you’re going to be all right here Elise—with John.”
CHAPTER XI
John looked across from the mass of papers on his desk to his father-in-law’s impassive face.
He was a young man with a generous share of self-control, but he could not help revealing that he was very much moved.
“You can’t really mean, Sir,” he said with a momentary trembling of his hand, as he turned over the mass of papers, “that all your work is to be left with me. The reconstruction work as well; that I am to have the regulation of all this and take the proceeds? It’s a tremendous future—and a tremendous fortune!”
Mr. Brett lit a cigar in a leisurely way and tilted back his chair to his favourite angle.
“Yes,” he agreed indifferently, “there’s money in it, there’s most usually money in what occurs to me, but it ain’t anything to make a fuss about. Some people breed money, and some people breed dogs. I guess I’m what you might call a money-fancier. As for those old notes, I took ’em while I was prowling round this garden and the English Government has decided it wants to take them up. I made it my condition that you were to be managing director—that’s all there is to it.
“I sha’n’t be over here any more. I can’t be in two places at once, and I’ve run that Channel passage during this war as faithfully as if I were a German submarine, and I guess I’m just about as tired of it as German submarines are going to be. I’ll get along all right in Paris. Brains don’t go bankrupt. What I have left will come in mighty useful in France. France wants new machinery a sight more than you do. She’s commercially as flat as a plate, but she can be built up and she’s got to be. There’ll be plenty on the plate before France is through, and I’d like to be one of the men who put something there. Don’t you worry about me.”
John drew a deep breath. He could not keep still in his excitement. He walked up and down the long library at Mambles with his visions hot before him.
Mr. Brett looked at him with satisfaction. He liked John, and he liked pleasing him, but he knew that he wasn’t going on pleasing him. He waited for his bad moment with the same unshaken placidity with which he waited for his good ones. There was no homely truth of which Mr. Brett was fonder, or more content to practise, than that of taking the rough with the smooth.
“If I come to pieces over it,” John demanded, “or if I get cold feet, can I come over and see you? There’s such a lot of things to plan and think of—you’ve given me such powers, and the plans themselves are so big—I almost hesitate to undertake them, and yet I’d rather do it than anything else in the world!”
“You can come over and see me as long as I’m there,” said Mr. Brett cautiously. “But you won’t need to. You go into your own brain and pick at that. You’ve got a-plenty.
“I’ve studied the English mind some, since I’ve been over here, and I guess I’ve spotted what’s wrong with it. It’s as lazy as a dog! You don’t use what you’ve got: maybe you’re frightened it would look showy, maybe you’re so stuck on behaving the way you weren’t made that you’re afraid your wits will let you down into behaving the way you were made; but you’ve got wits.
“Look at your navy! When I read your newspapers I could cry. When I talk to your high-brows I could laugh—and when I hear the muddles your Government is liable to slide into, I wonder any of you are alive. But when I look at your navy I see the whole thing as clear as glass. Are there any folk—even the showiest broker in Wall Street, or the latest quick-thinking Jap—that acts more like a live wire than the lieutenant of one of your destroyers? Are there any men who see cooler and clearer than one of your young admirals? Or I might say, one of your infant middies—for they’re all as clear-eyed and hard-headed as professional burglars! No, Sir, you can’t find men in any country quicker or more spry than your naval officers. And why is it? I figure it out this way—they got to be. Sea fighting is like operatic singing, you haven’t one thing to think of, you have half a dozen—pace, sight, signals, men, guns, the sea. The sea does it. Men need all their sap to face the sea. You can’t soss down and get into a habit with it. You can’t trust to a prejudice, you got to change your mind and your behaviour as quick as a north-east gale.
“Well, John—if a man can do a thing when he’s got to—all you have to do is to apply the emergency and take away his props.
“I guess that’s all you, or any other Englishman needs. This is a soft country and there are a lot of props in it for the well-to-do, and there ain’t many emergencies. So the English have got used to saying, ‘That’ll do,’ and ‘Don’t bother,’ and ‘It’ll probably come out all right without much trouble.’ But the war’s taken away some of the props, and it’s applied a pretty heavy pressure. So I reckon you can do jobs you never thought of now—and follow trails you never heard of—and I’m banking on you to do it satisfactorily.”
“Well, I can’t do more than try,” said John reflectively.
“Yes you can,” said Mr. Brett incisively. “You can succeed. I never had any hankering for an ‘also ran’.”
John laughed and Mr. Brett gave a reluctant smile. Then he said, “And now, John, there’s one more point we’ve got to go into, and then I think we’re wound up. I want your help on a point of domestic policy. Before I leave here I want to be sure of one thing—”
John turned round and faced him attentively.
“Yes, Sir,” he said, “is it about Elise?”
“It has to do with Elise,” said Mr. Brett slowly. “I want your word, John, never to invite nor to accept the offer of a visit from Hermione. She has given me already her word that she will not suggest it, nor accept any such invitation from you or Elise, but Hermione’s words are apt to be fluid. Facts don’t worry her, and people who ain’t worried by facts come through their promises like damp through an outside wall.
“Before my mind can be perfectly free I must have a solid word from you, John—and then I’ll feel all right.”
John flushed painfully.
“I really don’t know, Sir,” he said awkwardly, “that I can agree to give it. Of course I remember that the first part of Hermione’s visit was not a success, and it did seem as if Elise was a little overstrained by it. But I am sure now that all those little difficulties were caused by Hermione’s very serious ill health. Now that she is so much better, no one could be a more delightful guest.”
John paused. Mr. Brett regarded him thoughtfully.
“Have you forgotten the lawn-mower, John?” he asked, with a slight lift of his heavy brows. “Or Bodger? I don’t somehow feel as if they were the ordinary symptoms of a disease.”
John moved restlessly to the window.
“Hermione is very sensitive,” he said, with his back turned. “She felt at a great disadvantage when she first came down. She thought I was prejudiced against her. It is extraordinary how people will misunderstand each other under those circumstances.”
“Sure,” said Mr. Brett in a low voice. “Folks were made to misunderstand each other—but as far as I know, they weren’t made to hit out at every one who don’t take them at their own valuation.”
John let this pass. He did not understand what his father-in-law meant, but he knew that he did not wish to understand it. He was thinking of his last talk with Hermione, and their last talk had been an appeal from Hermione, not to his understanding, but to his emotion, and John did not find it easy to resist appeals to his emotion.
“It seems to me you are asking a great deal,” he said after a pause, “and more than I ought to promise—at least without her free consent. If Hermione wishes me to promise—I will consent to do it, but I couldn’t, as it were, do it behind her back.”
“You show remarkably good feeling, John,” said Mr. Brett cordially, “and remarkably poor sense. I’ve often noticed the way those two things hang together. However, you can send for Hermione and ask her in my presence what she does wish. I guess I’d rather see for myself how she tackles the subject. Sometimes it regulates the way a cat jumps if you’re watching the cat. If you’ll touch the bell we’ll ask Humphreys to let the Princess know we’d like to see her here.”
John obeyed reluctantly. He felt very up in arms about Hermione: he would stand by her whatever happened, even if it meant the loss of his future, but the worst of it was that it would not mean any such sacrifice and John knew it. Mr. Brett would never recall his generosities. Somehow or other whether John opposed him or not he would see that John didn’t lose. It made fighting against Mr. Brett much more difficult when one realised that he attached no penalties to his opponent in the hour of defeat. He was not even put out with John for insisting on the presence of Hermione.
Hermione kept them waiting ten minutes. At the end of that time she sailed into the library as if she were leading a procession. She looked every inch a Princess.
She wore a dress of a soft black material wonderfully lightened by Venetian point lace. Round her neck was a long string of pearls which fell to her waist.
“I think you want me, Papa,” she said without reproach, but as if it were strange that she had been sent for, and not sought.
“I can’t say that I do,” said Mr. Brett. “Accurately speaking John wants you; but I’m an interested party.”
Hermione turned her beautiful lifted head towards John. She smiled at him, as it is possible that martyrs, if they had time to think of it, smiled at their rather cowardly fellow Christians who had not joined them at the stake. John hesitated and stammered. He drew a chair forward for her, and then stood beside her as if he was there to protect and not to challenge her.
“Yes,” he confessed, “I do want to ask you something. Your father has suggested that I should give him a promise from Elise and myself—and I am not prepared to do so unless I have your consent. He has asked me not to invite nor to accept a visit from you—I gather for the rest of our lives.”
Hermione took it wonderfully. She did not lower her raised chin, or change the benevolent light of her clear grey eyes. She merely looked from one man to the other. John’s eyes were fixed anxiously upon her face, but Mr. Brett regarded without concern, but without appreciation, the points of his patent leather slippers. He did not consider that English servants understood patent leather.
“For the rest of our lives?” repeated Hermione. Her voice did not break, but it literally wrung John’s heart.
“You quite understand,” he urged, “that I have made no such promise; it has only been put to me as a condition of your father’s going with you to Paris, and what is more, I will not make it without your agreement.”
Hermione rose to her feet, she gave an exquisite gesture of mingled surrender and protection in the direction of her father’s unresponsive figure.
“Thank you, John,” she said with heroic fortitude, “for having consulted me. I don’t think we need go into the painfulness of the question—you will know, without my speaking of it, what it means to me. I must only urge that as far as possible Elise is spared; to put such a decision into her hands would torture her.
“As far as I am concerned the decision is already made. Since Papa makes it the express condition of our being together, I—consent.”
She turned and without faltering walked towards the door.
John sprang to open it for her, and as she passed out of it, he took one of her hands in his and kissed it. It seemed to him that he had been present at the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
He was so moved that he could hardly force himself to return to Mr. Brett. When he spoke to his father-in-law all the friendliness and gratitude had gone out of his voice.
“I should like to know, Sir,” he asked coldly, “how I am to explain this extraordinary arrangement to my wife?”
Mr. Brett raised his eyes and looked at John.
“Well,” he said slowly, “my way would be not to explain it. Half the trouble in life comes from explanations. When they’re honest they hurt, and when they’re dishonest, and most explanations are dishonest, they’re a waste of breath.
“If the question has to come up you can tell Elise that the arrangement is mine, that you only agreed to it at Hermione’s wish, and that she only agreed to it in order to succour the declining years of her hard-hearted old parent. That lets you out, that lets Hermione out—I guess that’s all that’s necessary.”
“The fact remains,” said John inexorably, “that by your action you deprive Hermione of her sister’s companionship.”
“Sure, Hermione can’t have us both,” said Mr. Brett with a sudden chuckle.
“And Elise can’t have you both either,” said John, ignoring his father-in-law’s untimely mirth.
“It’s wonderful how you put two and two together, John,” said Mr. Brett mildly. “But don’t you feel too bad about Elise; you can bring her over to Paris whenever you feel inclined. I don’t want to put up any unnecessary barriers, and Hermione and I will always be pleased to see you.”
John was silent. He loved his father-in-law, and he wanted him to justify himself. He waited expectantly for what Mr. Brett might have to say. But Mr. Brett made no attempt at self-justification. He too paused a little, but without expectation, and then he recalled John’s attention to the question of the new chrysanthemums.
Two days were given over to packing and farewells, then the electric brougham once more drew up at the door, followed by a luggage cart for the Princess’s ten boxes, the French maid and Bichette. Bichette’s increasing clamour almost outbarked the ghost of Bichon, if indeed she was not privately reinforced by his spiritual tongue.
John and Elise stood at the gate and waved their handkerchiefs until the electric brougham glided in ease and security out of sight. Mr. Brett did not wave: he contented himself with a long grave look at Mambles as if he were running over in his mind some secret inventory. The Princess and the French maid bowed farewell and all the servants, handsomely tipped and generously inclined, stood at the windows appreciatively watching their departure.
“It’s just too wonderful,” said Elise, turning to her husband with sparkling eyes. “I can hardly believe it—and it’s all due to you! You’ve brought them together just as I always hoped and prayed you would, and oh! John, isn’t it too perfectly lovely to think that dear Papa has got Hermione?”